Lynda Hunt and Pat Paige began to wonder last year, with America’s 250th birthday on the horizon, whether anyone in Rindge would organize a celebration for the town.
They asked around, but the question got flipped to back to them: Why doesn’t the Chamber of Commerce do it? Hunt and Paige, the president and treasurer of the Rindge Chamber of Commerce, agreed to take it on.
Hunt jokes that the town “just told the Chamber, ‘You’re going to do it.'”
“I was sitting at my kitchen table thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, what have we done?'” Hunt said. “But it turned out to be just a really wonderful time. Everybody got along, and everybody worked together, and it was just amazing.”
Paige and Hunt are no strangers to event planning. They already organize the town’s annual Family Fun Festival on July 4, so they decided they were willing to take on a larger 250th celebration.
“We do the Family Fun Day every year, and this was an extension of that,” Paige said.
Months of work culminated in a magnificent parade through Rindge, but Hunt and Paige both said the best part of the event was that it brought the town together.
“I loved the feeling of accomplishing it, and looking around and seeing people who might not agree on certain things, like politics, working together on something and all getting along,” Hunt said.
Paige remembers her view from the parade float fondly.
“The takeaway, when we were in the float looking at the people’s faces on the side of the road, was the smiles, how people’s faces lit up, how many people came to see the parade,” Paige said. “It was all worth it to bring the community together. Seeing all those faces, the kids enjoyed it, the adults enjoyed it, people just loved it.”
Hunt and Paige said the event couldn’t have happened without the efforts of many volunteers and support from Rindge’s businesses and organizations.
Pat Martin, the parade’s grand marshal, nominated Hunt and Paige as Hometown Heroes. The pair knocked on doors, got businesses involved and worked with the town to get funding, which Martin said is “hard to do.” That, plus sponsorships, brought in $18,000 in funding, she said.
Martin said the event truly brought the Rindge community together, with 44 people volunteering.
“They really brought everyone together,” Martin said. “Rindge can be kind of divided; there are political overtones in everything. We have had unhappiness over the school budget situation, and there have been a lot of contentious things, so this event, with so many working together to celebrate, was just a balm for everyone.”
Hunt said she and Paige made a perfect team and wanted to show people that the Chamber of Commerce is part of town and there for them. The two worked five or six hours a week, at least three days a week, for months to organize the 250th, all while running the Chamber.
“Pat was just my right-hand woman. We could not have asked for anything better,” Hunt said.
Paige agreed: “Now, if we go 24 hours without speaking, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, why haven’t I talked to Lynda?'” she said.
When they started organizing the 250th parade, Paige and Hunt realized that finding a marching band when school was not in session — and when almost every other town in the region was also organizing a 250th parade — was going to be a challenge.
Hunt said finding the Nashua Spartans, a drum and bugle corps originally founded to engage at-risk youth, was a stroke of good luck.
“What happened was really kind of magical,” Paige said. “We started to get really worried, like, where were we going to find a band? We couldn’t ask Conant, and then someone recommended the Nashua Spartans, and they just happened to be having band camp at Franklin Pierce in June. So we called them, and they said, ‘Absolutely, we will send the kids over to play.'”
Paige said she and Hunt kept quiet about the Spartans, and people in town weren’t expecting a 125-member teen marching band in the parade.
“People were standing on the sides of the road, and the Spartans were at the staging area at the Recycling Center, so people couldn’t see them, but they could hear them coming up the road,” Paige said. “People started to say, ‘What the heck is that?’ There were over 100 members of the Spartans who marched in the band, and it was just incredible.”
In addition to the Spartans, the parade featured several other bands, floats and town groups. There were vendors, police and firefighters, a band on a wagon, Boy Scouts and veterans.
“We were led by a bagpiper, and it was just beautiful. We had a bunch of floats, and that was wonderful,” Hunt said. “We had 159 people just marching. Everyone was there. It was crazy.”
The event also featured a children’s bicycle parade and games on the common, and the bell in the Meetinghouse steeple rang out 250 times.
“We had so many different things going on,” Hunt said. “It was just like when I was a kid.”
Martin credits Hunt and Paige with the celebration that “made my heart sing.” She called the duo — Paige, a retired teacher, and Hunt, a heavily involved volunteer — “unstoppable.”
“Neither of them wants recognition or attention for it,” Martin said of their contributions to Rindge. “They made sure to thank every single volunteer, every single person who helped, and they’re so grateful for everything everyone else does. They are really just good neighbors to the whole Rindge community.”