Sonny Weller readies for takeoff with KOLD's Millie Martinez up front for a demonstration flight in a Pitts S-C2 biplane to preview the air-show portion of the Marana Founders' Day celebration .

Jim Davis / Arizona Daily Star

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Marana celebrates itself Saturday for the 29th time, in all its incarnations.

The 29th Founders' Day attractions include a parade, food, skydivers, a car show, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe impersonators, music, rodeo, Little League games, arts and crafts displays and vendors — and way more history than one would expect of such a young town.

The all-day event starts at 9 a.m. at Ora Mae Harn District Park, 13250 N. Lon Adams Road, with a parade made up of marching bands, horse-drawn wagon floats, farm equipment and show cars.

What does a car show have to do with Marana's Founders' Day? At best a tractor or two, along with hot rods, classics, antiques from the early 1900s and race cars.

And the air show? Crop-dusters, maybe some kind of tribute to its cotton farming history? Not quite. Just fun watching aerobatic planes, though Marana does have a bustling airport and an aviation history dating back to its days as a World War II Army Air Corps training site.

Sonny Weller, an aerobatic pilot from Glendale, will be flying his Pitts S-2C Special over the celebration, doing tricks. He'll be joined by one or two other aerobatic pilots doing maneuvers within sight of the park.

Weller's little yellow biplane weighs just 1,700 pounds but has a 260-horsepower engine. Weller can make the plane do things to make spectators yearn for an air-sickness bag.

The idea underlying the celebration, and much of what the town does throughout the year, is that Marana is not an instant suburb of Tucson, a mere bedroom community, a place that grows houses where it used to grow cotton.

Mayor Ed Honea, a member of a pioneering Marana family, and Town Council members frequently give unscripted tributes to the good times they had attending Junior Rodeo and other events since the last council meeting.

And enough Town Council members show up for some civic events that Town Clerk Jocelyn Bronson finds it necessary to post official notices of possible quorums of the mayor and council at upcoming civic events.

For a town that's not even 30 years old — it was incorporated in 1977 — Marana leaders spend a lot of time talking about community and heritage. And, it actually is a much older place than the incorporation date would indicate.

"Really, we don't think of ourselves as that young. We may have been incorporated in 1977, but we've been here a long time," says Ora Mae Harn, mayor from 1989 to 1999 and the town's historian.

She's leading the town's effort to build a Heritage Park next to the Santa Cruz River in the old cotton-farming part of Marana. Harn says the center could open next year.

Replicas of two adobe buildings — one the original Producers Cotton Gin — that served as the center of Marana's early cotton trade are being reconstructed at the Heritage Park, Harn says.

The McDuff family, Foun-ders' Day Parade grand marshals this year, built the original gin in 1936, she says.

The Founders' Day history pavilion will include Chinese, Hispanic and Tohono O'odham cultural exhibits, and a tribute to Marana's time during World War II as a training site for military pilots, says Harn.

There will also be a glimpse back at the area's time as a Hohokam settlement, and the periods when it was visited by Father Eusebio Kino and the Spanish explorers, and later was part of Mexico, then a U.S. territory, Arizona and, finally, Marana.

Among the interesting exhibits, says Harn, will be Spanish Barb horses, descended from the horses the Spanish brought to the area, and that nearly died out until recent efforts to re-establish the breed.