"FORTHAJULY!!"

"Forthajuly"- the greatest Wing-Ding of the year! Not as generous as Christmas nor scrumptious as Halloween and Easter, but a day of pure excitement from wakeup to far after dark!

Our little house on Clark Street, a tiny subdivision long since paved over to become the parking lot for Utah Valley Medical Center, backed right up against the Hospital's north lawn. It was a great green field then, studded with apple trees, saved for someday-expansion (and how!) Two long blocks to the east was the dead-end of University Avenue, and the hill of the brand new "upper campus" of BYU. It already boasted the elegant Maeser building for administration, the Grant building for classes and library, and the Brimhall building for the sciences. A small stadium built into the hillside (where the Richard Building now stands) had an actual (!) football field with WHITE LINES PAINTED RIGHT ON THE GRASS!

There, on July 3^rd (barring rain, which we NEVER had, but always searched the skies for with worried faces), gloriously magical floats arrived, lining up in expectation of the "Forthajuly" parade! Daddy never let us go look ahead of time, but Mom busily made us costumes: sometimes cowboy outfits with fringed skirts and shirts, a felt vest with a star, and even cap-guns that would bang most delightfully, creating that unmatched, sulfurous smell of daring, wild-west bravado. (Mike tried his best for years to wish those caps into bullets that would shoot us girls to smithereens.)

Some years we went as Indians, with up-side-down paper grocery sacks fringed at the bottom, and holes in the top and sides for heads and arms - not too comfortable, but soooo exciting to our pre-school imaginations. We even had a strip of grocery bag taped around our foreheads with a stiff chicken feather sticking up for authenticity. We argued over whether real Indians wore their feathers in the front or the back. We had never seen a real Indian. (I believe Grandma had chickens in her back yard in those days). Daddy even made us bows one year, from narrow branches and string. No arrows, though. Who knows what depredations we would have wrought! (Mike-the-menace would have absolutely shot us dead!)

Then, just before ten a.m., we all walked, bounced, skipped and jumped to University Avenue to watch the parade. (We had no car. Occasionally we all loaded onto Daddy’s bike: Dad on the seat, Mom sidesaddle on the horizontal bar, Mike on the handlebars, me on the back fender, and Joan in Mom’s arms. I’m surprised we weren’t all killed! (There’s a photo somewhere. Anybody got it?)

I was enchanted at the gorgeous, colorful confections, like gigantic bridal cakes, that drifted along the parade route with no visible means of propulsion. Pretty ladies in bathing suits or ball gowns stood on top of them and waved at us, smiling, their lipstick bright red! (This was the late 40’s.)　

A clown on a unicycle rode past, occasionally falling down and howling. We laughed until we wet our panties. (I enviously wished I could ride a unicycle like they did.) Sometimes there were clowns on stilts. I was astonished they could balance up that high! How did they do that?

Bands played and marched, coming from BYU, whatever passed as Provo High, and maybe Springville.

(They always stopped playing in front of us for some reason, and started again on the next block.) Our pulses raced! Our feet marched in place! Our eyes sparkled! How I envied the girls in swirly short skirts, kicking their white, tasseled boots sky-high while twirling shining batons on their fingertips, flashing them like light-speed windmills, and tossing them in the air. (I always spent that afternoon hiding in the back yard, trying to twirl a stick between my fingers – with little success. I did once buy a painted wooden baton at Kresses after saving my pennies for weeks, but a genuine, silver one was beyond my wildest dreams! Boots and courage were beyond my wildest dreams in those days, as well.) (Now I’m an exhibitionist show-off!) (CLOTHED, of course! What did you THINK!)

The parade went south on University, turned west on Center, and ended at Pioneeer Park, which was neat, because that park had an irrigation canal running along side, and we all loved to get wet and ruin our crepe-paper decorations and clothing in it.

Usually a carnival had set up in the street beside the park, and we rode the merry-go-round and the little toy cars or boats, feeling so BIG and BRAVE! I was always way too scared for the Ferris wheel! We tried to throw rings around coke bottles in the arcade, and invariably missed (I also practiced that all afternoon with Mom’s vinegar bottle, determined that next year I would WIN! Still can’t.)

We sometimes got cotton candy, which was the supreme treat in the world. And then went home for naps (Mom and Dad’s naps. They were exhausted dragging 3.5 kids around town – Yeah, mom was ALWAYS pregnant.) (For 26 years she was pregnant every other year – I now wonder how she held Dad off through those whole, alternating, non-pregnant years).

Over time it became traditional for Dad to make root beer after the parade by stirring together a bottle of flavoring, sugar, water, and dry ice, all compacted in the pressure cooker for an hour or so. Ahhhhh! Dad’s Root Beer! We could hardly wait until it was ready, and nobody will ever forget it! (In later years, Mom took to making root beer with yeast, and letting it zazzle up a couple of days in the fridge. Definitely a weird flavor, but we would do anything for the magic of carbonation!) (Except BUY it! We could never afford “store-boughten” anything.) (I don’t think I had a bottle of store-bought pop before I was 12!)

At night, and for the only night of the year, we kids were allowed to stay up late and watch the fireworks being shot off from the BYU football field. Everyone on the street was out on their lawns on kitchen chairs, ohing and ahing like the enchanted hicks we were (and still are). I gasped at the glory of stars exploding in space like the beginning of the universe, which then spilled down and landed in the big fields that later became Provo High and a few BYU playing fields. They were all meadows in the 40s and 50s. Each and every year I SAW those stars fall right into the meadows, and swore with all my heart that the next day I would remember to go out into the fields and pick up some of those stars to keep. How I would love owning my own stars! But I always forgot until the next year, when I cursed my bad memory and swore that vow once again.

When the fireworks ended, Mom and Dad insisted we were tired, which was totally, absolutely untrue! We were so stoked we could have galloped up Y Mountain! But we sure fell asleep fast when they forced us, whining and protesting, into bed.

Now the Provo 4^th of July Celebration is billed as the biggest in the nation. People camp-out on the parade route, starting on the afternoon of the 3^rd, to save themselves places for a parade twenty times the size and brilliance of the ones of my youth. Bands and floats come from California, Wyoming, and Texas. The clowns throw baskets of candy at the kids. The Stadium of Fire costs $40 a seat, and big name entertainers come to tell jokes, play music, dance, march, and keep thousands of rich people entertained for the hours before the fireworks.

(The year Ben got home from his mission, I actually bought tickets! The first and last time ever. Bob Hope came and told dirty jokes which received dark mutters from the crowds. But the fireworks were spectacular up close!)

Nevertheless, nothing will ever match those Forthajulys from my childhood!