The first annual Portland Rose Show and Fiesta opened with a rose exhibit and competition at the Forestry building on June 20, 1907 (Morning Oregonian, 20-June-1907). The afternoon featured a children’s floral parade.
The Morning Oregonian editorialized the next day that the Rose Festival should be made an annual event:
There is no reason in the world why Portland should not hold a rose festival every year. Our weather in June, the month of roses, is always beautiful. The mountains are clad in their tenderest green. The fields and orchards are at the height of their charm. . .
Everybody will be happier and better all the rest of the year for the festival of roses. Old men will be younger, young men wiser; for there is nothing that contributes so much to wisdom as innocent joy. The happiest people in the world are the wisest. Let us therefore be happy, at least for a day or two every year. Let us banish care and worry and bask in the odor of roses. Let the bands play and the children march and the crowds shout with the clear sky over all and the sun bestowing his abundant blessing upon earth and man. And with every recurring June may the flowers be sweeter, the sky softer and the children lovelier until we shall forget how to begin the Summer without our Festival of Roses.
The second day of the festival featured a two mile long Grand Fiesta parade, an organ recital, and public viewing (free admission!) of the rose exhibit (Morning Oregonian, 21-June-1907).
On day three the throngs took in an automobile race at Irvington track, an exhibition of fire fighting apparatus, and baseball games – the day time game, a benefit for Flower Mission, pitted a team of bankers against a team of doctors and lawyers at Multnomah field. In a night game under electric light the Portland railroad men took on the Spokane railroad men (Morning Oregonian, 22-June-1907). The doctors and lawyers defeated the bankers 5-2 and the Portland railroad men won their game 6-3 (The Sunday Oregonian, 23-June-1907)
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