Fontana Days Parade

Sierra, Orange, Mango, Arrow

The Fontana Days Parade forms at the corner of Arrow Boulevard and Sierra Avenue on the first Saturday in May. A pre-show begins there at 9:30 in the morning to honor the grand marshal, and the parade steps off at 10. It runs south on Sierra Avenue, turns east on Orange Way, then north on Mango Avenue, and comes west again on Arrow Boulevard. The loop ends at Miller Park, 17004 Arrow Boulevard, where the city keeps an amphitheater stage, a playground, a pool, and a fitness center. The 2026 program had the last entry in by 11. The Exchange Club of Fontana runs the parade with the City of Fontana as co-sponsor, and has set the next one for May 1, 2027.

The club invites schools, businesses, clubs, nonprofits, and government officials to march, and it holds three contests along the way. In the Battle of the Bands, marching bands from schools and nonprofits play while they walk. No recorded tracks are allowed, and a band may not stop. Judges score the first 30 seconds of each band in a zone on Sierra Avenue, between Arrow and Orange Way, for musical quality, showmanship, fit with the year’s theme, and crowd engagement. The City Street Dance Off sends school dance teams and nonprofit groups down the same stretch, dancing on the move to music from portable speakers they carry or mount on the team. Costumes, music, and movements must be family-friendly. The Best in Float competition judges floats from schools, businesses, community organizations, and nonprofits in the same zone. The club urges local businesses to build floats with school clubs and youth groups.

Winners are named about a month later at the Fontana Days Festival in Veterans Park, held the first weekend of June. At the 113th festival, in 2026, the Exchange Club Special Awards Presentation took the stage from 2 to 3 on Saturday afternoon. Around it were carnival rides, food and vendor booths, folklórico troupes, and karaoke fundraisers to buy teddy bears for children who have suffered abuse. Admission was $3. A photographer posting from the grounds wrote that proceeds fund scholarships for Fontana’s high school seniors.

Grand marshals and sixty placards

Each parade has a theme. On May 3, 2025, it was “Dancing in the Street,” with Mayor Acquanetta Warren as grand marshal. The Fontana Herald News reported that the parade drew “throngs of residents and revelers” downtown.

The 2026 parade, on Saturday, May 2, marked the nation’s 250th birthday under the theme “Home of the Free…Because of the Brave: America 250.” Instead of a single grand marshal, the club named veterans as co-grand marshals, gave them vehicles at the head of the line, and honored them in a short ceremony during the pre-show. Bill Freeman, the club’s Americanism chairperson, said: “This year, the Exchange Club’s plans to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday includes inviting ALL veterans from the area, not just Fontana, to serve as co-grand marshals of the parade and to ride in a place of honor at the beginning of the parade.”

Behind them walked high school cadets carrying placards, two feet by three, each with the photograph of one of 60 men with Fontana connections. Each man had either died in service or been held as a prisoner of war, in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or the Global War on Terror. Freeman, a Fontana resident of 64 years when he wrote a 2023 newspaper column, is the author of a book titled FONTANA HONOR ROLL – Our Local Heroes.

The town’s centennial brought its own grand marshal. In January 2013 the Herald News reported that rock singer Sammy Hagar, who grew up in Fontana, had been confirmed to lead that year’s Fontana Days Parade. Tonia Lewis and other community leaders had spent more than a year planning an official centennial celebration, held in June alongside Fontana Days.

Grape juice at the flagpole

The centennial looked back to June 7, 1913. Before that date the place was Rosena, a station and small town the Southern California Railroad had set down by 1890 on land that had once belonged to Rancho de San Bernardino. Azariel Blanchard Miller, a farmer, rancher, and developer, bought 17,000 acres there; Freeman’s column dates the purchase to 1905. According to legend, as a San Bernardino County history puts it, Miller used 200 horses, mules, plows, and scrapers to turn the ground into citrus orchards, poultry farms, and cattle ranches. To shield his groves from the wind he planted long rows of eucalyptus, some of which still stand along the I-10 freeway. He chose the name Fontana, Italian for “fountain.”

On that June day, Miller’s mother, Eliza, struck the base of the town flagpole with a bottle of local grape juice and christened the town Fontana, ending Rosena. More than 4,000 people attended, and Freeman writes that land went on sale the same day for $200 to $500 an acre. The county history says the ceremony eventually became the annual celebration known as Fontana Days. Freeman calls that day its inaugural event, and names the Exchange Club as its modern sponsor.

The decades after moved quickly. Miller died in Fontana on April 13, 1941, at 62. The next year the Kaiser Steel mill came to town. The City of Fontana incorporated on June 25, 1952, with 13,695 people. Steel led the local economy for four decades, until the mill closed in 1984. Miller’s name stayed on a high school, an avenue, an amphitheater, and the park at the end of the route. In the first edition of the Fontana Herald, in 1923, publisher Cornelius De Bakcsy called Miller “a dreamer whose dream came true.”