Alan Bean walked on the moon. And then he had to survive this wild Fort Worth parade.
Amy Bean’s dad walked to the moon 50 years ago, and she had to watch the celebration as a 6-year-old peering through a giant mound of paper.
When Fort Worth threw an “Alan Bean Day” ticker-tape parade Dec. 22, 1969, we got a little excited about the Paschal High School graduate and the Apollo 12 moonwalkers.
For starters, 150,000 people turned out.
Also, Fort Worth didn’t really have much ticker tape.
So downtown workers threw office paper, computer tape, punch cards, catalog pages — all of the paper in their office.
As the astronauts, 20 high school bands and dignitaries wound their way through downtown, it was as if Heaven emptied a recycling bin.
Sixty tons’ worth.
“We were just buried in confetti,” Amy Bean said the other day, a year after Alan Bean’s death and 50 years after the parade that is still considered Fort Worth’s biggest ever.
So much paper was thrown that it piled up and caught fire on lighted West Seventh Street awnings.
The crowd was almost double from the plans. And the amount of paper workers cleaned up afterward was four times what was expected.
Amy and Clay, 14, were swamped in paper as they rode in a convertible with Bean and his wife at the time, the former Sue Ragsdale of Dallas.
Sue Bean said it was the biggest parade any of them had ever seen, to this day.
“It was an incredible Fort Worth welcome,” Amy Bean said.
Bean’s parents, Arnold and Frances, were still living in Fort Worth. At the time, they lived in the 3100 block of Bellaire Drive West, near TCU, after raising Alan in the Mistletoe Heights neighborhood.
The parade detoured from the usual downtown route along Main or Houston streets, turning west on Sixth Street to go by the family’s First United Methodist Church and turn back on Seventh Street in front of the Fort Worth Club and the Star-Telegram.
Mayor R.M. “Sharkey” Stovall called it the “biggest day in Fort Worth history.”
What is now KXAS/Channel 5 broadcast the entire parade. One of the co-anchors, Roy Eaton, of Decatur, said last year the crowd was so big because it was a time of Cold War-era uncertainty and the Vietnam War: “I think it was a time when Fort Worth was looking for a hero.”
Bean had carried along Fort Worth’s flag, key to the city and a police badge. At a luncheon, officials joked that Fort Worth was the first city to open a police substation on the moon.
Weeks after the No. 1-ranked Texas Longhorns’ “Big Shootout” win over Arkansas, the day also involved 10-gallon hats and UT championship jackets for Bean and Sue, both UT alumni. (She was the first UT cheerleader to turn flips.)
“This day has been Alan Bean Day, but to me it has been Fort Worth Day,” he said.
At a barbecue banquet afterward, Bean said when he was growing up at Paschal and what is now McLean Middle School, he never really understood the city’s slogan since the 1920s, “Where the West Begins.”
“I didn’t really see any geological feature that made this where the West begins,” he said.
But he had realized the “West is where people go to find new challenges and opportunities. Fort Worth gave me the urge to go where things are happening and where there are challenges.”
Bean’s mementos are part of a current exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
Fifty years later, the parade remains an event that will never be repeated.
Offices no longer use enough paper for such a ticker-tape parade.
This story was originally published December 28, 2019 at 3:10 PM.
