Old Timers Day Parade and Celebration

At ten in the morning on the last Saturday in September, the Old Timers Day Parade starts down Yosemite Avenue in downtown Madera. A usual year brings 50 to 70 entries, among them stagecoaches, fire trucks, bands, and youth groups. Organizers put the crowd in the neighborhood of 5,000. The parade ends at Courthouse Park, in front of the former Madera County courthouse, and the day continues there.

Stagecoaches on Yosemite Avenue

For years the parade ran along Yosemite Avenue between Flume Street and G Street. The 2026 parade, counted as the 95th, ran on September 26 over a different course. Work on State Route 145 and Yosemite Avenue moved the start to P Street, and the procession traveled west to east to finish at Courthouse Park. Big Valley News advised spectators who had watched from the same corner for years to reconsider where they set up their lawn chairs.

The Madera Downtown Association and Madera Sunrise Rotary host and organize the parade. Each year it carries honorees chosen from the town. In 2026 the Grand Marshal was Dennis Smith, a longtime Madera business owner. Ila Schoettler, a lifelong resident and business owner, rode as Honorable Queen. The memorial honoree was Jeff Cerioni, the downtown merchant associated with Cerioni’s Men’s and Ladies’ Wear. A new title, Madera Young Trailblazer, went first to R.C. Chahal. Organizers credited him with an integral role in four World Championship titles won by Madtown Robotics Team 1323. In 2025 the Grand Marshal had been Chris Miller, a former downtown business owner and Rotarian, with Sheryl and Randy Berry as King and Queen.

“As we celebrate the 95th year of the Old Timers’ Day Parade, we’re proud to continue a tradition that has brought generations of Madera families together,” said Nick Salinas, the parade chairman, before the 2026 event.

Steaks and a museum in Courthouse Park

When the last entry reaches Courthouse Park, Booths in the Park begins. Elevate Madera Inc. hosted it in 2026. In 2019 the Madera Tribune described it as a separate event run by the Madera County Historical Society, one that had complemented the parade for many years. That same year the Madera Young Professionals took charge of the post-parade activities.

The Tribune’s 2017 preview listed the fare in the park: barbecued steaks, a wide array of ethnic foods, and baked goods, served by local service clubs and some of the best cooks in town. The paper also reported, on the word of Bob Winslow, that the Madera County Museum would stay open after the parade until about 2 p.m., with free admission.

The museum occupies the old county courthouse at 210 West Yosemite Avenue. It opened on Old Timers’ Day, Saturday, Sept. 28, 1974, and the 2024 parade day marked its fiftieth anniversary.

October 31, 1931

A column reprinted by the Madera Method, originally published in the Madera Tribune in 2022, gives the beginning in detail. Early in 1931 someone proposed an “Old Timers Day” for Madera County. A committee formed, and by summer preparations were underway. Anyone who had lived in the county on or before Dec. 31, 1890, counted as an Old Timer, and the countywide celebration was set for Saturday, Oct. 31, 1931. The same year, according to the City of Madera, the lumber flume that had given the town its start in 1876 was dismantled.

Cattlemen H.A. Russell, John O’Neal, Brook Mordecai, and O.B. Price took on a host of activities. The committee invited ranchers to send their horses into town the day before, with stable room and feed provided free. The parade was planned to show the county’s economic stages: mining, cattle, sheep, grain, lumber, and fruit. The Madera Rotary Club handled transportation. It lined up a six-horse passenger stage that had once belonged to the Yosemite Stage and Turnpike Company, two four-horse stages, a 10-mule team pulling lumber, and long-horned oxen pulling a logging truck. Scores of carts, buckboards, buggies, surreys, and high-wheel bicycles joined them.

Ten days ahead, nearly every business on Yosemite Avenue dressed its windows with relics. The Cunningham Furniture Company set out original parlor furniture from the old Yosemite Hotel of 1877, along with relics of the Donner Party. Caesar Venturi’s Sport Shop showed early bicycles and tandems, including two 56-inch high wheels. Tighe’s dress shop displayed women’s dresses “that dragged the ground.” In the evenings crowds gathered at the glass to look.

At 10 a.m. on the day, stores closed. At 10:30 the two-mile parade stepped off. The Tribune and Mercury described it as “consisting almost entirely of relics, conveyances, and costumes of the days long since gone.” First came the flag, then grand marshal W.M. Hughes, pioneer ladies on horseback, and a Spanish orchestra float. Supervisor S.G. Owens and Henry Hedges drove two of the old turnpike company stages. Behind them came the Madera Union High School Band, a delegation of native Indians, miners with pack horses, cowboys, sheepmen, lumbermen, and farmers in buggies. The Native Daughters of the Golden West registered more than 1,000 people who had lived in the county in 1890 or earlier.

Hundreds then went to Courthouse Park for a lunch organized by the Women’s Improvement Club. Cornelius Noble cut and wrapped five beef cattle, and Joseph Barcroft and John O’Neal deep-barbecued them. Nello Barsotti supplied the bread. There were a few tables, and most people ate on picnic blankets on the ground. A literary program followed. In the afternoon, county cowboys did trick riding, and the American Legion ran games for children.

At 6 p.m. a Halloween parade went through the streets, with grammar school children in costume, high school students in pajamas, and Boy Scouts carrying flares. Stockton played Madera high school in football at 7. Two dances followed: one at the Lincoln School auditorium with “dances of the older variety,” and one at Memorial Hall with “modern music.” In the hall’s basement the Legion ran a “Days of ‘49” camp, where early-day games were “conducted in a legal manner.”

That date is not the only one on record. An Internet Archive description of a silent 16mm home movie, which opens on an early 1930s Old Timers Day parade, states that the event “has been held annually since May of 1925.” The Tribune gives Oct. 31, 1931, for the first parade. The Downtown Association keeps further footage of the parades of the 1930s, 1940, and 1946. It was filmed by Henry Clay Daulton II, son of one of the county’s founding fathers, and his wife Merle.

Ten thousand in 1947

Bill Coate, writing in the Tribune in 2021, judged that the parade “appears to have reached its zenith in the 1940s and ‘50s.” He singled out 1947. Ten thousand people packed both sides of Yosemite Avenue that year, sitting on awnings, perching on rooftops, and hanging out of windows. Grand Marshal Raynor Daulton, Queen Ann McKee, and King William Tighe led the parade.

Mrs. Boyd Givens, in 19th-century dress, pushed a 70-year-old baby buggy behind the Madera High School Band. Sheriff W.O. Justice followed with 22 members of his mounted posse. Hallie Silkwood, Bill Betters, and Tommy Thompson drove three stagecoaches. In the first rode Low Hoskins, the county’s first assessor, and J.M. Straube, then the only living builder of the old courthouse. Judges Stanley Murray and W.M. Conley rode in the others. Behind them came the Morger family in a covered wagon, a fire wagon that had served Madera in 1890, and gold miner Simeon Sotello with his donkey. A replica of the Madera General Store showed it as it stood in 1884 under L. Alpine.

Noble’s Independent Market entered “the Sausage Factory,” in which little pigs went into a grinder and came out three seconds later as packaged sausages. Oakhurst loggers rode atop a 32-foot log, 7 feet through, holding 6,200 board feet. Chief Leemi of the Yosemite Tribe danced in full regalia on the Kiwanis exhibit. The Ministerial Association brought a replica church with a pedal organ, and the American Legion float carried a section of the old flume. The 20-30 Club entered a 1914 Dodge and a 1901 Oldsmobile. The Olds, driven by Roy Long, broke down in front of the reviewing stands and was towed away by the Dodge. Fifty-three organizations took part.

The Kiwanis years and after

“Over the years, however, the spirit that powered these past events has dissipated somewhat,” Coate wrote. The parade has also stopped twice: once in the early 1940s during World War II, and again in 2020 for the COVID pandemic. In September 2006 it opened Madera’s year-long centennial observance.

For more than a decade the Madera Kiwanis Club staged the parade, with the Downtown Association paying the costs. In 2017 the Kiwanis honored Ross and Barbara Thornton as Grand Marshals. Jim Bryan, known as “Labman,” lined up bands, floats, equestrian teams, classic cars, youth dance squads, gymnasts, and a martial arts group. Monte Pistoresi, Jim Glynn, and Terry Nolan worked three announcers’ booths along the route. The family of the late Matilda Verdu Torres fielded a float thanking the community for naming a planned high school for her. She graduated from Madera Union High School in 1964, taught Spanish there in the 1970s, and spent years arranging scholarship money for Madera students.

The Kiwanis chapter closed in 2018. In April 2019 the Tribune ran the headline “Old Timers Day Parade at risk of becoming history.” The Sunrise Rotary Club took the parade over, and the 88th went down Yosemite Avenue that fall with County Supervisor Max Rodriguez as Grand Marshal. Afterward Supervisor Rob Poythress wrote to the paper: “the death of the parade was greatly exaggerated!”

After the 2020 cancellation, the Downtown Association and Sunrise Rotary announced the 90th parade for 10 a.m. on Sept. 25, 2021. “We are looking forward to seeing the sidewalks of Yosemite Ave. filled with smiling faces,” the organizers said.