Andy Devine Days

At ten in the morning on Saturday, September 19, 2026, the 56th annual Andy Devine Days Parade stepped off at First and Beale streets in historic downtown Kingman. It followed Beale to Fifth Street, turned north on Fifth, east on Oak, north on Second and west on Spring, and ended at Spring and First. The City of Kingman Parks and Recreation Department, which runs the parade, counted 105 entries and more than 1,000 participants: 18 floats, more than 100 vehicle entries and about 60 horses. The mayors of Bullhead City, Chino Valley and Wickenburg took part. The Kingman High School and Lee Williams High School bands played. Many schools and clubs of the Kingman Unified School District marched, along with walking groups from a variety of organizations.

At the head of the line was the Grand Marshal, Sam Elters, a longtime Kingman resident, former Mohave County Manager and State Engineer, and a member of the Arizona State Transportation Board.

Floats, horses and a yearly theme

The entries celebrate Kingman’s western heritage and its roots in mining, the railroad, Route 66, ranching and rodeo. Float builders are asked to work to a theme. In 2026 the theme was “Two Journeys, One Celebration,” marking 100 years of Route 66 and 250 years of the United States.

The 55th parade, on September 27, 2025, took the theme “How the West Was Won.” The Standard newspaper’s announcement that year listed dozens of floats, marching bands, local civic and educational organizations, native cultural performances and classic automobiles. That parade began at Locomotive Park and proceeded down Beale. Its grand marshal was Jean Bishop, who started as a dispatcher for the Kingman Police Department in 1977 and became a Mohave County Sheriff’s deputy in 1988, rising to sergeant. She later served two terms as constable and ten years on the Mohave County Board of Supervisors before retiring from public service at the end of her last term in 2024.

Kingman’s historic district guide describes the parade as usually more than two miles long, with 100-plus entries, lasting an hour and a half. There is no charge to enter it or to watch. Spectators stand anywhere along the route. The city sends cars to the edges, to the spaces along Andy Devine Avenue and the lot at the Powerhouse Visitor Center, and advises coming early for both parking and a place at the curb. In 2026 Allen Scott filmed and edited the parade, and the department posted the video afterward.

Dances, a chili feed and the rodeo

The parade is one piece of Andy Devine Days. The district guide lists dances, a chili feed and a PRCA rodeo at the Mohave County Fairgrounds, where cowboys from across the country compete in eight events. The rodeo is put on by the Kingsmen, a group of local businessmen dedicated to preserving the area’s ranching and rodeo heritage, and by the Kingsmen Cowgirls.

The boy from the Beale Hotel

Andy Devine was born on October 7, 1905, in Flagstaff. His father, Tom, worked for the railroad and lost a leg in an accident in 1906. He used the settlement to buy the Beale Hotel in Kingman, and Andy spent the rest of his childhood there. Tom Devine belonged to the Good Roads Association and helped pave the way for the National Old Trails Highway, which became Route 66. Andy’s mother, Amy (Ward) Devine, had tutored the children of Nevada’s governor before her marriage.

The Kingman tourism office’s history keeps two stories of the boy. In one, a judge offered Andy and a friend fifty cents to rid him humanely of a feral cat. The boys wrapped the cat with dynamite, lit a long fuse and let it go. The cat chased them, fuse and all, before running under a woodshed, where the dynamite went off. In the other, salesmen waiting for the train parked their satchels by the hotel’s front door, and Andy nailed the satchels to the floor. He then shouted “Train’s a leavin’!” and the salesmen tore their bags apart grabbing them.

His voice came from an accident. Running with a stick in his mouth (some accounts say a curtain rod), he tripped and drove it through the roof of his mouth. The district guide says he could not speak for almost a year, and that when the voice returned it had a wheezing, almost two-toned quality. He began in pictures as an extra, by chance, while standing on a Hollywood street corner, and made silent films through the 1920s. The coming of talkies seemed at first to end his career. Instead the voice carried him into sidekick and comic roles in film, radio and television. Devine once said, “I’ve got the same nodes as Bing Crosby, but his are in tune.” At one point Lloyds of London insured the voice for half a million dollars.

John Ford cast him as Buck, the stagecoach driver, in Stagecoach (1939), because Devine had actually driven a six-horse team. His salary was $10,000. The tourism office calls it his first A-movie and the start of a lifelong friendship with John Wayne. He played “Cookie” to Roy Rogers in ten films and “Jingles” to Guy Madison in Wild Bill Hickok, and he appeared in more than 400 films. Years later a bomb was reported before a flight he was about to board, and an FBI agent checked every passenger’s luggage. When the agent reached Devine he waved him through: “If you can’t trust Jingles, who can you trust?”

He was also a licensed ham radio operator, call sign WB6RER. An amateur radio club in Kingman now holds that call and puts on an annual event in his memory.

Andy Devine Avenue

The parade was first formally organized in 1970. Devine died of leukemia in 1977, at 71, and was buried in Corona del Mar, California; his funeral reduced John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart to tears. Kingman renamed its stretch of Route 66 Andy Devine Avenue. That is the old Front Street, the business district on the north side of the Santa Fe tracks, and the avenue where parade-goers now leave their cars.

In 1986 Karin Goudy, a former curator of the Mohave Museum of History and Arts, wrote: “If we listen carefully on Andy Devine Days we may hear, above the hoopla and fanfare, a squeaky, raspy voice, saying, ‘I’ve got the best seat in the house’.”