September 25
The Parade Will Unload at the Fire Hall, Which Solves It
Wednesday’s facilities walk-through found the one real conflict on Friday’s schedule — floats and Spelldown families arriving at the same lots in the same twenty minutes — and fixed it by moving the parade’s ending a quarter mile.
MISQUAH — The problem nobody had raised until this newspaper raised it two weeks ago turned out to be the only real one on Friday’s schedule, and it was solved Wednesday in about twenty minutes by moving where the parade stops.
The parade steps off downtown at 4 and has historically ended at the school, unloading eleven floats, four tractors, three fire trucks and a marching band into the north lot at roughly the hour Spelldown families would be arriving in the south one. On Friday it will instead end at the fire hall, a quarter mile short, where the floats will unload and disperse.
The band will walk the last quarter mile. Director Hannah Moe was asked whether this was a hardship and said the band walks two miles in the Fourth of July parade and that a quarter mile in September with instruments already warm is “not a topic.”
Everything else on Friday holds. Coronation at 5:15 in the gym, the gym clears by about 5:45, Spelldown seats at 6:15 and starts at 6:30, kickoff at 7. Football parks north, Spelldown parks south, two signs and four cones. The gym doors stay closed during rounds.
The activities director and the Spelldown committee have now been in a room together three times in three weeks and have, by the account of the principal who was in two of those rooms, never once raised their voices, which he says is either admirable or a sign that both of them are storing it up.
One unresolved item: the public address system at the field and the microphone in the gym run off the same circuit at the same panel, which nobody knew until Wednesday. The building engineer says it will hold. He said this while looking at the panel.
The walk-through took eleven people around the building for fifty minutes: the activities director, the principal, the building engineer, three members of the Spelldown committee, the band director, two custodians and the fire chief, who was there because the parade route change required somebody from the department to say the fire hall lot could hold eleven floats. It can.
The only person who lost anything in the rearrangement is the parade marshal, who has ended this parade at the school for nineteen years and who agreed to the change in about four seconds and then asked, twice, whether anybody had told the tractors.