March 17, 2004

The First Ever First Annual World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade was held in Hot Springs (Garland County), with an open invitation for gag parade entries turning out more than fifty groups, including seventeen marching Irish wolfhounds and a marcher who boasted he would cover the “entire parade route while holding his breath.” The parade began when a group of Hot Springs residents gathered in a pub on the city’s Bridge Street and began musing about ways to capitalize on the fact that the street had been named in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! during the 1950s and 1960s as the world’s shortest street in everyday use.