Azalea Festival

The parade starts at ten on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and comes through downtown Brookings on Chetco Avenue, the town’s name for U.S. Highway 101. KURY, 95.3 FM, broadcasts it live from the Central Building at the highway and Wharf Street. At the 2023 parade the crowd stood two and three rows deep along the sidewalks. The Brookings police and the volunteer fire and rescue department went by tossing candy, followed by departments from neighboring towns. Windsocks brought from Japan by the pilot Nobuo Fujita have flown over earlier parades.

The Azalea Festival has been held in Brookings since 1939. The City of Brookings runs it with community groups, volunteers, and service organizations. The weekend spreads from the highway to Azalea Park and on to whatever the town’s lodges and clubs put on.

Frontage Road and Azalea Park

The Street Market fills Frontage Road at the corner of Fifth Street and Highway 101, in front of the Goodwill store. It is open Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Food trucks park at the north end, where drivers on 101 can see them. They sell popcorn, hand-dipped corn dogs, fried cheese on a stick, Frito pies, burritos, quesadillas, cotton candy, slushies, coffee, smoothies, and lemonade. Down the row are fine jewelry, mosaics, leather, pottery, wood and metal crafts, and handmade soap. The organizers warn vendors to weight their tents because an afternoon breeze can come up.

Azalea Park lies on Old County Road. It has a bandshell, a snack shack, a gazebo, and the Kidtown playground. The festival is named for the azalea, a shrub that blooms in spring and whose flowers often last several weeks. According to Patty McVay of the Chetco Valley Historical Society, the festival is always held on Memorial Day weekend, when the azaleas in the park are in bloom. The Pilot’s 2023 coverage called them “ancient native azaleas.”

The park program opens with a Friday night dance party. Saturday brings concerts under the name “Rock the Park” and the festival ceremony. In 2023 the ceremony crowned the Azalea Queen and her court, named the parade winners, and introduced the year’s Pioneer Citizens. That year they were Jim, John, and Steve Donnelly, whose family homesteaded up the Winchuck River in 1924. In 2023 the local bands Disturbin’ The Peace and The Chetco Effect played the stage, and a Fleetwood Mac tribute band, Taken By The Sky, closed the day. Sunday begins with a community church service and ends with the Brookings Got Talent show, which returned in 2026 for its second year, and a last concert.

The Elks have run the barbecue in the park for at least fifty years, the Pilot reported in 2023. That year the pit master, Johnny Shaw, had been cooking the pork for twenty-nine of them.

Other organizations add their own events. There are an Elks pancake breakfast, a Masonic breakfast, a kids’ fishing pond on Saturday morning, a plant show and sale, a quilt show, an art show, and airplane rides. Sunday Airport Day returned in 2026. The Curry County Cruisers show vintage cars both days. In 2023 they held their Show ‘N Shine at the Port of Brookings-Harbor and then cruised through town. If it rains, the park events move to the Elks Lodge and the market moves indoors to the schools on Pioneer and Pacific Avenues. In 2026 the city announced the parade would go on rain or shine.

The Monday program and the people who keep it

The holiday stays in view. On Monday, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 966 holds a Memorial Day program, and the festival’s organizers ask visitors to attend one of the post’s events. The 2023 festival opened Friday at the City Hall flagpole with a tribute called Honoring Our Service Men and Women. The Vietnam Veterans of America hold an annual Reading of the Names. It honors Oregonians who died from causes related to their service in Vietnam, along with family members of people who have moved to the Brookings area. By 2020 the list held more than 600 names, and John Banuat of the group said reading them took about an hour and a half. The 2026 program had one gap. The F-15s of the 173rd Fighter Wing at Kingsley Field did not fly over, because the jets had been relocated while the base changed over.

For most of its life the festival was run by the chamber of commerce and the town’s service organizations. In 2019 the city stepped in to keep it going and reorganized it for financial and organizational sustainability. The next year COVID-19 came, and many events were canceled. Brookings rescheduled its festival instead. The 81st festival ran July 17 to 19, 2020, under the theme “Glory Days.” Every parade entry had to carry at least one live azalea, throwing candy from floats was banned, and an empty space separated each booth on Frontage Road.

The parade has had a small crew behind it. Dianne Rettke took over the parade duties of her business partner, Don Tilton, after his death, and led the parade for thirteen years. She was grand marshal in 2023. Her husband, Tim Rettke, a city Public Works supervisor, has worked on the parade since 2003. The grand marshals of the 87th festival, held May 22 to 25, 2026, under the theme “Living in Paradise,” were Dick and Ruth Wilson. Both taught in the Brookings-Harbor schools, and Dick also coached and served as athletic director. “Even though I cried when we came to Brookings in 1970 because I didn’t want to leave my family in Southern California, this has been one of the most important decisions we have made,” Ruth said. The festival’s website gives May 27 to 31, 2027, for the next edition.

A wild hog in a pen

The first festival marked a park opening. McVay draws on the historical society’s files, which include old Pilot articles, interviews with Pioneer Citizens, and a 1979 Rotary Club history, Then Till Now in Brookings-Harbor. By her account, Samuel H. Boardman, Oregon’s park superintendent, dedicated Azalea Park in 1939. The newly formed chamber of commerce decided to hold a festival as part of the celebration.

That May the main event was a free Wild Hog Barbecue. Laurel Gerkman tells it for Jefferson Public Radio: a wild hog was displayed in a pen and later let go, while a domestic cousin roasted over hot coals. The next year the barbecue drew some 2,000 people, some from as far as Portland and Los Angeles. McVay says there has been a barbecue at the festival every year since. She also says the first queen, Martha Hassett, was chosen for an essay she wrote.

The festival went dormant during World War II. Gerkman writes that it came back after the war with a parade, a flower show, a dance, and a queen pageant added. McVay says the first festival in 1939 already had a parade. In 1946 the national magazine Holiday listed the Brookings festival among six outstanding celebrations held in May in the United States.

Over the following years came a rodeo, a carnival, bands, and a scavenger hunt. A beef barbecue and a crab feed replaced the hog. Marching bands came from other towns to compete in the parade, and the Eugene Highland Band, a Scottish band, used to play. The court was chosen in January and traveled to other towns’ festivals for Brookings. Contestants at the pageant were judged on speaking, talent, a question, and a grand curtsy in a formal gown. The Chetco Swingaroos square-danced on the beach on Sunday morning. On Friday and Saturday nights they danced in the high school gym, while people sat in the balcony to watch the dresses. McVay’s father, Tom Short, trained as a caller under Gordon McNew and called as a guest the year she was on the court. “It was beautiful to see,” she said. Costs rose and crowds grew until the meals had to be sold, and in 1963 the festival broke even for the first time. In 2019, historical society board member Julie Payne worked with the city to bring back queens from the past eighty years. “Quite a few” rode in the parade.

Nobuo Fujita’s sword

The year before the festival first broke even, its guest of honor was the man who had tried to burn the forest above town.

Before dawn on September 9, 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced about twenty miles off Crescent City. Its crew assembled a floatplane on the deck and launched it by catapult. The pilot was Nobuo Fujita, a thirty-year-old warrant officer. According to historians quoted by OPB, he had hoped to bomb San Francisco or Los Angeles and was a bit disappointed to be sent to Oregon. His thermite bombs were meant to set the forest southeast of Brookings on fire. “It was too wet and it just stopped raining. He dropped these thermite bombs and they just fizzled,” said Brenda Jacques, a retired Brookings reference librarian. The bombs made enough smoke for the Forest Service to see them. Fujita dropped four bombs in all over a few days. The festival’s own account calls the raid the first and one of only two enemy aerial bombings of the U.S. mainland. OPB calls Fujita the only foreign pilot to drop bombs on the continental United States.

In 1962 the junior chamber of commerce, the Jaycees, invited him back for the festival. OPB reports that a few members came up with the idea over beers. A full-page op-ed against the visit ran in the local paper, and more than 100 residents signed it. “You gotta remember it was only like 16 years after the war,” said Greg Jacques, then a high school senior. Bill McChesney, the Jaycees’ president, received a death threat in the night. The young men met in his house and voted unanimously to go ahead. “[Inviting Fujita] was the right thing to do. To heck with the consequences,” McChesney said. President John F. Kennedy congratulated them.

Fujita came from Ibaraki Prefecture with his wife and their son, Yasuyoshi. He brought his family’s samurai sword, which had passed down through the family for 400 years and had flown with him on every mission, the Brookings raids included. He gave it to the city. That week he received a key to the city, flew a plane over the bomb site, and tried playing a bagpipe in the parade. A few men, among them the Forest Service employee who had first spotted the smoke, were jailed beforehand to head off trouble. Some teenagers raised a Japanese flag on the high school flagpole. It was reportedly pulled down moments before the Fujitas would have seen it. Years later Fujita said he had feared being pelted with rotten eggs or tried for war crimes. If that happened, he would have used the sword for seppuku.

The sword is on permanent display at the Chetco Community Public Library. Fujita and his employers paid for a collection of multicultural children’s books there. He kept a promise to bring Brookings high school students to Japan, though it took years. A few days before his death in 1997, the town made him an honorary citizen. His daughter scattered some of his ashes at the bomb site on Mount Emily, an hour from town, where a small marker and a single coast redwood stand.

On the morning the Fujitas arrived in 1962, Marsha McChesney walked into her living room and found her oldest son, Tom, in Mrs. Fujita’s lap with a picture book. “He was telling her the names of the animals,” she said, “and she was telling him the Japanese names for the animals.”