Boulder City Bash Makes Splash
Early in the morning, a strong smell of maple syrup wafts over Boulder City’s Bicentennial Park.
That’s how you know it’s the Fourth of July.
The 7 a.m. pancake breakfast starts the day of Damboree festivities, perhaps Southern Nevada’s quaintest and most reliable Independence Day celebration.
Eighty-year-old Elma Donahue, a 45-year Boulder City resident who never misses the holiday, took a bite of pancakes and proclaimed them delicious.
“It’s the same as it used to be, but with more people,” she said. “It’s tradition — it wouldn’t be Boulder City without it. We’ll be here from seven o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night,” when the fireworks end.
Looking back, the grandmotherly Donahue smiled mischievously. Her best memories, she said, are of when she was younger, “working the beer booth at the park. It can get pretty crazy.”
Among those ladling out the hot flapjacks was a boyish-looking young man more formally dressed than the rest. He said he’s been coming here “since I was in diapers.”
Back then, his daddy, Bob Miller, was a politician, eventually becoming governor. Now young Ross Miller is the Nevada secretary of state.
The Millers are known here for something else: their enthusiasm for the water-spraying component of the parade.
Every year, they up the ante. Last year, they brought in the 2,000-gallon water truck for the first time. A water cannon is mounted on top of the massive tank, looking very much like a tank-mounted gun.
But it couldn’t end there. “This year, we want to make the water super frigid cold, so we enlisted a Ph.D. chemical engineer to figure out how much ice we’d need,” Ross Miller said. “It turns out it’s about 3,000 pounds of ice. We’ve got 280 10-pound bags of ice there to cool it down.”
The line for pancakes extended from the corner in front of the Rotary Club, where a permanent brick installation makes for easy grilling, down to the end of the block.
But the line moved quickly, said Janelle Hough, as she neared the front. It was her first Damboree; the 37-year-old real estate agent heard about it from her co-workers in Henderson.
“They said, if you don’t know what to do, you’ve got to go to Boulder City,” she said.
On a day of patriotism, thoughts inevitably turned to the war in Iraq. It was on the mind of 60-year-old Army veteran Chuck Brown as he and three family members readied four horses, two of them formerly wild mustangs, for the parade.
“Anytime we’re at war, it’s something to think about on the Fourth of July, because this is our independence,” he said. “We gave the Iraqis their independence. We freed them from the tyranny they was under. I think we was right to go in, and now it’s time to get out.”
Brown wore an American flag shirt, jeans, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. He led a quarterhorse named Dancer as she munched sweet clover in a patch of shade.
His son Matt, a patrol officer with the Henderson Police Department, said everyone in the family served in the military, including all his brothers and his father-in-law, who just returned from Iraq. He would have joined too, if he hadn’t gotten a football scholarship.
“No matter what, they’re still over there giving their all, and they’re proud of what they’re doing,” he said of the military personnel overseas. “I support everybody 100 percent, no matter what’s going on.”
As the pancake line dwindled, the parade floats lined up. Miss Congeniality would be in a powder-blue Mustang convertible; Miss Boulder City would be in a gold Corvette.
At the head of the parade were the politicians who never miss it, Rep. Jon Porter and Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, both Republicans.
Porter got his start in politics on the Boulder City Council. He had done a shift serving pancakes next to Miller by the time he joined the truck full of people with his name on their shirts and on bunches of helium-filled blue balloons.
Woodbury moved to Boulder City in 1981. The 62-year-old, who in September will become the longest-serving county commissioner, joked that he managed to find a car older than himself: a 1915 Model T.
A member of Woodbury’s large family, son-in-law Dave Randall, teetered by on a unicycle. His handmade shirt said on the front, “BRUCE WOODBURY,” and on the back, “NOT JUST A FREEWAY.”
Behind them, in a thoroughly modern contrast, representatives of Assemblyman Joe Hardy, R-Boulder City, rode Segways.
Boulder City is predominantly Republican — an old-fashioned town, conservative in the literal sense of the word. A town that 68-year-old Victor Thomas and his wife, Sandra, picked when it was time to settle down from an itinerant career in the Air Force because, Victor said, “It’s a little bit Mayberry. We love that about it.”
Nonetheless, it was Democrats who joined the parade looking for votes in next year’s presidential election.
The top two candidates in the field didn’t have a presence, but New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards all entered floats in the parade.
A representative of Delaware Sen. Joe Biden was at the Damboree and tried to sneak his red Honda Civic with Florida plates into the parade lineup, but was rebuffed by a parade referee in a golf cart, as he wasn’t officially registered.
Nevada will hold presidential nominating contests before most other states next year, on Jan. 19, a fact that is just starting to seep into the state’s — and the candidates’ — consciousness.
Sara Harrison was noticing the candidate floats as her two kids and various cousins ran up to the water entries to get sprayed with squirt guns.
“I didn’t think we’d see so many,” Harrison said. “I didn’t know Nevada was an important enough state for them to be here.”
The 35-year-old teacher lives in Henderson now, but comes back to her hometown every Fourth. She said most of the candidate names were new to her. “John Edwards I’ve heard of, but the other one, Richardson, I’ve never heard of him. I might check him out.”
However, Harrison said she was a Republican and unlikely to switch.
Back in the valley’s more urban precincts, others were commemorating the holiday differently: by protesting the war.
In front of the Green Valley Library on Sunset Road, a group of about 40 very sweaty people held signs and banners. One of them said, “It’s hotter than this in Iraq — Bring the troops home!”
The protest was organized by a group called Workers Against the War. Organizer Sean Sabatini, a cook at Caesars Palace, said he wanted to make the point that “it is working people fighting this war.”
The group was asking Nevada’s congressional delegation, both Democrats and Republicans, to pledge to turn off the air conditioning in the Capitol and congressional office buildings until the war is over.
Protester Teresa Crawford noted that temperatures in Iraq in August can reach 130 degrees. She said many American service members have died from the heat, such as a New Mexico soldier who died June 27. The military didn’t say so, but his family members told the media he’d died of heat stroke.
“Why don’t our Congress people suffer the same conditions as our troops?” she demanded as drivers in SUVs swept past, some of them honking their support.
Las Vegan Kevin Acosta, who works for an airline, said the protest was the most patriotic way he could imagine to spend the Fourth. Acosta’s 21-year-old son Adam is a Marine corporal on his second tour in Iraq.
“I just talked to my son yesterday by satellite phone,” he said. “He said it’s really hot over there. … I think it’s our duty to speak out. We’re being more patriotic than the people who swallow the propaganda.”
One SUV stopped at the corner. Rolling down all its windows, the driver said he was turning off his air conditioning.
