By Thom Nickels
This year marks the 250th anniversary of Philadelphia’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Two hundred and fifty years is a milestone, an epic accomplishment given how the passage of time can wreck or alter many honorable traditions.
The 2020 St. Patrick’s Day Parade theme is, “250 Years of Faith, Family, Friendship and Heritage.” Parade themes in the past included: Saint Patrick Bless the American Worker (2012); Blessed Are the Peacemakers (1996); Saint Patrick, Bless America and Ireland (1987). The parade’s 2020 grand marshal is Michael J. Bradley Jr., a Havertown, Delaware County resident and father of two. Bradley, who owns a flooring company and is involved in commercial real estate, has multiple connections with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Catholic education and various Irish cultural organizations. If he’s not a man for all seasons, he’s certainly a man for all people.
As the 2020 GM he joins Sister Mary Scullion (GM, 2018), Rev. Thomas Doyle, S.J. (1998), Archbishop Anthony J. Bevilacqua (1991) and the Honorable James J. Tate (1967) and many others in a long list of special honorees. But Bradley doesn’t let that get to his head.
“When they first announced that I would be grand marshal, I cried,” he told me. “It threw me through a loop. I never expected to be so overcome with emotion. The tears started when [in my acceptance speech] when I talked about my parents.”
Bradley confesses that his first impulse was to turn down the offer but after realizing how proud the appointment would make his parents he decided to go ahead. Still, his long history of being parade director (2002-2019) caused some on the parade board to say, “Hey, I thought you had already been a grand marshal.”
“I don’t need to get recognition for a job I love,” he said, mentioning his 26-year-old son, Colin, who has just been named the Saint Patrick’s Day parade director. “I find myself talking about Colin for being parade director at a very young age as opposed to talking to me as grand marshal.” Bradley tells me that there’s no one superstar in the group of 26 people on the parade board. “Each of them has a part to do. Another thing, I don’t think you deserve to be GM just for the number of years you served. It’s not something you politic for. It should just come to you. If you do the right thing for a long enough time it will come to you. People who joined the parade board after me…they got to be GM way before me.”
Bradley says he has a hard time just standing on the reviewing stand, a comparable position, perhaps, to riding in a gilded coach like the Queen of England while waving to the masses. The thought of that makes him uncomfortable. The greatest challenges when it comes to a parade, he says, are handled by the parade director.
“You have vehicles; you have loud noises and excited little children looking all over the place. If just one child gets hurt, it ruins our day. When you consider that everyone is looking up at the TV cameras and that 4 and 5 year olds are running about—perhaps this is their first parade—as parade director you really have to have your head on a swivel that day.”
Bradley, who was the first one in his family to go to college, says that after his graduation from Penn State other family members followed. It began with his two sons, followed by eight nieces and nephews although the familial flood-tide is hardly over. “One thing my parents taught us is that education is the way out of poverty. It’s really heartwarming to know that you’ve started a tradition,” he said. You might say that going to Penn State is a Bradley family tradition every bit as entrenched as the traditional morning Mass at St. Patrick’s church in Rittenhouse Square that kicks off the annual parade.
The 2020 GM says he probably spends more time in educational pursuits than he does with parades. For one thing, he’s on the Executive Board of Elementary Education for the Archdiocese where he oversees 121 schools in Delaware County. He’s also on the Penn State advisory board and he’s run the Irish Festival at Penn’s Landing for the last 16 years.
The Main Line Times asked him several years ago what it takes to be the director of a major city parade.
“There is no ‘Parades 101’ course at Penn State,” he said. “Sometimes, I’ll have ladies who are interested in helping, but they say they don’t know what to do. I say, ‘It’s a parade. Follow the guy in front of you.’ I’m an organizer by nature. We have a board of 27, and then committees. I’ve learned from the old members. But some of our young ones are now in their 70s.”.
Bradley’s long sojourn as parade director helped make his heart sing. “But I could not do what I do if I did not have a good relationship with my wife, Linda,” he says. “Linda, who never gets credit… and who never asks for credit.”
“250 years is older than the United States itself,” he reminded me. “And based on the number of participants, it is the largest parade in the city. The Mummers, because they start at 9 a.m. and march till 4 or 5 p.m., have huge gaps in their parade and performances. What we do is try to keep everyone moving in the parade. You have a minute and a half and the other group is right up your rear end. There’s nothing worse than having 20 minutes of dead air time on TV. We try to condense the parade to three hours.”
Bradley talks about the acrimony among the various Mummers groups. “We don’t have that acrimony that the various Mummers groups have with each other. We are really one that day. As the parade director for so many years I got to know most of the groups. Television helps keep the parade more organized, he says. “You’re living and dying by commercials. It’s 3 p.m. and you want that last group on the air!”
A good parade director, like a good orchestra conductor, knows when to speed up the parade or slow it down.
“My son Colin asked me once how old I was when I became parade director. I said I was 42. He said well I’m 26. I told him he could handle it because he’s been a news anchor on TV and that he understood the television aspect better than I do.”
He compares being a parade director to juggling balls in the air, then makes a confession. “I have ADD but ADD is absolutely perfect for a parade. If you sat me down in front of a book and said I had to read the book in one day, I would jump out of a window.”
Please don’t jump, Mr. Bradley!
He brings up the fact that the first Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade was in 1771. “The troops were weary that winter, a lot of Irish guys wanted to get together and celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and they asked Commodore Barry if he would ask Washington about a parade.”
Washington, already a member of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, gave the go-ahead. The first St. Patrick’s Day parades were scattered around the city however. One parade was downtown, one in South Philly, while another was in the Northeast. There were also mini parades in many of the different neighborhoods. The random haphazardness of it all eventually led to the creation, in 1952, of one parade for the city. That was the year when the parade was officially recognized by the Archdiocese, when members went before the Archbishop to get a blessing before the start of the event.
It was also the year when the parade was organized as a corporation under one board.
Throughout the years the route of the parade has changed drastically, though mercifully, usually staying within the confines of Center City.
Bradley says that the 2020 parade will incorporate all the Grand Marshals of previous parades in a single contingent. “Let’s not focus on me,” he says. “Let’s focus on a parade that is 250 years old. Parades shouldn’t be about the grand marshal, they should be about all the people that came before us and all the people who will follow us.”
It’s a noble sentiment, comparable perhaps to his assertion that “I don’t burn bridges anywhere. I get along with everybody. I need everybody.”
For updates on the status of the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade please visit www.philadelphiastpatsparade.com