Hesperia Days Parade, the parade

Well, that was an unusually productive Saturday morning for me.

I wasn’t able to get the camera from the Hesperia Star office, as Main Street being closed diverted most people on the south end of town onto Olive Street (which I normally use as the nearly empty alternative to Main Street), including an awful lot of apparently frustrated little old ladies. Today was the first time I had someone in her 70s willfully blast through a stop sign in front of me to get wherever it is septuagenarians blast off to on Saturday mornings.

But me, Peter, Daily Press ad honcho Kevin Rigney and his wife all piled into a 1959 Ford Thunderbird convertible driven by a friend of a Daily Press employee, and dutifully beauty pageant waved our way down Main Street, followed by several trash trucks from Advance Disposal (which may or may not have been an editorial comment on our work, I’m not sure), who blasted their horns more or less non-stop for 90 minutes.

The Kiwanis Club of Hesperia has been running this parade for a number of years now, and it shows. As we went down Main Street at a stately 5 to 10 miles per hour, we passed a number of Kiwanis announcers, who let the hundreds, maybe thousands in attendance know who each of the floats were.

There were some nice surprises there: While I might expect the announcers to have something nice to say about everyone in the parade, we had several people wave to get our attention and yell how much they like the paper. The Daily Press commissioned a comprehensive readership study earlier this year, so I know what the numbers say about our readership (all very good stuff, although I think it’s probably proprietary info that I can’t share here), but plenty of people don’t necessarily like the paper they read. It’s nice to know that at least a few Hesperians appreciate and maybe even enjoy what we’re doing.

Next year, if I do this again, I’m wearing my Hesperia Star baseball cap, though. I’ve got a pretty serious sunburn.

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