A Distant Memory…Remember Hudson’s Thanksgiving Parade From Detroit?
A Distant Memory
Remember the Hudson’s Thanksgiving Parade from Detroit? Did you know this started in 1924, two years before rival Macy’s parade?
The parade was first broadcast in 1931 on radio station WWJ, but came to television in 1959 and that’s the year this photo was made. It was also telecast by Detroit’s WXYZ-TV that year and was hosted by ventriloquist and puppeteer Shari Lewis and her puppet Lamb Chop and carried nationally on the ABC broadcast network.
In 1960, the CBS broadcast network began to air portions of the parade and continued to do so for the next twenty-five parades. After a brief break in the mid-1980s, CBS returned to cover the parade through 2002 as part of its All-American Thanksgiving Day Parade compilation show. After being broadcast on WWJ, later WDIV, for over twenty years, local coverage switched to WXYZ for several years in the 1980s before returning to NBC-affiliate WDIV in the mid-1990s
Did Hudson’s merge with Dayton’s at some point to become Dayton-Hudson’s? I’d heard of D-H, but never lived where the company had any stores.
The parade now is independently produced by the Parade Company, founded by Art VanElslander local furniture company owner. It still is one of the great Thanksgiving Day parades, syndicated throughout Michigan by WDIV