EUREKA SPRINGS - About 20 parades are held every year in this tourist town, celebrating everything from Volkswagen bugs to zombies.
Laura Nichols of Holiday Island decided it was about time the city had a Celebrate Jesus Parade. After all, a seven-story statue of Jesus watches over this quirky ville from atop Magnetic Mountain, and Eureka Springs is famous for the Great Passion Play.
“They have so many parades,” she said. “I thought, ‘We can have a Jesus parade.’ … After the Lord laid it upon my heart, I thought, ‘What do I do with it?’”
Nichols said she took the idea to the Western Carroll County Ministerial Alliance in December, and it voted unanimously to sponsor the city’s first Celebrate Jesus Parade.
The parade was held Saturday morning with 25 floats and 12 walking groups creeping along a route that was six-tenths of a mile - from the Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library through a series of doglegged turns to the Carroll County Courthouse. The floats, for the most part, were trailers pulled by pickups.
By the time the parade ended, so did a light rain, and the Holiday Island Community Church choir held a concert in the band shell at Basin Park.
“I thought it went phenomenally well,” said Dick Kelsey, executive director of the Passion Play, which began in 1968 and depicts the last week of Jesus’ life.
When Nichols pitched the idea for the parade, the Passion Play was in peril. Because of financial troubles, the gates had been locked, and the floodlights had been turned off the Christ of the Ozarks statue for the first time since 1967. It appeared the Passion Play had put on its last performance Oct. 27.
Randall Christy, president of The Gospel Station Network of Ada, Okla., held a frantic fundraising drive in late December and early January to raise money to keep the play operating.
Christy is still fundraising. He plans to raise $6 million for the play in the next year. The play owed $2.53 million to Cornerstone Bank, Christy has said.
Christy is working this year with the nonprofit Elna M. Smith Foundation, which has been operating the play since its beginning. If all goes well, Christy said, his organization intends to buy the play after this season.
Formerly billed as America’s No. 1 Attended Outdoor Drama, attendance at the play peaked in 1992 at 289,212 and dropped to 46,578 last season.
This year, the play’s season will run from May 3 through October, said Kelsey.
So the parade had extra symbolism for the group that came in trying to save the Great Passion Play.
“I think it was symbolic all the way around, for both the churches in the area and the Passion Play,” said Kelsey.
Bonnie Roediger with Bible Reading Ministry International and David Kline, pastor at Valley View Baptist Church in Eureka Springs, also worked with Nichols to make the parade a reality.
“It’s just been a blessing and a miracle all of these people God brought together in unity,” Roediger said after the parade.
Many of the floats had banners advertising churches. Some floats had preachers and singers. Many contained characters from the Great Passion Play.
All three actors who portray Jesus in the play participated in the parade.
Joe Smith, one of those actors, explained why so many substitute Jesuses are needed for the play.
“During the flogging scene, over the years we’ve had one or two [Jesuses] get knocked out, so we have to substitute another one during the play,” he said.
Despite the rain, the parade drew a decent crowd along the sidewalks of Spring Street. Paraders tossed candy and plastic Easter eggs to children who lined the street.
“I think it’s great for the first one,” said Ronn Hearn of Eureka Springs, a retiree who is a volunteer with Opera in the Ozarks at Inspiration Point. “We have everything else here. Why not a Jesus parade?”
Over the years, tension surfaced between the city of Eureka Springs and the Passion Play, which is outside the city limits.
In 1992, the Eureka Springs City Council banned tour buses from the city’s Historic Loop, also known as Old U.S. 62B. That was seen as a “watershed moment” when the city began pulling its support of the Passion Play, Keith Butler, chairman of the Elna M. Smith Foundation, has said.
But Ladonna Hayner of Holiday Island, who plays Window Girl in the Passion Play, said the parade was the first real sign of change.
“I think it’s time for the city and the play to mesh together, to become one,” she said from her seat on a hay bale in the trailer of one of the floats, waiting for the parade to begin.
Hayner said she has been in the play for eight years. Her son and grandson are in it now. It’s a multi-generational tradition for many in Carroll County.
Some of the other parades planned for Eureka Springs this year include Easter Belles today, Friends of the National Rifle Association on April 5, a Mini Cooper parade on Oct. 25 and the Zombie Crawl and Day of the Dead Parade on Nov. 2.
The Zombie Crawl, founded last year by Jeff Danos, drew several hundred people its first year, according to an article in the Lovely County Citizen.
“A creeping parade procession of funeral hearses, doomsday vehicles, Halloween floats, and post-mortem street performers will lead the hungry horde of the undead,” according to eurekaspringszombiecrawl.com. “Zombie participants are only asked to bring two (or more) cans of food to benefit the Flint Street Food Bank.”
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 03/31/2013