The 76th annual Future Farmers parade and fair is behind us, and hot damn was it a good one. The Healdsburg police, who had help from five neighboring police departments on parade and fair kickoff day on Thursday, May 22 — squads from Sebastopol, Cloverdale, Cotati, Petaluma and the Santa Rosa Junior College — didn’t report any major incidents, even as thousands of locals and outsiders flooded the streets of downtown Healdsburg for the parade and swarmed Rec Park for the three-day afterparty. Instead, Healdsburg police officials posted a starry-eyed Facebook tribute to “one of our favorite days of the year, our small town Healdsburg Future Farmers Country Fair and Twilight Parade… where the whole community comes out and celebrates our agricultural roots together.” (No one is immune to the charm!)
One pretty tragic thing did go wrong that Thursday, though: Homeless man Clinton Smith, 57, was hit and killed by a car while walking along the southbound 101 freeway between the Central Healdsburg and Dry Creek Road exits. The county sheriff tells the Press Democrat that Clinton was “walking along the shoulder of the highway when the California Highway Patrol said he wandered into traffic and was struck by a Ford F-150 pick-up truck.” Just awful. May he rest in peace.
Another effect of the crash was hours of confused gridlock on Healdsburg’s main thoroughfares leading up to the parade start time at 6pm, on what might already have been the most hectic traffic day of the year in town. When I ran into Healdsburg resident Kaleigh Sharp at the parade, she recalled abandoning her car at the Westside Road animal shelter on the way into town and walking with her baby stroller all the way to the Healdsburg Museum, where she planned to watch — and there are lots more stories like hers in Facebook group threads like this one. Among the vehicles I spotted stuck in the mix were Jendala’s tribute float and a fancy white stretch limo with lord-knows-who inside. So yeah, no one was spared from the citywide jam — which was its own little parade, in a way.
