Corinth prepares for homecoming parade
CORINTH — The Corinth community is preparing for Corinth High School’s annual homecoming parade, and this year, it’s a sprint. With rains from Tropical Storm Francine on their way, CHS has bumped the parade from Thursday to Wednesday, Sept. 11.
The parade will include five floats — one for the homecoming queen, and one for each class “maid” — and 18 decorated cars. There’s one car for each club, and each club elects a senior “sweetheart” to ride in the car. The queen and maids each choose one boy to escort them, and the sweethearts get two — one driver and one doorman.
The sweethearts will be presented on the football field at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, and school will be dismissed at 2. The parade will start at 5:30 on the corner of North Fillmore Street and Main Steet and end at Trailhead Park, with a pep rally to follow.
Until then, parents, students and teachers are racing to finish decorating their floats and cars.
“I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape as far as getting everything finished,” said Tony Hardwick, a CHS teacher and coach who helps coordinate the float-building. “It’ll take some extra work. But, you know, parents will have access to this all throughout the day.”
The queen, maids and sweethearts draw up designs for their floats and cars, the school approves them, and then the parents and students bring the designs to life. They’re given trailers with wooden bases and chicken-wire frame skirts. Everything else has to be built.
The queen, of course, will ride in the parade on a castle float. Junior maid McKinley Moore decided on a ’50s diner theme for her float. Her mom, Stephanie Moore, showed the Daily Journal the life-sized jukebox they’d created from cardboard boxes, duct tape, and butcher paper. All it needed was paint.
Stephanie Moore is a veteran maid mom — McKinley’s twin was the freshman maid two years ago.
“It takes a village to do this,” Hardwick said. The students work on the floats, of course, but teachers turn out to help beyond their allotted shifts to oversee the float decoration. Parents throw themselves into the work — “the planning, the building, the stuffing, the gluing; all of it,” Stephanie said. And local businesses contribute to the project as well.
Chad Austin of Tool Slingers is letting the school use Tool Slingers warehouses to house the floats while they’re under construction. Corinth Hardware’s Clayton Stanley and his team rebuilt the float skirts. Even principal John Barnett’s elementary age kids get excited to help decorate floats.
And when the parade takes place, the whole town turns out to watch. Crowds line the streets in downtown Corinth, and locals cheer as the decked out floats and cars roll by.
“There’s a lot of work put in, but it’s one of my favorite things,” said CHS teacher Tori Frasher. “Nowhere else does what we do for homecoming. I think it’s a phenomenal tradition.”
Students get to showcase their creativity and make memories, and “it's something that the community loves,” Frasher said.
Despite the hard work and chaos of building the floats, despite glitter getting everywhere, it’s worth it to see her child happy, Stephanie said.