Greenbelt Always has a Parade on Labor Day. Once It Started Late.
By Wayne Williams
My happy memories of Labor Day include many about people helping each other for the community’s benefit at Festival planning meetings, in the Pageant, in the Art Show, with communication throughout the annual four-day event, in the selection of the Outstanding Citizen, on the Midway, at the Festival Stage, and in the many other aspects of this great celebration. One of my most vivid and lasting memories is that of the first time I chaired the Parade. The year was 1975.
Greenbelt always has a parade on Labor Day. Once it started late. That year I had a lot to learn about the process of presenting a parade. We prepared and mailed invitations to entertainment groups, to celebrities, and to politicians. We recruited the volunteer groups that support the parade in communications, as parade marshals, and as judges. We secured the necessary city permit and the promise of a reviewing stand from the National Park Service. We distributed directions, instructions, and information to all who agreed to participate. We thought we were ready for the parade.
We then prayed about the rain. This is a common Labor Day Festival duty. Perhaps our prayers were misunderstood that year. Perhaps the Supreme Being answered by telling us to work it out. The rain started during the Festival and on Sunday night it rained hard enough during the night that it woke me several times. By an hour before the scheduled start of the parade the condition could have been described as being a bit less than a deluge. Fortunately the rain stopped before reaching that stage.
A while before the parade normally would have started I met with several of the parade marshals. Would we have a parade? Greenbelt always has a parade on Labor Day. One of the marshals had a speaker and two of them attached it to a car and drove through the community announcing the parade would start an hour late, at 11:00 AM instead of 10:00 AM. The rest of the marshals and communications personnel spread out to take care of activities in various areas of the parade. The marshals had to try to convince the entries to stay and wait for the parade to start.
At the same time that all of the activity was going on throughout the parade area, the telephone at my home had been ringing continuously. I had received a few calls before I left the house that day to meet with the other volunteers, but my wife, Ginny, received continuous calls after I left. Only a few of us can imagine receiving dozens and dozens of calls over a period of an hour or so and trying to respond to all of them. She relayed our plans to the callers who wanted to come. She also received information from those who were calling to say why they could not come.
The National Park Service was ready to assume we would not have a parade. We had to convince them to come and bring the stage and try to get here to be set up by the time of the parade. We had been going to place the stage along Crescent, next to Southway but when the National Park Service driver got the truck and stage here and pulled the truck onto the ground at that point, it sunk and stayed there, unable to move. Many people volunteered to help pull the stage from behind the truck to Southway and set it up. (The truck spent the parade and, I believe, several days afterward stuck in the ground.
With so many helping and doing so many different things to assist, by 11:00 AM everything was as ready as we could make it considering the conditions. Because of those who roamed the community announcing the delay in the parade, many people did see a parade that day. Many of the groups, especially those concerned about possible rain damage to musical instruments or to their uniforms, did pull out of the parade or never came to it. Some probably had to go to other parades. But at 11:00 AM, Greenbelt started its Labor Day Parade. It may have been the shortest parade on record. I believe the only music may have been the recording of “Candy Man” played by the Gino’s (fast-food restaurant) float. Many who assisted with the preparation early in the day got very, very wet. The rut in at the corner of Southway and Crescent remained for a long time. But still, that parade stands out as a symbol to me of how great the people in Greenbelt are, how willing they are to support the community, how important Greenbelt’s traditions are and have always been to its citizens. And the Parade is one of the greatest of these traditions. Greenbelt always has a parade on Labor Day. Once it started late.
Reference: Greenbelt New Review, September 4, 1975 editorial, "That Dauntless Festival."