The sad state of ticker tape parades (York: home, salary)

[Cida]

PBS was showing women-themed documentaries Women's History Month, and I was watching a bit of the ticker tape parade for Amelia Earhart. And I was thinking about how they declined.

If you've ever walked along Broadway, where the list of honorees is embedded in the sidewalk, it ends up being rather sad. Once, we often celebrated either the great achievements of individuals who contributed something to the world (Charles Lindbergh, Winston Churchill) or honored a head of state (Jawaharlal Nehru, David Ben-Gurion). But now it's most for groups, and mostly just for sports, with the recent exception of the self-congratulatory pandering to health-care people who probably would much rather have had a 20% salary bump.

Hey, maybe there'll be one for Zelensky?

Here's the list, if you're curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._New_York_City

[Mightyqueen801]

Great post. I worked in lower Manhattan, noted those markers on Broadway many a time.

And from your list:

1926: August 27 – Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the English Channel

From about mid-1999 until her death at 94 in late 2001, my grandmother lived in a health care facility in Wyckoff, NJ. Her roommate was Trudy Ederle, who was a few years older. Trudy had not only been the first woman to swim the English Channel (and broke the previous record), she was part of the 1924 Gold Medalist US Olympic Relay Team. She had the photos of her ticker-tape parade and a display of her gold medals on the wall of the room. She'd spent most of her life in Queens as a swimming teacher, and in her old age she fell down some stairs and needed full-time care. She'd never married or had children, so a niece in the area made arrangements for her care.

In 2000, Sports Illustrated came to interview her at the home as part of their 20th-century sports stories. As I was a Girl Scout leader at the time for my daughter's troop, I brought the girls to meet her and see her ticker-tape picture and her medals and to let them know they'd met a woman who had broken a man's sports record.

She died a few years after my grandmother, around 98 years of age, IIRC.