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Editorial: Days’ a blast
Op-Ed · August 11, 2016
Congratulations to the organizers of Hoover’s Hometown Days for another wonderful event!
Favorite activities like the Lions Club tractor pull, the inflatables, the Team Fergalicious 5K Road Race, Hooverball, the Fire In The Hole Bags Tournament, waterball fights at West Branch Fire Department and more returned. Organizers made it a point to keep what people love.
New this year, “Circus Boy” Bobby Hunt and Flying Houndz Frizbee made big hits and fit well with the small-town festival atmosphere.
Youth Hooverball, also new, made a splash with children looking to one day supplant current and longtime adult teams. Like middle-school and junior varsity teams, this is a great way to train West Branch-area youth to begin a lifelong love of a sport unique to its favorite son, Herbert Hoover.
With a strong variety of music, from B.F. Burt’s blues to the Dean-O-Holics Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin tribute band to the Scrap Metal rock music, the Days’ never fell silent this weekend.
The parade brought lots of fun, drew old friends back to town (some of whom appeared in the parade on reunion floats) and plenty of music, sirens and candy for the children, not to mention popsicles and bananas and bottled water.
With the Fine Arts adding a Saturday morning breakfast, the hours with food available stretched even further, joining two dinners by the fire department and plenty of local and commercial food vendors lining the streets, offering pork on a stick, sweet corn, hot dogs and grilled cheese, just to name a few.
Yet the biggest reaction had to come from the enhanced fireworks display. The half-hour show, again synchronized to music, ended with the most powerful finale in recent history. We heard more people talking about this than anything else, with good reason.
So here’s to another successful Hoover’s Hometown Days party — and here’s to the many, many people, including an abundance of volunteers behind the scenes — who made it a hit.
Very well done.
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