STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Bellevue’s Labor Day Parade was short but sweet.
EXTREMELY sweet.
Candy was in no short supply, especially thanks to the Bellevue Elementary Bears.
The kids have either been taking throwing lessons since school started last week. Or, they certainly understand what the value of candy to a youngster as they paved Bellevue’s Main Street with candy that they threw from their float.
While the youngsters gravitated to candy, the adults seemed to gravitate towards history.
Larry Plott and Les Cameron reveled in the green and yellow 1936 and 1937 steam engine tractors they proudly drove down the street, pulling a railroad baggage carrier from the 1920s behind. Plott has collected several of the two-cylinder tractors which, he said served as the alarm clock for many a farm boy, rather than a rooster.
Richard Fife pulled a replica of the USS Idaho nuclear attack submarine that will be christened in spring 2022 and commissioned in 2023.
“We’ll douse it with a champagne bottle filled with Idaho water we’ve collected from different rivers,” he said.
And the Bellevue Museum paraded out a 1967 quilt emblazoned with hundreds of names, and three yearbooks from the Bellevue Bulldogs back when Bellevue had a high school.
“I, Kenneth Worthington, will my ability to chase the women to George Vickery with the suggestion he take it easy,” Worthington wrote in the students’ will in the 1953 Bulldog yearbook.
I, Melvin Worthington, will the hair on my chest to Dick R., advising him to brush it every day,” wrote another student
As for the students’ predictions?
They predicted that Shirley Ivers would one day be the nation’s top specialists on polio. And they predicted Carrol McCrea would end up vice president of Union Pacific Railroad.
It was Homer Gome and Hattie Irish who opened a high school and grade school in Bellevue in 1881. While the original school is long gone, the town still sports plenty of historic buildings, such as the Old City Hall, originally the fire hall, built in 1885; the two-cell jail built in 1881, and the McNary cabin built in 1881 with v-notching.
The Bellevue Street Bank, built in 1910, is now the site of Fuego Restaurant.