When it comes to watching a parade, it’s an honor (and big responsibility) to be part of the advance team.

While the rest of the family is still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and rooting around for the corn flakes, you grab the chairs, blankets and coolers and stake out the spot. Sure, it means you have to get up a little earlier and sit around a little longer. But it also makes you a hero of sorts, and the waiting isn’t all that bad.

“You get some good relaxation in before all action starts,” says Alex King, who with his wife Stephanie claimed a premium slice of Western Avenue bright and early Thursday while the rest of the family was still “milling around” in the cabin. “I brought a book to read, and I’ve done my little puzzles all morning. I love it.”

The Kings and a few thousand others descended on Glen Arbor for a holiday parade that has become nothing short of a Leelanau County institution. Locals and visitors will tell you the Stan Brubaker Fourth of July Parade – named after its longtime organizer – is just a little more special than most.

“It just feels very personal, very specific to this community and definitely community oriented, whereas in a big town parade it feels like everything is just commercial,” Stephanie says. “There’s so much interaction here, and everyone really gets into it.”

The parade is a rarity in that anyone who wants to participate is welcome to march without registering ahead of time. Sure, there’s some organizing when it comes to the vehicles that lead the parade off, but the rest is a mix of anyone and everyone who wants to join in.

“Stan Brubaker had a very heartfelt desire that anyone who wanted to celebrate the Fourth of July should be able to participate,” says Glen Arbor Township Supervisor Tom Laureto. “So he had this concept of anything goes – just show up.”

The parade has been going on since the mid-1960s, said Stan’s daughter, Kristi Jo Brubaker. But despite the oft-repeated lore that Stan founded the parade when he gathered up some Glen Haven kids and sent them parading on bicycles, Kristi Jo says the credit actually goes to her mother, Jo Brubaker.

Jo started the tradition down in Birmingham (where they lived full time) and brought it up to Glen Haven when the family bought a cottage there in 1963. Stan, the consummate organizer, got involved a few years later.

“Everybody thought it was my dad (that started it), but it was my mother,” she tells The Ticker. “He was bossy, and that’s probably why everyone thinks it was him – he was out driving around on his moped (directing things).”’

Either way, it became Stan’s thing, and he served as the lead organizer for decades, shepherding the parade from a collection of kids on bikes into the large and beloved community event it is today.

“My dad was just very patriotic. He worked for the fire department, consulting with them, and he served on a couple of township boards, and I think it just kind of overflowed,” Kristi Jo says. “For the Brubakers, the Fourth of July was a really special holiday – it was our holiday.”

Before he died at age 95 last year, Brubaker passed the mantle to his friend and local resident John DePuy, who was honored to carry on the tradition.

“It’s just a big birthday party, basically,” DePuy says. “A time to show some patriotism and celebrate this country that we live in.”

The big birthday party has undergone some growing pains and evolution over the years as times have changed. The township now gets liability insurance, for example, and for many years now a volunteer “broom crew” has helped sweep the copious amounts of candy thrown from vehicles closer to eager children so none of them end up with a crushed hand (or worse).

“And we kind of put our foot down on too many squirt guns and the water balloons because that gets a little bit out of hand downtown when there's five people deep,” Laureto says.

But no amount of changes are likely to dampen what one local resident described as a “slice of America.”

“I’ve always called this our own little Norman Rockwell parade,” said Sue Wright, a seasonal resident who’s been watching the parade for 40 years. “It’s just like back in the olden days.”