The most unusual Ohio act in the modern Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade didn’t carry an instrument. It carried jump ropes. J.U.M.P. — Jumpers United for Macy’s Parade — is a jump-rope performance team based in Strongsville, and it performed in the parade twice, in 2013 and 2015, turning a two-and-a-half-mile route into a moving rope routine in front of a national audience. This is part of “Ohio at the Macy’s Parade,” NewsForce247’s series telling the parade’s first century through the Ohioans woven into it, counting down to the 100th parade on Thanksgiving morning.
Even the team’s name is a mission statement: Jumpers United for Macy’s Parade — a group that exists, in large part, for the chance to do this. Under leader Pam Evans, J.U.M.P. built a Strongsville-based troupe of jumpers whose specialty work fills a category the parade calls its specialty performers — the acts between the bands and floats that give the route its variety: dancers, cheer squads, performance groups of every description, and, twice in the last dozen years, a jump-rope team from Cuyahoga County.
The first appearance came in 2013, and it was no token contingent. Marching.com’s account of the 2013 parade lineup records a J.U.M.P. troupe of 240 members performing a routine to “I Need Your Love.” Two hundred forty jumpers — a performing group larger than most of the marching bands on the route that year — keeping ropes turning in formation down the avenues of Manhattan. The same parade carried Lakota West, the only Ohio marching band invited in 2013, which meant Ohio put both a band and a 240-member jump-rope team into a single Thanksgiving morning.
Two years later, Macy’s asked them back. The company’s own 2015 parade announcement listed J.U.M.P. of Strongsville, Ohio, among the parade’s official specialty groups — the corporate record, in Macy’s own release, of a return engagement. Repeat invitations are the parade’s sincerest compliment; as this series has shown with Pickerington’s four band invitations and Defiance’s three, Macy’s brings back the acts that deliver. J.U.M.P.’s 2015 return put the Strongsville jumpers in that company.
The back-to-back Strongsville stories are this series’ favorite coincidence. In 2006, the Strongsville High School Marching Mustangs marched the parade playing “Roll Over Beethoven” — the story this series told yesterday. In 2013 and 2015, the same suburb sent a jump-rope team. No other Ohio community of Strongsville’s size has placed two different acts in the parade, and the pairing could hardly be more different: brass and drums one decade, ropes and footwork the next.
J.U.M.P. also widens the definition of what an Ohio parade story can be. This series has followed balloon builders, marching bands, a Springfield-born superstar and a Cleveland greeting-card empire into the parade’s history. Strongsville’s jumpers stand for the performers in the parade’s other economy — the specialty acts, auditioned and invited, who train for years for a few minutes on the route and a few seconds in front of the Herald Square cameras.
No Ohio specialty act has been announced for the 100th parade, and Macy’s full performer announcements were still awaited as this series went to press — the Ohio chapter of this year’s parade may yet get a late addition. But whatever the centennial lineup holds, Strongsville’s two trips by rope are already in the books: 2013, 2015, and 240 jumpers turning Manhattan into a gymnasium floor.
The 2013 parade, in fact, was one of Ohio’s fullest mornings in New York. Alongside J.U.M.P.’s 240 jumpers and the Lakota West band, WOSU Public Media reported thirteen Ohio high school students marching that year as individual members of Macy’s Great American Marching Band, drawn from Hilliard Bradley, Marysville, Brecksville-Broadview Heights, Perrysburg and Grove City. Bands, solo students and a small army of jump-rope artists — for one Thanksgiving, Ohio seemed to be coming down the route in waves.
“Ohio at the Macy’s Parade” continues through Thanksgiving Eve, when it concludes with “Akron Built the Balloons” — the Nov. 25 finale telling how Akron’s Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. designed and built the parade’s giant balloons from 1927 into the early 1980s, including every Superman balloon the parade ever flew. The 100th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade steps off Thursday, November 26, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on NBC and Peacock.