|
 Thousands
thronged Fayetteville's Dickson Street Saturday April 20 for
the 20th annual Springfest. The Alliance booth perched at
the east edge of a group of about 20 vendor tents, all
clustered on an uphill slope near the University campus,
with the Alliance booth facing eastward toward the panorama
of special displays and fifty more white vendor canopies
that clustered along seven blocks, downhill to the old
railway depot and then uphill toward College Avenue. With a
prime corner spot, the Alliance booth's t-shirts, banners,
and signs attracted attention on two sides.
"We were swamped all day," stated Denele Campbell, "starting
at 9 when the event opened and even after it closed at 6 –
our last-shift workers had to turn people away at 6:30 just
to start tearing down. The whole time I worked, morning til
around 1:30, we had two or three people working constantly
just to answer questions, sell t-shirts, and get our
postcards signed. People would walk up and say, "What do I
sign?" and "Thank you for doing this."
Volunteers working the hot, muggy afternoon shifts struggled
to keep up with demand for the new Legislator postcards. The
postcard strip was placed on a clipboard for a person to
sign, but with only 5 clipboards in operation, people also
used every spare open space on the two ten-foot tables to
sign their names on the four cards. T-shirt sales also
soared, especially for the popular gray shirt with the red
cross/green marijuana leaf logo.
"We brought in about $500 in t-shirt sales, another $55 in
sales of our (NOT) Medical Marijuana Brownies, logo
stickers, and bumper stickers, and we're estimating that
around 850 postcard sets were signed. That's about 3400
individual cards signed by Arkansas citizens, ready to sort
into congressional districts and to distribute to our
elected representatives," concluded Ms. Campbell. "This was
our third Springfest, and by far our best.
Crowds enjoyed four stages with live music, food vendors
including open air barbeque, kettle corn, snow-cones,
hamburgers, and every other imaginable food, UA science
exhibits, booths for political issues, crafts, various arts,
demonstrations of swing and salsa dancing, medieval combat,
belly dancing, and then of course the famous Springfest bed
races.
"We're especially grateful to board member Randy Childers
and volunteers Jeb Campbell, Kadie Campbell, Deste Campbell,
Ryn Shane-Armstrong, Wayne Whitmarsh, Patrick Frizzell, and
guest Van Spence, who came up from Little Rock to give us a
hand. A special thanks to Jamie Ulick, who provided flyers
for the upcoming May 11 benefit concert and brought us some
big posters to help decorate the booth. Thanks to Darrel
Henschell for donating some great bumper stickers for us to
sell. We also appreciate the hard-working folks with Pride
In Dickson Street, who sponsored a great Springfest this
year and gave us such an excellent location. |