Corps to launch Marine Week event in Chicago - Marine Corps News, news from Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Corps to launch Marine Week event in Chicago

The Corps will launch an effort this spring similar to the Navy’s popular Fleet Week, with hundreds of Marines descending on Chicago in May for a week of community outreach efforts, concerts and demonstrations by a Marine Air-Ground Task Force.

Marine Week will begin May 11 and extend through the following weekend, said Maj. David Romley, the Corps’ director of community relations. It will conclude with activities at Navy Pier, the 3,300-foot-long tourist attraction on Lake Michigan that is surrounded by restaurants, sculptures and a 150-foot Ferris wheel.

“It’s akin to the Navy Fleet Week, and it kind of has the same purpose,” said Romley, who is based at the Pentagon. “The Marine Corps is looking to share its history, its traditions and what it has to offer.”

Fleet Week, a joint community outreach effort involving the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, has been held since 1935. Fleet Week events are held annually in cities across the U.S., particularly in New York City, where it was romanticized in the television show “Sex in the City.”

The Corps’ event has been in planning stages for months but had been kept quiet until Thursday. No Web site for the event has been launched, and neither the Corps nor Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had acknowledged it previously. Daley’s office was not immediately available for comment.

Last week, numerous Marine officers from the Washington, D.C., area traveled to Chicago to participate in the planning process with city officials, Marine sources said. A schedule of events has not yet been finalized, but Marines could be involved in events with organizations ranging from professionals sports teams to veterans groups, Romley said.

The event is designed to give the Corps a stronger presence in the Midwest and Chicago, where there aren’t as many Marines.

“We’ve got relationships in places like California and North Carolina, but we don’t have a lot of great relationships in a lot of other places in the country beyond our inspector-instructor staff,” Romley said. “We don’t get to a lot of other places in the country, and I think we feel a responsibility to try and get to those places.”

The Corps is already in discussion with another major city for a second Marine Week event, which could be held in either fall 2009 or spring 2010, Romley said. He declined to name the city, saying it was too early in the process.