Tradition

 GOLDEN ONION DAYS 

Payson’s Labor Day Homecoming Tradition

Carnival rides, art and flower shows, breakfasts, theater, concerts and a parade turn the holiday weekend into a community reunion

By Don Charles Dixon

PICTURED: Ladies with a front row view in the chairs they set out along Main Street for a Golden Onion Days parade in a mid-century Payson. (Photo courtesy of the historical Payson Junior Cultus Club scrapbook collection)

PAYSON — Long before the carnival lights begin to flash in Memorial Park and days before the first marching band steps onto Main Street, there is a sure sign that Golden Onion Days is coming.

The chairs begin to appear.

Families place lawn chairs along the parade route days before the Labor Day parade, claiming the familiar spots where parents, children, grandparents, and old friends have watched the celebration unfold for years.

Some chairs sit empty for days, lined neatly along the curb like quiet promises that their owners will return Monday morning.

And they do.

Golden Onion Days has become more than a city celebration. For generations of Payson residents, it has been a homecoming.

The tradition began in 1929 as Payson’s Onion Harvest and Homecoming celebration, honoring the onion growers and other farmers whose crops helped support the community.

As the years passed, the festival grew. Horse races, athletic competitions, games, music, exhibits and entertainment were added. Eventually the Labor Day weekend became filled from Thursday right through Monday evening.

 

Some activities have disappeared. Others have become traditions of their own. But the spirit has remained remarkably similar. Payson comes together.

For children, one of the first signs of Onion Days has always been the carnival trucks arriving. Trailers pull into Memorial Park carrying rides folded into strange shapes. Crews begin raising steel frames. Within a short time, the park is transformed. At night the rides turn beneath flashing lights while music, bells, and laughter fill the park. Children carry tickets in their hands and move from one ride to another. Carnival games offer stuffed animals and prizes to anyone who can knock down the bottles, make the basket or land the ball in exactly the right place.

The smell of popcorn, cotton candy, hamburgers, and other carnival food spreads beneath the trees. Parents wait beside the rides. Teenagers meet friends. Grandparents sit and watch another generation enjoy the same Labor Day excitement.

For years, Onion Days weekend has begun with music on Thursday evening. Mountain View Hospital has sponsored a Thursday night concert at the Peteetneet amphitheater, bringing families to the historic school grounds before the busiest days of the celebration begin.

People bring blankets and lawn chairs and spread across the hillside and amphitheater seating. The old Peteetneet building stands behind the crowd while the music carries into the summer evening.

It has become one of those Onion Days traditions that feels both large and small at the same time — a community concert where many may attend, yet people continually turn around to greet neighbors they know.

Inside the Peteetneet Museum and Cultural Arts Center another side of Payson is displayed during Onion Days. The art, flower and craft shows bring together gardeners, artists and craftspeople from the community. Flowers grown during the summer are carefully arranged and brought to the Peteetneet for judging and display. Roses, dahlias, zinnias, sunflowers and other varieties provide color throughout the exhibit.

The craft show reflects another tradition — making things by hand. Quilts, needlework, woodworking, paintings, decorative pieces, and other handmade items show the talent that often stays hidden in homes and workshops during the rest of the year.

Visitors walk slowly through the displays, stopping to read names and admire what their neighbors have grown and created.

Saturday morning brings another long-standing gathering, the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. City leaders, residents and invited guests gather for breakfast and a morning of gratitude, faith and community fellowship. Before the noise of the carnival and the competitions of the day take over, the prayer breakfast provides a quieter beginning. It reminds those attending that Onion Days is not only about entertainment. It is also about gratitude for the community and the people who built it.

Among the activities that have brought both excitement and ingenuity to Onion Days is the soap box derby. Young racers climb into homemade gravity-powered cars and wait for their turn at the starting line. There is no engine. Gravity provides the power, but good wheels, careful construction, steering and courage determine what happens on the way down.

Parents and grandparents help build the cars, but when the race begins, the young driver is on their own. The starting signal is given. The car begins to roll. Then it picks up speed. Spectators cheer as the racers head toward the finish.

The soap box derby fits perfectly with the spirit of Onion Days — a mixture of competition, family involvement and homemade fun.

Perhaps no Onion Days competition has produced quite as many laughs as the outhouse race. Teams built and decorated outhouses on wheels and then raced them, with pushers providing the horsepower. There was nothing graceful about it. That was the point. Outhouses rattled and bounced down the course while teams pushed as hard as they could and spectators laughed and cheered. Some were built for speed. Others seemed built mainly to make people laugh. All of them were memorable.

The event represented the kind of humor that has long been part of small town celebrations — people willing to look a little ridiculous if it gives their neighbors a good laugh.

The Onion Days car show brings a different kind of machine to the celebration. Classic cars, restored pickups, muscle cars, custom and hot rods are polished until the chrome shines. People walk slowly between the rows, stopping to look under hoods and study interiors. For many older visitors, the cars bring back memories.

“That was my first car.”

“My dad had one just like that.”

“I wish I had never sold mine.”

For younger visitors, the show is an opportunity to see machines from an era before computerized dashboards and electronic controls.

The owners are often as much a part of the show as the automobiles themselves, telling the stories of where the car was found, how long restoration took, and what still needs to be done.

Another Onion Days tradition takes place beneath the stage lights rather than those of the carnival. Each year Payson Community Theater presents its summer production during the Golden Onion Days season, and the performances have become one of the most anticipated cultural events of the celebration.The productions regularly draw large crowds and performances often sell out.

Months of work go into the show. Actors rehearse lines and music. Costumes are made. Sets are built and painted. Lighting is arranged. Musicians practice. Volunteers work behind the scenes. 

Then the curtain rises.

For a few hours, local accountants, teachers, students, parents, business owners and retirees become characters from another place and time. Theater has become an important part of Onion Days because it demonstrates something the celebration has always done — allowing Payson residents to entertain one another.

Payson’s fascination with machines has not been limited to cars and carnival rides. The community’s aviation story began surprisingly early. An airport was operating in the Payson area during the early days of aviation, and by the 1920s airplanes and exhibition flights were bringing residents to look toward the sky. At a time when many people had never ridden in an automobile very far from home, an airplane seemed almost impossible.

People watched pilots take off from open fields and climb above the farms surrounding Payson. For some, an airplane flight became an unforgettable experience — seeing the streets, homes, orchards, and fields of their hometown from above.

Decades later, Onion Days would bring that excitement back. During the 1980s and 1990s, helicopter rides became an attraction. The sound could be heard before the helicopter was seen. The blades began slowly. Whup. Whup. Whup. Then faster.

Passengers climbed aboard and lifted into the air for a short flight over Payson. From above they could see Memorial Park, the carnival, Main Street, the fields and the mountains surrounding the valley.

The aircraft had changed since those early airplane flights of the 1920s. The excitement had not.

Labor Day Monday begins early. Before the parade, before the bands and floats move onto Main Street, families gather for the Payson Civic Chorale’s breakfast. The breakfast has become part of parade day itself. People arrive hungry, sit down with friends and neighbors and begin talking about where everyone plans to watch the parade.

Some are already wearing shirts identifying them as members of a float, band, organization or volunteer crew. Others are simply enjoying breakfast before walking to the chairs they placed along Main Street days earlier.

For many families, breakfast and the parade belong together. One follows the other. 

Visitors sometimes find one Payson tradition surprising. The parade may be on Monday, but the chairs arrive much earlier along Main Street. One family puts theirs out. Then another. Soon long sections of the parade route are lined with them.

They sit empty overnight. Cars pass by. People walk by them. Rain might fall on them. But everyone knows what those chairs mean. Someone has a place. Often it is the same place the family has used year after year.

By Monday morning, the empty chairs are filled. Children move toward the curb with bags ready for candy. Parents visit with the people sitting beside them. Grandparents point down the street when they hear the first distant sound of a marching band. Then come the police cars, fire engines, flags, floats, horses, queens, businesses, school groups and bands. Candy sails toward the curb. Children scramble and people wave. The Golden Onion Days parade moves through town. And for a few hours, it seems that nearly all of Payson is gathered along one street.

Over the decades Golden Onion Days has included almost every kind of community competition imaginable. There have been foot races, softball games, basketball tournaments, swimming events, horseshoe tournaments, golf events, children’s games, and athletic competitions. Some people enter to win. Others enter because their family and neighbors talked them into it. The difference usually becomes unimportant once the event begins. The point is participation.

That same spirit can be found in the flower show, the soap box derby, the outhouse race, and the community theater production. One person grows something. Another builds something. Another sings. Another acts. Another race, another volunteers. Together, we make Onion Days happen.

Payson has changed enormously since the first Onion Harvest and Homecoming in 1929. The onion fields that once surrounded the community have given way in many places to neighborhoods, schools and businesses. The old airport is part of another era. The horse races that once drew enormous crowds are remembered more often than they are seen.

Carnival rides have changed. Cars have changed. Even Main Street has changed. But every Labor Day weekend the old purpose of the celebration remains. People come home. Someone walking through Memorial Park sees a person they attended school with 40 years earlier. Families gather for breakfast. Children enjoy carnival rides. Gardeners proudly display their flowers. Craftspeople show what they have made. Actors take the stage. Soap box cars race downhill. Classic automobiles gleam in the sunlight. People laugh at an outhouse racing down the street. And on Monday morning, thousands gather along Main Street, many sitting in the chairs that had been waiting there for days. That may be the real meaning of Golden Onion Days.

The onion gave Payson a reason to begin the annual celebration. But the people gave it a reason to continue.

Nearly a century later, Golden Onion Days remains what it was intended to be from the start — Payson’s great Labor Day homecoming.