“You the man!” someone shouted. “You win the man prize.”

“Ahh, someone else would have done it,” said Ruth, 36, shrugging off credit for the high-wire act that transformed the Watts Hospital-Hillandale park into ground zero for Durham’s oldest ongoing July Fourth celebration.

Hundreds, maybe more, filled the streets for the annual parade, which marked its 63rd year since Alice and Tom Walker got a handful of children to walk a block down Club Boulevard and back for the first parade in 1950.

“This is the oldest, but it started off very modest,” said coordinator Tom Miller, who rang off the start of the parade with a cowbell. “It was so short, they did it twice.”

Wedenesday saw Independence Day celebrations across the city: in Durham Central Park, Duke Park and Parkwood. But the Watts Hospital-Hillandale parade is special, participants said.

“It’s the most fun,” said City Councilwoman Diane Catotti.

Ann McAndrew brought six family members and two friends to the parade, including her mother Alice McAndrew, who’ll turn 88 on Halloween.

“I used to walk it all the time,” Alice said, who rode the parade’s now several blocks-long route in a wheelchair. “Everybody’s so happy to be here.”

Mike Shiflett walked with three of his kids and Cupcake, a 2-year-old English bulldog.

“It’s tradition,” said the former neighborhood president. “It’s what makes a neighborhood a community.”

According to an online history of the parade, Tom Walker urged newcomers to Watts-Hillandale to bring the flags of their home states and countries “to illustrate the melting pot that is not only our country, but our neighborhood.”

Eventually the flags made their ways from poles to the pines.

One of the biggest, a 45-star American flag, hung mightily Wednesday, an authentic flag that Miller’s grandfather acquired in 1898 to celebrate the end of the Spanish-American War.

But Miller said he wasn’t worried about any damage from it hanging in the trees.

“It’s no good sitting in a drawer.”