Billy Moore Days

Four nights at Festival Fields

The carnival at Festival Fields Park, on Lower Buckeye Road in Avondale, opens at six o’clock on a Thursday evening in late October and runs four nights. The 2026 festival is set for October 22 through 25. The rides turn Thursday from 6 to 10 PM, Friday until midnight, Saturday from 3 PM to midnight, and Sunday from 3 to 10 PM. Unlimited-ride wristbands are good for a single day and are sold only during the first three hours of each opening. They cost $17.99 bought online or $20 at the gate, where the sale is cash only. The 2026 site map lays out food trucks, a handcrafter market, wine-barrel cocktail tents, a seating area, a splash pad, restrooms, and six light towers standing over the grounds. The City of Avondale Parks, Recreation and Libraries department runs the festival as a celebration of the city’s history and heritage, with cultural showcases and exhibitors set among the vendors.

Saturday evening, October 24, is the main event, from 6 to 11 PM on the main stage. DJ Rey plays between sets. Soulitify plays from 6:30 to 7:30 and again from 7:45 to 8:30, and 512: The Selena Experience plays from 9 to 10:30. The festival goes on rain or shine. The exceptions are lightning within 10 miles, wind over 20 miles an hour, or flooding.

Chairs on Western Avenue

That same Saturday begins hours earlier, a few miles north in Old Town Avondale. The parade steps off at 9 AM on Historic Western Avenue near 351 East Western. Western Avenue, Dysart Road, and Central Avenue are closed to traffic from 6 AM to noon. The city tells spectators to bring lawn chairs and blankets and to set up along Western Avenue or at the turns on Central Avenue and North 6th Street. Floats, marching bands, dance groups, local businesses, and community groups make up the line. Entrants are asked to come “decked out in your best western gear.” A Grand Marshal and a Junior Grand Marshal, both nominated by the public, ride at the head, and the police department co-hosts the morning with the parks department.

The 2018 parade ran east on Western Avenue to Fifth Street and turned north to end at Agua Fria High School. It carried three honorees. David Schwake, 69, was grand marshal. He had been food service director for the Litchfield School District for more than 24 years and was board president of the Agua Fria Food and Clothing Bank. Narmeen Ghazawneh, 18, was junior grand marshal. She had grown up in Avondale and logged more than 300 hours of community service in high school. The guest of honor was Randall McDaniel. He was raised in Avondale and played for Agua Fria High School before 14 years in the NFL. “I remember going to the parade every year as a kid and it’s kind of surreal that now I get to be the ‘old guy’ riding in it,” McDaniel told the West Valley View. “No matter where I am or what I do I will always be an Avondale kid.”

The postmaster of Coldwater

The man the parade honors was William “Billy” G. Moore. The accounts of him differ in their details. The Three Rivers Historical Society’s newsletter in 2014 says Moore came to Arizona in 1867. He made his way to the west bank of the Agua Fria River, where he set up a stagecoach station, added a general store, and became postmaster of a town he named Coldwater. The West Valley View dates his stage stop, general store, and saloon near the river to 1880, in what was incorporated in 1946 as Avondale.

The society’s 2018 newsletter, written by Sally Kiko, is blunter. “Most municipalities honor an upstanding citizen or a successful businessman,” she wrote, “but our earliest settler was a rascal and a reprobate!” She allows that his history “is a bit sketchy.” In her telling, after the Civil War he spent some time with Quantrill’s Raiders, a Missouri guerrilla band. He then drifted west, passed some time in Tombstone, and settled near a ranch called Avondale. There a well was dug that gave cold water, the reason for the town’s name and the site of his stage stop, store, and saloon. He served as Coldwater’s postmaster until it was discovered that he was dispensing moonshine as well as the mail. He died in 1932 at 92 and is buried in Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery.

Beards, flatbeds, and seven lean years

The first Billy Moore Days parade and festival came in 1954. The society’s 2014 account credits the local Chamber of Commerce, which hoped both to honor the pioneer and to bring new business to the merchants. Kiko’s 2018 account credits the “Tri-Cities” of Avondale, Goodyear, and Litchfield Park, backed by the Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce. It was usually held in October, when the weather moderated a bit, and later settled on the third weekend of the month.

Weeks ahead, local men started growing beards for a prize. To compete, a man had to be clean-shaven the day before the official start. Shopkeepers and store clerks worked in western wear, and school bands practiced their marching. Civic groups built floats on flatbed trailers. During cotton picking a farmer with a trailer to spare could be hard to find, and once one turned up it was “all hands on deck” to decorate it. Equestrian units rode in the line. Young women competed for Miss Billy Moore Days, and the winner went on to the Miss Maricopa County contest. Booths sold food, soft drinks, and ice cream. There was always a carnival, and some years a street dance. The West Valley View lists more: an arts and crafts fair, a homecoming celebration, a golf tournament, burro races, a car show, and a 100-unit parade with politicians and local celebrities. The city keeps a historic parade film from 1978.

Organizers changed over the years. The city names the Downtown Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the cities of Litchfield Park, Goodyear, and Avondale among them. Kiko dates the City of Avondale’s sponsorship to 2005. The 2014 newsletter says only that the city took it on “somewhere along the line.”

The economic downturn of 2008 ended what the 2014 newsletter calls the longest-running parade in the state. In February 2012, Avondale and Goodyear joined to hold a new parade and festival called “A Tale of Two Cities” for Arizona’s Centennial. Kiko gives the gap as the lean years of 2009 to 2016, when civic funds were tight. Ingrid Melle, the city’s communications and marketing manager, described it in 2018 as a seven-year gap. The event returned in 2016 at the request of the Avondale City Council and has since been run by the city with Goosebump Marketing & Events. No event was held in 2020, a COVID year. In 2022 the Saturday was cancelled for weather.

“We hear numerous stories from long-time Avondale residents who grew up coming out to the parade every year and dressing their kids up or being dressed in western costumes to participate in event,” Kirk Haines, the city’s parks and recreation director, said in 2018.