The Float That Left the Parade
A stiff Panhandle gust lifted the Farm Bureau float, with six children and a papier-mache bull, clean out of the parade route.
Small towns in the Texas Panhandle take their parades seriously, and Dalhart's is no exception. I had volunteered to build the Farm Bureau float, which in practice meant that I welded a flatbed trailer to a frame and let my wife cover it in crepe paper. The theme was Harvest Days. We had hay bales, a small windmill, and a six-foot papier-mache bull that my granddaughter had named Frank, painted brown with a red ribbon around his neck.
The children rode on top, six of them, in overalls and straw hats, each holding a paper sunflower. The pickup pulled us out of the staging lot at ten sharp, and for the first block everything went splendidly. People waved. A man on the curb saluted. The band behind us played a march slightly out of tune. I was walking beside the trailer with a clipboard, feeling like a general, when the wind came down the main street like a freight train.
I have never seen a papier-mache bull take flight. He lifted off the float at an angle, sailed over the heads of the crowd, and landed in the fountain in front of the bank. Frank floated, I should say, quite gracefully. The children cheered, because to them it had been planned. The crowd, who had gone silent for a half second, cheered too. I looked down at my clipboard, which said, in my own handwriting, Bull: secure.
A man in a cowboy hat waded into the fountain, fished Frank out, and carried him back on his shoulders to the float. They put him in his old place, still dripping. The parade judges, who stood at the courthouse, gave us a blue ribbon, with a note that said Most Dramatic Entry. Afterward I asked a friend who works on the weather desk about the gust. He said the Panhandle has more wind than most of the country, which is something you can read on the National Weather Service too. Frank now lives in my shop, a little faded, and I tell my granddaughter he is a retired performer. The folks at farm.FM asked for a photo, and I think the bull enjoyed the attention.