World War II had just ended and it was time to have fun again. Dick O’Toole was home from the sea, having somehow safely made 22 wartime crossings of the Atlantic Ocean with the Merchant Marine, and he wanted to party.
“That was 1946,” he says, “the year of the Victory Carnival, when it all started up again after being shut down for the war years. I’d made it home, and I wasn’t interested in the King’s Guard or anything else. I wanted to be on Vulcan’s Krewe.”
That was more than 60 years ago, and Dick O’Toole still rides in carnival parades with fellow alums of Fire and Brimstone, the fraternity of former Fire Krewe members.
Dorothy Furlong was Dorothy Arneberg when she was chosen Queen of the Snows in 1955, and she later formed a queen’s alumnae organization that will celebrate its 50th anniversary this year. Dorothy has remained active in the Winter Carnival and has kept track of the 70 women who’ve been Queens of the Snow since the tradition started in 1937. All but five are still alive, and as many as 30 attend a special tea each year where the senior queens pass their magic on to the current year’s queen candidates.
“This is a like a family,” she says. “St. Paul is a big small town, and the carnival is a good reflection of that.”
Paula Berends comes from another side of the far-flung family. She’s a former Klondike Kate, having warbled her way to fame in 2005. She was very, very green when she tried out two years earlier, but had learned a few of the tricks by the time she finally made it on her third try. (Most Kate candidates try out four or five times before making it.)
“I’m from New Richmond, Wis., and it was really new to me,” she says. “I’d not done anything like this before but I had a fabulous year and now it’s part of my life. I can’t imagine not being involved in this. I wonder now what I did with my life before all this.”
Becoming a Kate is a five-year commitment, she says, and “you really do get used to having it, and the whole Kate family, as a big part of your life.”
O’Toole, Furlong and Berends are among hundreds of carnival aficionados for whom the event is more than a 12-day festival – it’s something they’ve become.
On the royalty side of the carnival tradition, King Boreas is abetted in his ethereal work by princes of the East, West, South and North winds. Each wind has its own organization, its own little closely-knit clan.
Lonnie Piche, an East Side antiques dealer, became Prince of the East Wind in 1997, following in a tradition championed by such late iconic East Winds as hardware man Bill Godwin, mortician Al Mueller and grocer Matt Morelli.
“I’ve been with it ever since. That entire ’97 royal group stuck around the carnival and became part of our social family. This whole thing has been going on for 122 years, and this is how it keeps operating.”
How it keeps operating is a sweet mystery to some. The West Wind was traditionally keeper of the carnival six-shooter, and one time many years ago West Wind turned out to be a convicted gun-runner. One Fire King playfully mugged the governor’s wife. The governor was not at all thrilled, but Vulc later wound up on the Supreme Court.
In 2005, the entire Vulcanus Rex tradition was endangered after three female bartenders alleged they’d been groped by the reigning Fire King.
Vulcanus Rex was cashiered from the corps and eventually pleaded guilty to fifth-degree criminal sexual assault and the bartenders’ lawsuits were settled for an undisclosed amount. Vulcan and his Krewe for a time were in serious jeopardy of being written out of the carnival legend.
Last year, the carnival hierarchy toyed with eradicating the Torchlight Parade because to have two parades was considered a logistical drain. There was also some thought given to moving the traditional black-tie coronation of King Boreas and Queen of the Snows from the RiverCentre ballroom to a tent on Harriet Island. Then the weather got cold and carnival organizers wanted to have a “stationary parade” in which spectators would brave the cold to walk past festival royalty all huddled on idling buses.
None of these ideas was received well by carnival old-timers.
“No way were they going to call off the Torchlight Parade,” says Gerry Lanahan, Fire King in 1993 and again in 2005, when he took over from the Vulcanus who was unrexed after the bartender debacle. Lanahan and his krewe worked hard that year to change the image of the harbingers of spring.
“The Torchlight Parade belongs to Vulcan and is a crucial part of the whole,” he says. “That’s the most unique parade in the nation and it has to go on. There is simply not a better parade than the Torchlight.”
Lanahan, 62, has seen a lot of parades. His father marched with the old Griggs & Cooper marching band for years, despite the fact he couldn’t play a note. Dad had to be part of the action.
“This is a sickness with some of us, I guess,” he says. “But a good sickness. I still remember what it was like to put on the red and run the streets. You’ve become part of a big family, and when the krewe after mine went out on Luverne, the Vulcans’ truck for the first time, I felt like someone was taking my place.”
Of all the alumni groups of the costumed groups, none is more active than Fire and Brimstone, which has 230 members, about 150 of whom are active in putting on such events as the annual Christmas party for the West Side Boys and Girls Clubs, where more than 500 people are fed and entertained.
“The Vulcans get it,” says Bob Olsen, a historian of the St. Paul Winter Carnival. “As costumed characters, they’re not so full of themselves that they forget to have fun.”
Those who get it might agree. The Winter Carnival is far too important to be taken seriously.
Retired Pioneer Press columnist Don Boxmeyer can be reached at donboxmeyer@comcast.net.
Copyright 2008 Pioneer Press.
