Picnic Day memories: from the best seat at the parade to chasing greased pigs
Although there were several rough years, it was rightly decided this was a celebration worth keeping
I attended my first Picnic Day in 1952 and haven't missed one since.
We had moved here from our hometown of Portland the year before, mostly because Portland didn't have a Picnic Day and Davis did.
Okay, I made that up.
Truth be told, nobody in Portland had ever heard of Picnic Day. Or, for that matter, the burg formerly known as Davisville.
Davis at the time was a town attached to the University Farm that had been established by the esteemed University of California so ag professors at Cal could come to Yolo County and grow the tomatoes that refused to ripen in Berkeley.
And those same professors eventually did enough weird things to those tomatoes that one day they could be harvested by machine instead of by hand. (The tomatoes, not the professors.)
Turns out our dad's college career at Oregon State had been interrupted by the outbreak of World War II and he dearly wanted to complete his education one day.
That day turned out to be September 12 of 1951, my fifth birthday, and our immigrant family of seven pretty much doubled the town's population with the arrival of one overstuffed Ford station wagon.
We had my birthday party in Central Park with a chocolate cake from the Vienna Bakery after dad had rushed to the only bank in town to purchase two rolls of nickels as a birthday present.
That might sound like a panic present, which it likely was, but I was truly fascinated at a young age with the Buffalo Nickel that was still in circulation in those days even though it hadn't been minted since 1938. Best $4 present I ever got.
Of course, $4 in those days would buy you a brand new 3-bedroom, 1-bath starter home in Oeste (rhymes with toasty) Manor, plus a burger and a shake at Kozy Korner across Russell Boulevard from Davis High School. (Now City Hall.)
A few months later, Dad came home from one of his Botany classes to report that some of his classmates were talking about a wonderful upcoming event known as Picnic Day.
We circled the date on our April 1952 calendar and truly didn't know what to expect, but visions of fried chicken and potato salad were already dancing in my dear mother's head.
That day eventually came and we all put on our Saturday best with great anticipation.
Picnic Day 1952 started with a parade through campus featuring elaborate floats put together by various student living groups, with several high school bands providing some John Philip Sousa marching music to keep things moving along.