Going Out

By Ed Wesely

Fourth of July

	TRR photo by Ed Wesely A parade marcher takes a break on her tricycle. (Click for larger image)

Up river, in the tiny community of Lordville, NY, they have a Fourth of July parade that’s a unique throwback to old time celebrations—a parade with homemade banners and costumes that meanders across the Delaware River Bridge to PA and back again.

It began in 1949 when a mother got tired of big, staged parades and pulled a couple of kids around the hamlet and across a 1904 suspension bridge in a wagon she decorated. For the last few years, Callie Brunelli, one of the little girls who rode in the wagon, has been in charge.

Scores of adults and children formed a line-of-march this year, and stepped off at 12:00 noon to a peal of church bells, their ranks about as free form as a parade can be. A couple of minutes brought everyone across the railroad (the old Erie tracks are now owned by Norfolk Southern) and onto a new steel and concrete bridge with spectacular vistas of the river.

For many of us, the short trek also rekindled memories of Thelma Buckley, a retired Binghamton teacher (now deceased) who loved the 1904 suspension bridge, and made a solo promenade across it in November of 1986, minutes before it was demolished.

“If I go down with the Lordville Bridge,” Buckley had told the approving work crew, “I can’t think of a nicer place to go.”

Demolition subcontractor Bob Csigay recalled later that week, “They had a saying in the old Navy: ‘wood ships and iron men.’ Well, the Lordville Bridge was like that. They didn’t have machinery, so they used men. It was built by men, and it was a real work of art.”

Happily, after six years of lobbying the state, Buckley and her family could welcome a modern steel-concrete bridge on July 4, 1992. The construction was supervised by Frank Sander of New York’s Department of Transportation, whom Thelma had befriended.

Frank Sander’s bridge respects the contours of the valley as few modern bridges do. And Thelma, stepping sprightly in an Uncle Sam hat, christened it by leading the way to Pennsylvania.