Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
JOHNSON Lightened 1975 parade
JOHNSON Smurfs
JOHNSON 2008 Crowd
Three of the late John Druffel’s daughters in the 1975 Johnson parade; Linda (driving), Paula and Anita. At top is their younger brother Dan as the cuckoo in a clock, and their late mother Frances.
The blended family of John and Alma Druffel pose as the Smurfs in 1985. Note the lack of people in the background.
Well before this picture was taken in 2008, the Johnson parade was a perennial attraction. Photos courtesy of John Druffel
It has thousands of spectators and more than a hundred participants every year.
It has no committee, no board, no phone number, no website, no sponsors.
Since 1967, a Fourth of July parade has taken place in Johnson, running from the Grange hall to the old Johnson-Union Warehouse and back.
It will happen again for the 50th edition this year, although there is nothing to confirm it will.
Carrie Druffel, 67, missed the first one. She was at band camp at WSU, before her senior year in high school.
She left campus to go home for a few hours to see an aunt and uncle visiting from Pennsylvania over the Fourth. She asked what her sisters and brothers did that day.
“We had a parade,” they said.
Kathy was 20, Chris was 18, Claire was 14 and Drew was seven.
“We were old enough to know better,” Carrie said.
It was a normal summer day.
“At breakfast, you'd go, 'What are we going to do today?' Dad was a farmer, you knew what dad was gonna do. One year, you're gonna write a newspaper. It came out weekly, for two years, two cents an issue. I think that summer we had enough money to go swimming (in Pullman).”
They were the children of the late Alfred “Fritz” and Jeanne Druffel.
Their house – the first white one on the left – is still there, a short walk across the (former) railroad tracks to the parade route.
Today, two of the children have died – Drew and Mike – while the girls survive. Kathy (Wolf) who farms with husband Dan in Uniontown, Christine (Lynch) who lives in Spokane, Carrie in Spokane and Claire (Commeree) in Seattle.
First years
In the second year, the sisters wore their mother's old formal gowns, carrying drums and a horn.
Few neighbors noticed, not expecting to see the parade again.
So the kids knocked on doors.
“'We're having a parade, you need to watch,'” Carrie said. “It probably took 10 minutes.”
Back at the house, the kids decided they weren't done. Kris drove their brother Mike's Jeep and the other sisters stood on back pretending they were royalty.
In the third year, another kid, Curtis Steiner, 12, joined on a bike. He lived a block away at the intersection of Bald Butte Road. A young married neighbor, Gary Bloomfield, pulled in behind on a go-cart.
In the fourth year, 1970, Mark Hoffman, a 13-year-old neighbor boy, rolled out of his garage on a riding lawnmower, pulling a giant “root beer float,” which he and his mom made.
The first float in the Johnson Parade debuted and something changed.
“The next question was not when it was gonna happen, but that there's no stopping it,” Carrie said.
A year later, Dave Port, a neighbor who married into the Hooper family – original Johnson homesteaders – and his neighbor, Shirley Ringo, arrived with music.
Ringo, a teacher in Moscow, had access to instruments and sheet music from school.
Shirley's husband John played the bass drum and the parade had an impromptu band of eight kids and adults.
“Oh, all ages,” Port, now 71, said. “We were a lot younger back then, too.”
The makeshift band continued for about 20 years, during which trombone player Wally Friel and members of the Community Band of the Palouse joined the parade.
Today, the Community Band of the Palouse leads music in the parade, with anyone still welcome to join the band, as they are for any part of the parade.
“Sure, anybody can come,” said Port, whose three sons and their families now visit from Portland, Seattle and Boston for the Fourth.
What does he expect in the 50th year?
“There's no expectation. And that's part of the fun of it,” he said.
After the parade, Port and his wife Darla host a barbecue and reunion for 70-80 family members.
ATTRACTIONS
As the '70s progressed and the parade kept happening in Johnson – an unincorporated community between Pullman and Colton – Carrie's father, Fritz Druffel, built a train.
Over time, other mechanisms showed up. In the '80s, a Pomeroy man named Jim McKiernan loaned a mini-ferris wheel to his nephew Phil McKeirnan of Pullman to use in Johnson.
“It's just stayed here,” said Jim Simpson of Pullman, who pulled the signature item – with little kids riding on it – by tractor for 25 years, until his brother took over three years ago.
Also in the '80s, out of Fritz Druffel's shop came a pull-apart car.
From the first family of (now) four children, 11 are in the next generation and 17 in the next. The oldest of the third generation is 23, who works at an aviation school in Arizona, and will be at the parade this year.
“Someone said, 'How is it you're not making any money off it?',” Carrie said. “What? Why would you do that?”
At some point, someone arranged for Porta-Potties to be brought out for the crowds.
For the 50th, the word is gold may be a part of the theme(s).
“There's a committee, and we have an annual meeting,” Simpson said, with a twinkle in his eye. “It's at five minutes to 10 a.m. on the Fourth of July. The committee is made up of whoever happens to be standing there.”
American Impromptu
In the '90s, someone in an ag plane began to do flyovers.
“Nobody calls,” Carrie Druffel said. “He just shows up.”
One year, the Fritz and Jeanne Druffel train rolled down the road, and two masked men on horseback emerged from the houses.
They held up the train.
“They got all our aunts' money,” said Carrie. “Then went flying out of town.”
Apprehended later, it was cousins Marty and Pat Weber.
For two or three years a little girl carried a frog through the parade.
The late Lillian Ellerson dressed up as Uncle Sam and walked in the parade for years and years, until someone gave her a ride in a truck.
National Guard flag-bearers just show up.
They all converge, at the old Johnson school – now Johnson Grange – and line up in the yard, stretching around the back side.
The Border Highlanders bagpipers just show up.
“I don't think anybody's ever called anybody,” said Carrie. “Not a phone call. But you can bet the families are all talking to each other.”
Along the way, those in the parade see their own attractions.
“There at the same spot, Gary Bloomfield's gonna be down by his old house,” Druffel said. “He hasn't lived there for 50 years. Afterwards you go, who were all those people?”
The Neighbors
Gary and wife Karen bought the little yellow house in 1961, at the corner of Front and Main, when street signs in Johnson were still up.
They heard the drum and horn of that first parade.
Since then, they have been involved as participants or spectators, later moving to Pullman.
“It's probably the only parade I've been to that always started on time,” Bloomfield said.
Just the same, Fritz Druffel kept at work in his shop, building future attractions.
“He was a jack-of-all-trades. He was always coming up with something new that showed up in the parade,” said Bloomfield.
In the mid-'70s, Gary and Karen were part of a group who square-danced on a modified flatbed trailer.
He worked at WSU for 35 years as a research farm manager.
In 2009, he and Karen re-joined the parade lineup in his 1935 International pickup. They drove it another year, too.
“We decided it was more fun to watch the parade than be a participant,” Karen said.
Will they be there again this year?
“Good Lord willing, we will be,” Gary said.
“It's our Fourth,” said Karen.
Work and water
Three weeks ago, a work party was held at Drew Druffel's widow Karen's farm. Various Druffels repainted part of the train, got the mice out of it and fixed the pull-apart car.
“It's all come from one family that had a lot of zaniness and inspiration,” said Karen Bloomfield.
In the past decade water became an issue. Starting with squirt guns and water balloons, the antics built to makeshift pumps and gadgets and even a fire truck pumping water through a hose.
“We had to call a halt to it,” said District 12 Fire Chief Lester Erwin.
“It was time to say, 'Enough is enough,” Carrie Druffel said.
The matriarch
Alma Druffel, 92, married into the family in 1982, the second wife of the late John Druffel, who was a widower. John was the brother of Fritz, the father of the original parading children.
In 1967, the first year, Alma was a pharmacist working in Pullman.
“I wasn't even in the Druffels at that point,” she said. “When I was going to Pullman, everyone was driving out to Johnson.”
John's kids were cousins to the original kids. His family joined the parade all at once in 1972, with 10-12 family members in an “American Gothic” theme.
They have participated in theme every year since.
It is decided just a month before. Since three of the daughters became teachers, they decreed that they won't decide the family theme until after school is out.
“You work better under pressure,” Alma said.
The two families – up to 30 people each participating – deliver their own theme each year, kept secret from each other.
Alma's first year participating – after her retirement from the pharmacy –was as a California Raisin (1989). Sleepless in Johnson was 2008, Wall Street Casino (2009), Wizard of Oz (1992), MASH (1998), Heroes of September 11th (2002), Crayola Crayons (2003), Smurfs (1985) and Keystone Kops (1977).
In 1995 it was “Christmas in July,” for both families. Their secret was really secret.
This year two granddaughters' weddings lead up to the Johnson parade and two Druffel families will come from Waverly, New York.
The families all gather at Jeff and Dan Druffel's farms outside Johnson a day or two before the Fourth.
“Right now a couple of them have motorhomes, so that's handy,” said Alma. “So all they have to do is park in the yard at Jeff's.”
The breakfast
Another feature that built the Johnson parade arrived in the early '80s. Johnson Grange members started a fundraiser breakfast on the Fourth at the Grange hall.
The first year, between 200-250 people came.
“We ran out of food,” said Dan Boone, 89, Master of Johnson Grange, a member since 1972.
They put it on every year, serving eggs, ham, fruit and cinnamon rolls.
As Johnson and its population of 50-100 people turned into 3,000-4,000 on parade day, the Grange breakfast's best turnout was more than 600.
“We ran out of food that year, too,” Boone said.
The tradition carried on, and, 20 years in, Grange members were getting too old to do it anymore.
Discussions began to find a successor. When none could be found, Fire District 12 took it on in 2012.
“We just wanted to keep it going,” said Chief Erwin. “We might raise a hundred bucks in a good year but we are not there to make money. We do it mainly just to help the community.”
After they took over the breakfast, the Fire District discontinued a Fourth of July hamburger feed they had started at their nearby Johnson Station, for after the parade.
Cousins to cousins
A retired teacher in Kennewick, Anita (Druffel) Fabre is the daughter of the late John Druffel, who died in 2014.
Growing up a mile- and-a-half from her cousins, on the original homestead property, she is part of the family who joined the parade in the sixth year as “American Gothic,” standing on the back of a wheel tractor pulling a hay trailer, at age 17, her parents John and Frances dressed as the famous couple, pitchfork in tow. Anita's sister and her college roommate wore her grandmother's wool swimsuits.
“It's a four-generation parade that we're in now,” Fabre said. “There's just no end in sight.”
Aside from family members, as the parade built and the children got older, boyfriends and girlfriends became part of it.
Over time, significant others often met Druffel family members for the first time on the Fourth of July weekend.
“If you can make it through the Fourth of July parade, I guess you can marry into our family,” Fabre said.
Her generation is now handing the reins off amidst the families preparing each year – once school is out, of course.
“We've been saving cardboard,” said Laura LeVan of Kennewick, Fabre's niece, whose earliest memory of the parade was 1992 as a munchkin in a rain jacket for the “Wizard of Oz.”
“I wasn't as into it when I was younger, but now all of us cousins are saying, no we've got to keep it going,” LeVan said.
She and her mother, Paula (Druffel) LeVan, paired as an AT-AT walker for the “Star Wars” theme three years ago. A year later, they used the same cardboard box for an elephant in “John’s Sons’ Circus”. Last year, it served as a Dots candy box.
“I feel very lucky to have been born into this tradition,” LeVan said.
It begins at 10 a.m. on the Fourth.
“I think it's pretty exciting,” Alma said. “It started out so simple, and look what it did.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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