2022 Winner: Racine Concert Band 2019 Winner: Washington Park High School Award biography: Charles B. Arnold 1904-1981  A self-employed sign painter, Charles “Barney” Arnold started sign writing in 1925 and opened his own business in 1930. He became a professional builder of hundreds of floats for area parades for fifty years and encouraged the enthusiasm of amateurs, teaching them to build their own floats. That is why the Charles B. Arnold Award is so appropriate.  Arnold, with family members and friends, created parade floats that thrilled spectators in Racine’s July Fourth parades since 1937. Before that, he and his wife, Mildred, started building floats for Labor Day parades when every union had its own float and every union member walked in the parade. The Arnolds were amateurs then. Local union leaders resisted going to Chicago when they could get them build in Racine by Arnold.  With the formation of the Goodwill Celebrations in 1937, the Arnolds consistently pleased their clients, including Racine’s major manufacturing companies, and the crowds that lined the streets. Using floral paper, wood lath, chicken wire and staple guns, their team would turn old farm wagons with plodding milk delivery horses into Cinderella’s carriage; sea world strips, TV and Disney. Rebuilt many times since, the stirring Iwo Jima float was created originally by the Arnolds in 1947. Some years they built as many as 20 floats for the Fourth and as many for Labor Day parades.  Arnold officially retired from building floats at the 200th Birthday Fourth of July parade in 1976, the year he was named “Mr. Goodwill” by parade sponsors. For one of Racine’s biggest parades, Arnold had built his own small float of Uncle Sam’s top hat on which he rode proudly down the line of march leading 35 floats, including many of those he and his crew had built.  He built floats or helped others build them for every Fourth of July parade except for the three he missed while a Navy Seabee in the South Pacific during World War II. His wife carried on the float business in his absence.  Since 1978 The Charles B. Arnold trophy has been awarded to one of the top three floats in the Non-Industrial Division.