It’s true: Once, years ago, Fort Worth skipped Veterans Day for lack of interest | Opinion
(From a column originally published Nov. 11, 2015.)
This is almost unimaginable today in Fort Worth, a city named for a U.S. Army outpost and for 80 years the home of pilots and defense workers guarding America’s freedom.
But in 1981, this city forgot our veterans.
Six years after Vietnam and 20 years before the war on terror, the annual downtown Veterans Day parade was canceled for lack of interest.
“Veterans Day parades, like old soldiers, never die — they just fade away,” the Star-Telegram reported after the 1980 parade drew only a few hundred participants and spectators.
“There’s just not enough interest in it anymore,” said parade chairman and state Rep. Doyle Willis, a Bronze Star U.S. Army Air Corps intelligence officer in the Pacific in World War II and a past Veterans of Foreign Wars state commander.
[In 1980] There was no one there to watch us except winos sitting on the curb and a few construction people.
Coy French
a Veterans of Foreign Wars district commander[In 1980] There was no one there to watch us except winos sitting on the curb and a few construction people.
Coy French
a Veterans of Foreign Wars district commander[In 1980] There was no one there to watch us except winos sitting on the curb and a few construction people.
Coy French
a Veterans of Foreign Wars district commanderThe first Armistice Day parades in Fort Worth and elsewhere were in 1919, celebrating a year since the end of the yet-to-be-numbered World War.
In 1954, the name was changed to Veterans Day.
By 1980, the patriotism of World War II had waned and football was drawing crowds away from the then-Saturday parades, Willis said then.
The commander of one local VFW post said no one came “except winos sitting on the curb and a few construction people,” probably from then-unfinished Sundance Square.
“It just breaks my heart,” Willis said.
When the parade was revived in 1982, organizers chose a regular Nov. 11 date. The crowd was estimated at 5,000-plus.
The parade has resumed every year, even in a muted form during the COVID pandemic.
In 2024, it celebrates 106 years — and 105 parades..
This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 8:22 PM.
