By Kathianne Boniello
James McBride has a schedule that would make anybody tired, but when he’s asked, all the 16-year-old will do is shake his head and smile.
“It keeps me out of trouble,” the fresh-faced teen from Little Neck said with a laugh.
A Boy Scout and National Honor Society junior at Benjamin Cardozo High School who has been working to balance his Advanced Placement classes with a membership in the school’s Fitness Team and his community activities, “Jimmy” McBride seemed weary but hardly fazed by his numerous activities.
Having just come home from several days in California with the Cardozo Fitness Team, McBride had about a week to go during a Monday night interview before being honored by his colleagues in another group: the Little Neck-Douglaston Memorial Day Parade Committee, of which his father Charles is a member.
As the Youth of the Year for the 2001 parade, which is one of the largest Memorial Day parades in the nation, Jimmy McBride was to be honored just as much for his contributions to the annual march as for his community work.
But in the McBride family getting involved with the community has been par for the course, with Charles heavily involved in the Little Neck-Douglaston Lions Club and the Memorial Day Parade and his wife Nancy active in local schools and the family’s church.
“Kids get you involved,” Charles McBride said.
The family began its involvement in the Little Neck-Douglaston Memorial Day Parade when the McBride children, Charles and Jimmy, were young students at PS 94, one of the many schools that creates a float for the march.
The elder Charles McBride got involved through his kids and PS 94, where he drove the trailer carrying the school’s float in the parade for some 11 years.
As a child Jimmy McBride would march in the Little Neck-Douglaston Memorial Day Parade with his Boy Scout troop or with his school, but as a member of the organization that runs the parade McBride handles one of its most crucial fund-raising efforts of the year.
For 76 years the Little Neck-Douglaston Memorial Day parade has marched down Northern Boulevard in recognition of the area’s veterans. In the last several years the annual march has grown to be what is now a close second to the Chicago, Ill. parade in terms of size.
Dependent entirely on volunteers and fund-raising, the committee works each year to raise the money for the parade. Jimmy McBride, one of the few young faces at the group’s weekly meetings, handles the group’s journal.
The journal, which sells ads to generate money for the parade, raises about $10,000 each year, Jimmy McBride said.
“You don’t realize what goes into the parade and all the effort everyone puts in,” Jimmy McBride said of his behind-the-scenes view.
Charles McBride, who watched the parade himself while growing up in Little Neck and was honored as Man of the Year in 1997, said the parade’s spirit has never changed even as the event has grown.
“It’s to honor the veterans — what we have in this country was not cheap,” he said. “It’s a small town parade.”
Reach reporter Kathianne Boniello by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 146.
