Cover of John F. Kennedy
Fifty years ago Lucille Aldrich and the Aptos Ladies Tuesday Evening Society celebrated the first Aptos Fourth of July Parade. This annual event began as a community victory celebration and has expanded into a world-renowned icon known as the “World Shortest Parade.” Even 50 years later the parade is based on the same small-town community values that were so important to Lucy and the Aptos Ladies Tuesday Evening Society.
As Lucille explained, the Aptos Fourth of July Parade actually began as a Memorial Day barbecue in celebration of the community’s victory over a proposed zoning change. The change would have allowed a cement packaging plant to be built right in the center of Aptos Village. The locals rose up and defeated the proposal.
The first event was so popular, that a parade and potluck were planned to follow on the 4th of July. The year was 1961, the same year the Berlin Wall went up, John F. Kennedy was President, and a first class stamp cost just 4 cents.
The Ladies Society invited everyone in Aptos to the 4th of July potluck and parade. Lucille had enlisted the help of her friend, Hank Shaw, a member of the Monterey Bay Antique Car Club. Hank showed up with 18 antique cars and drivers. The Ladies of the Tuesday Evening Society dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and paraded alongside the antique cars with their children in tow.
As they were parading through the village, a train (Yes, there were passenger trains running though Aptos in those days) called the “Sun Tan Special” that transported visitors from San Francisco and the Bay Area to the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, pulled into the Aptos Station.
When the passengers saw the impromptu parade many decided to hop off to join the fun. Soon a procession of happy folks was marching along Soquel Drive. Originally, the parade route was from the Driftwood Gas Station at Trout Gulch Road (formerly known as Terrible Herbst) to the Pop Inn restaurant (now the Britannia Arms) and returning to the Bayview Hotel. Little did they know that was the beginning of the annual Aptos Parade.
“It was a happy coincidence that the parade coincided with the train passing through,” recalled Lucille. Later that year, the Southern Pacific Railroad tried to close the crossing in front of the Bayview Hotel. The Aptos Ladies again took action and dressing in Victorian clothes, invited the press to watch them lay down on the railroad tracks in protest. The court decided that the Southern Pacific could not close off the right-of-way. The Ladies Tuesday Evening Society of Aptos were again victorious.
Lucille and her friends decided to repeat the celebration the next year by making it an annual Fourth of July parade. Enthusiasm for the event grew by leaps and bounds. The crowd of parade goers and watchers increased from a few families and passersby in 1961 to a several hundred in 1968 to an estimated 20 thousand today including both the participants and spectators.
Now very early each Fourth of July, lawn chairs and blankets mysteriously appear out of the darkness and the morning fog along the 3,300-foot (0.62 miles) parade route between State Park Drive and Trout Gulch Road. By parade time, the street is lined with people and the chairs and blankets are filled by enthusiastic spectators. Times may have changed since that first parade 50 years ago, but we believe that Lucille Aldrich and the Ladies Tuesday Evening Society of Aptos would be pleased by what their victory parade has become.
