Fall is for festivals and lousy weather

As I stood on the sidelines taking pictures of the Harrisonville football game Friday night, I could only think of how enjoyable it would all be if it weren’t cold and rainy.

The way the game played out had it been 70 and clear it would have been a terrific Friday night.

Then I thought of all of the people I’ve heard complain about how long and hot the summer was and how they were looking forward to fall. Congratulations, it’s here. I’m ready for summer again.

The weather has been interesting to follow as we have wound through the fall festival season.

Week one was in Freeman where it was very hot. The following week at Garden City Friday night it got very nippy, but then on Saturday it was pleasant for both the Garden City and Archie festivals.

Two weeks later came Harrisonville’s Burnt District Festival and it had a little of everything: hot, very cool, rain and lots of rain.

Morning showers forced the Drexel Pumpkin Festival indoors, but cleared enough to allow the community to come enjoy the event.

Fortunately, in every case the weather cooperated enough for the festivities to go off pretty much as planned with only some Saturday night events being shortened in Harrisonville.

It was another great year for festival food.

Between barbecue, tenderloins, turkey legs and funnel cakes along with the assortment of hamburgers and hot dogs, it was very easy to get a great meal this year.

For future reference, if you are festival-going on a budget consider the hot dog eating contest. I made a mental note of hot dogs costing $1 each while entering the contest was free. So enter the contest, eat 12 or 14 hot dogs and you’ve saved enough money for a nice souvenir or a really big container of Alka-Seltzer.

One sad development this year: I found no caramel apples.

There is one more festival on the horizon and that takes place Saturday in Adrian. After that event, we then move on to Halloween weekends and then prepare for Christmas events.

I bring up the Adrian Fall Festival not only to promote the event, but to announce a change in The South Cass Tribune beginning this week. There is now going to be a weekly section of the paper devoted to Adrian, as we call them, our neighbors to the south.

Since beginning early this year, The Tribune has experienced tremendous growth and we thank each and every one of you for being part of that.

An unexpected development has been the requests from other communities to work with them as well. We started talking to community leaders in Adrian this summer.

Like many in our area feel like the old traditional paper had abandoned our news, folks in Adrian have been underserved since the closing of the Adrian Journal.

Having worked in the newsroom of the old county paper for many years, I got to know the publishers of most of the area papers as they brought their work to Harrisonville to be printed. Among others there was Kirk Powell from Pleasant Hill, Pat Thomas from Drexel and Steve and Linda Oldfield from Archie and Adrian. Of those publications, only the Pleasant Hill paper still survives.

While there are some other publications in the northern part of the county, south Cass County and Adrian both were left without a consistent news outlet.

Our plan is for Adrian’s coverage to be self-contained with coverage centered on that community while the coverage of Southern Cass County will not change. This is an experiment at this point, but one which we hope provides increased interest and service in all of our communities.

Now each public will have its own coverage and of course by running in one paper all of the communities involved will be able to share news with their neighbors. We hope it is a long and successful relationship.

The same offer goes now to our Adrian readers as we have offered in our area: If you have news send it to us. We want to know. We can’t say for sure what all we will be able to report, but we can guarantee you what we won’t report – anything we don’t know about.

Finally, one other change with the paper. Last week our webpage: www.southcasstribune.com went live. It is also a work in progress, but we hope will be a beneficial resource. We encourage you check it out and if you have any comments or ideas, please let us know.

As I stood on the sidelines taking pictures of the Harrisonville football game Friday night, I could only think of how enjoyable it would all be if it weren’t cold and rainy.

The way the game played out had it been 70 and clear it would have been a terrific Friday night.

Then I thought of all of the people I’ve heard complain about how long and hot the summer was and how they were looking forward to fall. Congratulations, it’s here. I’m ready for summer again.

The weather has been interesting to follow as we have wound through the fall festival season.

Week one was in Freeman where it was very hot. The following week at Garden City Friday night it got very nippy, but then on Saturday it was pleasant for both the Garden City and Archie festivals.

Two weeks later came Harrisonville’s Burnt District Festival and it had a little of everything: hot, very cool, rain and lots of rain.

Morning showers forced the Drexel Pumpkin Festival indoors, but cleared enough to allow the community to come enjoy the event.

Fortunately, in every case the weather cooperated enough for the festivities to go off pretty much as planned with only some Saturday night events being shortened in Harrisonville.

It was another great year for festival food.

Between barbecue, tenderloins, turkey legs and funnel cakes along with the assortment of hamburgers and hot dogs, it was very easy to get a great meal this year.

For future reference, if you are festival-going on a budget consider the hot dog eating contest. I made a mental note of hot dogs costing $1 each while entering the contest was free. So enter the contest, eat 12 or 14 hot dogs and you’ve saved enough money for a nice souvenir or a really big container of Alka-Seltzer.

One sad development this year: I found no caramel apples.

There is one more festival on the horizon and that takes place Saturday in Adrian. After that event, we then move on to Halloween weekends and then prepare for Christmas events.

I bring up the Adrian Fall Festival not only to promote the event, but to announce a change in The South Cass Tribune beginning this week. There is now going to be a weekly section of the paper devoted to Adrian, as we call them, our neighbors to the south.

Since beginning early this year, The Tribune has experienced tremendous growth and we thank each and every one of you for being part of that.

An unexpected development has been the requests from other communities to work with them as well. We started talking to community leaders in Adrian this summer.

Like many in our area feel like the old traditional paper had abandoned our news, folks in Adrian have been underserved since the closing of the Adrian Journal.

Having worked in the newsroom of the old county paper for many years, I got to know the publishers of most of the area papers as they brought their work to Harrisonville to be printed. Among others there was Kirk Powell from Pleasant Hill, Pat Thomas from Drexel and Steve and Linda Oldfield from Archie and Adrian. Of those publications, only the Pleasant Hill paper still survives.

While there are some other publications in the northern part of the county, south Cass County and Adrian both were left without a consistent news outlet.

Our plan is for Adrian’s coverage to be self-contained with coverage centered on that community while the coverage of Southern Cass County will not change. This is an experiment at this point, but one which we hope provides increased interest and service in all of our communities.

Now each public will have its own coverage and of course by running in one paper all of the communities involved will be able to share news with their neighbors. We hope it is a long and successful relationship.

The same offer goes now to our Adrian readers as we have offered in our area: If you have news send it to us. We want to know. We can’t say for sure what all we will be able to report, but we can guarantee you what we won’t report – anything we don’t know about.

Finally, one other change with the paper. Last week our webpage: www.southcasstribune.com went live. It is also a work in progress, but we hope will be a beneficial resource. We encourage you check it out and if you have any comments or ideas, please let us know.

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