Filmmaker unknown, vantage point speculated

Apple Festival parade time in Westminster is the 5 o’clock hour this afternoon.  No matter how impressive today’s parade might be, it likely won’t mirror the procession that made its way through Westminster at apple time 58 years ago.  This is known by a colored film of the 1963 South Carolina Apple Festival Parade.  The existence of the film became known to the Oconee History Museum and can be seen on the museum website.  The museum’s Leslie Hagerty says it’s unknown who shot the film, but they think they known the filmmaker’s vantage point, a building which housed a downtown car dealership. In the third year of the official celebration of Oconee’s apple crop, the parade featured state and local politicians, church and commercial floats, beauty queens and, striking to 21st century eyes, were women’s long length dresses, men’s ties and jackets, and not just those in the parade, but those who lined the parade route as spectators.  The 1963 Apple Festival parade on a comfortable sunny day was a snapshot of a more innocent time, memory serves, as it was three months before on another sunny comfortable day when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.