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Chock-full of balloons, bands and floats, the Veishea Parade has had a colorful past.

Brent Carmichael, co-chairman of the 1999 Veishea Parade, said the spectacle began as a showcase of ISU clubs touting their achievements.

“It started out as with clubs parading to promote their clubs and activities, but it has gotten a lot bigger,” he said. “It is just a case of people trying bigger and better things.”

Veishea hasn’t always included a parade, Carmichael said. It was halted during World War II and replaced with marching troops.

“The parade hasn’t been going for all 77 years of Veishea,” he said. “It was canceled during the war years.”

ISU alumna Betty Lou Varnum wrote an essay, which appears in “Veishea, the First Sixty Years,” a scrapbook by Chris Bertleson chronicling the event.

In the essay, Varnum recounts her memories of the parade. She remembers a shift in the ambience of the parade after the mid-’60s.

“I remember the light-hearted fun and gaiety of the parades in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and how that mood changed with the 1964 parade, the one following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” she recalled.

After Kennedy’s death, Varnum noticed a marked change in the Veishea parades.

“From that time until the late ’70s, the parades reflected the turmoil, the sadness, the concern and the involvement of the students in the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam era, the Watergate scandal and the other events that changed the texture of national and campus life,” Varnum wrote.

Until the mid-’30s, the parade was held on Friday morning rather than Saturday afternoon, its current time slot.

Though the past few Veisheas have been free of inclement weather, sunny skies weren’t always the case.

“The daily precipitation records for Ames show that more than one-tenth of an inch of rain was recorded for half of the first 60 Veishea celebrations,” Bertleson wrote. “This is not surprising in light of the fact that May is the second rainiest month of the year. Of those 30 rain-dampened Veisheas, the average rainfall was .67 inches.”