A weekend of rollicking entertainment brought more than 1,000 visitors here amid a three-day Labor Day celebration that included a parachute drip and balloon ascension in Siloam Park. There also was a huge street parade with many surrounding towns entering floats, a bathing beauty contest, and a spectacular fireworks display in the evening. There was an old-time music contest, with fiddlers vying for the title of Northwest Missouri fiddling championship and $50 in prizes. A “Battle Royal” boxing match was staged in a ring erected in the street at Marietta and Broadway The celebration wasn’t all secular; that Sunday, there was a mammoth religious service conducted jointly by the churches of the community in the evening.

Another Labor Day weekend was filled with band concerts and other festivities, including a greased pig contest, a Yo-Yo top spinning contest, a sack race and a “real old-fashioned Punch and Judy show.” The highlight was the formal dedication of the Excelsior Springs municipal airport “located two miles west of Excelsior Springs on the McKee farm.” There were aerial stunts by a number of planes, and an official U.S. air mail plane was at the field to dispatch 200 pounds of mail from the local airport. Then back to Siloam Field, where the Jolly Jones revue entertained visitors with a puppet show. A visitor from the Fox film company in Kansas City filmed various events. The evening ended with a parade of the winners in the bathing beauty context staged on a special runway added to the Siloam Park pavilion.

The Roaring 20s ended with the stock market crash in October 1929, which may have contributed to a more subdued Labor Day observance in Excelsior Springs in 1930. But mostly, the Daily Standard noted, the community was more focused on the upcoming three-day celebration to commemorate the founding of Excelsior Springs by town founders Anthony Wyman, Elizabeth Wyman, and the Rev. J.V.B. Flack on Sept. 1, 1880. The most notable Labor Day weekend event was an all-night dance at Lake Maurer (it actually ended at 2 a.m.) that was well attended by locals and many people from the surrounding towns. The writer got in a dig at the poor condition of the roads, noting that “despite the fact that Kansas Citians are forced to detour over the Mosby Road to reach this city, the number of cars on the streets indicated many from KC made the trek here, and the registration at the golf course showed many were here for a day’s entertainment.”