It’s ABA weekend!
The parade is in full gear. Ashland got closed down around 6:00 tonight. DUI checkpoints are active. Have a safe parade night.
Wait a minute. That’s the past.
As a matter of fact, driving through Ashland today, this may be the first year without a ‘welcome home ABA..’ without a sign to be seen.. it has been forgotten, it would appear..
There is no parade. There is no celebration. There are no Mummers, and there is no music.
Ashland is quiet tonight, despite more than 100 years of having an active and entertaining romp celebrating the Ashland Boys Association homecoming and Labor Day weekend.
It was something special, and something that people who weren’t there probably don’t really understand.
Of course, it was a parade, and we’ve all seen parades. We know what a parade is. But this was a homecoming. This was a full-fledged series of family reunions taking place on practically every block in town, with adult beverages flowing, sometimes to children but mostly to adults, laughter everywhere, and horns being blown well into the night.
Of course, the vendors always charged too much, but that’s beside the point. There were balloons floating into the air, mostly Barney for some reason and mostly in the 1990s, food everywhere, people everywhere, and a town that for one weekend seemed a whole lot bigger than it really was.
What we got back were a number of responses from people who played along, along with memories and recollections from people who remember what ABA weekend actually felt like.
You see, it’s not going to come back again.
There was some hope back around 2010 and 2011 of a reinvention of the parade, and there were a few years when fire trucks once again rolled through town. But there were no Mummers or marching bands. It wasn’t the same.
And it wasn’t the same because it couldn’t be the same.
Everything else had changed too.
You can’t really have the old ABA parade in a town where everything surrounding the ABA parade has changed and expect only the parade itself to survive untouched. As communities change, so do the things built around those communities. Parades, festivals, traditions and all those little functions of society that once seemed permanent change right along with everything else.
We don’t like it any more than the next guy, but it’s the reality that has to be accepted. And maybe it’s easier to accept when you weren’t there to see what came before.
For the newcomers to town who have absolutely no idea what in the world we’re talking about, let’s paint a picture.
Streamers were everywhere. Businesses, when there were still businesses downtown, shut down early. Signs welcomed the Ashland Boys Association home. There was music. There was Chuck Kehoe. Front porches were filled with life. People went from house to house for whatever was waiting there, a crock pot full of food, a hot dog, a cold beer or just another group of people to talk to.
Father Kean! Floating like an Angel in the wind!
20 YEARS AGO NOW there were images of a tribute to the Mother’s Memorial for that year’s ABA parade..
There was music. There was laughter. And there was just a touch of fall in the air.
The ABA parade also meant something else. Autumn was here. Summer was over.
Marching bands practiced for hours to get that march through downtown right, and for those of us who marched in those bands back then, that march up Walnut Street was painful. You knew exactly where the hills were by the time you reached the end.
But all of that is over now.
There’s probably not much reason to even talk about it anymore because it isn’t coming back. It belongs to the past. The only real inkling of all of this now is a distant memory somewhere in your brain, if you were lucky enough to have been there to see it.
But for those of us who were there, we remember people on every street. We remember the celebrations. We remember the smiles, the music, the crowded porches, the food, the horns, the balloons floating away and the feeling that, for one weekend, seemingly everyone who had ever called Ashland home had come back.
Things like that don’t happen here anymore.
But they happened then.
Just take our word for it.
We were there.
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