GRAND BOULEVARD — Saturday will be Col. Eugene Scott’s last trip down King Drive as the head of the Bud Billiken Parade.
Scott has for 22 years been chairman of the Chicago Defender Charities, which organizes the parade, and will step down after Saturday’s parade.
“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away and I’m just going to fade away,” said Scott, who at 75 still runs three miles every morning.
He said he will stay on as a consultant for the next two years to train his successor.
On Saturday, he will ride in the parade for the first time in 10 years a few cars back from the grand marshal, Roy Austin Jr., director of the Office of Urban Affairs Opportunity and Justice and deputy assistant to President Barack Obama.
Scott said he was inspired to start working on the parade, now in its 86th year, when he was just 11 at his first Bud Billiken Parade in 1953.
He said he was lucky to get a spot on the viewing platform and found himself face to face with TV cowboy Roy Rogers, his horse Trigger and Kid Durango.
“I thought I’d died and gone to cowboy heaven,” Scott said. “I thought, ‘This isn’t real, it can’t be.’”
He said ever since then he’s wanted to re-create that sense of awe in kids during the parade. He said he thinks now he’s been successful and he’s kept that tradition going for the parade as well a reputation as a clean, safe family event.
“That is my first goal every year and I insist on bringing something new for the kids,” Scott said.
This year’s parade will feature a Louisiana brass band, the Dancing Dolls of Jackson, Miss., as well as local talent like the South Shore Drill Team and the Broken Arrow Riding Club of Chicago cowboys.
The parade kicks off at 10 a.m. at Oakwood Boulevard and King Drive. The parade will head south down King and then take a detour through Washington Park on Ellsworth Avenue from 51st Street to Garfield Boulevard, where the parade ends.
For more information, visit budbillikenparade.org.
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