Willimantic, a small Connecticut city about a dozen miles from my house, faced a problem with no obvious solution in 1986. City leaders wanted to arrange a parade for Memorial Day, but budget cuts had disbanded the local high school marching band. And what’s a parade without music?
They mulled over solutions but came up empty. But as July 4 came closer, the late community activist Kathy Clark marched on City Hall with a plan and a cassette tape of band music. She proposed that the town ask everyone to just show up and create a parade, but bring with them radios and boomboxes (this being nearly 40 years ago). She also suggested that the local radio station WILI play band music which everyone could tune into with their radios and play as they marched.
It was a massive hit. Willimantic’s July 4th Boombox Parade was born.
It is the ultimate people’s parade. WILI still broadcasts music throughout the event. The town’s website emphasizes the populist nature of the gathering. No registration is required. Kids of all ages are welcome. Grannies and grandpas too. If you have a float, drive it, push it or carry it. The dress code of the day is absolutely anything, so long as it’s red, white and blue.
It’s small-city eccentricity on full display, and it attracts thousands of marchers and onlookers. This year, the 38th annual parade, a fencing team put on a sword fight along the route. There were Humvees, vintage cars, motorcycles, golf carts and kids on bicycles. Gay pride flags and the flag of Ukraine were ubiquitous. Boomboxes retrieved from attics and purchased from Goodwill stores were everywhere, volume cranked up, so the John Philip Sousa music bounced off the buildings of this struggling former mill city that nevertheless knows how to put on a show.
The parade is both small-d democratic and big-D Democratic, reflecting the city’s liberal bent, although the county in which it is located voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. It always features political signs and general commentary on the state of the country. Or the world.
One of the most popular floats every year is from the Traveling Fish Head Society of Northeast Connecticut (yes, that’s its name), founded seemingly for the sole purpose of appearing in the parade. The group has a gigantic fish constructed around a wooden frame under which several people march. And the fish spouts political opinions too; this year the fish displayed a “Stand with Ukraine” sign.
The parade always has some handmade protest signs, but in recent years they increasingly denounce the Supreme Court. During the height of the war in Iraq, for example, the parade featured signs against the conflict and denouncing George W. Bush. As in all parades, every year, politicians march, too, getting booed or cheered, depending on the crowd’s mood.
This week and in 2022, women marched with signs protesting the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of a year ago, which took away women’s abortion rights, casting aside nearly 50 years of precedent. Last year, when the court’s decision was still fresh, the signs in the parade made the TV news. Asked to react, a minister from the area said, simply, that women didn’t want to “return to bondage,” and that’s what the court’s decision ordered them to do. Amen, pastor, I thought.
The court continued its cherry-picking of precedents last week when it nullified 45 years of case law supporting affirmative action in college admissions. But if the parade is any indicator, that decision has not yet registered like the one rolling back abortion rights. If the signs hold clues, many people still feel real anger at the Court (me, too) over the Dobbs decision. One vintage truck in the parade was decorated with “Abort the Court” signs.
The mixing of the personal and political is nothing new in the Boombox parade, But the takedown of the court is recent.
In more conservative areas I’ve observed the other side of this coin. In Olcott, N.Y. last year I stumbled on a town festival that sported no fewer than three tents selling Trump/Make America Great Again products, all doing brisk business on a warm July day. One tent sold flags so big they nearly blotted out the sun, declaring, “TRUMP WON,” and in smaller letters underneath declared, “We all know it.”
Um, no, I thought.
Free speech is one of the glories of our democracy, the one that strengthens and protects all other rights, on full display whether in Willimantic or Olcott, during a parade or not. Not a bad way to celebrate the Fourth.
Another great story by YOU.