Riverfest, chairman hit 40-year milestone

Catherine Cole, Riverfest chairman for 2017, keeps her head in the game in planning not only the annual festival but its 40th anniversary celebration.
Catherine Cole, Riverfest chairman for 2017, keeps her head in the game in planning not only the annual festival but its 40th anniversary celebration.

Catherine Cole grew up with Riverfest.

photo

Catherine Cole maps out the Riverfest logistics for 2017.

The current Riverfest chairman turned 40 in April, a couple of months ahead of the festival's 40th birthday. The festival was smallish at first but now covers three areas -- two in Little Rock's Riverfront Park and in the Clinton Presidential Park a ways east along the Arkansas River. This year's festival is June 2-4.

Cole was last year's co-chairman, which mostly involved shadowing then-chairman Alecia Castleberry -- "kind of a learning year," she explains. This year, her job consists mostly of "overseeing the celebration, attending meetings and making sure the work gets done."

Handling most of that work is a 250-member festival planning committee; she's primarily making sure that "they get what they need to do their jobs."

Planning for the anniversary has added another dimension to the process, "but it'll be more fun, not just more responsibilities," she says. The chairman's role is not to be confused with that of paid executive director DeAnna Korte.

Riverfest draws more than 2,500 volunteers, each of whom this year, including Cole, will get a 40th celebration T-shirt, white with red lettering. Piles of those shirts were awaiting repackaging two weeks ago at Riverfest's River Market offices, overlooking Riverfront Park and the First Security Amphitheater, the heart of the festival. Cole says she'll only get to keep one.

She came into Riverfest through her longtime connection with the Junior League of Little Rock, of which she is a sustaining member and for whom she spent a year as volunteer vice president of marketing.

The Junior League has been involved with Riverfest from its inception. The annual celebration of visual and performing arts has been a spring event on the banks of the Arkansas River for nearly four decades, but it didn't start out that way.

The Junior League had arranged to bring the American Wind Symphony to Little Rock in August 1978. Korte says the idea was to have them float down the river on a barge to Murray Park, where the League set up what it was calling the Summer Arts Festival to frame the performance.

It was a big hit, big enough that the Junior League decided to repeat it. It was then that the decision was made to move it to Memorial Day weekend and change its name to Riverfest.

By 1982, Riverfest had incorporated as a nonprofit and established a board. After outgrowing Murray Park, the festival was moved to the Convention Center Plaza along Markham Street and, the following year, to its permanent home in Riverfront Park. Attendance that year topped 100,000. The board hired a full-time executive director in 1987.

The festival has grown bigger physically -- from 2002-10, there were also concerts and activities on the North Little Rock side of the river. It expanded eastward into the Clinton Presidential Park in 2009.

In 2016, the festival moved again, not physically, but in time, away from Memorial Day weekend. It was also split into two events: "Springfest," which now takes place in April, a one-day, free event aimed at children and families; and the now-more-adult-centered Riverfest over the first weekend of June.

Sunday's 40th celebration, Cole says, is a nod toward what the festival used to be, adding back a range of children's activities, including crafts and face painting, a crawl through Box City, hero and construction zones, a Heifer International petting zoo and stick pony races. (Cole says Oaklawn, a big Riverfest sponsor, is supplying the wooden equines.)

For this year's landmark event, local food vendors and local entertainers will have an overall bigger presence. General activities include a Riverfest Treasure Hunt, professional and amateur cake-decorating competitions, a celebrity dunking booth and the PK Grill Steak Cook-off. There will be an attempt to break the Guinness Book of World Records' record for the most sparklers lighted at once. The first 1,000 Sunday festivalgoers through the gates will receive a free 40th anniversary Arkansas Democrat-Gazette koozie.

And they're lowering the Sunday celebration admission to the retro price of $5.

The festival kicks off the evening of June 1 officially with "Flowing on the River," a separately ticketed wine-and-craft beer event.

Cole, a Little Rock native who graduated from Mount St. Mary Academy and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, attended the festival as a kid; now her kids -- Trey, 12; AnnMarie, 9; and twin 7-year-olds, Addison and Charlie Belle -- come every year. "They all love it and look forward to it," she says. The biggest draw for them, she says with a wink, is "Auntie" DeAnna.

The festival has actually been a Cole family affair since before Catherine married Robby Cole nearly 15 years ago. He had traveled up from southern Georgia one weekend in the early '90s with his brother, who was engaged to, and has since married, Little Rock's Janie Willis, now Robby's sister-in-law. Catherine Cole identifies her as a "former Riverfest addict."

"They worked a Riverbank together," she recalls. That's where festivalgoers trade dollars for the Riverfest scrip they need to make food and other purchases on the festival grounds. The system, she says, "helps keep people honest."

In recent years, the festival has skewed away from local performers and toward big-name national acts, and also focused on more "current" performers and fewer has-been acts. Among this year's major musical draws: Wiz Khalifa, Justin Moore, Cage The Elephant, Colt Ford, Dylan Scott and Tank and The Bangas. (Cole, who identifies as a country fan, says her favorites on the lineup are country singers Moore and Billy Currington, but "I've also become a fan of Grouplove.")

The increase in national acts has also meant a corresponding increase in ticket prices, which this year are $40 for a three-day pass. (Available early-purchase discounts and multi-ticket packages can reduce the per-ticket price to as low as $10.) Cole, however, says she doesn't see that the festival might be pricing itself so high that it keeps people away.

"The idea is to make this a relevant music festival," she explains, repeating the word "relevant."

"It's necessary to sustain ourselves."

Ticket and schedule information are available at RiverfestArkansas.com.

High Profile on 05/21/2017

Upcoming Events