“I felt a drop,” Jonathan Knight said looking up at the gray clouds overhead.

He looked at his watch. It was approaching 10 a.m.

“It was about this time last year when it started coming down.” That was the year the Warwick Neck Improvement Association canceled the Fourth of July parade. Association President Knight was hopeful he wouldn’t have to make that call this year.

I conveyed what Leslie Baxter learned from her phone only minutes earlier. If there was rain, it would hold off until the late afternoon. Jon kept looking up. There were no more drops. He surveyed around the seminary parking lot behind the Aldrich Mansion. Patriotic music played from the speaker in the back of the John Deere Gator, festooned with flags, I was seated in. Robert Cutler -   “Bubba” as I was to learn from spectator greetings – was at the wheel. He introduced his wife and two daughters. His grandson, Foster, would be driving a kids’ version of the John Deere directly behind us. Ahead, seated in chairs in the bed of a pickup were the ladies if the Warwick Neck Garden Club wearing dresses and colorful hats. They were given the honor of leading the parade.

Bubba has participated in the parade for almost as long as it has been a neighborhood tradition for nearly 30 years.

“I missed the first three years,” he said. But he remembered the names of the instigators. Howard and Delores Haronian loaned their replica of the statue to lead the parade – Lady Liberty rode in the back of a truck. Bill Riggs, who dressed as Uncle Sam in red and white stripped pants, a blue tailed jacket, a top hat and pedaled a bicycle with bunting woven between the spokes. Then there was Jack Henriques dressed as a colonial with a blood-stained bandana wrapped around his forehead. I’m not sure Jack and Lillian Clegg displayed their giant American flag with fewer than 50 stars on that first parade, but it was out there this year being carried carefully by members of Warwick Pack 1. Jack and Lillian rode in a vintage yellow convertible Mercedes this year. Many rallied for those early parades, but none were more invested than Bill and Madeline Nixon who opened their property on Narragansett Bay Avenue and the porch to heir home overlooking Greenwich Bay. Bill was usually up front in one of his sporty convertibles, music blaring and leading the assembly plus spectators who joined the line of march back to the house where they would raise the flag, hand out awards for the colorful displays and then enjoy lemonade, watermelon and cookies.

The parade has transitioned. In recent years, area residents who have gussied up their lawn tractors, and vintage cars with bunting, flags and streamers or gone to lengths converting them into floats to congregate in the seminary parking lot. From there they went down Warwick Neck Avenue toward the lighthouse before circling back through the neighborhood to the parking lot.

“Bubba,” came the shouts of kids. Some spectators snapped to attention to salute him which he returned with a wave.

“You know,” Ward 5 Councilman Ed Ladouceur told me after the parade, “he still fits into his uniform.” I knew I recognized Cutler from Veterans Day ceremonies at Warwick Light involving the US Coast Guard and Warwick Neck School students organized by Henriques. Cutler was always there in uniform -  ram rod straight as they presented the colors. (That ceremony is now held at the school.)

On Thursday he wore a camouflaged hat and a bar on his chest signifying the medals he was awarded while serving our country in Vietnam outside Da Nang.

Bubba didn’t volunteer information about his tour in Vietnam and I didn’t press. Also a former Marine,  Ladouceur told me later that Bubba is the recipient of a Bronze Star with a V.

“You know what that means?” Ladouceur didn’t wait for me to answer. He explained the Bronze Star can be awarded for service, but the V is for heroism in combat.

I gleaned a few details of how he happened to land in Warwick Neck. He was living in up-town Manhattan and working on Wall Street as an investment advisor when he tired of paying high property taxes and discovered the comparative bargain prices of Rhode Island real estate.

What does he think of Warwick taxes?

“There’s always taxes.”

He’s right, of course. But then there were other things for his grateful passenger to ponder after the parade like water melon and cookies.