About an hour before Friday’s Downtown Los Angeles parade, celebrating the L.A. Dodgers’ World Series win, was scheduled to begin, Johnny Cepeda took a photo of his 5-year-old son Johnny II in front of a large replica Dodger foam finger at Gloria Molina Grand Park.
Cepeda said his father took him to a Los Angeles Lakers parade and he wanted to his son to experience the same thing.
“To me this is once in a lifetime. You don’t know how many times the Dodgers can win it,” Cepeda said.
They traveled from Corona in Riverside County to get to the parade route.
“Just celebrating with the fans, just being a part and creating memories for my son,” Cepeda said. “It’s something I don’t think he’ll appreciate until he’s older.”
They were among thousands on Friday who were celebrating the Dodgers World Series title.
And as they filled the streets, one thing became clear: This was a celebration that spanned generations. Fathers, moms, grandfathers and grandmas, aunts and uncles absorbed a truly rare moment with their younger kin, bright-eyed little ones who only know the image of the late Fernando Valenzuela, or the legendary heroics of Kirk Gibson.
But it was a line of L.A. history that goes back decades to when the Dodgers came to L.A. from Brooklyn in 1958, rooting the organization’s history in L.A.’s own, creating millions of memories for families across Southern California.
Those memories culminated this week, with new memories from a team loaded with new heroes, from Freddie Freeman to Shohei Ohtani.
