Editor's note: The City of Dublin announced the 2022 St. Patrick’s Day Parade is canceled for Saturday, March 12 due to the forecasted freezing temperatures and high winds.
Instead, the City will host a community celebration on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, when the forecast is more favorable. Read more here.
Courtesy of Jeff Glorioso
After a year in reverse, the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day Parade will return on March 12 in its traditional format with floats and festivities. But don’t call it the luck of the Irish that everything falls into place on March 12; it takes a lot of hard work and preparation, too.
Whether it’s maintenance for events throughout the year or building something one-of-a-kind for St. Patrick’s Day, floats are anything but an afterthought.
Carina Dacierno, who helped organize several floats as an Indian Run Elementary Cub Scouts leader in years past, says the process would often begin in early January in anticipation of parade participant applications opening up around the end of the month. For the Indian Run scouts, a month of planning could be followed by three to four weeks of actual building.
“First, we had the idea, then it was, ‘How are we going to execute this?’” Dacierno says. “Then, OK, do we actually have people who know how to do this and execute it?”
Through the knowledge and skills of parents, leaders and scouts combined, the group would custom make its floats, often designing ones that nod to scouting activities or St. Patrick’s Day. One memorable float, towed by a yellow convertible pickup truck, featured a Paddy 500 racing hill with pinewood derby cars midway down.
Photo courtesy of City of Dublin
The Indian Run scouts don’t always have a float in the parade, sometimes marching with banners and flags instead. As a smaller organization, sometimes the scouts simply don’t have the resources to make the float happen.
“Logistics to have a float are hard to come by when you are a group like scouts,” she says. “No. 1: You have to have a flatbed trailer, and you have to have somebody in the (organization) who has a vehicle that can pull that trailer.”
Storage throughout the year can be a challenge as well. Leo Knoblauch, parade coordinator for Honor Flight Columbus, an organization providing Veterans with trips to Washington, D.C., to visit war memorials, says that his group purchased a float vehicle from a neighbor who was unable to store it.
That vehicle is a large hay wagon that Knoblauch, who estimates Honor Flight has participated in five Dublin St. Patrick’s Day Parades, had to update to make street ready to drive to parade destinations.
Photo courtesy of Leo Knoblauch
Honor Flight participates in as many parades as possible to raise awareness of the program, so the wagon gets plenty of use throughout the year. Towing it is typically a pickup truck with Honor Flight painted on it. Knoblauch says that David Horner painted the truck after his father, George Horner, traveled to Washington through Honor Flight. When David Horner died, Honor Flight purchased the truck.
New to Honor Flight’s vehicle collection is an M35 style military cargo truck, commonly known as a deuce and a half for its 2.5-ton weight. That vehicle poses more extreme storage challenges, but Honor Flight is able to keep the deuce and a half at its headquarters.
“It’s not like you can just park it in your driveway,” Knoblauch says. “A lot of cities have ordinances against you having these things in your driveway.”
Knoblauch says the truck may make an appearance in Dublin, as he hopes Honor Flight will be able to participate in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade this year.
An alternative to storing a parade float is using it year-round. The Columbus Zoo & Aquarium’s float is used on site throughout the year for events or even as decor, says Jeff Glorioso, director of experiential marketing.
The zoo had a float professionally designed just before the COVID-19 pandemic began to minimize the work of preparing for parades.
“We decided we had enough presence in parades that maybe we should look at getting our own float,” Glorioso says, “and then we can put holiday decorations on it.”
The float matches the decoration style of the zoo’s entry gateway. It’s purposefully designed to be neutral so it can be styled to match any event and so no zoo animals or characters look out of place in the habitat depicted.
Glorioso estimates that creating the new float took two months of planning and another two to three months of production. The zoo hopes to participate in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and Glorioso says the already complete float will simplify the process.
“Having a float that’s always here, it’s a lot easier to commit to being a part of things because you don’t have to do that planning in advance,” he says.
Instead, the zoo can focus on other aspects of parade participation, such as which characters or live animals might be able to accompany the float. Glorioso says this often depends on the event as some animals – and some character costumes – have more difficulty with long, hot parades. Organizing a group, not just animals, for any parade float isn’t always easy, especially once kids and families come into play.
“It’s like herding cats and dogs,” Dacierno says. “They’re kids. They want to have fun, but you want to make sure they’re safe and you can accommodate all different ages.”
Dacierno says that, with enough planning, the float can be the easy part, leaving more energy to handle other logistical concerns.
For some groups, the challenge can be finding participants. Honor Flight offers the dozen or so spots on its float to veterans in the area who have signed up for flights with the organization, which can result in a mixed number of respondents.
“The hardest thing is trying to get people to ride and answering all their questions and stuff,” Knoblauch says.
Still, the result is worth it.
“Going down and seeing all the people,” Knoblauch says, “that’s the fun part, seeing all the kids and the other people that thank us.”
Especially for parade participants who live in Dublin, it’s an opportunity to feel a part of the community.
“It is so much fun for the participants to be able to see people in their community shouting and waving,” Dacierno says. “I think the (scouts) felt like a little bit of celebrities.”
Cameron Carr is the associate editor. Feedback welcome at ccarr@cityscenemediagroup.com.
