After a two-year hiatus due to COVID, the Skokie Fourth of July parade is returning with grand marshals from the teaching, police, fire, nursing, and public health professions who helped the community get through the pandemic, as well as three military grand marshals.
“We’re excited to be back,” said Richard Evonitz, chair of the Skokie 4th of July Parade Committee. “We feel like people in the community are hungry for these kinds of events that show they’re getting back to a time like before the pandemic.”
“Our goal in putting on the parade is really just restarting the whole process of the parade,” he added. “It was important to us as a committee to try and bring back a parade like we had done in 2019.”
The parade starts at noon on July 4 and will follow its normal 1.2 mile route starting in the Oakton Community College parking lot and winding its way north on Lincoln Avenue and east on Oakton Avenue, concluding just after the Oakton Community Center.
Chicago broadcaster and singer Wayne Messmer will perform the national anthem to get the parade started.
“He’s a Chicago legend,” said Evonitz. “He’s an incredible person and an incredible singer.”
He also said it was important to the committee that the parade include grand marshals from the teaching, police, fire, nursing and public health professions.
“Those professions have done so much to help all of us in this community get through these trying times,” he said. “It just felt so right to honor these incredible people as representatives of their professions.”
Niles West High School teacher and 2021 Illinois Teacher of the Year Justin Johnson is one of the parade grand marshals.
The parade’s three “military grand marshals” include Gerald Jaffe, who was drafted in 1968 and served in Vietnam, Paul Plotnik, who retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of staff sergeant and went on become a Chicago Public Schools teacher and an assistant public defender, and Skokie resident Hank Gould, who enlisted in the Illinois Army National Guard in 1949 and spent his 24-year National Guard career in field artillery and munitions.
“I think it is great that we are getting back to normal,” said Gould. “The idea of being able to stand on the streets of Skokie and watch the elements of the Fourth of July parade go by, that is very important.”
“Being able to express patriotism on the Fourth of July, that is a great return to fundamental ways of celebrating that we are all Americans,” he added.
The parade will feature more than 60 groups providing music and entertainment along the route, including the Jesse White Tumblers, the 144th Illinois Army National Guard Band and the Colt Cadet Drum & Bugle Corps.
The parade will be held rain or shine but will be postponed if there’s “severe weather,” Evonitz said.
“We’re telling people there’s plenty of room along the parade route but they should get there early, as early as 10 a.m., to secure a spot,” he said.
More information is available at: https://www.facebook.com/skokie4th.
