Opinion: The challenge of the Pumpkin Festival

This Pumpkin Festival weekend was challenging; as it seems more so every year. The challenge was looking through the mix of the crowd and vendors to see what resemblance the event now has with what attracted local residents in a gathering of community spirit 37 years ago. This year I noticed at least two remote sets of twin ATM machines. And, not unlike parents who park their kids in front of the multi-channeled electronic babysitter, there was the super wide screen TV (maybe 6 x 10ft) showing a ball game to a group of about 30 or 40 in front of the Adult Day Care Center amid the hot dog, sausage, and beer booths. Out on Main Street, there were booths for rain gutter sales, travel and vacation packages, two newspaper subscription booths, do-it-yourself Comcast installation kits, a mobile Starbuck’s van, and I assume that next year there’ll be concessions for Peet’s Coffee, Jamba Juice, and (God forbid) Popeye’s Chicken. If one were to inquire of those who intentionally left their homes for the weekend, it would probably remind them of the beach town scenario in "Jaws", where actor Murray Hamilton’s preoccupation with tourist perception far outweighed any concerns for any individual swimmer’s personal safety. 

One queried former vendor said it was just getting too expensive to get a booth here anymore. What we are left with is many  professional artists from around the country who make their living running the circuit of national events—in other peoples’ communities. And the ratio of local to non-local artisans has gone from 80/20 to having to reassess that ratio to accommodate those concessions which don’t represent any art interest at all—at the "Pumpkin and ART Festival," no less.

I sat by the gazebo at the south end on Saturday with a blind date from Hayward, a former resident who hadn’t been back here in decades. It was a bit surreal. Throughout the rest of the concessions to the north that we saw earlier, it more resembled a trip to the Tanforan Mall, yet down at the gazebo was an older band playing bluegrass, Janice Joplin, some light gospel, and some tunes that seemed genuinely befitting of the "cute and quaint" image that some here believe might again be possible for HMB. And that made me wonder why we even had a gazebo crammed into an area surrounded by brickwork, so close to a residence, and in a barely used section of town.

The number of legislative and economic factors that have made this such a local hot button are fairly obvious for those who struggled for years to make sense of declines in funding, and certainly more so for those who have been here longer than I. I mean, there does have to be funding to compensate for the shortfall to our charities and programs, but rather than take a hard look at the direction we are currently headed in, and instituting a pointed business focus of "Recovering the Relationship with the Residents", (or something to that effect), it seems to me that this mega-virus is going to ultimately consume its host. 

In former Review editor Eric Rice’s article about Professor August St. John and his downtown doomsday scenario (July or August of 1993), it just seemed all the more predictive as I walked the entire festival area. People I spoke with last Thursday, and in particular on Friday, were developing really short fuses as they had once more had to prepare to honker down or feel held hostage in their residential bunkers to avoid the onslaught that they’d moved over here to avoid. Many other residents simply left the area for the weekend.

I know many people are "up" for the event and are charged by it, and still others make the best of it by taking in parking fees or just knuckling up, thinking about all the good it does for the charities, but do we even have any idea at all how the majority of residents feel? Do people even care how they feel? Every time the Pumpkin Festival is held is just one more reminder to us all that this locale can’t support its own, whether the elderly or the students. It’s a yearly reminder of the dissociation between the people who live here, their civic and moral responsibilities, and the continued failure of business to address the harder, long term sustainability issues.

I have enclosed an article that I found interesting relative to "small towns":
http://www.smalltownproject.org/2006/03/15/revisiting-an-old-myth/

There were parts of the Pumpkin Festival that I did enjoy. Watching the Wizard of Oz skit (the tornado was a stroke of genius) and the little kids getting pulled in wagons by their moms and dads also gave me another opportunity to try to look for some solutions, but the more I looked at it, the more it was obvious that driving a wedge between the business community and the very residents that actually live here was not the answer, whether we’re talking one large event, four events, or a dysfunctional year-round focus of trying to attract people who don’t even live here, when we can’t even service our own. Occasionally, I could see past the glitz of travel brochures and gutter samples to view what it must have been like, years ago, when a few well intentioned folks had a great idea to draw the community together. What .... the .... hell .... happened? One person I spoke with commented that the Pumpkin Festival was doing just fine until Safeway became the major sponsor and the whole thing went corporate.

At this point, the Pumpkin Festival cannot just disappear because too many charitable entities have been progressively forced into their respective corners and can do nothing but put up with it. The Catch 22 is that the more that charities rely on these "events", the more they drive a wedge between themselves and the voters within the community they service and who keep voting down the measures. 

Somewhere on the horizon, at least, I’d like to see re-establishing a viable link between downtown businesses and the local residents because, ultimately, that is the only solution to keeping this community ........ a community. Continuing to chase down tourists with ad campaigns worshipping an orange colored ‘sacred cow’, and fluffing up the median strip to attract the small percentage of drive by tourists who claimed they didn’t know there was a downtown district, while the local residents struggle yearround to find a pair of underwear, doesn’t paint a very functional picture. The gentrification supporters here can’t even buy a tie in their own town. The locals, the ones with yearround needs and, I might add, a yearround supply of money, blame the business community, ...... and of course the business community continues to blame the locals; a real model for success. 

With as affluent as the Coastside is, I would hope that this article might at least serve to open up a dialogue for re-evaluating why it is left struggling to fund itself from outside the community and whatever level of disconnect is happening that allows this to happen?

Frank Long
Half Moon Bay