STURGEON BAY, WI — Three Door County residents have walked into Stitch & Co. on N 3rd Avenue in the past nine days and ordered custom red-and-white sashes reading GRAND MARSHAL — JULY 4, 2025, each operating under the unshakable impression that he or she is, alone, the Grand Marshal of Friday’s parade. Mayor Doug Halverson confirmed Sunday afternoon that this is, in his words, "a thing we are working through."
According to Halverson, the position was promised in three separate conversations — at the Memorial Day brat fry, immediately following a zoning hearing on June 4, and once "in the produce aisle at Econofoods" — none of which were attended by a person taking notes, including Halverson himself.
Joline Pavlicek, who has run Stitch & Co. for nineteen years, said she suspected something was off when the second customer placed an identical order. "I asked her if she knew about the first one," Pavlicek said. "She said there was no first one. Then the third one came in. I stopped asking."
The three sashed residents — retired letter carrier Carl Vrieze, fifth-generation cherry farmer Pat Lutz, and Cherry Festival board chair Linda Brask — have not, as of Sunday evening, been informed of one another. Each has independently begun practicing a wave.
Parade committee chair Wanda Heisler said the committee learned of the overlap Friday night and held an emergency meeting Saturday morning that produced, by her account, "no resolution and one nosebleed." A motion to split the parade into three slightly staggered processions was tabled without a second.
The situation deepened Saturday afternoon when Ernie Behnke, 81, arrived at the city clerk’s office holding a Door County Co-op napkin dated July 2003, on which, he says, then-Mayor Wessel promised him the role "next time it comes around." The napkin reads GRAND MARSHAL — ERNIE in what city staff have provisionally identified as ketchup.
Halverson, reached Sunday outside the Methodist church, said he was "letting it cook" and expected to have an update by Tuesday, possibly Wednesday. He declined to say which of the three he intended to inform first, citing what he called "the order in which I run into them at the gas station."
Pavlicek, for her part, was finishing the third sash. "It’s already paid for," she said, threading the loop on Brask’s. "I don’t get paid to figure out who’s the Grand Marshal. I get paid to make a sash."