From 1976 to 1981, Fountain Hills received much acclaim in the Phoenix area for its award-winning floats in the annual Fiesta Bowl Parade.

The Fountain Hills Civic Association sponsored the floats, under the volunteer leadership of Paul May. Developer MCO Properties provided the funding and residents came up with the designs and did the decorating.

Themes were creative and colorful and each year won one of the prominent awards. “City at the End of the Rainbow” was the first entry. It showed a multi-colored rainbow with a replica of the Fountain shooting through it.

Riding on the float were the first Miss Fountain Hills, Linda Anderson, and her attendants, Elaine Haemmerle and Mary Ryan.

“Castle in the Hills” was the second entry which featured internationally known author and Fountain Hills resident Elleston Trevor dressed as a knight on horseback, business woman Kay Kinder, who operated her Fountain Fashions shop in the Village Bazaar shops and the Bashas’ shopping center for nearly 50 years, was the queen and Valley National Bank manager Chuck Uhlig was a trumpeter.

The basic shape of the float was utilized again a month later when resident volunteers re-covered it with black and silver decorations and contractor Ray Good dressed as the Lone Ranger riding atop the same reared-up white horse. It won the Grand Prize as the best float in the Scottsdale Parada Del Sol.

Incidentally, an interesting aside to that story was when they were driving the float down the Beeline Highway at 4:30 in the morning to avoid traffic, a traffic signal at Gilbert Road caught one of the castle’s towers and ripped the entire castle from the float’s base.

Other float themes were “Follow the Yellow Brick Road to Fountain Hills,” “Showtime Fountain Hills” (circus theme with a live tiger and me as the strong man), “Happiness is Being Ten Years Old” and “Up, Up and Away to Fountain Hills.” This float featured a grouping of brightly colored hot air balloons reminiscent of scenes at Fountain Park during the Great Fair. It was completely covered in carnations. Each one was put on the float by a large number of volunteers the morning of the parade.

The float project ended when the Fiesta Bowl Parade Committee decided all of the float entries had to be professionally constructed. The resultant cost was out of the price range for the community.

May went on to be a valued volunteer in the community. During the community’s 10th anniversary celebration, he organized a Ford automobile car show in Fountain Park. He even invited the top executives of Ford in Detroit to fly out and be a part of the festivities. They became so enthused about attending the event that they used the park event to unveil a new model of Ford called the EXP. It was not a big seller and was pulled from the market after two years. But the hype it was given in the park that Sunday afternoon in November of 1980 brought Fountain Hills plenty of free publicity.

Ford shot promotional photos for several of their models in Fountain Hills for several years after that.

A large party was held at the Fountain Hills home of author Elleston Trevor for Valley Ford dealers and the Ford executives. As it turned out the executive vice president of Ford was a big fan of Trevor’s Quiller spy series.

“He and Elleston talked about spy stories all night long,” said May. “It was a lucky twist for us and made the evening that much better.”

There was only one problem. We have no photos of the evening because of a major blunder by me. When I loaded the film, I didn’t look to see if the film was engaged on the other side of the camera. It never did and I had no pictures on the 36-exposure roll.

In the 44 years I covered events in our town, it only happened to me that one time, but what a time it was.