Dear Group, This evening I finished putting together the Town of Porter Historical Society newsletter for this month and because I'm still excited over the subject matter that I filled it with, I thought I would share its contents with all of you. Now I don't know how the Town of Porter folks will react to a long article about the Magna Charta parades that were held in nearby Niagara Falls, but in spite of my struggle to recuperate from surgery, I was inspired to actually research and type up a bit of history of this area. Trust me, it was quite an accomplishment. Because of the length of our newsletter--10 pages--I'll post the whole subject of the Magna Charta parades in segments. I don't know how many there will be, but I'll number them 2, 3, 4, etc. Let me know if somewhere in your reading over them, you might have "heard" the bands playing or thrilled over "seeing" such a magnificent parade. This kid still remembers. vee DO YOU REMEMBER THE MAGNA CHARTA PARADES? WELL, I DO! For those of you who don't have a clue as to what I'm referring to, they were the magnificent annual Magna Charta parades that always took place in Niagara Falls in June from at least the late 1930s to the end of the 1940s. And as a kid who grew up in Niagara Falls, I knew that there never was a parade as grand as the Magna Charta parade. In looking back on it now-now that I'm a "reporter!"-I was forced to check my encyclopedia to refresh my memory as to what the whoopla was all about. What was so important about the Magna Charta? I used to know, but you know how that goes! In an unscholarly nutshell, this is the way it all went. Way back in the 1200s, there was unrest in England that had to do with the lack of the very basic freedoms of all of the people under the hammer-fisted rule of the King of England. It was a feudal society at that time but I guess that even the barons and lords were about as fed up with the king's absolute authority as much as the peasants and serfs were and they rebelled. As a result the Magna Charta came into being that forced the king to submit to the explicit laws of it that allowed the people some sort of protection against his tyrannical rule. The entry in my encyclopedia ends with, "And it was Coke [Sir Edward Coke 1552-1634)] and his contemporaries and their immediate successors who wrote the legal treatises which shaped the thought of men like Thomas Jefferson. Thus Magna Charta forms part at least of the background of the political ideas which shaped the United States." (per Sidney Painter, Professor of History, The John Hopkins University.) Therefore, it took them about 300 years to get around to finally assuring some sort of freedom for everyone! And I guess that back in the 1930s and 40s both our Canadian neighbors and those of us on this side of the border still remembered and revered the original roots of our mutual freedom and we reveled in celebrating them together. And, Boy, did we celebrate!!! We held the grandest parade in the whole world!! It was the MAGNA CHARTA PARADE!!! And you can bet your bottom dollar that among the thousands of marchers and spectators, were half of the population of the entire Town of Porter! The following are abstracts of articles from the Niagara Falls Gazette that gives an indication of the feeling of the closeness of our two countries-Canada and the US. Note: I transcribed the articles from photocopies off the microfilm at the Niagara Falls Library, History Department, so bear with me regarding blurred lines, etc. In addition, I had to cut them down a bit due to space restrictions in our newsletter. Note: the first article reported the details of the parade of June, 1942, a few months after our country entered WWII.