Newport Loyalty Days & Sea Fair Festival

At 11:30 on parade morning, Highway 101 closes through Newport. The highway divides the town and serves as its downtown, running from South Beach to Agate Beach. Ten minutes after it empties, the runners go. The Loyalty Days Run is a single mile, point to point, from Highway 101 and NW 20th Street to a finish near McKay’s Market. The course starts flat, rolls into a long gradual downhill, and ends on a short uphill. In 2026 the chip-timed Competitive Mile started at 11:40 a.m. The free, untimed Community Mile followed at 11:45. It needs no registration, and strollers are welcome.

A mile of Highway 101

At noon the parade follows over much the same ground. Entries stage at Pacific Plaza, at Highway 101 and NE 20th Street. According to the News-Times, the parade starts at the north end of town and proceeds south on the highway to NE 3rd Street, about a mile, while traffic is diverted around it. The line of march holds floats, local organizations, cars, horses and riders, and tributes to veterans and service members. Nothing is thrown from the floats. Under the parade’s rules, candy and literature are handed out within five feet of the sidewalk.

The 2026 parade, on Saturday, May 2, was the centerpiece of the 69th annual Loyalty Days & Sea Fair Festival. Its theme was “250 Years Strong.” The 2025 floats were decorated for “Let Freedom Ring.” The 2026 grand marshal was Scott Stimpson, a retired Army National Guard command sergeant major. He spent more than 25 years in recruiting and retention, personally enlisted nearly 250 soldiers, and mentored more than 10,000. The Army National Guard named him its 2014 NCO of the Year.

At 2 p.m. the crowd moves to the National Guard Armory at 541 SW Coast Highway for a free concert by the 234th Army Band, which the festival’s Facebook page billed as “NO Brass No Ammo.” In 2026 the 1/224 EN company held an open house there at the same time. In 2025 the Armory afternoon was also a Cinco de Mayo celebration, with food, local beer, and art.

Six heroes and a queen

Six Hometown Heroes ride in the parade alongside the Loyalty Days Princesses. “What I enjoy most about the Loyalty Days Celebration is that it’s a chance to recognize and honor local people who live in Newport,” event coordinator Elizabeth Golden told the News-Times. The 2026 heroes:

• Kathy Wertz, a volunteer ground searcher and K9 handler with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team since 2016. She works K9 Gunny, a Belgian Malinois, and is training K9 Pistol, a Treeing Walker Coonhound. Her family plays the lost subjects in weekly training.
• Officer Jerimiah Mangum of the Newport Police Department and K9 Sly, a three-year-old German Shepherd. The pair recently earned the “Top Dog” award at the annual Springfield Police K9 Competition.
• Petty Officer Third Class Jonah Pahel of Coast Guard Station Yaquina Bay. In his first few months there he logged more than 100 underway hours and took part in 12 search and rescue cases, in which 30 lives were saved or assisted.
• Josh Malloy, who grew up in Newport, began volunteering with the fire department at 18, and was hired as a firefighter/EMT in July 2025.
• Deputy Bo Douglas of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, a 1997 Newport High School graduate assigned to the Siletz Enhanced Services District.
• Specialist Mitch Feldman, a horizontal construction engineer with the Oregon Army National Guard’s 1-224A Engineering Company.

The princesses in 2026 were Caroline Gardner, Hadessah Bobeda, and Kiley Humphrys. Their work began weeks before the parade. They helped children at an Easter egg hunt in Yaquina Bay State Park on April 4 and gave speeches to the Rotary Club and at the Chamber of Commerce’s monthly luncheon. Their food drive, with collection buckets at Ballast Gym, Oregon Coast Bank, and the Armory, brought 389 pounds of food to the Newport Food Pantry.

The festival opens on Friday. At noon, veterans gather for a lunch at the Newport 60+ Activity Center, 20 SE 2nd Street. From 7 to 9 p.m. the public meets the court at the Elks Lodge, 45 SE Moore Drive. The 2026 program promised speeches, dance numbers, “little treats throughout the night,” and a crowning, and it ended with Hadessah Bobeda named Loyalty Days Queen. The News-Times also lists a Reading of the Names Ceremony among the weekend’s events. On the 2024 schedule it fell at 9 p.m. Friday at the Armory: a reading of the names of all fallen soldiers.

Blessing the fleet on Yaquina Bay

Sunday belongs to the water. According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, Newport is home to the largest commercial fishing fleet in Oregon. The 2026 day began at 9 a.m. with survival suit races at Port Dock 3 on the bayfront, followed at 11 by the blessing of the fleet on Yaquina Bay. At 1 p.m. there was a free community barbecue and the Highliners Competition at the Port of Newport International Terminal. At 4 p.m. a memorial was held at the Fisherman’s Sanctuary in Yaquina Bay State Park.

Free crab and an agate crown

The fleet was part of the festival from its start. Every account traces Loyalty Days to 1938 and the first Newport Crab Festival. According to the News-Times, the first parade theme that year was Red Crab Day. Sachiko Otsuki, curator for the Lincoln County Historical Society, told The Oregonian that the festival drew thousands to Newport on the first weekend in May with the promise of free Dungeness crab. It was meant to stimulate the local economy at a time when crab prices were low. The society’s Pacific Maritime Heritage Center displays the 1941 proclamation for the fourth annual festival, in which Mayor Andrew Naterlin told citizens to “give recognition of his majesty, the Jumbo Crab.” According to the historical society, at the festival’s peak the town handed out a free crab lunch and ran a carnival with door prizes that included a new car, a washer, and a clothes drier.

The highlight was the coronation of the Crab Queen, and the society later traced the crown used for it. A.L. Thomas came to Newport in 1895 and opened a gift shop selling his own agate jewelry and photographic postcards. He went on agate-hunting “vacations” to eastern Oregon and out of state, because the local supply of suitable stones was undependable. The crown he made is heavy with agates and metal. The society notes that it “has no other crowns to compare it with, nor has anyone on staff ever been crowned.” The crown’s first known appearance was at the Salmon River Highway dedication in July 1930. There Mrs. Rhoda Quick Johnson, the celebration’s “queen mother,” arrived by covered wagon, sat on a throne that was the first chair ever made in Oregon, and was crowned by Governor Norblad.

Thomas died in 1940. His son Richard moved the store from Nye Beach to Highway 101 and in 1947 sold it to Ralph W. Emerson, and the crown likely went with the sale. Emerson closed the shop after a few years and moved to Bend. In the early 1990s, Thomas’s last surviving child, Helen Payne, told museum staff she believed the crown had been taken apart and its agates sold. In fact Emerson still had it when he died in 1990. His children inherited both the crown and the story that their father had made it, and those who knew of it called it the Emerson Crown. The family later lent it to the historical society, which put it on exhibit at the Burrows House Museum in 2018.

Accounts of the festival’s wartime years and its end differ. The News-Times says the parade lapsed from 1941 to 1945 and returned in 1946. The Oregonian says the Crab Festival paused during the war, revived in 1947, lost money as crab prices rose, and was canceled after 1951. The historical society dates the festival’s run from 1938 to 1952. It says the festival ended because crab grew too expensive to give away and the crowds overwhelmed the town.

Loyalty Day on the coast

Loyalty Day itself came from elsewhere. According to background supplied to the News-Times by Newport High School teaching assistant BayLee Layton-Karnes, the Veterans of Foreign Wars began it on the East Coast as a counter-demonstration to May Day rallies held by communist supporters. Congress made it an annual holiday in 1958. Portland held its first Loyalty Day parade in 1949.

Newport’s dates vary by source. Otsuki says a modest Loyalty Day celebration replaced the Crab Festival in 1953, and The Oregonian dates the organized parade to 1957. The News-Times credits American Legion Post #116 with the first Newport Loyalty Day in May 1956. In 1957, Governor Robert Holmes and Mayor Ellis Moses issued a proclamation asking citizens to renew their faith in America.

JoAn McAdams organized the event off and on for about 20 years, beginning in the 1950s. “In those days it was quite big,” she said. “Russia had a May Day, and the United States felt that we needed to have something to combat that.” Navy ships came in from other cities, she recalled, and Canadian fleets attended. Crab stayed on the menu, though no longer free: a crab dinner cost $1.75 a plate in 1970.

In 1973 the celebration went unobserved. Students at Newport High School set out to revive it, and according to the News-Times, it has gained participants and activities every year since 1974. In 2010, Jerilyn Guiss walked across the Yaquina Bay Bridge with 75 other flag holders to greet a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was on display as part of Loyalty Days. The pandemic stopped the festival in 2020–2021, and it has been held every year since 2022.

The Oregonian found only seven other Loyalty Day events still held in 2025, and only one older parade, at Long Beach, Washington, which began in 1950. Both McAdams and Mary Buck, president of the organizing committee, cited Newport’s status as a Coast Guard City as part of the reason Loyalty Days continues. “We’re not stating that people can’t believe what they want to believe,” Buck said. “It’s just a way to show the military population that we still honor them.” McAdams said, “Of course, it’s not as big as it was, but we still have (U.S. Highway) 101 lined with people.” Buck recalled the parade before that one: “Last year, we had pouring down rain and we had 92 entries out of 97 to show up.”