Way Off the Road Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America

Standstill Parade Whalan, Minnesota, Pop: 62 Whalan, Minnesota, is a bucolic little town. But you know what? Things can get a little too bucolic sometimes. The unlocked front doors, the peace and quiet, and the downhome neighborliness are all well and good, but from time to time folks want a little excitement for a change. "Let's have a parade!" proposed the young, vivacious, ponytailed local businessman and fairly new guy in town David Harrenstein. Hmmm. Nice idea, but next to impossible in a town where the population is sixtytwo and dropping fast, numerically and quite literally. Whalan has none of your essential parade elements, according to town council member Buddy Olson. A marching band? "No." Fire truck? "No." Police car? "No." A queen of any kind? "No." Buddy isn't going negative on us, just stating the facts. All of this is not to mention the biggest problem of all, paradewise: the whole town's only, at the most, two blocks long. A parade would be over before it began. "Everybody loves a parade," David says. "We're just geographically challenged." He admits to an ulterior motive. David owns the Overland Inn, one of the only buildings in town. It's no longer an inn, but a small restaurant of sorts that serves ice cream and "worldfamous pie"world famous around here at least. He wanted to attract some people to town, people who like pie a la mode. Since purchasing the inn two years earlier, he'd found doing business without people around to be extremely challenging. Townsfolk were skeptical, as smalltown folk often are when it comes to new ideas. "We've never had a parade," says Harley Olson, Buddy's father. "At least not since '43, when I got here. About, oooh, forty years ago we did have a carnival, but it's been pretty quiet since." Adeline Larson backed him up on that, saying she could not recollect a parade in her eightyeight years here. Then David came up with a breakthrough ideamaybe even a concept. To solve the paramount problem of a parade being too long for their short town, why not have the parade stand stillstay with him on thisand have the crowd walk around it? A standstill parade! "We were gonna lock him up when he said that," Buddy scoffs. But the more Buddy and others in town got to thinking about it, the more they thought: You know, it just might work. Not to bring up a sore subject, but what would beinthe parade? You need a cop car with a siren and flashing lights, for openers. The Fillmore County sheriff had one and said he supposed he could send it over, since there really ought to be a police presence at a major public event like this. You need a color guard. Oldtimer Marvin Severson, commander of the local American Legion post, had to be convinced to deploy his forces. He said he was a little out of practice: "The last parade I was in was up in Black River Falls in '52." But Marvin came around. The flagbearing Legionnaires would lead the parade, right behind the police car. They're old, but they could still stand, which was all that would be required. David named Adeline, the town's oldest living resident, as grand marshal. She, too, resisted the honor. "I finally agreed after he told me I wouldn't have to do anything," she says. "I guess in this parade nobody does anything." You need smiling, waving politicians in a parade, but that's never a problem. State RepresentatiGeist, Bill is the author of 'Way Off the Road Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America', published 2007 under ISBN 9780767922722 and ISBN 0767922727.