March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Spring festivals offer hint of things to come > Fried dough, crafts, line dance attract fair-goers

BANGOR — For those few hours that the weather cooperated, area residents this weekend got a taste of the summer that has yet to arrive.

In Orono, hundreds walked around downtown for the annual Festival Day, enjoying unexpected sunshine in the afternoon. From the Asa Adams School to Mill Street, vendors sold crafts and food, while children took to face painting and hanging around the fire engines.

The 19th rendition of the annual shindig, which opened with a pancake breakfast, included a town yard sale and line dance.

By the afternoon, music drifted down Mill Street as restaurants such as Subway and Margarita’s hawked their specials. University of Maine students walked about with their dogs, while others proudly displayed lapel stickers of their favorite political candidates. At Rite Aid, a mound of cheap sunglasses was ready for sun-blinded bargain hunters.

Around the corner, Ken Walden, a longtime organizer of Festival Day, was peddling raffle tickets for an Old Town canoe.

At the Orono Historical Society’s table on Main Street, Charles and Alice Smith showed a visitor their latest project — collecting old photographs that chronicle the life of this university town. The bottom of a large glass jar was covered with small blue slips of paper for a quilt raffle.

As people stopped to say hello, there was talk of the future of a nearby building, located where Main Street forks into Bennoch Road and Park Street. A dull, rusty red, the structure for years has been an apartment building housing university students.

Like much of Orono, it has a history, most notably as a 19th century tavern, Mrs. Smith said. But like many historical buildings, it soon could fall prey to development, leading the Smiths to scour the town for anything available to document its past.

The society’s table included as well a sign of one of the group’s most successful ventures — two copies of Old Orono Oddments, a collection of historical columns written by the late Dr. A. Douglas Glanville.

On a whim, the society recently printed 500 of the soft-cover books for Festival Day, Smith said. Even at $30 a pop, there were only 25 left by Saturday afternoon. The book, Mrs. Smith said, has been quoted in works from California to New Jersey.

“It’s very far-reaching,” she said. “What a tribute to Dr. Glanville.”

At another booth, passers-by could donate 25 cents to the Dorothy Clarke Wilson Peace awards and offer their opinion on how to end the FBI’s standoff with the Montana Freemen. Of 115 votes received, 59 generally supported negotiation, 35 voted to leave the Freemen alone, and 21 said the FBI should “nuke ’em” and use force.

In Bangor, the weekend rain that began Saturday evening dampened the size of the crowd at a carnival set up in a mall parking lot.

The show, a preview of the Bangor State Fair that opens next month, included the usual sights and sounds — carnies, fried dough, air-brushed T-shirts, and tried to entice the handful of residents who showed up Sunday afternoon to try their luck.

When asked how business had been, owner Bud Gilmore shrugged and pointed to the gray skies, which offered a steady drizzle. Still, Smokey’s Greater Shows has been on a busy tour, raising money for nonprofit groups from New Hampshire to Old Town.

The latest Bangor carnival, which spent five days in the parking lot of the Westgate Mall on Union Street, was a fund-raiser for the Bangor Elks, Gilmore said.


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like