Volunteers’ work needed to keep festival moving

BANGOR – A veritable army, this year’s National Folk Festival volunteers were hard to miss in their lime-green T-shirts. It seemed they were everywhere, and to organizers every volunteer assignment was critical to the festival’s success.

For some volunteers, the work began while the three-day event was still in the planning stages. During the days leading up to the festival’s Bangor debut, volunteers set up tents, stages and chairs and tended to dozens of other chores.

Once the three-day event got under way Friday, volunteers pitched in with anything that needed doing. Some staffed information booths or handed out festival programs. Some waded through the crowds collecting donations in 5-gallon plastic buckets or helped park cars at Bass Park, where festival-goers could hop onto one of the shuttle buses running to the waterfront and back.

Volunteers organized games and crafts in the children’s area at Pickering Square or were assigned to keep people away from the three railroad crossings at the festival site. They sold T-shirts and cold drinks and served as drivers or as “buddies,” who made sure performers had everything they needed.

And that’s just a partial list.

Lyndy Rohman, festival volunteer coordinator, said organizers put out a call for 500 volunteers. Nearly 700 signed up.

“The response was far beyond our expectations,” Rohman said Saturday. Volunteers, she noted, came not only from the immediate area but from as far north as Presque Isle and east as Mount Desert Island. One even flew in from East Lansing, Mich., the festival’s host city for the three years preceding its move to Bangor.

“I’ve got to tell you that I’m having a ball,” said Robin Barfoot, who flew to Bangor from Michigan on Thursday to serve as one of the “bucketheads” who waded through the crowds collecting donations.

“This festival is just a fabulous start for you guys and it gets better every year,” said Barfoot, who took time off from her job with the Michigan Public Service Commission to lend a hand.

Barfoot said that when she signed up as a volunteer during East Lansing’s first year as host city, she was willing to do whatever work was needed. She wasn’t especially interested in serving as a member of the Bucket Brigade – until she tried it and ended up leading that aspect of the festival.

“I love it. You get to be out all day and you get to listen to the music. Everybody’s having a good time and you get to feel all of the positive energy from the crowds,” she said.

Her sentiments were echoed often by the Mainers volunteering at their first national festival over the weekend, who said they saw their volunteer work as a way to help make the event possible and to contribute to the community.

For Mary Turner, who led Bangor’s Bucket Brigade, volunteering at the folk festival was a family event. Several members of her family turned out to help make sure the event went smoothly, including her father, Gerry Turner. Turner said public service was a tradition instilled in her by her father, the recipient of a Jefferson Award in 1998 for community service.

Volunteering was a family event for Tom and Markie Farnham of Vanceboro, who brought along their children and a niece.

“We’re spending all three days down here,” Markie Farnham said. This was their first folk festival, she said, and the whole family was looking forward to it.

For Cynthia Esty-Kendall of Glenburn, the festival was an event worth contributing to.

“It’s interesting to see the extensive organization that goes into this,” Esty-Kendall said. “We all want our clubs and our children to be involved.”