Round Table Panelists to Share Festival Memories
5/17/2010
“Music, dance, enthusiasm --- all the talent was right here,” said Tom Flaherty, remembering the first several decades of the Festival of Nations. “Almost every store on Main Street displayed collections and memorabilia of Red Lodge’s various ethnic groups, folk donned traditional dress, free food was offered on the street and gardeners brought flowers to the Civic Center. Behind store windows, craftspeople worked on the arts of their native or ancestral lands.”
On Thursday evening, May 27 at the Carbon County Historical Society & Museum, Flaherty will moderate a panel composed of people who were involved in the Festival from its earliest days, including Bob Moran, Betsy Scanlin, Marilee Duncan of the Golfi family and Shari Kansala Nordstrom.
The first Festival was held in 1951 in the then-new Civic Center. For many years, the annual event went on for nine days, with each evening focused on a particular ethnic group (English/Irish, Italian, Finnish, German, Norwegian/Swedish/Danish, Yugoslavian and Scottish), plus a Montana night and an All-Nations Night.
Duncan, who came from Billings to spend most of every summer with her grandparents in Red Lodge, began dancing with the Italian children’s group when she was seven or eight years old. In the decades since, she has remained involved in the Festival in one role or another, including as director of the Italian program and co-chair of the All-Nations Day for several years. Ever since those early childhood days, folk dancing has been part of her life. She has danced with English/Irish, Serbian, Scottish and Greek troupes in Billings and was a member of the Red Lodge International Dancers “as long as it was around.” A goal of the latter group was to catalogue and preserve all the dances, music and programs its members had performed.
One of Duncan’s “top favorite” memories of the Festival is the Tambouritzan band heading to Main Street following the Yugoslavian night performance. At each corner from the Civic Center to the Elks Club, the group would stop traffic, form a circle and dance. Little kids, the elderly and the in-betweens joined in, she remembers, likening it to a true peasant experience from the old country. “The Festival kept traditional cultures alive,” she believes. “There was a feeling of being connected to everyone else. We all danced, laughed, twirled around and differences were pushed aside.”
For Scanlin, the Festival involved the whole family. Her father, one of the early organizers, served as Master of Ceremonies for 40 years or so, while her mother and sister cooked German food and her brother danced with the Irish group. A number of her high school peers danced with the Veseli Tambouritzans and Betsy began playing violin with the group. She became interested in the other instruments that comprise a tambouritzan band and now has a complete set of the various stringed instruments.
Many with long involvement in the Festival of Nations played a number of roles over the years and Scanlin is no exception. When the event incorporated, she served on the Board as the Yugoslavian delegate, then chairperson for several years, followed by a term as treasurer. For the past 15 years, she has been a “Leprechaun,” helping to paint green stripes along Main Street for St. Patrick’s Day. She sees the spirit of this day’s celebration as a testament to that of the Festival of Nations.
The lively music, colorful dress, the sharing of cultures, the party atmosphere and the good humor of one and all remain precious memories for Scanlin. Everyone played an instrument, sang, danced or helped out in other ways, she recalls. The Festival “took so many people to pull it off,” she said, adding that today, these efforts are still there but directed to diverse causes, as the Historical Society, Art Guild or Nature Center. While the Festival in its traditional form has “had its heyday,” Scanlin remains “pleased that its spirit lives on.”
It was as a young seventh grader that Nordstrom first took part in the Festival as accompanist for the Finnish Ladies Choir. She missed very few Festivals after that although her role eventually changed to that of choir director. Choir members came not only from Red Lodge and Roberts, but from Laurel and Billings, as well. All were of Finnish ancestry and they wore their authentic traditional dresses with pride. Nordstrom promises to attend the Historical Society program in such a dress. Choir practice always concluded with coffee and pulla, a Finnish coffee bread, she added.
Her dad directed not only the Finnish band but the German and Italian bands on their respective nights, as well, from the year of the first Festival until his death. Two of her cousins still play trumpet at the Festival, while another cousin plays the tuba. “Wonderful Finnish music,” as she put it.
` Nordstrom remembers being a little afraid as a young choir accompanist. The director and his wife were “quite accomplished,” so she was determined to have the music “down perfectly.” Perfection was “very much the norm,” she recalls, as each group wanted to perform as well as the other nationalities. With so many ethnic groups in town, you “knew your own identity, starting with your name” and while there was respect for everyone, Nordstrom recalls a “feeling of extreme closeness” with one’s own ethnic community. “You wanted to make them proud.”
Moran, as long-time coordinator of the Festival, feels “indebted to the people of Red Lodge who recognized their rich multi-cultural heritage and sought not only to preserve it, but to share it.” Practically everyone participated in some way, he said, calling the event an “amazing endeavor” which remains “an overall wonderful memory of collaborative community effort that is very special to me. I feel so privileged to have been a part of it.”
The program will begin at 7:00 p.m. at the Museum in Red Lodge. All are welcome and admission is free. The evening guarantees to provide happy memories for those who have been in Carbon County a long time as well as anecdotes and an important bit of local history for relative newcomers.