Long ago, when the Newport Seafood & Wine Festival was still in its infancy and success a worrisome question mark, the event was held at the Newport Armory. As it is today, the festival was largely the work of the Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce and a small country of volunteers, all operating largely on hope and shoe leather.
On that Thursday long ago the volunteers gathered to give the armory an artistic touch. Armed with wooden seafood boxes and damaged fishing nets begged from the commercial fishing crews and processors, they went to work decorating.
“We had dried starfish, shells, etc. and thought we had done a masterful job with materials that we had begged, borrowed and stolen from a variety of sources,” recalled volunteer Dick Fowler in an e-mail. “As we finished up late Thursday night, we congratulated ourselves at making the old barn-like Armory building look pretty snazzy with only some sweat equity and almost no money.”
Since the weekend was slated to be a cold one, the crews turned up the heat, hoping to ensure the amory would be comfy when the festival opened Friday at noon.
As expected, Friday morning was brisk, giving the set-up crew ample opportunity for some back patting on their forethought.
They arrived at 10 am for the final prep before show time.
“When we unlocked the Armory doors … we were nearly bowled over by the stench of rotting fish, crab and shrimp waste which had been ‘enhanced’ by the heat in the building overnight,” Fowler said. “In fact, I believe a couple of our volunteers could be seen running back out to the parking lot and losing their breakfast because of the smell.”
“We were doomed — destined for failure before we even opened the festival!”
In roughly two weeks, the Newport Seafood & Wine Festival — now the largest party on the Oregon Coast — will open its doors once again, this time for the 38th year. The ticket takers will be in place, the vendors ready to pour, the cops and security guards keeping peace and the volunteers tidying up. To the average visitor, eager for the opportunity to chase away the winter blues, it will no doubt look as effortless as a swig from the glass in their hand. But to many of the workers and volunteers behind the scenes, it is nothing less than the culmination of nail-biting, edge-of-the-seat, ‘what-if?’ weeks of preparation that might or might not go according to plan.
As the executive director of the Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce, Lorna Davis is the one whose phone is likely to ring when everything flies apart (usually in the middle of the night), though she is quick to note that it’s the ingenuity and hard work of her staff and the many volunteers that ends up saving the day.
One year when the call came in the wee hours, it was to say that the tent — not yet tied down, but anchored like a balloon — was in danger of collapsing under the weight of the rain that had pooled on the panels.
They rounded up a pick up and while one person drove, two others pushed up on the roof panels with push brooms. Last year, there was snow, rain and finally — four days before the event was to open to vendors — wind.
“We had just left the tent after getting the electrical equipment installed to take a lunch break,” Davis said. “Ten minutes into the lunch break, the fire marshal called to say the north tent — 25,000-square-feet — had rolled and collapsed. It was just shock and disbelief.”
Despite two more storms, somehow the festival opened right on time.
As it did all those years ago when the good deeds of so many came up smelling like, well, fish guts in a heat wave.
As it happened, the fire station was right across the armory parking lot. Volunteers borrowed the exhaust blowers normally used to evacuate smoke following a fire, opened up the armory doors and, creating a cross flow, slowly began clearing the stench. Meanwhile, the others raided every grocery store in town for air fresheners.
“For nearly two hours we worked on the problem,” Fowler said. “By noon opening time … we had achieved an ‘air’ of respectability in the building.”
And just as it has for coming up on 38 years, the show went on.
For information on ticket availability, go to www.seafoodandwine.com.
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