Reporter and columnist Jesseca Timmons is secretary of the Friends of the Greenfield Community Meetinghouse.
Anyone who has ever run an outdoor event knows how hard it is to plan around the weather. Last week, as the Friends of the Greenfield Community Meetinghouse geared up for our seventh annual Oktoberfest fundraiser, a Nor’easter was heading up the East Coast.
While many people asked about a possible rain date, it is impossible to have a rain date for Oktoberfest, as the beer and wine vendors and the bands are booked solid throughout the fall — not to mention Oak Park, and event volunteers. We had to make a decision before our volunteer cooks — Todd Powell, Tyler Baldwin and Warren Aldrich — started making spaetzle and chopping potatoes and cabbage.
Throughout the week, I was grateful for detailed, in-depth weather forecasts by meteorologist Cyrena Arnold of Francestown (@wxcyrena), who downplayed wild predictions comparing last week’s Nor’easter to Superstorm Sandy. Cyrena kept my sanity last week.
On Monday night, our volunteer crew met to strategize. John Hopkins, owner of Monadnock Tent, donated a much larger tent with walls in case of rain, large enough for all our vendors and seating.
No one knows more about events at Oak Park than John. He was a founder of the original Oak Park Committee; he helped design and build the Oak Park kitchen and, for 20 years, he organized the Blues-B-Que, which drew up to 1,500 people.
By Wednesday, the musicians let us know they were a little worried about their instruments and would have to keep a close eye on the weather. We moved them under the picnic pavilion, and they planned a more acoustic set.
The storm did cause one minor emergency. At 1 p.m. on Saturday, while we were in the middle of setup, the power went out at Oak Park and a loud, beeping alarm began blasting through the kitchen. We learned that about 100 buildings in town had lost power after a huge limb had fallen just down the road from Oak Park and brought down wires.
Our crew began to triage. First, we had to get that alarm off before the cooks lost their minds. (One of our volunteers might have figured out how to disconnect the alarm battery until the power came back on.)
Then we had to decide: Could we keep going without power? The cooks could still cook, as the Oak Park kitchen has a gas stove and oven; we had a generator for lights in the tent and the band’s equipment, and trusty Porta Potties. But we wouldn’t have running water or lights in the park when it got dark.
At Oktoberfest 2023, the old Oak Park oven died two hours before the event, and we had to spend the afternoon ferrying pans of spaetzle to various ovens around town. That year, Warren Aldrich set up an emergency cheesy spaetzle assembly line in the old Meetinghouse kitchen, and we had to shuttle all the pans back to Oak Park just as people were arriving at Oktoberfest.
This year, everyone stayed calm as we hooked up generators and watched as Greenfield fire and police, followed by Eversource trucks, pulled up to the downed wires on Forest Road. Eversource restored power a full hour earlier than projected. (One of our volunteers might have offered their crew Oktoberfest tickets, courtesy of Friends of the Meetinghouse.)
At 3 p.m., the lights came back on, and the sun was peeking out, just in time to make people think about heading out of the house for Oktoberfest. Volunteers assembled, the cooks tucked all the food into our new warming oven, the ladies had the buffet ready to go, vendors began tapping kegs, and the bands started plugging in their equipment. By 4 p.m., people were flooding in, knowing the weather would get worse later on. More than 300 people came, despite the storm.
