Days to Remember

     Long Beach is one of only a few West Coast communities that still celebrates “Loyalty Day” the first weekend of every May.  Others are Willow Grove, California and Newport, Oregon.  There are a few more Loyalty Day observances in towns scattered across the United States, but the number of celebrations has diminished over the years.
      Loyalty Day was made an official holiday by the U.S. Congress (Public Law 85-529) on July 18, 1958.  Following its passage, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1, 1959 the first official observance of Loyalty Day.  “Official” but not “legal” means that schools, post offices, stores and other businesses and organizations are open as usual.  Here on the peninsula, we celebrate not on May 1^st necessarily, but usually on the first weekend of May.
     When I moved full-time to the peninsula in 1978, I was fresh from the San Francisco Bay Area where, for the past decade, peace marches and student sit-ins and draft card (to say nothing of bra) burnings had been the norm.  When I found that Loyalty Day had been conceived during the cold war as an answer to communist May Day celebrations, and that it was still celebrated enthusiastically here, I was aghast.  It seemed a total anachronism to me.
     What I found was that, though the military always had a large presence in the celebration, residents here were more focused on ‘honoring their own’ as evidenced by the enthusiastic support of school kids in their various loyalty courts, the parade which featured riders from the Red Barn, local dignitaries in spiffy cars, the various volunteer fire departments, and even the Pepsi truck (which often got the biggest cheer from the crowds.)
     For a dozen or more years I met friends in the parking lot at the drug store on Loyalty Day Sunday and we watched and clapped and whooped and hollered – and made frequent visits to the back of their van to replenish our snacks and beverages.  In 1980, I was actually in the parade, much to my amazement – on a ‘float’ featuring the Daughters of the Pioneers, Shoalwater Chapter.
     It was 1980, the year of Long Beach’s centennial celebration so there was as much attention being paid to pioneer heritage as to national patriotism.  The Daughters and their escorts were dressed in 1890s garb and were seated on the back of Eddie Wickberg’s 1920s flat bed pickup.  It was cold and rainy, but like the ancestors we represented, we endured.
     Tomorrow we won’t be attending the parade.  Instead we will be getting ready to host a House Concert here with the Kosher Red Hots who play Klezmer music – a genre with origins in Eastern Europe, and developed in the United States in the milieu of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1924.  It seems a bit of a departure from the Loyalty Day celebration… or is it?