Arlington’s Massive Fourth of July Parade, No. 58.5, Is Ready to Resume

Arlington’s population had just passed 50,000 in 1965 when Dortheda “Dottie” Lynn and a few members of Church Women United decided Arlington needed a little Independence Day spirit.

Maybe a parade. Sort of.

They organized a little loop around the trails of Randol Mill Park, with about a hundred kids decorating their bikes with little American flags and red, white, and blue streamers, and many of the bikes with playing cards in the spokes. It made them feel a bit like they were on a motorcycle. Sort of.

A phenomenon happened. People showed up to this small event. Lots of them. So much so that kids did a few rappelling laps around the park. A makeshift kazoo band played a version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” along with a semi-recognizable attempt at “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Collectively, it was a big event that started small.

“I knew right away that something bigger could come of this. Something that should come of this,” Lynn told a reporter for the Arlington Citizen-Journal in the 1970s.

And so it did. Soon the parade became a nonprofit, moved downtown, and is now Arlington’s longest-running event. It may well be the largest Fourth of July parade in Texas, though a few other Uncle Sams could claim it. It’s a 2-mile montage of American red, white, and blue that begins at UT-Arlington’s “South Forty” parking lot, winds north through the university district, loops back to City Hall, and then loops back south to the original parking lot.

Ninety minutes, maybe a bit more. The crowd is bigger, much bigger, than at the Randol Mill event, now around 100,000.

Lynn, who once served as Albert Einstein’s secretary at Princeton University, served for four years as chair of Arlington’s newly formed Fourth of July Association, becoming one of the first female city council members, as well as the namesake of Dottie Lynn Parkway and the Dottie Lynn Recreation Center. She died in 2006. But the parade goes on.

The July 4th parade will be the 59th, or possibly the 58th, held in 2020. The COVID-19 outbreak forced the parade to be canceled for the first time in history.

It’s a development that board members find intolerable, said the association’s current president, Kevin Donovan.

“We dressed up in red, white and blue, met at the South Forty and at 9 a.m. we walked the entire parade route,” Donovan said. “So technically we haven’t had a parade since 1965.”

There have been a few near misses. Rain is a rare occurrence, a statistical improbability in this part of Texas on July 4, at the exact time of the parade, but it does happen.

“We delayed one parade by half an hour because of the proximity of lightning and another by an hour because of a deluge,” Donovan recalls.

Donovan works in the parking lot staging area during the parade and was there during the year of the flood.

“It ruined a lot of floats,” he said. “The Arlington Conservation Council had created these very decorative, big, colorful paper flowers that slowly faded into unrecognizable clumps.”

The parade continued despite the rain, the floats were soggy and lumpy, the spectators damp but enthusiastic.

Two of the parade’s longstanding traditions are the naming of a marshal and a theme. This year’s theme is “Home Run for Heroes.” The parade marshal this time around will be former Major League Baseball Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Ferguson “Fergie” Jenkins, whose more than 3,000 strikeouts and 284 wins make him the leading black pitcher in MLB history.

“We will also have a float with the World Series trophy that the Rangers won this year, accompanied by an entourage of the Rangers Six Shooters,” said Claudia Perkins, also a board member.

The parade participants are diverse: high school marching bands and bicycle scouts, cheerleaders and sergeant teams, Moslah “car-vette” drivers, Korean veterans, mounted patrols, Sikhs, religious groups and even an atheist association.

“I’ve been doing this since 1997 and it’s always a pleasure for me,” Donovan said. “It’s one of Arlington’s true community events and it’s really a melting pot. It’s an event that anyone can attend or participate in – no memberships, no reservations, it’s all free right here in downtown Arlington.”

OK Carter is a columnist for The Arlington Report. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article was first published on Arlington Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.