Oh, the Fourth of July. For most people, it brings to mind the colors red, white and blue, the savory taste of grilled hotdogs and hamburgers, and the loud, bright spectacle of fireworks exploding above you to send off the evening. For myself, I associate all of those things with the Fourth of July — and, at this point, three summers into my role as the Landmark’s staff reporter, I also associate the day with walking in the morning parades in both Brookfield and Riverside.
Like the past two years, the day’s schedule demanded that I wake up around 7 a.m. so I could get dressed and ready to make the drive from my Far North Side apartment to Riverside, stopping only at the Dunkin Donuts at the corner of Broadway Street and Foster Avenue for some early caffeination.
The drive takes me through downtown, with a gorgeous view of the skyline from Lake Shore Drive as I approach from the north. That view is an underrated perk of the commute. Before long, I was on the Stevenson Expressway heading west, and then suddenly I was turning onto Longcommon Avenue from Harlem Avenue and finding a place to park on Selborne Road so I could make my way to the Landmark’s parade unit. The group consisted of sportswriter Bill Stone, circulation manager Jill Wagner and her husband, Ned Wagner, who drove the car with the Landmark logo on it while the three of us handed out candy to residents of all ages, especially to the kids.
In years past, I remember the parade in Riverside feeling endless, but this year, it was over before I knew it. I was surprised by the number of attendees who cheered on the Landmark for our reporting or recognized me personally by name or photo.
Once we got past the end of the parade downtown, we realized we had far too many boxes of candy to have room in the car for all four of us to zip over to Brookfield, so we gave two of the boxes to firefighters watching the festivities from the fire department’s open truck bay. We hope they enjoy all the Laffy Taffys we bestowed upon them.
Then, with no time to spare, we drove to Brookfield’s parade starting point at the intersection of Garfield and Grand avenues and arrived only moments before the parade set off. In Brookfield, we were joined by Charlie Meyerson, formerly a board member for the nonprofit Growing Community Media that published the Landmark from 2019 through this year before it and its sister publications were donated to NEWSWELL in February.
The four of us continued to hand out candy while Ned drove, though this time it seemed to fly out of my oversized satchel as soon as I filled it, and I had to make multiple walking refills out of the open trunk of the car. Hopefully, with four candy-givers, no one had to go without due to our planning folly there.
By the end of the second parade, with sweat in my eyes and an ache in my feet, I’d achieved nearly 7,000 steps for the day, a feat that made me feel justified later in lazing around on a friend’s couch.
At one point during the day — I can’t remember in which town, though hopefully this reader knows who she is — one woman in the crowd waved hello to me and told me I was her favorite journalist, a compliment I never expected to hear. In this line of work, it’s easy to abstractly agree with the sentiment that local news is important, but it never feels truer than when I get to interact with you, our readers, in real life to hear about the impact our reporting makes. I’m truly honored to be someone’s favorite journalist and to make an impact in each of your lives by keeping you informed of government, business and community life in Brookfield and Riverside.
Like I said, after we finished the parades and I drove back into the city, I was beat. I spent a good couple of hours languishing at home before I got myself together and hung out with a couple of friends for a triple feature of scary movies, my favorite kind. (For the curious, we watched “It Came from Outer Space” from 1953, “Creepshow 2” from 1987 and “Vamps” from 2012, my favorite of the bunch.) By the time I was heading home for good, those aforementioned fireworks were exploding overhead through the fog that had crept up on the city.
I’d say it was a Fourth of July for the books.
