My mind has been wandering as usual tonight and ended up at Popcorn Festival Floats. I started thinking about writing a post about popcorn last Friday as I had bought several types of popcorn. This will not be that post however :-).

After going to the Apricot Fiesta in Patterson, California this weekend, my mind wandered to Hamburg, Iowa which has been home to the Popcorn Days festival since 1960.

So I dug out some of my Grandma’s scrapbooks to see if I could find some pictures from Popcorn Days. In a 1962 scrapbook I found some neat pictures of floats that had been in the annual parade. At that time the festival was known as the Hamburg Popcorn Festival and had just recently been renamed from the Peony Festival.

Hamburg is home to Vogel Popcorn which is the largest producer of popcorn in the country.

I love the slogan on this float:

A Poppin’ Good Time

The float features a group of children sitting around a small picnic table eating popcorn. The float was entered by Inter-State Nurseries. This also has special meaning to me because my Grandpa worked for Inter-State Nurseries.

This float was entered by the Inter-State greenhouse gang. The float depicts a group of pioneer popcorn growers arriving in Iowa from back east.

I really love this float which was entered by the Locust Grove community. Here we have ‘The Old Woman in the Shoe’. It was reported that this float was a big hit with the parade watchers. The big shoe does look very cool. I can just imagine it rolling down Main Street in Hamburg.

I will be visiting Hamburg again very soon, so you may see a few more Hamburg posts in the next couple of months.

Do you have memories of building floats for parades?

Steven