This weekend is the West Point Sweet Corn Festival! Sadly, I won’t be able to get back for it, but the Sweet Corn Festival holds a lot of fond memories, not just for my family but for just about everyone in the area.
You can read all about the history of the festival here, along with the schedule of events and so forth. I won’t recount any of that here. The festival started before my time, in 1952. I don’t know how quickly it caught on with my family, but by the time I was a kid in the 1960’s it was a big event for us.
All the cousins from Chicago and Oklahoma would come to West Point for the Festival, and we’d all convene at Grandma’s. She lived on Avenue C, west of the church, so it was an easy walk to the square, even for the littler kids like me.
It was always a good time. We kids pretty much ran free as long as we didn’t do anything too stupid. We had to tell a grownup if we were going uptown, but otherwise we kept ourselves amused. Amazingly, we all survived somehow!
Some of the cousins would stay at Mom’s in Fort Madison, and the balance would stay with Grandma in West Point. Neither house had air conditioning, and I’m still amazed that anyone would want to visit in August. The siren call of free sweet corn must be stronger than I thought!
Sherrey
Sweet memories
Sandy
Such sweet memories! I don’t recall the festival but do remember fondly our vacations in West Point. The food, the trips to town…always a trip to Ft Madison for fun and a great evening of Aunt Georgie’s cooking! The chicken yard, the outhouse, ewww! And the pump on the porch!
Grandma Link…no one like her! ❤️
Charles Buckles
That particular visit photos are quite rare for the family, I believe maybe the only time Les and Louise made a visit at the same time as everyone else. Of course they were considerably further away than the rest of us. Now earlier visits may have occurred but I was too small to recognize them. Louise in Janesville got to ave c more often, but once in Tulsa by 62 less visits by them, unfortunately . And while those in Fort Madison saw the most of lizzie, the rest actually spent a good bit of time soaking up the small town vibe, of people who were all related to everybody else nearby with a lot less than 7 degrees of separation, which bred a very comforting enviroment,as opposed to say the urban jungles we mostly live in now. The deaf dumb and silent paranoia that has come to substitute for actual congeniality found in a population 300 town of staunch German catholics. Who fortunately aren’t around to criticize and mock politically correct mantras, as raging conspiracies were dear to there hearts or at least their conversations,I miss that most if all