Chicagoland Toys For Tots Motorcycle Parade
Since 1979, Western Avenue has been the venue for what is billed as the largest motorcycle parade in the world. On the first Sunday of December each year, thousands of motorcyclists assemble at the Dan Ryan Woods Forest Preserve at 87th Street and Western Avenue, bringing new, unwrapped toys for donation to the Toys for Tots charity. The parade drives north to deposit toys at Lane Tech at Addison Street, a distance of over fifteen miles. From 1979 through 2008, the parade instead continued north to deliver the toys to the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve station on Foster Avenue, a total distance in excess of eighteen miles.
Read more about this topic: Western Avenue (Chicago)
Famous quotes containing the words toys, tots, motorcycle and/or parade:
“If, during his daily walk, he met any children flying kites, playing marbles, or whirling peg tops, he would buy the toys from them and exhort them not to gamble or indulge in vain sport.”
—For the State of Rhode Island, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Kicking the heart
with pain’s big boots running up and down
the intestines like a motorcycle racer.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Chaucer’s remarkably trustful and affectionate character appears in his familiar, yet innocent and reverent, manner of speaking of his God. He comes into his thought without any false reverence, and with no more parade than the zephyr to his ear.... There is less love and simple, practical trust in Shakespeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue do we find expressed any affection for God! Herbert almost alone expresses it, “Ah, my dear God!””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)