A Unique View Of The Billboard Radiothon Emergency Vehicle Parade

I don't remember exactly what year it started, but the annual parade of emergency vehicles that show up for the Billboard Radiothon is one of the highlights of the entire week.

Dozens of fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles fill the parking lot in the Target / Lowe's / PetCo plaza on Hooper Avenue in Toms River. It's a crazy spectacle, with flashing lights and wailing sirens, and every year we hear that the local police stations get calls from citizens concerned that Armageddon has hit Target.

Here's how it looked in 2015:

And here's how it looked in 2016:

In 2017 we threw a member of the Hawk Flight Crew (I think it was Chippendale Joe) on one of the trucks so we could get a different point of view:

This year I was back atop the Billboard for the "Hawk's Eye View":

www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1526708511051684

We also got another very cool first-person video from one of the trucks in the parade, and it's a little bit different from the one we got in 2017. When we had Chippendale Joe in the truck, all you could hear was the wailing sirens, but in this video from Pin The Q Productions, you can actually hear what was going on the air on the Hawk. It's a brief moment of conversation between Andy and Theresa from Ocean of Love, but it's still pretty cool. Andy even mentions that the parade was delivering a "good check" - we had no idea just how "good" it would really be!

Every year it is incredible to see how the community comes together to help out kids with cancer. The way people unite, from organizations who make big donations to children dumping out bags of change, it has become my yearly reminder that good things still happen in the world.