77th Annual Fourth of July Celebration

It’s our country’s 250th birthday and it’s the 77th annual Watts Hospital-Hillandale Neighborhood July 4 parade and celebration. This event is Durham’s oldest, unbroken Independence Day tradition. It’s red, white and blue. It’s flags; it’s singing, it’s kids, parents and neighbors. It’s a little corny, but very beautiful and not to be missed.

Origins – It was July 4, 1950. It was hot. There was no air conditioning. The neighborhood kids were mopey and bored. Club Boulevard neighbors Alice and Tom Walker had an idea – “Why not have a parade?” Alice rustled up some red, white and blue crepe paper and set the kids to decorating their trikes and wagons. Tom got U.S. and North Carolina flags and tied them to bamboo poles. When everything was ready, the kids marched one block down the sidewalk along Club Boulevard and back. It was so much fun, they did it twice. Back in the Walkers’ yard, they recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful” and “This Land is Your Land.” When it was all over, they had soft drinks to cool off.

It was supposed to be a one-off sort of thing – something to distract the kids that day. But the kids didn’t forget. Something about it really resonated with them. The next year, they insisted that the event be repeated, this time for more kids and their parents too. A tradition was born. One that quickly grew to involve hundreds of participants – too many for the sidewalk and too many for the Walkers’ yard.

Tom got the police to shut down Club Boulevard for the parade. The Pledge, the singing and the soft drinks moved to Oval Drive Park just down the street. Neighbors came, of course, but soon people from around town joined in too. Folks came dressed as minute men and Uncle Sam. Kids wagons became elaborate homemade floats. Tom Walker encouraged folks to bring flags – not just U.S. flags, but flags from their home states and home countries. He believed in the principle of E. Pluribus Unum – “from many we are one” – and wanted people to see it in action in the parade.

Today, the event lives on true to its original program and ideas. With hundreds turning out, it is bigger, but it is still the same.

It begins with a parade that starts on Club Boulevard and goes around a couple of blocks back to Oval Drive Park. The parade is led by local law enforcement officers and a firetruck from the Ninth Street station. There are lots of flags – E Pluribus Unum – but participants still march behind the Walkers’ original U.S. and N.C. flags carried on poles by a color guard of kids, neighbors and visitors. After the parade, in the park, neighbors put up a big, new U. S. flag on the pole there. The neighborhood put the pole up about twenty-five years ago and dedicated it to Alice and Tom Walker. Then the crowd is hushed as folks recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Next comes “The Star Spangled Banner” led by Durham’s O. K. Chorale. Standing beneath the flagpole, they sing a cappella – no amplification, no accompaniment. It is moving and beautiful. Visitors are supposed to sing along, but most people put their hands over their hearts and just listen. People really join in with the other songs – especially “America the Beautiful.” An interesting aside – parade founder Alice Walker was related to Katherine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful.”

After the singing, everyone rushes to the steel tubs where volunteers have iced down hundreds of Cokes in the little glass bottles. The nostalgic little bottles are a hit with grandparents who remember when all soft drinks came in bottles and with kids who want to take them home as souvenirs. Watts-Hillandale has been lucky to have the local Coca Cola Bottling Company as a neighbor for decades. The firm has always supported the neighborhood Fourth of July. Coke has now moved to a new facility near Apex, but the firm’s heart remains securely in Durham. They are delighted to support the neighborhood Fourth.

Oval Drive Park is the perfect setting for a neighborhood Fourth of July. Its bowl shape hugs the participants gathered on the ball field. Volunteers rise early to festoon the park with flags – hundreds of flags from around the country and around the world. Over the years, the neighborhood has collected more flags than it can possibly hang on the Fourth so the display changes annually. Some of the flags are gifts from neighbors. The donor families’ names are recorded on the flags’ hoists. Some of the flags are gifts from elected officials and community leaders. Some of the flags are truly gigantic – one U.S. flag is twenty feet long!

By noon, the event is over. There is plenty of time left in the day for a cookout, a nap or a visit to the Eno Festival. Volunteers take down the flags, recycle the bottles and pack everything away for next year.

It is a thoroughly lovely and appropriate way to celebrate our nation’s founding, gently, happily and as a community. It’s the best kind of patriotism. American humorist and newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck captured the spirit of the thing,

“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato
salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.”

It’s true, you know. The Walkers understood it 77 years ago, and the Durham community lives it even today. The event the Walkers created in 1950 has been repeated every year since. There has never been a gap.

Tip for photos:

Volunteers arrive at the Park at about 8:15 a.m. to set up. By 8:30 a.m., the somewhat comic process of hanging the flags in the park is underway, and groups of neighbors with colorful flags over their shoulders pinning them on lines strung from tree to tree make great subjects for photos.

Contacts:

For more information, contact neighborhood association president Fred Peterson at fred.peterson@whhna.org or vice president Dot Doyle at dot.doyle@whhna.org.