5 years ago: St. Patrick’s Day without parade was proof that Spokane could not avoid COVID chaos

Just before St. Patrick’s Day five years ago, like most communities around the world, Spokane was on edge.

In the face of a pandemic, many Western Washington schools were shutting down and iconic events were being delays or canceled.

One of the first major cancellations in Spokane was the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade hosted by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.

Things began to move quickly in March 2020. Schools shut down. Restaurants closed. Then Gov. Jay Inslee prohibited large events in the state’s most populated counties, a restriction that would soon spread statewide. The Spokane Regional Health District ordered the Washington Middle School Basketball Championship, set for the same weekend as the parade, to be canceled.

On March 11, 2020, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick announced that the parade that had been held every year for more than 40 years would not happen. The decision was made on a Wednesday evening, only a few days before the parade. The group had a vote and narrowly decided to cancel the outdoor event, parade committee member Paul Delaney said.

“I was on the organizing committee then,” he said. “We decided it would not be a good look (to hold the parade) if everyone else was hunkered down.”

Delaney said he believes the decision to cancel was the correct one.

“There’s a significant cost involved in putting on the parade,” he said. “It was the right move to do.”

That year would have been the 42nd annual parade. The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick also decided to cancel the parade in 2021. Delaney said at the time there still wasn’t much interest in large gatherings. “People were still coming out of COVID,” he said. “We thought it would take longer to regenerate interest.”

Organizers of other large community events saw the same hesitation. The annual Bloomsday Run, usually held the first Sunday in May, was at first postponed in 2020, then done as a virtual race. Bloomsday board President Michael Kiter, who was a board member at the time, said the nature of the Bloomsday event gave them flexibility.

“We had it a little bit easier than some of the other events in town,” he said. “We had fingers crossed, initially, during the shutdown time period.”

It was simple enough to make it a virtual event in 2020, with people logging in their miles from around the world. Organizers hoped to bring Bloomsday back in 2021, but a new surge in COVID cases axed the idea. “We worked pretty closely with the Health Department,” Kiter said. “As we got up to it, we realized we weren’t going to get the state’s blessing.”

They turned again to a virtual Bloomsday in 2021 and were able to get participation numbers above the year before. “We had a really big push with the virtual at that point,” he said.

Hoopfest, the largest 3-on-3 basketball tournament in the world, was canceled in June 2020 and 2021. Organizers had pushed the 2021 event to September and planned to host only half the usual number of teams in an effort to bring the event back, but canceled it at the end of August 2021 in the face of rising numbers of new cases of COVID-19. When the tournament finally returned in 2022, it was smaller than usual but has since grown again.

This year, snow and rain were the only obstacles faced by the St. Patrick’s Day parade organizers, who take pride in hosting the event rain or shine. “Outside of COVID, the parade has marched on for a long time,” Delaney said.