Wanted: A July parade on Orcas – Museum says it won’t handle the annual Historical Days parade

If Orcas Island wants a parade on July 4 or the first Saturday of the month, somebody else is going to have to handle it.

“We’ve been doing this for 50 years,” says Linda Tretheway, president of the Board of Trustees of the Orcas Island Historical Museum. “It’s a good time for another organization to step forward and be recognized” for putting on the parade.

Board members contend that their plates are now full, having committed themselves to making a big push this year to its fundraising campaign that will require $800,000 to restore six homestead cabins, remodel the rooms linking the cabins together, and install a heating and cooling system that will enable the museum to remain open year-round. It also calls for constructing a 1,861-square-foot building for offices, volunteer work areas, archive storage, mechanical room and bathroom.

Other tasks facing the museum include staffing the facility with volunteers during the summer and helping the library index local newspapers going all the way back to 1891.

The museum board had been threatening to pull out of the parade the past few years. But members always decided that they’d continue to do it if nobody else would take it on. Tretheway says that offer cannot be made again. “We have to say ‘we won’t do it.’ We need to not do it for a while,” she explains.

Organizing and directing a parade is a major undertaking that requires a hundred volunteer hours, according to Tretheway. Tasks include coming up with a theme, getting out the necessary forms to participants, arranging to have streets blocked off, getting the necessary equipment to the announcers, arranging for prizes for the winners, etc.

This is why finding somebody else to take it on may be difficult. One possible organizer would be the Orcas Island Chamber of Commerce. President Michael Rivkin says he appreciates the museum’s situation. “We share their frustration,” he says. “But our good people’s plates are also full.”

The museum does intend to continue hosting the Historical Days celebration in the Eastsound Village Square the first Saturday in July. That involves selling hot dogs and pies, and providing booths for private vendors and non-profit corporations.

Tretheway insists that the board’s decision was a difficult one, and that it’s her fervent hope that there will continue to be a parade on Orcas Island. The board president has many fond memories of local parades that go all the way back to the time when she was a little girl visiting the island every summer.

Last week the museum board wrote a letter to 27 different organizations asking them to take on the parade. In the letter, the museum offered to help the new group by providing “the 50 years of our experience,” Tretheway says.

As for whether the parade would take place July 4 or the first Saturday of the month, that would be left to the organization undertaking the project. Islanders have been debating this issue for years.

Anyone interested in putting on the parade should call museum Curator Jen Vollmer at 376-4849.

— Ted Grossman is editor of islandssounder.com and The Islands’ Sounder. He can be reached at (360) 376-4500 or email.

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