Jean McFaddin

Look, sometimes, we find people who don’t have Wikipedia pages. That’s fine. Some of the people covered in this column are fairly obscure. That’s almost the mandate. But not only does Jean McFaddin not have her own Wikipedia page, she’s not mentioned on the one for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Which is basically a crime, given how important she was in the history of the parade. The “directors” listed are presumably the men who directed the television broadcast. Not the woman who actually ran the parade for nearly a quarter of a century. IMDb has more on her than Wikipedia.

McFaddin was born in Lufkin, Texas, in 1942. (Most of the information that follows is from the obituary that appeared in her hometown paper, which is reprinted from The New York Times but isn’t behind a paywall.) She had a Master’s in theater. She worked for a company called Liquid Theater, appearing in New York, London, and Paris. She produced several Bicentennial celebrations in New York and Washington, DC. Reading between the lines, she was becoming really well known in theatrical circles for her spectacle.

We were never a Macy’s Parade family—I’m not sure families in the Denas are. We had the Rose Parade, and that was all we needed. We knew about it, because we watched Miracle on 34^th Street like everyone else, but even if I did watch it, I couldn’t speak to the idea that the Macy’s parade was in a slump in those days. Either way, they hired McFaddin, and she ran the parade for another 24 years. The number of balloons apparently skyrocketed, and she personally auditioned 300 bands in some years.

She also ran Santaland. Not to mention all the other seasonal stuff at Macy’s. The Macy’s Flower Show. The Fourth of July fireworks. Something called “Tap-o-Mania,” a summer event with thousands of tap dancers, which frankly sounds a bit nightmarish, but whatever. She was iconic at Macy’s, holding the rank of senior vice president for special productions. By all accounts she was thrilled with her work and happy to be making children happy.

This included, in her personal life, her nieces and nephews. I don’t know if that was just her siblings’ kids or those of her long-time partner, Susan Falk. They were finally able to marry right around the time McFaddin retired after having been together thirty-seven years. Which is longer than she’d been at Macy’s. She seems to have been a warm, wonderful person, and she shouldn’t be left out of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade story. Even Maureen O’Hara sent her a charming letter when she retired.