Easy being green

This month the Wearin’ of the Green Parade, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish, rolls at 10 a.m. on March 15, starting at Acadian Thruway and Hundred Oaks Avenue and ending where Perkins Road crosses Acadian.

For many, the city’s most populated parade means beads, house parties and green booze, but for co-organizer Robert Grey Hammett, his favorite thing about the parade is less about celebration and more about an observation.

“I’m off the grid during the parade,” Hammett says. “I wear dark sunglasses while I ride in my golf cart. But I study hard the faces of the spectators, and it brings tears to my eyes that we can bring such joy to 150,000 folks. We do this for the love of the event.”

225 asked WBRZ chief forecaster Pat Shingleton to share his favorites from the parade that he launched in 1986. What he offered were several things even the greenest, most diehard Irish among us in Baton Rouge probably don’t know:

The Thursday night before the parade, Shingleton and volunteers, known as “The Parade Group,” celebrate inside the Slattery Room at Mockler Beverage.

Shingleton has breakfast with friends and family at 5 a.m. the day of the parade. It consists of corned beef hash, eggs, potatoes, fruit, coffee and Jameson Milk Punch.

The U.S. Marine Corps Band always leads the parade.

Zee Zee Gardens was the headquarters and epicenter of the parade in its first year, nearly 30 years ago.

Six of the parade’s grand marshals have been men born and raised in Ireland: Ivar Quigley, the late Denis Coffey, Thomas “Junior” Finnegan, Mike Rosney, Dick Bourke and Michael “Train Tracks” Leahy.