An Old-Fashioned Fourth

Our town does not have a 4th of July parade; we do our parading on Memorial Day. It was the same in the village where I grew up, so it was with great excitement that when I was six we started spending our summers - or at least the beginning of July - at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.

The Wellfleet parade was - and is - a fully civic affair, with all walks of townfolk involved. Floats can be patriotic, political, moral, religious or promotions for town businesses, from restaurants to banks. The selectmen always had a float and even summerfolk join in, fully aware that they're both a nuisance and a foundation of town's economy. Bunting abounded on Main Street buildings, and horses led the parade, followed by antique cars - even a Stanley Steamer. Wellfleet claims its founding as 1620, so Pilgrim hats are always in fashion. It's a shellfish town, embodied by this oysterman who makes popular perennial appearances.

People climb to the rooftops to watch the marching bands, and in earlier days soldiers from the nearby National Guard camp joined the line of march. Sometimes the spectators' cars were more interesting than those in the parade. That night, there were fireworks over the harbor, not always done these days, I'm told. One tradition that's long gone is the bonfire on the evening before. Townfolk spent weeks building a tower of railroad ties, filling it with tires and topping it off with an old outhouse. It lit up the sky, and burned for days. Today the EPA would put a stop to it, but Wellfleeters ceased the tradition long ago, when they ran out of outhouses.