By MARK SARDELLA
WAKEFIELD — You can mark your calendar because it’s now official. After a two-year absence, the Wakefield Independence Day Parade will make its triumphant return this year.
The Board of Selectmen last night approved the request of the new Wakefield Independence Day Committee (WIDC) to hold the parade on Saturday, July 4, 2015. The board’s enthusiastic approval came after WIDC Chairman and 2015 Parade Coordinator Patrick Sullivan made a brief presentation to the selectmen. Many members of the parade committee, all clad in their “I Love the Parade” T-shirts, were also present.
“The parade will begin promptly at 4 p.m. at the Clarion Inn and conclude at the Galvin Middle School,” Sullivan told the board. He requested permission for the parade to use the same route that it has used in recent years, coming down North Avenue and turning on to Church Street and Common Street before marching through the downtown.
Sullivan also had several other logistical requests regarding the use of Quannapowitt Parkway as a staging area for the parade as well as asking for some control over the vendors in and around the parade route.
Members of the board expressed their enthusiastic support for the WIDC’s efforts to bring the parade back.
“You’ll be making a lot of people very happy,” Selectman Patrick Glynn said.
There was no Independence Day Parade in 2013 or 2014 after the old Wakefield Independence Day Committee announced that it was disbanding following the 2012 parade.
“Speaking on behalf of the Wakefield Independence Day Committee,” then Chairman Stephen Daly told the selectmen in September 2012, “I would like to say that it has been this committee’s honor and pleasure to produce the Annual Wakefield Independence Day Parade for the past 22 years. The time has come, however, for the WIDC to step back from producing the annual Fourth of July Parade. The WIDC will neither fundraise nor produce an Independence Day Parade for Wakefield for 2013.”
Daly at the time cited finances and the burden of year-round fundraising as contributing factors in the committee’s decision to disband rather than downsize the parade that was always regarded as the biggest in the state. He also noted in 2012 the difficulty of securing a major corporate sponsor that would not expect control of the parade in exchange for its generosity. For years, Time-Warner Cable had filled that role without imposing any conditions.
Daly and other members of the committee expressed a willingness to hang on as advisors if a new group came forward to handle organizing the parade.
Hope was expressed that a new committee would come forward, but 2013 came and went with no sign of a re-incarnated committee.
But in the spring of 2014 the announcement came that many in town had been hoping for: A new committee had been formed, led by Wakefield High School class of 2013 graduate Patrick Sullivan, with the goal of bringing the parade back in 2015.
Following last night’s unanimous vote to approve the 2015 parade, WIDC member Dan Benjamin and his wife Lois presented each selectman with a lei made of red, white and blue flowers.