UNIONVILLE - For the seventh year in a row, Unionville has celebrated Independence Day with a Fourth of July parade.
The procession starts at the old Unionville schoolhouse. Some old timers can still remember going to school there. The parade then meanders up the single-lane dirt road to the Mohea Whitaker Memorial Youth Park of Unionville and then comes back down past the schoolhouse to make sure the residents who live along the way know it's the Fourth of July. Then it's back to the schoolhouse for an old-fashioned barbeque.
This year's grand marshal was Washoe Valley resident George Chapman, who is a long-time friend of parade organizers Tom and Linda Johnson. Chapman's wife Brenda was the grand marshal last year.
"We've had a lot of good times up here," Chapman said, speaking of the renovated schoolhouse.
He said that the night before the Johnsons and some friends were sitting around talking about this being the first year there was no grand marshal, "and Tom looked at me and said, 'what are you talking about? You're the grand marshal,' and that's how I got to be the grand marshal," Chapman said with a chuckle.
Chapman and his wife have attended many of the Johnsons' gatherings at the old schoolhouse, but this year they were not sure if they would be able to make it. Just two weeks prior, Chapman, who is a two-time cancer survivor, had a collapsed lung.
"We weren't sure if we would be able to make it, but we did," Chapman said.
This year the parade had over 20 entries. Participants include friends of the Johnsons, local residents and others who just wanted to be in the parade. Such is the case of Reno resident Lucas Landau, who said he was surprised by the parade one year when he was camping at the Unionville park and had returned for the last few years to watch the parade. This was Landau's first time actually participating in the parade.
"We're long-time watchers, first-time drivers in the parade," he said.
Landau and friend Tara Prokop decorated his Rhino and invited all the children of those camped in the park to ride in the parade.
"It was a lot of fun. All the kids had fun yelling, 'Happy Fourth of July' to everyone," Landau said.
The parade and festivities afterward are truly family oriented, evident by all the children in the parade and running around the old schoolhouse. One of the many children was the Johnsons' granddaughter, Avery Jo Lynch, who won the mutton busting at this year's Reno Rodeo. She won a pair of pink cowgirl boots for her ride.
"I was so nervous I couldn't eat my cotton candy," the 6-year-old Lynch said of her experience. "All I could think of was I want the pink boots."
The parade started in 2006 when the Johnsons and some friends were doing some renovation work on the old Unionville Schoolhouse, which was known as the Buena Vista School, back in the day.
As Tom Johnson tells it, the group was having some adult refreshments and began reminiscing about Fourth of July parades they had watched in the past and that this would be the first time they hadn't been to a parade on the holiday.
Well, that was all it took. The friends found what they could to decorate their ATVs and paraded up the road shouting greetings to anyone who happened to be outside.
"It was so much fun we did it a couple of times," Johnson recalled.
So the parade has become a tradition with the Johnson family, friends and locals.
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