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Show Strawberry Days have come and gone p.g. blab By MARCELLA WALKER Well, Strawberry Days is over for another year and I imagine the Strawberry Days Committee breathed a united sigh of relief and sat back for a week or two before they begin plans for next year's celebration. For the first time in my life I got to ride in an antique car in a parade. It was a beauty, too. It was Allen Strasburg's 1967 Lincoln Continental Convertible. My experiences riding in parades are not many. I think I rode in the Pioneer Days Children's Parade in Ogden a few times with crepe paper on my bike. Around that same time each year the Primary would have a parade around the park across the street from the church. All we children dressed up like pioneers or Indians and marched around the block, a good half mile. When I was a teenager, I worked as a junior assistant to the park director and we made a park float for the Children's Parade for Pioneer Days. We made it from chicken wire and we poked colored paper napkins in the holes in the chicken wire to cover the float. Floats were a lot cheaper in those days and probably looked almost as nice as the expensive stuff they use nowadays. You may have noticed that every parade in the county, except perhaps Lehi's, is having fewer and fewer floats enter. The reason for this is probably the cost. It is formidable for-midable to build a float because they are so expensive. Do you remember how the wards used to always have floats in the parades? They don't anymore and this may be the main reason. A so you see them in the next parade only with another sponsor on them. They hope to take the Strawberry Days royalty float to the Days of '47 parade this year because it is self-propelled self-propelled and this is a requirement for that parade. Most floats of any size are now self-propelled, as you may have noticed. Anyway, back to the Pleasant Grove parade. I only rode in the morning one as part of the Chamber of Commerce Board and the rest of the board rode in the evening parade. It was fun waving to everyone. We noticed that children wave the best. Lots of older folks, like over age 12, just sit like a bump on a log the entire parade and never change expression, smile or wave. The students from the Utah State Training School wave with energy and it makes it kind of nice. Friends wave if they see you. I cannot believe how many of my friends said they did not even see me in the parade. I am surprised because my dress was bright red just like a strawberry. Your teenage children do wave but look cautiously about to be sure no one recognizes that you are their mother. That would be em-barassing. em-barassing. Some people will wave if the people in the parade wave at them so I found it was good to be a wave starter and wave at everyone almost, whether they were ready to wave to you or not. Your face gets frozen into a smile. The muscles get tired but you want to keep on smiling so it sort of freezes there. Another thing you have to be careful of is that your waving arm does not get intertwined with the waving arm of the person sitr I next to you in the car. This hannlj and I about flipped Dennis Ba?, Chambe of Commerce presidee i right out onto the pavement. ' I I found that it was difficult to Wa, " with my left arm. I had been wavin6 I with my right arm and the blood w beginning to drain out 0f it (as V1 holding it up so much, so I tried ik left arm. The left hand did not J? $ right from lack of practice, I gUes ! so that did not last long. ' fin My camera bag was squeezed int ' a small place by my feet because had had to take pictures before th parade started. I was trying hard to keep the bag out of the way 0f Z others riding in the backseat of th V car so my feet began to fJ 'v squeezed about half way through the ' parade route. There was no place t ' P move my feet so I just suffered through it for the most part. '.-sc I was also peeling. It is so fun to be all dressed up to look nice f0r QaN special occasion and then the sun burn you hoped had just faded awav '' decides to peel. C;jrl You wave with a right arm that ' looks like one big flake and lit(e Wl white specks keep flying off. You 'j9 hope people don't notice and that the ' person next to you doesn't think he has developed dandruff all of a & ' sudden. When the parade was all over we rode back to City Hall on Main Street and climbed out of the beautiful car Since the parade was over, the street was nearly empty and we all went back to our normal duties. But for a little while there, it was fun to smile and wave to everyone ? and be an integral part of the actual ! Strawberry Days Parade. If I never ' get to ride in a parade again, I can at - least say I did once. And, it was fun. ( couple of wards used to build a float and have it in the Strawberry Days parade and then rent it out the rest of the summer and make enough on it to pay for the ward budget. That was a good idea but it must not be that profitable anymore because they don't do it as much. They have professional float makers nowadays. This is what they do for a living and they make gorgeous floats. Of course, the ones around here are nothing much compared to the ones in the Rose Parade and other famous parades throughout the country. The interesting thing in Utah County is that when you have been to one parade you have really been to them all because each city sends it's float to each of the other cities and commercial floats are often rented |