NOTE: This page uses cascading style sheets (CSS) to present the content in the best possible manner. If you are reading this message, then you do not have a standards-compliant browser or CSS (or JavaScript) is not enabled in your browser, and the page will not appear as the designer intended. Please visit The Web Standards Project for details and for information about how to upgrade your browser.

 

Sept. 11, 2001: Deciding to go on with the festival

By Ross Farrow
News-Sentinel staff writer

It was perhaps the toughest decision that Lodi Grape Festival officials ever had to make: Would they cancel all or part of the 2001 Grape Festival because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks?

In the end, they agreed to go on with the festival which opened just two days after Americans witnessed the destructive attacks which destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and damaged the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. and killed nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.

“The terrorists did this to shut the United States down,” said Jean Rauser, the 2001 president of the festival’s board of directors. “The consensus of the board was that if we canceled the festival, all we’re doing is giving in to exactly what they want.”

During an emergency session on the Wednesday morning following the attack, festival directors decided to have the festival as planned and not follow the lead of professional baseball and some college football teams which canceled their games that week.

The festival gates on East Lockeford Street then opened at 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 13, and remained open through the festival’s through the following Sunday.

Festival General Manager Mark Armstrong said he couldn’t decide on the day of the attacks whether to have the festival at all.

“I spent half my time in a daze,” Armstrong said.

He talked about the terrorist attacks and their effect on the community with several people for two days. Armstrong said he heeded the advice of Lodi Police Chief Jerry Adams, who advised him that Tuesday morning to wait 24 hours before deciding what to do.

Armstrong also contacted the state Fair and Exposition office to find out how other festivals throughout California were responding to the tragedy.

County fairs in Watsonville, Tulare and Pomona were shut down on Sept. 11, 2001, but they all opened Wednesday, Sept. 12 said Fair and Exposition spokesman Steve Lyle. The state allowed individual fairs to base their decisions on the dynamics of their own communities, Lyle said.

“We don’t want to necessarily celebrate our harvest as much as we want to say to the people we aren’t going to shut down,” Rauser said. “We’ve got to stand up as a nation and not let them bring us to our knees.”

While keeping the gates open, the festival board made some changes. Among them:

• Acquiring as many American flags as possible for display during the festival. Employees spent Wednesday, Sept. 12 shopping every place they could think of for flags.

• Donating $1 from every full-price adult admission to relief efforts related to the Sept. 11 tragedies. The American Red Cross was on hand to accept donations.

“The healing process will be long, and it is our hope that by holding the Grape Festival this weekend (2001) we can gather our community and begin that recovery,” Armstrong said in a prepared statement issued at the day before the 2001 festival began.