Greensboro NC Christmas Parade in 1960 - 16x20 PRINT

This is a 16x20 print and is not part of the original limited edition. I painted it in 1994 and published 200 signed and numbered prints. Those early prints were handled by J. Harold Smith Studio and Martin’s Frame and Art of Greensboro.

People do show up and tell you about things in a print like this. Notice the person in the car waving to the parade-goers. I assumed he was a mayor. Wouldn’t you? But no! I learned that there had been a TV show in 1960 for the kids, and that the man waving was ``The Old Rebel” in the show.

When I published this print in 1994, there was a retired Greensboro police officer in town - Edd Wynn. He saw the print, and actually remembered that very parade, and he swore that one of the policemen standing to the side had to be him!

The picture includes the famous F.W.Woolworth building on 132 S. Elm Street. It’s the one with the red striped awning, in the center of the painting. The Woolworth’s Five and Dime building is the site of the famous 1960 Woolworth Lunch Counter Sit-in and is now an international Civil Rights Center and museum.

Can you find Marilyn Shoes? Rexall Drugs? Richards Jewelers? The Greensboro Parks and Rec Show Wagon? I couldn’t see all the details in the photo, so I used the store names that I could decipher and then went to the library and compared old city directories to nail down which year the stores in the photograph would have all been on that block at the same time. I hope I got the store colors pretty close. You have to be careful! Some eagle-eyed Greensboro natives will surely yell “Gotcha” if you get it wrong! They do love their city and their memories.

I published several other prints in the 1990s showing typical downtown Greensboro scenes in 1910, 1918, 1949, and 1960. In painting them, I worked from photographs loaned by the Greensboro Historical Museum, the Greensboro Merchants Association, and by Jack Moebes, a former photographer for the Greensboro News and Record. This “Christmas Parade” painting won first prize at ``Celebrating Place: Historic Neighborhoods and Downtowns” at the Craven Arts Council in New Bern NC that year.

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