Keep Your Eye Out for These Perennial Favorites at the Parade Today

Among the approximately 100 entries at the Novato Fourth of July Parade today will be some old or perhaps, new-to-you, favorites.

The parade starts at 10 a.m. Monday, and as you wait for it to start you can share your insights about who and what you love about our big little town’s annual romp fest down Grant Avenue from coffee shop to coffee shop on this Great American holiday.

Let’s do a little review: You’ve seen them wearing their bright flag shirts, straw hats and shorts as they cavort in unison, waving and manipulating plungers in a way that would get them arrested for disorderly conduct on any other day of the year. A dozen or so Pini Ace Hardware employees and friends of employees get in touch with their inner clowns and vaudevillians and have a good ‘ol time. Maybe so much so that you can’t help but have a good ‘ol time yourself.

Talking about the Pini Plunger Brigade, of course!

“My kids have been involved at times, my wife thinks it’s kind of funny,” says John Stoffel, 58. “We did a routine with folding chairs one year. We try to mix it up.”

A Pini employee for 41 years and plunger extraordinaire from the first, Stoffel tells me life got really good when they hooked up with the San Marin High shop class and got a the motorized toilet.

“Now we’re trying to figure out a way to spray out water,” he says. It remains to be seen if and when they will succeed in that liquid endeavor, but Stoffel assures me it will be fresh water in any event. He promises.

The Pini Plunger Brigade started approximately 10 years ago as the brainchild of another long-time Pini employee, Tony Bayer. Bayer died several years ago the day after Fourth of July, I’m told. Suffering from cancer, he had participated in his beloved plunger brigade from the truck during the previous year. 

“We skipped some years as the Pini plungers,” Stoffel tells me. “We just handed out bubbles and the like to the kids, and there was an uproar.”

The all-volunteer group of plungers decided to plunge on.

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For the past 43 years, the Nave Patrola has been participating in parades going as far as Virginia City, San Francisco, Carson City, and Sutter Creek (to name a few) in addition to their hometown of Novato. Started in 1968 by Bob Nave, Bob, 84 and brother Richard, 80 are only original members left (brother Bill died in 1994).

Bob is the general or leader of the group who got the idea of a comic World War l marching group. “We have WWl helmets, costumes and fake mustaches,” Richard Nave tells me. “We start to practice in early April because our first parade is the Petaluma Egg Parade ... we have to fall down and these days I fall on top of my son.”

The Nave Patrola is made up of some or all of the 11 sons between the three brothers and their friends. What keeps you coming back all these years? I ask Richard. “I enjoy the camaraderie with family and friends and we do go and have a couple cocktails after, so it’s a family thing and a party thing.”

Party on (octogenarian) dudes!

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Last year’s grand prize winner of the Novato Fourth of July parade with its theme of “50 Years Young” was Creekside Bakery with its huge birthday cake and rolling wall of sound featuring Danny Jordan, son of Creekside owners Steve and Cindy Jordan, on his Yamaha organ.

“They set the bar for floats, theirs was thematic and musical and so pretty,” says Kathy Nickel, long-time Novato resident and volunteer for the parade (including six years as the parade chairperson). “It embodied everything and they went all out. I can’t wait to see what they do this year.”

 This year, with the parade theme being "Novato Into the Future," the Creekside Bakery float is being managed by the bakery’s next generation with daughter Rachel Jordan taking over the designing while the band expands to (at least) six pieces under the direction once again of Dynamo Danny. “It’s three intense days to get it up and running,” says patriarch Steve Jordan, and that includes the arduous loading of the organ onto the flatbed truck for your listening pleasure. Expect old-timey New Orleans Dixieland music and expect these guys and gals to rock it.

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As usual, you’ll want to look up in the sky to see the Coast Guard helicopter at 9:30 a.m. and at 9:55 there will be a U.S. Air Force C17 cargo plane (“big and noisy” says Kathy Nickel) and finally, a group of Nanching vintage aircraft will fly in formation over the parade at 11 a.m.

Nickels gets the last word about the parade: “You know, half of the parade is who’s in it, and half of the parade is who’s watching. The town looks beautiful and it's really something not to be missed."