One of Gordie Shumaker’s biggest Winter Carnival Grande Day parade floats was commissioned by Dayton’s in 1956, a celebration of fashion, 1856-1956. Gordie didn’t push the envelope; he destroyed it. The fashion float was 170 feet long, 10 trailers in all, pulled by a civilian-model Jeep, the CJ2A, the driver unseen and unseeing, taking his instructions through an earpiece by a guy walking along.
In those halcyon days, the Grande Day parade started up on Summit Avenue, wound down the hill and entered the sold-out St. Paul Auditorium, with some 30 major league floats, most built by Gordie Shumaker. Gordie had 32 floats in the 1968 parade. His clients included Dayton’s, Hamm’s, Grain Belt, Whirlpool, Donaldson’s, Brown & Bigelow, Ford, Standard Oil.
How big did this parade used to be? When Hubert Humphrey was in the parade in 1966, one of Gordie’s guys had all the Secret Service cars towed to an impound lot. They were blocking the already-crowded parade route.
Gordie died in 2000, just shy of his 85th birthday, which fell that year on the same day as the Grande Day parade. By the time the great float maker went to the carnival in the sky, there wasn’t much left of the rolling extravaganzas, all their lights and spinning concoctions powered by surplus World War II generators.
Well, Gordie’s kids are still around, including Steve, 55. And Steve, who also is in the float and entertainment business, still has perhaps the greatest Winter Carnival scrapbook ever pasted together. That doesn’t do readers much good, but I was given access to the book the other day at Steve Shumaker’s house in Arden Hills, and I am just old enough to recall that when the late Ramsey County Sheriff Kermit Hedman reported a parade crowd in the hundreds of thousands, he wasn’t off by much.
“People still talk about those big floats,” Steve Shumaker said, “but I’m not sure people realize where they came from.”
They came from Gordie’s shop in Roseville, Gordon Displays Inc. Gordie worked in the display department of Snyder’s Drug Store in the years before the war, and in 1937, when the carnival was making a comeback from the Depression, Gordie built the Snyder’s float. After the war — Gordie went into the Navy at age 27 — he was commissioned by a guy named Walter Van Camp, the carnival’s director, to be the float builder. And he didn’t stop until he died, with Steve figuring the last of the big parades was the 1992 event, with the Super Bowl in Minneapolis and one of the best-ever ice palaces on Harriet Island.
Floats started with ideas. The ideas became sketches. The sketches became plywood and foam and wire and lights and action.
“My wife and I were driving to the store the other day,” Steve said, “and Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was on the radio and I imagined a Rhapsody in Blue float and how it could be done. You can bring anything to life on a float.”
Which is Steve Shumaker’s point. The big parades could make a comeback. And not just big parades. One of Gordie’s ideas was to hold a Grand Prix snowmobile race through downtown St. Paul. That brainstorm occurred to Gordie in the late 1960s. He was ahead of his time now that the Red Bull people have fallen in love with St. Paul and might be just the ticket to kick-start a new generation of winter extravagances, bigger parades, Crashed Ice, a snowmobile Grand Prix.
I don’t know where we would sign up, but it would be more than interesting to target 2018, the Super Bowl year, to host a carnival that would force the media, for example, to acknowledge St. Paul in the Super Bowl mix. Big parade. We have the floats covered, with a laying on of Gordie’s hands to Steve. So, yes, big floats. Throw in that snowmobile Grand Prix.
And an ice palace to rival some of the giants of 1886 or 1937, or that 1992 beauty. Let’s get cracking. We’re only two years out. Come on, let’s tow some Secret Service cars.
Copyright 2016 Pioneer Press.
