Sanpete County Legends

MORONI 4th OF JULY PARADE 2012

As many of you may know Laura and I are from a county in Central Utah called Sanpete county, as described in the above illustration we have a Temple, snowflakes, a blue moon and a mountain called the big horseshoe.

This map shows a exact approximate location of Sanpete

Well every year we like to go to Moroni to take the kids to the parade. It's really fun because it isn't too long and they still throw candy, which is one of the best part of parades.

Moroni main street

Well last year (2011) like every year, we went to the parade as we have done for the past 10 years or so. The parade was just as good as it ever was with one difference, hardly any candy was thrown. It was actually quite pathetic, all the participants just threw small hand fulls of candy to large groups of kids. Can  you imagine 20 kids all running after 9 pieces of taffy? Needless to say most kids walked away with a very small baggie of candy.

After the parade Marc and I were talking about how little candy was actually thrown that year, suddenly the heavens were opened and Marc and I came up with an idea so good that it can only be described with one word....Legendary.

I told Marc that the next year we should enter the parade with the sole purpose of throwing candy and nothing more. We would somehow need to raise enough funds to buy a very large amount of candy, enough to fill the bed of my truck to be specific. We told Andy of our idea and he immediately started helping plan for this great event, Laura, Cole and Shamri also thought it was an awesome idea. We had plenty of help, and time to pull it off. With a full year of preparation we expected everything to go amazingly well.

Well, if any of you have ever been involved in something that has a seemingly infinite amount of time to prepare for, you probably know that it can also be easy to put it off till the end. This is exactly what happened. About one month before, we decided that it would be time to make preparations. We called everywhere to get pricing on the taffy and did the math to figure out how many pounds would be needed to fill the bed of my truck. Andy has a friend who has an account with Sweets taffy, and after much research we concluded that he could get us the best price. Andy ordered 2 cases just so we could see how much volume each one would take. Before the two cases arrived we started punching numbers and we figured out that it would cost nearly $2000 for the amount of candy we would need.

After finding out how much money it was going to cost each one of us must have concluded that it was not a realistic goal and all planning ceased. Nothing more was said about the parade until about one week before the 4th when Andy called me and said the two cases had arrived and wanted to know if we should try to return them or what we should do with them. We decided that we would beg everyone in the family for donations and just buy as much as we possibly could we were just worried about getting entered into the parade, and also if we could order that much candy on such a short notice.

Well, we were able to get a spot in the parade #24 to be exact, which incidentally turned out to be a lucky number because it got us one of the only shady parking spots while we waited to begin the parade caravan.

Marc was able to have some shirts made for us at the last minute, which he paid for and donated, good thing he works at Namify.

Andy took care of getting the candy ordered at a discount price and I was in charge of calling everyone and begging them to invest a large amount of money in something that has little return, and when I say "little return" what I really mean is; absolutely no return, unless you count the bag of candy each investor collected during the parade.  I will not name the amounts or people who donated but I would like to thank them in behalf of hundreds of Sanpete county children, and their dentists.

We were able to get all the candy the weekend before the 4th, This is 22 cases, we were able to buy a total of 26 cases which contain nine three pound bags of taffy. Each case weights 9x3 lbs, for a total of exactly 9x3x26 pounds.

Aiden and I even made a special box made out of a special type of material known as wood.

The night before the parade Laura and I spent about 2 hours opening each three pound bag of taffy into the cardboard boxes so we wouldn't have to do it the next day. Our basement smelled like a candy factory for days.

The morning of the 4th Laura and I woke up at 5:30 and emptied all 26 cases into the special wooden box. It wasn't as much candy as I had envisioned but it was still more than I had ever seen in a wood box, in the back of a black Dodge truck, that year.

All of the boxes after we finished.

 

Here we are patiently waiting to begin.

When we started in the parade we threw a few large hand fulls at some kids who were waiting at the top of the hill, they were too lazy to even pick up the candy, if picking up pieces of candy off the ground is to much work for a kid, he's in for a rough life. We were kind of concerned that that's how the rest of the parade would be......it wasn't.

Once we pulled into the main part of the parade where more people were we made it rain candy. Kids who were so used to fighting over a few pieces of candy were diving on top of the candy, they soon realised that diving was not necessary as we through so much candy everyone got their share.

Here is a group of teenagers that were crowding out the little kids, so we gave them more candy, at about 80 miles an hour right in the back.

Notice how in front of my truck there is no candy in the road and all the people are off the road, now notice behind my truck how many people are in the street gathering candy, also, notice how far back the people are still on the street, on both sides, because it took them so long to pick it all up. 

It was so awesome seeing the look on peoples faces as we threw more candy than all the other floats combined, they had never seen anything like it before, especially from an organization they had never even heard of. People were cheering, and taking pictures of us.

We felt kind of bad for the guy behind us who only had one case of candy to throw, I'm pretty sure that no one even noticed the next three floats after ours.

Now, when we got to our group...We freaking unloaded!!! Look at all the candy on the ground.

Taking a closer look at this picture. The red circles show the amount of candy that was air born in any given second during the entire parade. The red arrows indicate the approximate amount of candy that was on the ground at any given second during the whole parade.

I love taking pictures of people taking pictures of me.

Andy walked the whole way and made sure that the kids (and adults) who were unable to run in the road still got plenty of candy, including a girl in a wheelchair who was unable to pick up any candy, and several people who were sitting on their porches.

After the parade we still had a full case of candy left over so some of us walked back up the road and threw it to people, including an old man in a scooter. We received several encouraging words of gratitude for making the parade awesome, it was such an awesome feeling.

I think we were one of the highlights of the parade, what an awesome way to celebrate our country's independence.

Getting back to our family, and telling of our adventure. I think we all had perma-grin for the next few hours.

Showing off our shirts.

All of the participants

As long as we can afford it we will continue in this tradition, hopefully we'll be able to get some outside donations or sponsors.