This week, I am giving you the background on the Thanksgiving Day Parade.

When new resident E.J. Goodwin called the Fountain Hills Chamber of Commerce and asked the time of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, she was told there wasn’t one.

She and her family had just moved to the community from Detroit, Mich., which traditionally had a very large Thanksgiving Parade. When she found that it wasn’t just Fountain Hills, but no town or city west of the Mississippi River held a parade on that holiday, she arranged a meeting with me as the president of the Chamber about starting one.

The first responsefrom the Chamber board was negative.

“Many felt holding a parade on Thanksgiving might take away from traditional family activities,” I reported to her. But, E.J. persisted, and the result was a big success that became a great family tradition -- attending the parade together as a family each Thanksgiving.

Goodwin agreed to chair the parade planning committee for the Chamber, which she did for several years. She named the event “Parada de los Cerros” (Parade of the Hills). The first Thanksgiving Day Parade was held on Thursday, November 22, 1984.

Since I had been named the community’s Citizen of the Year, I was named first Parade Marshal and the first Grand Marshal was Ladmo of the

“Wallace and Ladmo Show,” a popular afternoon children’s show on Channel 5 that was the longest continuously running television show in the country. Channel 12 helicopter pilot Jerry Foster, another popular local television personality at that time, led the parade riding his black Peruvian horse.

We had trouble finding a band that would play on Thanksgiving. We were getting desperate. l saw a newscast that had featured a San Francisco parade band that had a precision marching band of guys in suits and carrying briefcases. My late buddy, Mike Petrone, suggested we could get some guys together and form a kazoo band. We could play the theme to the movie “Bridge on the River Kwai.” We were never able to put it together.

Finally, we ended up with two bands, one being the 18 Fountain Hills members of the Coronado High School band. (That is where our high school age students attended classes at that time. But that will be the subject of another future column.) The other was the Creighton Middle School band from Phoenix.

Many local groups and businesses participated as well.

The top prize for floats was presented to the Village Bazaar Merchants Association, which converted a pleasure boat into a replica of the Mayflower and each of the merchants dressed as a pilgrim or Indian. Santa Claus was the last entry in the Parade.

To this day, the Thanksgiving Day Parade continues as a longtime tradition. In recent years, Chamber Special Events Coordinator Sharon Morgan has been the parade organizer. The parade averages more than 70 entries each year.

And families attending the parade together has also become a tradition.

I participated in all but one of the parades held during my years of living in Fountain Hills. I was even in one parade twice. I appeared on the Fountain HIlls Theater float as Elvis at the beginning of the parade. When I finished the parade route, I changed clothes in the back of a van as we quickly drove back to the start of the parade route. Then I appeared on The Times’ entry just ahead of the last entry in the parade -- Santa Claus.

Diane and I will be in Fountain Hills the week of Thanksgiving and, of course, we’ll be at the parade.