White Center has had various summer festivals over the years that offered a numbing array of events and competitions.

The first was a one-time event called the Great Fair held in early August 1923. It featured a carnival, a side show, a contest to determine the biggest baby, and a sermon against capital punishment. The beauty pageant back then was called a "popular lady contest."

During the rest of the 1920s, White Center residents were invited to West Seattle's annual picnic in Lincoln Park. Then in 1932, a pre-picnic dance was held at Holy Family Hall, which was said to have the best dance floor on Seattle's west side.

The Lincoln Park picnic offered a freckle-face boy contest with two categories: plain and fancy. There was also a husband-calling competition and a rolling pin throwing contest.

Hi-Yu started in West Seattle in 1934, so White Center initiated its own version of Mardi Gras. Sponsored by the Odd Fellows and Rebekah lodges, it featured games and athletic contests as well as a carnival, street dance and a "popularity contest" for "young ladies of the South District."

Mardi Gras soon went away and there was no summer festival in White Center for about a decade. North Highliners went to celebrate the Fourth of July in Burien, where they held running races from Burien to White Center, and walking races from White Center to Burien.

White Center's first big parade is believed to have been in 1938, when thousands gathered to celebrate the construction of sidewalks along 16th Avenue South.

Part of the summer festival has always been a beauty pageant. The first Miss White Center, Telva Huested, was crowned in 1931.

The Miss White Center pageant continued through the years and, in 1966, winner Lynda Kilp went on to become Miss Washington. She competed for the Miss America title in Atlantic City that year.

In 1987, the beauty pageant became the Miss White Center Scholarship Program.

White Center revived its Mardi Gras celebration in the late 1940s with carnival booths, a parade, flower exhibits and riding demonstrations by the South Seattle Saddle Club. The event drew a reported 20,000 people.

At the 1949 Mardi Gras, the West Seattle Amateur Radio Club offered to send personal messages, via voice or Morse code over ham radio, throughout the country and all U.S. possessions.

The 1950 celebration was canceled due to a scarcity of products because of the Korean War.

Events at the summer festival changed with the times. By the mid-1980s, there were martial arts demonstrations of tae kwon do and kendo.

The 1985 Jubilee Days focused on dance - belly dancing, flamenco, tap, square dance, ballet, cancan, as well as folk dancing from Austria, Polynesia, Bavaria, Switzerland, Mexico and Sweden.

Elvis impersonators were the rage at the 1988 Jubilee Days, which attracted 6,000 people.

By 1992, White Center's large Cambodian community joined the Jubilee Days parade down 16th Avenue.