``It's gotten so much bigger, with the vastness of Rosemont,'' Simpson said. ``It used to just be little Garrett Hill. . . . Before it was not as affluent here, so everyone wouldn't be down at the Shore. The Fourth of July parade was it.''
Back then, the neighborhood was an island of clapboard homes skirting farms and large estates. Today, after decades of development, few vestiges of that era remain.
But the Garrett Hill parade is still around. It recalls a time when blue- collar workers, many of them former GIs with jobs in the city or the Chester Shipyards, moved their families to this quiet spot away from the hustle-bustle of Philadelphia.
Saturday, residents waved flags from their wooden front porches, while other onlookers lined the sidewalks watching the marching bands, baton twirlers, vintage cars and fire trucks pass by.
Octogenarian Len Stackhouse, dressed as Uncle Sam, waved to the crowd from the back of an Army Jeep. For years, Stackhouse walked the parade route on stilts, a tradition he ended only a few years ago.
``It's really a very cute neighborhood parade,'' Betty Fewell said as she sat in a lawn chair in her front yard. Fewell has watched the parade go by her house on Lowrys Lane for 41 years, and this was one of the few times, she said, that her daughter has not come up from Florida to watch with her.
As new homes have popped up, the parade has grown. An estimated 4,000 people turned out to watch this year. At a party afterward at Clem Clement Memorial Park, the parade's terminus, organizers served up 3,000 hot dogs and as many cans of soda.
