Celebration fit for a leprechaun

If you’re a Bangor resident of Irish descent, or even if you just pretend to be when St. Patrick’s Day rolls around, perhaps you’ll choose to celebrate the occasion today by heading to a crowded bar in town and knocking back some green beer and corned beef sandwiches.

And that’s fine, hangovers notwithstanding. But considering that people of Irish ancestry make up nearly a quarter of the city’s population, why is it that Bangor doesn’t have some kind of St. Patrick’s Day parade, as Portland does, to properly honor its rich Irish heritage?

City Manager Ed Barrett said having a parade would not necessarily be out of the question, although putting one together would take quite a bit of planning. For one thing, he said, a local civic group would have to come forward to organize the event, and that never has happened, as far as he knows. The threat of a late-winter snowstorm is also a drawback, and so is trying to get a few marching bands to participate when schools are in session.

“Parades go better on holidays than on working days,” Barrett said.

Maybe the real problem, however, is that we think too big about our parades in Bangor, which typically are elaborately orchestrated affairs that wind through the downtown and past reviewing stands for more than an hour. Maybe our grand sense of scale is holding us back from having a St. Patrick’s Day parade we Irish in Bangor could be proud of.

I recently learned about a college town in Missouri, located 90 miles north of Kansas City, that proves any community can have a St. Patrick’s Day parade if it wants one bad enough and is willing to forgo quantity for quality.

Maryville, Mo., population 11,000, claims to hold the record for having the world’s shortest St. Patrick’s Day parade. Well, that’s not exactly true. There’s another town somewhere that has that distinction; its residents assemble in colorful costumes every March 17 and simply walk across the street – parade over.

So Maryville decided to make its name by painting its mini-parade route green, thereby earning the title of the world’s shortest painted green St. Patrick’s Day parade. At 97.1 feet, it’s a wee parade, indeed, but all the parade that Maryville needs.

“The people here really enjoy it,” said W.R. O’Riley, who calls himself an Irishman through and through. “We started it on a whim and this is now our 18th year.”

O’Riley told me that he and five other Maryvillers originally decided to stage the parade as a way to give the townspeople a much needed break from the late-winter doldrums. They made the route 97.1 feet long because that happens to be the local radio station’s number on the dial.

“We surveyed the route to be precise about its length,” he said.

O’Riley said setting up the parade can take as long as an hour. If the weather is nice, the parade can draw 600 spectators and 100 marchers, most of them decorated in shamrocks and decked out in leprechaun costumes with top hats.

“We don’t have floats or marching bands or anything like that, but we did have a bagpiper once,” he said. “Mostly we just play Irish music on boomboxes. Nothing too fancy.”

The Maryville parade has its own grand marshal, of course. This year it’s a retired postmaster named H.B. Sears. The selection process, like the parade itself, is never complicated.

“He’s my brother-in-law,” O’Riley said.

With the route painted green and blocked off from vehicular traffic, the parade gets under way shortly after 5 p.m. It begins at the corner of a downtown intersection, then proceeds exactly 97.1 feet until it reaches a pub called The Palms, where the green beer starts to flow.

The world’s shortest painted green St. Patrick’s Day parade can last as long as 10 minutes, if the marchers don’t hurry to the finish line.

Afterward, the route is washed clean with high-powered water hoses and people dine on corned beef and cabbage and everyone in the little town enjoys being Irish for the night.

“It’s pretty laid-back,” O’Riley said, “but people look forward to it every year. After all, everybody loves a parade.”

And that’s no malarkey.