Hundreds Brave Cold for Christmas Parade

Baby it was cold outside for the Christmas Parade at Camp Jordan on Friday evening.

Several hundred bundled-up-people filled with the Christmas spirit braved sub-freezing temperatures to enjoy an abbreviated parade with a quarter mile route down Camp Jordan Parkway.

A group of businessmen in cooperation with the City of East Ridge, were not dismayed when the traditional East Ridge Christmas Parade was cancelled on November 18 due to the threat of storms. Brian Scott and Robert Padgett, two local businessmen were determined the children of East Ridge would indeed have a parade complete with floats, candy and Santa.

To borrow a phrase from a century-old letter published in the New York Sun when a young girl wrote asking if the old man with the white beard really existed, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

About Dick Cook

Dick Cook has lived in East Ridge since the Kennedy Administration when his parents bought a house on Marietta Street. Dick graduated from ERHS in 1976 before going on to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he studied Political Science. Dick worked for the Chattanooga Free-Press and the Chattanooga Times Free Press for 22 years. Free-Press Sports Editor Roy Exum plucked him out of production in 1989 and gave him a job as a sports reporter. Dick covered everything from prep sports to the whitewater events on the Ocoee River for the 1996 Olympics. When Chattanooga's two paper's merged, he became the Crime Reporter covering both the Chattanooga Police and Fire Departments. He was among reporters who were honored by the Associated Press for the TFP's coverage of the 2002 fog-shrouded crash on I-75 in Catoosa County, Dick and his wife, Cathy, live on Marlboro Avenue where they are seen frequently chasing around their three grandsons.