Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By CHARITY SMITH
Bessemer — The Bessemer Pumkinfest committee has canceled the 42nd annual fall festival.
“It would just be too risky to try and schedule our events,” said committee chair Donna Frello.
The longstanding festival usually involves an indoor craft fair, a carnival, a pet costume contest, a car show and many other events that would involve large groups in both indoor and outdoor settings. Frello said that cordoning off all the people would be “really just impossible unless a miracle happens.”
Many of the events take place on school or city property. Frello said that they don’t know if those sites would even be available for their use. She said that in the interest of the students’ and the public’s safety, they should not even consider asking the school for use of its facility, especially with school in session.
“With so many unknowns, I wouldn’t want to risk our public or our students,” Frello said. “The same for the carnival. I was trying to think of different ways that we could do some of this stuff and it is just too risky. There is just too much going on at once, too much of a crowd at one time.”
She said there is generally a large turnout with more than 100 kids attending the kiddie parade alone, and that it would be too difficult to separate all of the kids and people attending the varying events which take place simultaneously.
“It’s not as big as the Fourth of July by any means, but we have a lot of events,” Frello said. “The majority of the stuff is done on the Saturday and it is all happening at one time in various places, but generally it’s well attended.
She also said that a lot of the funding and donations for the festival events come from area businesses, many of which have been greatly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It would be hard to ask for their support during such a time,” she said. “I just would find that hard to do, because they give, give, give. I wouldn’t want to ask them to donate right now, based on them being impacted by this pandemic also.”
She said organizers waited and waited to make the decision, hoping this would get better, but things are not getting better, only worse. She said they will just try and plan for an even bigger event next year.
