Veterans Day parade set for Saturday

When asked what impact cold weather might have on Saturday’s Veterans Day Parade, organizer John Montano remembered a parade standard.

“One year, we had snow and it was hard to get from Hilltop to Commerce Way,” Montano said. “Some of those floats, we had to get a pickup to pull them up. We kept getting calls asking if we were going to call it off. A commander from the Veterans of Foreign Wars post, he told me, ‘We didn’t call the war off in the snow in Korea.’

“I said, ‘OK, the parade goes on.’”

In short, be ready to bundle up and enjoy the city’s annual parade, which will run along Main beginning at 10 a.m.

The parade has been going on somewhere between 25 and 30 years, Montano said, and he has organized the event for the last 16. He said as of Friday afternoon, there were around three dozen entrants.

“It’s lining up pretty well,” Montano said. “The deadline was today, but we may be adding some more later. We could have 50 or more.”

The parade’s theme this year is “We the People,” and the parade marshal is Gene Hendrick.

Hendrick, an economic development specialist with the Clovis Industrial Development Corp., has been in Clovis for 38 years and served in the Navy for 40 years, although most of it was spent in inactive duty.

“As far as I’m concerned, there are dozens of people who certainly deserve to be honored before I should be called on,” Hendrick said. “People who were dodging bullets are the ones we should be honoring.”

He first joined the Navy in 1952, figuring at his size he was an easy target charging up and down hills in the Army.

“When you join the Navy Reserve, you get into several situations. I was at first a naval reservist on active duty, and that was for four years. I was inactive for the next 16 years. That qualified me for retirement. But you never get your name off the books. They could have recalled me right up until 1992.

“I was very concerned during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I expected my phone to ring every day. By the time we were in Vietnam, I was senior enough that the Navy would ask why they’d want somebody with my rank. I hadn’t been on active duty for the last 12 years, and they were reluctant to call guys like that back.”

He was discharged in 1992 as a commander, which Montano said would be equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.

“The thing I liked the most was all the travel,” Hendrick said. “I was single in those days, and leaving for nine months was no problem. We looked forward to those trips, at least the single guys did. The married guys didn’t look forward to it any more than the married guys (at Cannon Air Force Base) like deployments.”