Photo Gallery

The last of the Three Amigos, Stuart , Bill, and Gary was the honored Grand Sultan in year 3. Gary, of course, would drive, host get-togethers and instruct others on the proper etiquette to drinking Goldschlager. In upcoming years, because of his lime green fire engine, the Grand Sultans became one of the best known floats of the entire parade!

To this day, the Grand Parade has never had weather as beautiful as we did in 1995. It hit a high of 75 and helped paved the way for the huge growth of Soulard Mardi Gras in the future. If you look at the pictures this year you’ll see the parade winding right through thick crowds with no barricades or policemen at all. These were the days! (Fat Tuesday, however, was was right back down to 36 degrees.)

Gary had just broken his elbow days before, slipping on the ice on his way out to dinner with Jeanie for Valentine’s Day. You’ll notice that he wasn’t slowed down too much as he and Jeanie just painted his cast gold, and kept on partying!

The overall theme to the parade in 1995 was Festival of the Clowns. We used Drakes flat bed with a giant paper mache Clown head that was made by Mary Kruse, Gwen (maybe Mindy). That clown head was then mounted and served as a giant Jack-in-the-Box that would rise and fall with Drake at the controls. You’ll see Drake in his shower cap in many of the pics.

The line-up/staging area was at the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Some floats were staged in the tour parking lot. Others, like the Sultans, were on the street. We were on 11th near Lynch. We had all our staging pretty much done at LaSalle Plumbing before we even lined-up. Therefore we could start the party right away. We even took some pics with the Grand Marshall, Tiny Tim.

The route went north through Soulard right past Vincent’s market. However, the parade was slightly rerouted because of a disgruntled resident stupidly decided to drive right through the crowd and the parade to get to his house. Needless to say, there’s now more crowd control than there was back then.

Founder Stuart was actually on a trip to see Marilyn’s in-laws, but mid-parade we did manage to persuade some young babes in to talking very dirty to him via cell phone. That way, he could still feel like he was still a part of the festivities!