Amherst Rotary Town Fair getting ready for action
Ah yes, that brief period when Amherst town center is transformed back to a simpler time, before the University became a bustling big city -- bringing our small town with it.
When you could leave your doors unlocked at night, buy a hammer in the downtown, or when most families in town had milk delivered to their front porch.
The town has changed, children have not.
7 comments:
Of course it's raining to transform the Common to mud bath. Sigh.
The sad part is you can always tell when it will rain every day. Traditionally the Amherst fair is soaked. Forecast for this week looks to make that tradition part of this years fair too.
You can still have milk delivered to your front porch.
If the Rotary Club had sticked to their usual schedule, the fair would have been last weekend...a perfectly gorgeous weekend and few days leading up to it. The common would have been dry and no rain! Instead they moved it to this weekend to avoid the rain problem. Didn't their mother ever tell them that you can't fool mother nature?! They should either reschedule it for June or leave the date alone.
Oh ... they didn't want to conflict with graduation? That makes sense. Hmmm ... maybe June is a better idea. It would be a party for locals, but less lucrative for the amusement folks.
For fifteen years I've watched nearly every year of the fair wash out but I think two, maybe three. It is normally so early in the season as to be too cold to go anyway.
Somewhere in the planning and commencement of this fair is some sort of prejudice or prevention of something, namely the company that puts on the fair from making any money or perhaps a way to disallow people to attend from out of town... you know families that might want to go.
Yea, Wally, the Rotary Club intentionally plans the fair for a time when it will always rain because they do not want anyone to come and have a good time. Hello, this is one of the Rotary Club's biggest fundraisers. Of course they want people to come!!! They tried moving it to a later weekend in hopes that would help. If that had left well enough alone, the fair would have been last weekend - a gorgeous, sunny Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It would have been awesome.
You say some pretty bizarre things, Wally.
I will always remember Amherst Community Fair dates as being May 18-20'ish, because of the poster contest that was run for kids in town to make posters to advertise it. Hastings sold a lot of posterboard and paint in the weeks leading up to the Fair, I'm sure.
There is no longer the 'Battle of the Bands" bringing more excitement and anticipation to Saturday nights there, but those times live on in memory. Older siblings were recruited to drive to (Westfield?) to buy prizes for the booths set up by each class as fundraisers for ARHS activities. Remember those bristley "leis" that advertised your prowess in gamesmanship? Wasn't it just the best thing ever to be GIVEN on by someone you had a crush on? :-)
May all the kids of Amherst (and the Amherst area) have at least as much to look back on fondly as we do.
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