Bicentennial Parade

By Wm. on July 4, 2026

It’s Sunday evening, July 4, 1976, and I’m standing on the sidewalk along Commonwealth Avenue in Erlanger, KY, with a Zip Polaroid camera in my hand and a transistor radio in my pocket. This is the second trip we’ve made today from our home in Walton to Erlanger–we would have attended church with my grandparents in the morning. We came back, of course, for the city’s Bicentennial parade and have camped out with many others on the steps of the Erlanger Baptist Church. My grandmother will soon be riding by on one of its floats.

While we wait for festivities to begin, I snap a picture of my sister Amy sitting right in front of my Papaw, who might be chewing on one of his ubiquitous Ibold cigars.

Alas, the actual picture isn’t any clearer.

That’s Mom on the right edge of the frame. Sitting to her left are my cousins Mark and Suzanne, Mom’s younger sister Nancy’s kids–I’ll soon scoot over to take a picture of the three of them, but Suzanne is very uninterested in being photographed and buries her head in her lap, arms covering it.

I brought the radio with me to listen in to American Top 40‘s special presentation of the #1 hits on the forty most recent July 4th weekends, which starts at 6pm on WSAI. I catch only occasional snippets over the course of the evening (my recollection is that the Cincinnati Enquirer published the entire list in that morning’s paper, but I didn’t think to keep a copy). This might be my first encounter with Gary U.S. Bonds’s “Quarter to Three.”

My mother has also brought a camera–you can see it in her right hand above if you know what you’re looking at–and she takes two pictures during the parade. Here’s the City of Erlanger float:

I presume someone on that trailer is the Mayor of the city. This helps me understand now why Mom’s older sister Susie and her family aren’t around this evening. Aunt Susie’s husband, C. M. “Hop” Ewing, is Mayor of Florence, the town to Erlanger’s immediate southwest on U.S. 25, and I imagine he’s involved in their parade.

Gran is riding on the float of the Erlanger Woman’s Club, of which she’s been a member since 1950.

My grandmother is rightmost on the front row. Mom doesn’t usually write on the backs of pictures, but this time she did: “Erlanger 4th of July, 1976/ Bicentennial Parade/ Woman’s Club Float with Lucille Houston as librarian.”

I also take a picture of the Woman’s Club float but am a bit too late to capture Gran. I do, however, get something in the photo that Mom doesn’t, something that’s sent me down an internet rabbit hole half-a-century later.

The sign on the back of the float, with “NEW LIBRARY” across the top and a schematic of a building below, in combination with Mom’s notes and the references to books on the float’s other signs, got me wondering yesterday morning. Long story short-ish, I came across a history of the Kenton County Public Library, through which I learned of the long, deep connection between its Erlanger branch and the Woman’s Club. Starting in 1942 and lasting until 1967, when the libraries in Covington and Erlanger were united as the Kenton County Library District, the Woman’s Club fully ran the Erlanger library. As evidenced in the float pictures, the library remained a core part of group’s identity. As best I can tell, in 1976 it was still being run from the house the Woman’s Club had purchased in the 1950s. The ‘NEW LIBRARY’ would open in the early fall of 1978. (Side note: a few years after the library moved, Gran and Papaw moved to a small house across the street from its former location. Gran would live there into the mid 1990s.)

Civic engagement. Investing in and improving one’s community. It’s a deeply American story. The Woman’s Club of Erlanger, with its near-singular focus on providing library services to part of the burgeoning northernmost tip of Kentucky, accomplished great, meaningful things in the middle of the twentieth century. Times change, though. I imagine that by 1976 the Woman’s Club was already running into trouble recruiting younger members with the rise in two-income households and single-parent families. In June 1996, they held their final meeting, having agreed to formally disband months earlier. My mother and grandmother served as co-presidents that last year. One of the presenters at that last gathering was, naturally, the Head Librarian of the Erlanger Branch of the Kenton County Public Library.

Mom held on to several mementos from her time in the Erlanger Woman’s Club. A few years ago, I packed them up and dropped them off, fittingly but without being aware of all the history, at the current iteration of the Erlanger library. They’d outgrown the 1978 location in fairly short order, moving again in 2002.

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Bonus content: In searching for Mom’s pictures of the parade, I came across this photo of 12-year-old yours truly, flanked by my cousin Alan and my sister, both 10. We’re standing in the rarely-used front entrance to the farmhouse where my grandparents lived. The date on the back says 7/5/76. I kinda remember those garish cut-off shorts.