Celebrate 30 Years of Sweet Pea
by Ray Sikorski
When a handful of artists and arts appreciators pooled their creative energy and created Bozeman’s Sweet Pea Festival in 1978, none of them dreamed it would still be going on 30 years down the road.
“I originally thought, ‘Gee, if it could last 10 or 15 years...,’” said Montana State University-Bozeman School of Art Director Richard Helzer, one of the eight-or-so founders of the festival. “It seems like I was definitely underestimating the extent of this event.”
Nowadays Sweet Pea is the seminal summer festival of Bozeman, with dozens of music, theater, dance, art, and children’s performances, events, and workshops over the course of a long August weekend. In recent years, around 18,000 people have donned their admission buttons and parked themselves somewhere in Lindley Park, and it’s all put on with the help of an army 2,000 volunteers strong.
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Sweet Pea Poster 1993
photo courtesy Meril Burlingame, MSU Archives
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Naturally, its founding was a bit more humble. The little band of organizers had seen other festivals, such as the Festival of Roses in Oregon, and wanted something like it for Bozeman but something Bozeman could call its own. They wanted a festival to celebrate the arts by bringing cutting-edge art, music, theater, and dance to town, but they had also heard of something called the Sweet Pea Carnival that took place in Bozeman from 1906-1916. Intrigued by old photos featuring floats festooned with thousands of flowers, with hundreds of spectators lining the blocks of Main Street, the organizers sensed a natural connection.
“We saw in the pictures that people had flowers and brought sweet peas to people on the railroad going to Yellowstone Park,” said Kathryn Helzer, wife of Richard and owner of Bozeman’s Shackup art gallery. “That whole little nucleus piqued our interest a lot, to build on something that the community had and then hadn’t had for at least 60 plus years at that point.”
When deciding on a name, “we always kept coming back to Sweet Pea Festival, how interesting it was,” she said.
And so it was on. In 1978, the gaggle of festival organizers made 500 of the now-collectible buttons themselves, undertaking the time-consuming task of cutting out paper circles, setting them on sheet metal blanks, and crimping them down with a hand-powered button pressing machine. “We knew after we did that that we had to go to a professional button person,” Helzer said.
Despite the work, every one of the $2 admission buttons sold. Helzer said she remembers walking around Lindley Park with large wads of cash in her pockets from all the ticket sales, continually getting sidetracked before securing it safely in someone’s van.
“I think it just speaks so much of Bozeman,” she said. “That you can actually walk around with all that money, stick it in a van in a safe place, and never have to worry.”
It’s that element, along with top-rate performances, that made Sweet Pea a must-see in Bozeman. For every headliner on the Main Stage, there’s also the parade, the children’s workshops, and Tater Pigs – which are also celebrating their 30th year at Sweet Pea.
“When you see all these little kids run down the street, you really do feel the sense of community, and I think that’s what Sweet Pea has brought to Bozeman,” Helzer said.
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Music at Sweet Pea Festival
photo courtesy Meril Burlingame, MSU Archives
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The success of the first festival led to another and another... and eventually turned Sweet Pea into an event that garners national attention and many attempts at emulation. The event became so popular that promoting the festival’s growth was stopped in 1989; organizers now turn down requests for interviews from Good Morning, America and the Today Show.
President of the Sweet Pea Board of Directors Todd Hoberecht said he didn’t think the festival needed the exposure. “We had enough exposure as it was.”
The secret to Sweet Pea’s success? For one thing, there’s the can’t-beat-it $10 button price for a full weekend’s allotment of music, theater and dance performances, workshops, and more. But more than anything else, it’s a desire to show the community a great time. “We get calls from all over the nation wanting to know how people can do what we’ve done with the Sweet Pea Festival,” said JoAnn Brekhus, the festival’s Executive Director. “Unless they want to do it for the sheer enjoyment of a celebration in their community, I don’t have a lot of answers for them.”
Brekhus explained that the festival is one of very few that rejects local or national sponsorship. All the money is raised from button and merchandise sales, and if there’s anything left over, it’s given back to the community in the form of grants.
The system helps create a festival that the community feels belongs to them, but it also makes for a tight budget. Some big-name performers are lured not by big bucks, but the opportunity for a working vacation in beautiful Bozeman. And of the platoons of volunteers it takes to roll out the events, every one of them has to pay full price for his or her entrance button.
Stories abound from past festivals. Former Owenhouse Hardware owner Lou Spain, who served as the parade’s Grand Marshal in 2006, remembered having a 600-pound cake baked for the 1979 Sweet Pea parade, to coincide with the hardware store’s 100th anniversary. The multi-tiered cake had been baked in 76 sections and was driven down Main Street on the back of a 1929 International Harvester flatbed truck.
“If you had a little shift in weight, you could not only lose the top layer, but also maybe the whole cake off the side of the truck,” Spain said. The cake, along with 90 gallons of ice cream, fed 1,500 people, and Spain explained that it started the tradition of having cake and ice cream at Lindley Park after every Sweet Pea parade.
Brekhus recalled that much of Sweet Pea’s adversity came from the sky.
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Parade
photo courtesy Meril Burlingame, MSU Archives |
“It’s a festival and it’s outdoors. Almost anything can happen,” she said, explaining that there have been few festivals where it hasn’t rained at least a little.
“I remember wearing my long johns in the parade, because it had snowed that morning,” she recalled of one festival. Despite the snow, the parade went on, and by afternoon it was warm and sunny.
Likewise for a mid-’90s Taste of Bozeman event, the food-themed precursor to today’s Bite of Bozeman. “It was just gushes of water running down the whole street—not just along the gutter, the whole street. People just picked up their stuff and stood under the awnings, went into the stores—all the business owners were really gracious and just sort of hung out. You could tell it was going to be one of those cloudbursts that would disappear. Sure enough, it did; the sun came out, the water drained on down Main Street, and the restaurants that were setting up for the Taste of Bozeman that year came back out, brushed the water off the tables, set things back up, and we had a beautiful Taste of Bozeman,” Brekhus laughs. “I think it takes quite a bit to deter the Sweet Pea fan overall.”
Other than being bigger and better organized, founders, organizers, and Sweet Pea aficionados claim that little has changed. It’s still a place to see great performances, it’s still the time of year to invite friends and relatives from out of town, and it’s still the place to expose kids to the arts.
“It makes a bit of noise on Saturday,” Brekhus said, describing the annual ritual of the children’s wood building workshop. “To those of us who’ve worked headquarters for many years it’s like music to our ears – the little ‘tick-tick-tick-tick-tick’ going on over there so you know the festival’s happening.” Despite several requests to stop the workshop because of the noise, wood building prevails. “Sweet Pea wouldn’t be the same without the ‘tick-tick-tick’ on Saturday afternoons.”
Along with all the other festival founders, Kathryn Helzer no longer takes part in the organizing of the event, but she’s happy to attend. “I’m amazed that it’s lasted 30 years,” she said. “I’m excited, and it makes me feel really proud because that means the community owns it. Which is always what we wanted: for the community to own this festival, that it become an important weekend in August. So every time I go to the parade I get kind of choked up, like, ‘Yes, we did this!’”
Festival: August 3, 4 & 5
Sweet Pea Ball: July 28
Chalk on the Walk: July 31
Bite of Bozeman: August 1
Art Show Opening: August 2
Sweet Pea Children’s Run: August 4
For more information: www.sweetpeafestival.org
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