I have never tried to create a summer festival from scratch.  I have covered others charged with doing such a task, but never have I been part of the effort myself.  I got a small taste of that as the work was going on during the first Spark!Fishers Festival Saturday.

Summer festivals are not new to Fishers.  We had the Fishers Freedom Festival from 1989 through 2017.  I won’t go into what happened with the Freedom Festival, all I can say is that I enjoyed that festival each year as a Fishers resident since 1991, and we as a community should thank all the dedicated volunteers that made the Freedom Festival a summer tradition locally.

But when it became clear the Freedom Festival would not host an event in 2018, the city announced January 30th this year that a new Spark!Fishers Festival would be held at roughly the same time of year as the Freedom Fest of the past.  Let me put that into some perspective for you.  Putting together a festival such as Spark!Fishers for the first time normally takes 2-3 years.  The city had a few months to do this.

There is one variable festival planners cannot control – the weather.  You don’t want rain and you don’t want oppressive heat.  This year, Spark!Fishers dealt with the heat. I was not able to arrive at the festival until about 4pm Saturday, the hottest time of the day.

There was a crowd there but it wasn’t large, and the heat had something to do with that.  People started showing up around 6pm in anticipation of the parade.

Let me say at this point that I was a volunteer at the Freedom Festival, serving as a judge for the contest involving decorated bikes and wagons.  I loved every second of that.

At the Spark!Fishers Festival, I was asked to host a public address system setup at 116th Street and Municipal Drive.  I had been involved in parade’s before, and every parade has an order of the units and every parade gets out of order and some units don’t make it.  It doesn’t matter how large or small you parade may be, this happens.

I was very fortunate to have two outstanding Fishers High School incoming seniors to work with me…Joey Cerone and Max Keithley.  It helped that these two young men had experience as announcers for the Fishers Sports Network.  Calling sports on a live event requires that you think on your feet.  Both these young men did that, and we all worked together very well.

I have been reading the comments on social media about the festival.  There are some that are disappointed that this festival doesn’t measure up to what they remember from the Freedom Festival.  Others have praised the Spark!Fishers celebration.

In my view, it will take about two more Spark!Fishers Festivals to reach a final verdict on this.  I do know tons of city staff members, along was an army of volunteers, worked very hard on this inaugural summer event. I was at the City Hall volunteer nerve center for about an hour working on my part of the volunteer effort and found it a very busy place, with volunteers and city staff going in and out, working to keep the festival going.

I will address one rumor I found on social media.  Mayor Scott Fadness was in the parade, but he and his family were in the back seat of a closed vehicle.  The mayor’s wife is expecting their second child in late August and she needed to be cared for while handling the parade route.

As I tried to do at past Fishers Freedom Festivals, I took a ton of pictures at Spark!Fishers.  Because I was tied-up on the public address system, I was only able to snap one photo of the parade, but I have many others,

Here are my photos from the inaugural Spark!Fishers Festival: