Winter Carnival in a Western Town : Identity, Change and the Good of the Community 9780874218305, 9780874218497

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

Winter Carnival in a Western Town Identity, Change, and the Good of the Community

Lisa Gabbert

Volume 1 Ritual, Festival, and Celebration A series edited by

Jack Santino

Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 2011

Copyright ©2011 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-3078 USUPress.org ISBN: 978-0-87421-829-9 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-87421-849-7 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-87421-830-5 (e-book) Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free, recycled paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabbert, Lisa. Winter carnival in a western town : identity, change, and the good of the community / Lisa Gabbert. p. cm. — (Ritual, festival, and celebration ; volume 1) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-87421-829-9 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-87421-849-7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-87421830-5 (e-book) 1. Carnival—Idaho—McCall . 2. Winter festivals—Idaho—McCall . 3. Community life— Idaho—McCall . 4. Social change—Idaho—McCall . 5. McCall (Idaho)—Social life and customs. I. Title. GT4211.M33G32 2011 394.2509796’76—dc23 2011015286

For Gretchen and Bridget

Photo by author

Contents Foreword.  About the Series, by Jack Santino Acknowledgments Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.



xi xiii 1

Relations of Self and Community: Participation and Conflict in Winter Carnival

37

Sculpting Relationships: Aesthetics, Citizenship, and Belonging in Winter Carnival Art

68

On Neon Necklaces and Mardi Gras Beads: Style and Audience in Winter Carnival Parades

114

Creating, Remaking, and Commemorating History in Games of Skill and Chance: Winter Carnival as Historical Process

164

Laughter, Ambivalence, and the Carnivalesque: Lake Monsters and Festive Culture

191

Conclusion

223

Appendix.  Winter Carnival Events List

232

Works Cited

238

Index

251

Photo by author

Photo by author

Photo by author

Foreword About the Series Jack Santino, Series Editor

With Winter Carnival in a Western Town: Identity, Change, and the

Good of the Community, by Lisa Gabbert, Utah State University Press initiates a new book series titled Ritual, Festival, and Celebration. The literature on ritual and festival continues to grow as scholars find these subjects very rich ground for research. The study of ritual and festival is genuinely interdisciplinary. Not only are scholars from many, varied scholarly perspectives researching festivity, ritual, and other examples of patterned symbolic behavior, they are reading each other’s works and engaging in dialogue. Folklorists, anthropologists, historians, religious studies and performance studies scholars, and other researchers are pursuing a shared discourse. It is our hope that this series will reflect that multidisciplinarity at its best. Ritual and festival can be perceived as polar opposites. Ritual is instrumental in the eyes of its participants. It causes change; it makes something happen. Festival is most often seen as ludic, a form of play. It is celebrated as an end in itself. Festival’s effects, or “functions,” have been viewed as secondary and unarticulated. However, both scholars and participants often conflate the terms—an annual festival is frequently viewed and described as a ritual. And the two phenomena co-exist in other ways—where does festival end and ritual begin in the annual celebrations of Christmas in the US? This series is designed to include ethnographic studies of the sacred ceremonies we refer to as ritual and the symbolic social celebrations we call festival. We are interested in studies of holidays, of the carnivalesque, and of ritualesque public events such as demonstrations, political protests, and public commemorations or memorializations. We are interested in ethnographic, analytical, and theoretical works. We intend to present the finest work available in the burgeoning field of ritual and festival studies. Ritual, festival, celebration, and holidays, parades, street theatre, and protests—the series casts a wide net. What connect these phenomena are xi

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the concepts carnivalesque and ritualesque. As stated, ritual, strictly speaking, is instrumental symbolic action, while a festival is an expressive event, but in reality these concepts are blurred; as genres, they are porous. Pure festivity, particularly of the Bakhtinian bodily imagery sort, is rare, as is a purely instrumental ceremony. By ritualesque we refer to the aspects of certain events that are consciously intended to bring about change, such as the spontaneous shrines created in the wake of gun violence or a celebration of an oppressed identity, such as Gay Pride day. Despite the festivity that may be involved in a Gay Pride event, one of its intended purposes would be to change public attitudes. All of the events that fall under the rubric of this series will be more or less carnivalesque or ritualesque. Lisa Gabbert’s Winter Carnival in a Western Town is an important look into the workings of a type of festive event that today typifies the culturescape: the town festival planned and organized by the local chamber of commerce (or some similar booster organization), which is largely intended to promote tourism. Gabbert sees the complexities of such events and tests traditional ritual and festival theory against these realities. In such bureaucratic and economic contexts, where do the townspeople fit in? How do the people who volunteer to produce the event experience it and what do townspeople feel about their tourist festival? Are familiar ideas of communitas relevant here at all? In asking such questions, Gabbert concludes that the production of Winter Carnival is indeed closely connected to community, and she does so partly by exploring the important role that ambivalence plays in its enactment. Gabbert sees, as a volunteer herself, that periods of limnality and communitas occur for the backstage producers and festival workers, but less so during the winter carnival itself. Gabbert provides a history, ethnography, and analysis (her interpretations of the snow sculpture components of the carnival are masterful) of one type of festivity that typifies American popular culture, and she does this by paying important close attention to the specificity and locality of the event in question.

Acknowledgments

A book is not made by one person alone, and there have been many

people who have helped me, some of whom, I am sad to say, are no longer here. First of all, I thank the people of McCall and of Valley County who were willing to take the time to talk and to help me with my research. Many of you granted me formal interviews; others simply generously shared their time and opinions, both of which were invaluable. First and foremost, my thanks goes to the Krahn family, their 2001 sculpting team, and their friends and associates, who have been so kind over the years: Marilyn and Gaylord Krahn, Nancy and Dan Krahn, Karen Morris, Sue Anderson, Mark Bennett, Marlee Wilcomb, and Ron and Pauline Hines. I am also grateful to Tom Grote, editor of the Star-News, Rob Lyons, Diane Wiegand, Jane Sager, Jan Kangas, Frank and Kathy Eld, Fred and Judy Drake, Don Parker, Patty and Dean Hovdey, Barbie Burke, John and Shirley Hicks, Morgan Gonzalez, Bob Scoles, Dalene Lemberes, Cory Corbet, Mary Benson, Dick and Geri Wisdom, Barbara Schott, Jerry Frederick, Consuelo Blake, Mike Dingle, Charlotte Hines, Father Fraser, Tamara Sandmeyer, Gerri Pottenger, Tally Larkin, Nelle Tobias, Nathelle Equals, and Martha Chitwood. I also thank the McCall Chamber of Commerce, the McCall Public Library, the Nelle Tobias Research Center, the Valley County History Project, and the McCall Arts and Humanities Council. My friends and colleagues have been indispensable. I am particularly grateful to folklore maverick Jack Santino, who encouraged this project every step of the way and who had faith in it even when I was in doubt. I am also indebted to the editors at Utah State University Press, John Alley, Michael Spooner, and Dan Miller, who patiently shepherded this project along and who play an important role in supporting the field. In addition, the suggestions, support, and encouragement of Lisa Gilman, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Paul Jordan-Smith, Christie Fox, Kate Holbrook, Sam Brown, Jill Derr, Darby Moore-Doyle, Matt Bowman, John McDowell, Jim Leary, Jennifer Attebery, Steve Siporin, Jeannie Thomas, Pat Gantt, Lawrence Culver, Jan Roush, Jennifer Ritterhouse, Melody Graulich, Barre xiii

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Toelken, Keri Holt, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Joyce Kinkead, Sakura Handa, Andy Kolovos, Rob Howard, John Fenn, Ray Cashman, Tom Mould, Samuel Kinser, Danille Christensen, Kathy Roberts, Amy Goldenberg, Liza Olsen, Jon Trimble, James Burris, Krisjan Hiner, and Troy Reeves have been invaluable. I also thank my professors at Indiana University and the various participants of the FHE writing group for comments on initial portions of this project. I am lucky to have such good friends and colleagues. I am also grateful to my babysitters Maria Ozuna and Regina Celia. The following institutions and organizations provided financial assistance, without which the project would not have been possible. The Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University provided assistance for early fieldwork, a New Faculty Research Grant from Utah State University provided assistance for project development, and the Folklore Program, the Department of English, and the Center for Women and Gender at Utah State University all contributed towards the publication of photographs. I also thank the Idaho State Historical Society, the University of Utah Mariott Library Special Collections, and the Newberry Library Seminar in Festive Cultures. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents, Myron and Elfriede Gabbert, both of whom read and edited the manuscript; my daughters, Gretchen and Bridget, who experienced a lot of daycare; and my motherin-law, Nancy Walsh, for her encouragement and support. I am grateful for my husband Bill Walsh.

Introduction

At 8:00 a.m. on Friday of the last weekend of January, the mountain-

ous, snowbound, and remote village of McCall, Idaho (approximately 2,554 residents in 2009) is cold and silent.1 The temperature is eleven degrees below zero, and all signs of activity have ceased. The early morning sun casts long shadows on strange objects, sparkling and glinting in the pale light. Drawing closer, one realizes they are sculptures made of snow, the results of preparations by local people for their annual Winter Carnival, which officially begins that evening. Some sculptures are gigantic, as tall and long as the buildings in front of which they sit. Smooth, pure white, they look like they have been coated in ice. Here is “Hedwig the Owl,” there, “Darth Maul.” There’s a scene from Where’s Waldo (gallery fig. B) or a statue of a cow’s skull. There are also animals, particularly bears, frolicking over fallen logs or picnicking on wooden benches. The city sculpture occupies the most prominent position. It lies at the edge of Payette Lake just before the two-lane highway makes a sharp lefthand turn to the west. It is called the city sculpture because it occupies the most visible location in town. Years ago, the chamber of commerce made the sculpture on behalf of the city; today sometimes a consortium of realestate agents creates it. It could be a god of fire (gallery fig. C), a laughing Buddha (fig. 1), or an ice castle (fig. 12). And always every year, there are sculptures of serpentine, dragonlike creatures with humps and scales and fins, all representing imaginative and playful versions of Payette Lake’s own legendary lake monster, Sharlie. Signs of Winter Carnival activity are visible weeks beforehand as people begin to collect snow to make sculptures, which are the festival’s main attraction. Piles of snow are guarded and moved from one place to another to create gigantic stockpiles. Snow also may be obtained by ordering it from the city, which delivers it to all registered participants free of charge. People 1

This population figure is based on 2009 U.S. Bureau of the Census estimates. Available online at http://www.factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en. 1

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

2

Fig. 1. Hotei, 1986.

order snow, collect their own with buckets and backhoes, fight with their garden hoses for water, and beg, borrow, or steal backhoes and other construction equipment to make this year’s sculpture bigger and better than last. All manner of household and construction items may be transformed into useful tools when it comes to making a snow sculpture: kitchen utensils, chain saws, log peelers, cake pans. Talk about the weather dominates conversations. Will there be enough snow? Will it snow again? Will it be cold enough to preserve the sculptures? Will it be too cold? The work pace peaks the evening before Winter Carnival begins. By the start of the festival, the people of McCall have transformed their small town into a frozen outdoor museum. Most of the sculptures are located in front of businesses and function as a kind of advertisement. Some are obviously amateurish; others are stunning in their realistic detail. The best sculptures have been glazed: rubbed with warm water that freezes to create a thin layer of ice over the entire piece. Many are playful, riffing on themes from literature, mythology, popular culture, and history. The purpose of Winter Carnival is to attract tourists to the area during a slow part of the winter season. The tourists come largely from Idaho, but

Introduction

3

some trek from the neighboring states of Oregon and Washington as well as California. Estimates are a best guess, but the chamber of commerce puts the number of visitors at around fifty thousand over the course of ten days.2 They come to view the sculptures and attend other events that occur over the course of the festival. Depending on the year, these include all-you-can-eat breakfasts and spaghetti feeds; a Monte Carlo casino night; a dance or masquerade ball; ongoing sleigh rides; a snowshoe golf tournament; a Monster Dog Pull; a Beard, Hairy, and Sexy-Leg Contest; an outdoor beer garden; a snowmobile fun run; various downhill skiing and cross-country events; an art auction and wine tasting; bingo and an Optimist Club teen dance. The local playhouse usually stages a play. In addition, food vendors concentrate in the downtown area. The Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship concludes the festival over the second weekend, and all sculptures are demolished with backhoes and tractors the following Monday. McCall is a resort town located at the northern tip of Valley County in west-central Idaho (fig. 2). Situated on the shores of Payette Lake, the town is surrounded by federal lands and accessible only by two-lane state highway 55 (fig. 3) or charter plane. The nearest large city is Boise, with a population of 205,707, located 107 miles to the south and nearly two hours away by car.3 Summer is an important season in the tourist economy, but winter looms largest in local consciousness. At an elevation of 5,031 feet, the average snowfall for the Payette Lakes area is approximately 134 inches, which buries it continuously for five or six months of the year. There is a strong collective identification with winter. Snow may begin to fall in late October or early November, and flurries can continue into late April or even May. It has been known to snow on the Fourth of July; in such cases, winter is said to have “relapsed.” The ability to “take winters” is an important aspect of local identity and viewed as a positive character trait. Year-round residents wear their fortitude against the climate like a badge of pride. Time is measured in winters, and each winter counts as a feather in one’s cap, a testimony to traditional local values of strength and hardiness. “This is my fifteenth winter here,” Mrs. Nathelle Equals, a local historian whom I met in 2000, told me when I asked how long she had lived in McCall. Both residents and visitors spend the winters skiing, snowmobiling, and engaging in other bracing winter 2

This estimate was provided by former chamber of commerce office manager Shirley Hicks. E-mail communication with author, 18 March 2009.

3

This population figure is based on 2009 U.S. Bureau of the Census estimates. Available online at http://www.factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en.

WASHINGTON

CANADA

MONTANA

McCall

Approx. 107 miles

Boise

Map by Jon Trimble

OREGON

IDAHO

UTAH Fig. 2.

Introduction

Photo by author

5

Fig. 3. Highway 55 in winter between Adams and Valley County.

activities to avoid cabin fever: feeling hopeless and blue and isolated by the weather. Snow is important not only to local identity but also to the economy. It is the primary source of water; the area receives only about twenty-six inches of precipitation annually, mostly in the form of snowfall.4 A high snowpack means that in the spring, the melting runoff fills reservoirs that provide water to local ranches. A low snowfall means a dry year, igniting both forest wildfires as well as endless arguments over water rights, whose entitlements 4

Information provided by the Western Regional Climate Center. Averages given are total average over the years 1930–2005. Available online at http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/ cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?idmcca.

6

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

were fought in hand-to-hand combat in the past and in courts today.5 The winter tourist economy also depends on snow to attract visitors. Without snow visitors do not come to the area for recreation, so they do not rent skis or other equipment, buy lift tickets, or spend the night. Winter Carnival can be classified as a calendrical harvest festival associated with the yearly seasonal cycle and communal means of work and play because harvest festivals mark the changing of seasons and tie people into annual natural rhythms. Roger Abrahams notes that harvest festivals also “celebrate the economy” because they are “celebrations of capacity of increase of the earth . . . by acknowledging the powers of nature and the place of humankind in enhancing that process” (1982, 163). It seems appropriate, then, that every year the village holds an annual Winter Carnival, which celebrates snow both as an element of identity and an economic resource. It takes place at the end of January and marks a seasonal intensification (Falassi 1987a). It is the moment when winter is at its deepest and spring is anticipated. The carnival, a for-profit event sponsored by the area chamber of commerce and designed to attract visitors during a slow part of the business year, is an intriguing festival of community life, one that raises more questions than it answers. This book is about the relationship between Winter Carnival, constructions of community, and change. The McCall area has undergone rapid socioeconomic change in the past thirty years, transitioning from primarily an extraction-based timber economy—with tourism as an important, but secondary, source of income—to a resort with tourism as the main emphasis. Having been transformed from a “location” to a “destination” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 152), it is a recent example of the emerging New West, where a “landscape of production [is] gradually transformed into a landscape of leisure” (Wiltsie and Wyckoff quoted in Nicholas, Bapis, and Harvey 2003, 123). This transformation has long historical roots, but the rate of acceleration increased rapidly in the last decade with the 2004 opening of Tamarack, a year-round, destination ski resort. The economic changes that occurred have challenged people to reconsider their notions of community, place, and identity as growth, increased tourism, and shifting economic formations changed social, cultural, and geographic landscapes. I am a folklorist by training and have always been interested in place. When I began research in the McCall area in 2000, my initial focus was on 5

During a political forum in November 2001 where issues of water quality were being discussed, Phil Davis, then a candidate for county commissioner, quipped, “I grew up with a father who believed that whiskey was for drinking and water was for fighting over.”

Introduction

7

the relationship between folklore, place, and landscape because I knew the area was undergoing rapid transformation and I was interested in change and expressive culture. I am originally from Boise, and, like many Boise families, mine owned a share of a cabin on Payette Lake that we frequented on weekends when I was growing up. I therefore have been a weekend tourist in McCall since I was a child, and I have a strong emotional attachment to the area. I worked for the Forest Service in the nearby New Meadows Ranger District as a wilderness firefighter in 1991, and it was during that summer that I first became interested in local culture. My parents relocated to neighboring Adams County in 1993 and have worked in McCall since then; my sister moved to McCall in 2000. It is now my family’s home, and so I consider myself something of a “halfie” (Narayan in Abu-Lughod 1991, 161 n.1), even though I have never lived there as a permanent resident. As I investigated the folklore of place, I concluded that Winter Carnival occupied many people’s minds. It certainly dominated many conversations. People discussed topics such as change, growth, and tourism, but they also talked a lot about Winter Carnival, despite the fact that many people did not attribute much importance to it as an example of local culture. A few people in McCall even asked me why I cared about Winter Carnival. It was only about money, they said, a tourist trap, an event staged by the chamber of commerce. Such ambivalence about Winter Carnival became important for me in understanding the role this festival played in the community’s life. Winter Carnival was an important topic of conversation for local residents exactly because it was a commodified cultural production sponsored by the chamber of commerce and designed to attract tourists. Winter Carnival concentrated, intensified, and transformed key cultural ideas and relationships by putting them on aesthetic display, an idea based on the work of Émile Durkheim ([1912] 2001) in his examination of Australian totemism and expanded by a range of scholars, including Victor Turner (1974, 1982, 1986), Barbara Babcock (1978), John J. MacAloon (1984), Frank E. Manning (1983c), Alessandro Falassi (1987b), Jack Santino (2004a), and Don Handelman (1990), among others. In McCall these ideas were expressed in notions about relations between self and community, citizenship and belonging, the town and its history, and identity formation—all of which were debated in a context of rapid social and economic change. I developed the idea of examining Winter Carnival as a means of understanding the McCall area because I was frustrated by the fact that its history eluded me. There were many self-published histories and memoirs of

8

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

the area (e.g., Bean 1999; W. Brown 1999; Callender 1992) but no formal academic histories, and central Idaho was only minimally described in histories of the state (Beal and Wells 1959; Arrington 1994).6 I visited the library frequently in 2000 and 2001 and spent time with Nelle Tobias, Martha Chitwood, and Nathelle Equals, who were McCall’s senior community historians at the time. The librarians affectionately dubbed them the “glue girls” because they used so many glue sticks in their work (fig. 4). They were interested in local history, not Winter Carnival, and as part of their service for the Progressive Club (a women’s social and service organization in McCall), they met at the library every Thursday afternoon to clip articles from newspapers, paste them onto sheets of white paper, and file them in historical files. I helped them, hoping to understand the area’s past more completely. My historical awareness grew, but dimly. There seemed to be only scattered facts that I could not put together. One snowy February afternoon, I asked the women what they thought were the most important historical events of the area. Martha said she thought that one important event was when the Brown family sold their mill to Boise Cascade in 1964 because she felt that the character of the town changed as a result. Nelle said that she had never heard of the mill until she moved to McCall in the 1930s and only knew of the town as a resort area. Both of them agreed that the making of Northwest Passage, a 1940 film about a disastrous military expedition against French-allied Indians during the French and Indian War starring Spencer Tracy, was a big deal.7 But then Martha somewhat offhandedly added, “Well, there really haven’t been a lot of events. Nothing much happens here.” Nelle and Nathelle nodded their heads in agreement. Martha’s insightful comment led me to reconsider the way I had been approaching local history. How can there be a history when “nothing much happens”? The answer depends on the way one thinks about history. In contrast to early medieval Europe, for example, where events were thought to occur simultaneously and eternally in the realm of God, modern history often is constructed as sequential—an unfolding of events that punctuate 6

Other local histories and memoirs include Cottrell and Ingraham 1987; Ingraham 1992; Peterson 2002; Woods 2002; and Rowland 1960, among many others. The book Valley County Idaho: Preshistory to 1920 was edited by an historian, Shelton Woods, but not written by him. The Payette Forest Service office also had many useful publications on the history of the forest, which is important in understanding the region.

7

The film was partly filmed in McCall in 1938 and released by MGM.

Introduction

Photo by author

9

Fig. 4. McCall’s community historians, left to right, Nelle Tobias, Nathelle Equals, and Martha Chitwood in 2001.

undifferentiated time and that, when examined carefully, explain the present circumstances because they are thought to lead, one after the other, in a progression to the present. This linear model of history is based on a notion of homogeneous, empty time in which a particular actor plays a part (Fabian 1983; Giddens 1990; Frykman and Löfgren 1987). It is the way I sought to understand local history when I began this project. The problem with this way of formulating history in small, rural areas such as McCall is obvious. An event-based history favors the grandiose, the special, and the abnormal, while it misses continuity and the massive amounts of time when people go about their daily lives. “What is missing,” explains Henry Glassie, “is that which does not move in time with the developmental conventions of narration” (1994, 964). And, if there are few events, if the events that do happen mostly are the daily struggles and

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successes of ordinary people, how can one have a history at all, much less one that is interesting? This way of constructing history leaves quiet, rural areas where nothing much happens with seemingly no history. Even when one tries to construct one (as I did), a linear, event-oriented model of local history is difficult to grasp because the events, such as the ones the glue girls clipped or those documented in the available self-published histories, are small, scattered, and difficult to put together in chronological fashion. In Valley County there were narratives of ethnic Finnishness, of the timber industry, of the development of skiing, of McCall as a smoke-jumping base for wilderness firefighters, of various homesteading families and their interrelationships. A chronological and event-oriented history is one way to construct history, but it must be supplemented by other models. Anthropologist Milton Singer identified festivals as part of a broader category of expressive culture he called “cultural performances,” which included religious rites and ceremonies as well as films, radio, formal theater and concert programs, and a variety of other media (1972, 71). Singer thought cultural performances were useful “concrete observable units of Indian culture” (1972, 64) that encapsulated key components of Madras society (see also Geertz 1972). The people with whom he worked thought so as well, and the idea remains important today. Winter Carnival is a key text or center (Glassie 1982), perhaps not the only one but an important one, in understanding, telling, and creating McCall’s story, if not, perhaps, its history. Taking Martha’s hint that nothing much happens here, I began to explore Winter Carnival as an alternative means of understanding the region and its people. One of the appeals of festivals as an object of study is that they are bounded events: they occur at certain times and in certain places, and therefore the perimeters appear (at least initially) quite clear. Don Handelman, for example, writes that “their standing is that of indigenous phenomena that exist in the lived-in worlds of their participants, and that are graspable as such by external observers” (1990, 16). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out that, since World War II, festivals have “proliferated with the explicit intention of encouraging tourism” (1998, 61) and that they offer “in a concentrated form, at a designated time and place, what the tourist would otherwise search out in the diffuseness of everyday life, with no guarantee of ever finding it” (1998, 59). In other words, festivals are an encapsulated cultural object, and some types, such as Winter Carnival, are directly related to the expansion of tourism (MacCannell 1976).

Introduction

11

At the same time, however, festivals are complex, multisimultaneous events designed to be experienced and understood physically, rather than intellectually (Neustadt 1992; Noyes 2003b), which makes studying and analyzing them difficult. I began attending Winter Carnival as frequently as I could over the next decade as a visitor, participant observer, and occasional volunteer. I formally interviewed organizers, volunteers, and participants; talked casually with many more people; and scoured the library and state archives for information. The history of Winter Carnival was not documented formally, so newspaper stories and past brochures were my primary printed sources of information about the past. It is undeniable that my family’s presence in McCall affected people’s responses and willingness to talk to me or be interviewed as my research developed. Not only did my family provide introductions in some cases, but also residents generally were willing to talk to me because, although they did not know me personally, they knew or had heard of my family and could therefore place me socially (see Narayan 1997). This no doubt defined the kind of people with whom I interacted most frequently. My parents provided access to people who were middle class, active in the community, and emphasized public service; these are the kind of people most active in Winter Carnival and with whom I became most familiar. My sister worked at a variety of minimum-wage jobs in local convenience stores and hotels. She introduced me to many working-class people as well as the working poor with whom I had numerous informal conversations about Winter Carnival that gave me some insight into class participation in the festival. These people were less likely to volunteer actively for Winter Carnival, but they attended the events, and certainly everybody had something to say about it. My own academic inclinations led to me seek out historians such as the glue girls as well as other community scholars and preservationists; this group tended to comprise the few registered Democrats in a staunchly Republican county. I occasionally drew on my rather scant experience as a wilderness firefighter, which allowed me to situate myself as someone outside my family who was invested in the region. I also interacted with teachers, community scholars, local business owners, and, to a lesser degree, the Forest Service. I do not claim to provide a viewpoint that represents everyone in the area, and the interpretation of Winter Carnival is my own. I know, for example, that some people would have preferred me to write a book that focused only on the happy aspects of Winter Carnival, and to overlook some of the stressors that naturally accompanied its production. Winter Carnival

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

was overall a happy, positive event and people were proud of it. However, like the joyful dimensions, the stress was important in understanding how community actually works, and so I examine it in chapter one and other parts of the book in the spirit of scholarly inquiry. I hope that readers, both scholars and community members, understand why I did so, offering a partial perspective on some of the important points about Winter Carnival, which, no doubt, are derived from my own decidedly middle-class social position. I conducted interviews and conversations over a period of years, and so I provided people who helped me with an opportunity to revise and reflect on their statements by returning their statements to them prior to publication (Lawless 1991). In some cases, I changed people’s names when the topic or their statements were controversial; the text indicates when I have done so. McCall is a small town, and everybody knows everyone and everything. The purpose of my work is to provide a snapshot of festival life, community, and social change in a small western town.

Becoming the New West: An Overview of Social and Economic Realities in McCall and the Payette Lakes Area The Intermountain West historically has been a sparsely populated, isolated region. It consists of the states of Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming; the eastern portions of Oregon and Washington; the western portion of Colorado; and the northern parts of Arizona and New Mexico. This area has few large cities, and the distance between them is great. Although a majority of the population is urban, living in small cities, the area is better known for its smaller towns, farming and ranching communities, and large tracts of federal and state land. Since the postwar period, but particularly since the 1970s, the Intermountain West has experienced enormous growth and change, due in large part to the increase of recreational and entertainment tourism. Many places have emerged, transformed, into what some historians and environmental writers have identified as the New West. The term New Western History was coined in 1989 by pioneering historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, who organized a conference panel by that name; it represents a rejection of conventional frontier-oriented histories and ideals of exceptionalism to focus instead on narratives of ethnic and gender diversity, class and labor relations, contestation and conquest, borderlands, environmental studies, and new urban histories (see Limerick 1991; Robbins 1991; Campbell 2000).

Introduction

13

Today the New West refers to a confluence of factors that have affected many communities and that figure them as infinitely pliable for commercial gain. For the purposes of this study, these include (but are not limited to) the increase and influence of tourism and the rise of leisure and wilderness recreation; the impact of environmental politics; class issues; rising housing costs and urbanization; changes in demographics; the privileging of aesthetic values with respect to the landscape; rampant consumerism and media marketing images that mythologize the western past; and changing regimes of capital that mask labor inequalities and highlight the recreational landscape as pure and untrammeled (Nicholas, Bapis, and Harvey 2003). Extraction economies have declined, real estate-development has expanded, and the populations of small towns and cities such as Reno, Jackson, and Boise have exploded.8 The Internet and availability of computers have ushered in new economies and types of work, bringing economic development, prosperity, and new kinds of problems to these previously isolated areas. Western environmental and cultural historian Dan Flores points out that transformation of region has become a new category of analysis, and that, while the idea of regional consciousness may be ludicrous, regional economies are not: “In that sense many parts of the West . . . really are at a crossroads as we enter the new century” (Flores quoted in Nicholas, Bapis, and Harvey 2003, viii).9 Historian Hal Rothman (1998) documents extensively the impact and change that tourism wrought on some western communities, particularly the development of skiing in Colorado in resorts such as Aspen and Steamboat Springs and planned, corporate communities such as Vail, Sun 8

Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Reno, Nevada, grew from 133,850 to 180,480, an increase of 34.5 percent, and to 210,255 in 2006, an increase of 14.8 percent between 2000 and 2006. Available online at U.S. Bureau of the Census QuickFacts at http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/16/1608830.html. While Jackson Hole has slowed somewhat in growth, surrounding bedroom counties such as Teton County, Idaho, grew at a rate of 24.5 percent between 2000 and 2005; Sublette County, near Jackson, grew at a rate of 17 percent for the same period. “Census Sees Growth Shift,” Jackson Hole News & Guide, 12 April 2006. Boise, the capital of Idaho experienced a 37.5 percent population increase between 1990 and 2000. Available online at http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/16/1608830.html.

9

The mission statement of a New West website, which alludes to perspectives similar to those articulated by Flores, states, “New West is a next-generation media company dedicated to the culture, economy, politics, environment and lifestyle of the Rocky Mountain West. Our core mission is to serve the Rockies with innovative, participatory journalism and to promote conversation that helps us understand and make the most of the dramatic changes sweeping our region.” Available online at http://www. newwest.net/plain/entry/13/.

14

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

Valley, and Jackson Hole. Rothman famously calls tourism the “devil’s bargain” because of the perceived loss of local control that ensues and the negative effects on community and local identity. He outlines a pervasive pattern of development—sometimes referred to derogatorily as Aspenization since it happened early in Aspen, Colorado—that includes the economic decline of traditional industries such as ranching and mining, the arrival of initial visionary developers who bring much-needed outside capital, the influx of “neonatives,” escalating real-estate prices, the eventual arrival of the chic and ultrarich, and the transformation of local people to poorly paid service workers who eventually are displaced by even lower-wage and frequently illegal immigrants. Rothman is critical of the effects of tourism on local communities, a perspective with which I do not entirely agree (see Wrobel and Long 2001), but the pattern that he documents is applicable to McCall and the surrounding Valley County/Payette Lakes area, which is why I consider it an example of an emerging New West resort. Located at the tip of Valley County on the edge of Payette Lake, McCall is part of a geographically isolated area surrounded by the Payette National Forest and the Salmon River Mountains. The region is called the Payette Lakes area because Upper Payette Lake, Payette Lake, and Little Payette Lake are located there. Situated about halfway between the equator and the North Pole, the region is flanked to the west by the Snake River, which flows north into the Columbia. The main Salmon River, known as the “River of No Return,” flows west along the northern border.10 The Salmon River’s tributaries, the South Fork and the Middle Fork, lie in the eastern half of Valley County. The Middle Fork constitutes the eastern boundary of Valley County and is located directly in the heart of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area. Several valleys, including Long Valley and Round Valley, lie directly south of the Payette Lakes area, and the Payette River flows south out of Payette Lake. The southernmost end of Valley County lies fiftyfive miles south of McCall near the area called Smith’s Ferry. State and federal lands constitute 64 percent of the state of Idaho, and that number climbs to approximately 88 percent in Valley County (fig. 5). Private land is scarce and fuels the fierce desire to protect private-property rights.11 The Payette National Forest spans more than 2.3 million acres. It is a forest 10

According to historical legend, the name was originally Lemhi Shoshone and meant that whoever went down it never came back.

11

National forests constitute approximately twenty-one million acres in the state.

Kootenai Ka ni ks u

Coeur d’ Alene

St. Joe Clearwater

z Ne

e r c Bitterroot e P S

Pa y e t te

McCall Boise

a

lm

Ta

Challis

o

rg

n

he

Ta rg h e e

e

Ta rg h

Sawtooth

ee

ibo u Cache

Map by Jon Trimble

Car u

w

Curle

Fig. 5. Idaho National Forests.

ibo

Car Sa wt o o t h

16

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

of pine and fir and home to a variety of wild animals, including bear, moose, elk, deer, fox, and coyote (Hockaday 1968) and, recently, wolves, which were reintroduced to the region. The eastern portion of the Payette Forest is adjacent to and partially responsible for the administration of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area, which spans another 2.4 million acres and is also located partially in eastern Valley County. It is known locally as the backcountry. Originally designated as the Idaho Primitive Area in 1931 (Baird and Baird 1987), this is some of the most remote land in the continental United States. It is adjacent to other federally designated wilderness regions in the state and constitutes the largest block of wilderness outside of Alaska.12 In the past and today, this geographical remoteness has contributed strongly to a local sense of self-sufficiency, hardiness, and close ties to the land. Due to its remote location, access to federal lands, and position on the lake, McCall always had a strong summer tourist season to supplement its traditional timber industry. But tourism expanded over the past thirty years, transforming it from primarily a timber town with summer tourism as a secondary economy into a year-round destination resort. Various economic classes always mixed in McCall. The town has strong working- and middleclass roots, and making a living has always been difficult. Its transformation to a destination resort has, as at other resorts, exacerbated class distinctions as real-estate prices soared during a development boom in the mid-2000s. Hourly or seasonal jobs in service and retail are common, particularly in hotel, restaurant, construction, and recreation industries. Many people who live in McCall hold two, or sometimes three, jobs to make a living. Local resident Cory Corbet once told me “creativity” in McCall (and Valley County generally) meant finding a way to make a living there, illustrating that the New West is in large part about lifestyle and identity.13 12

The wilderness area was established in its current state by Congress at the urging of Senator Frank Church in 1980. Two other wilderness areas lie north of it: the Gospel Hump Wilderness area (206,053 acres) and the Selway-Bitteroot Wilderness Area (1,340,681 acres). Together, these three areas constitute a nearly solid block of congressionally designated wilderness of more than six thousand square miles. Available online at http://www.fs.fed.us/r4/payette/main.html.

13

The following figures for McCall are based on the U.S. Census Bureau, 20052009 American Community Survey: classes of workers: 78.7 percent were private wage and salary workers; 14.9 percent were government workers; 6.4 percent were self-employed; types of occupation: management, professional, and related occupations 30.1 percent; service occupations 18.4 percent; sales and office occupations 18.4 percent; farm, fishing and forestry occupations 2.5 percent; construction, extraction, maintenance, and repair occupations 25.8 percent;

Introduction

17

To understand the kinds of transformations that occurred in McCall and the way they relate to Winter Carnival, it is important first to understand the region’s geography, socioeconomic makeup, and history. The modern boundaries of Valley County were established in 1917 with the town of Cascade, some thirty miles south of McCall, as the county seat. The county has some small rural towns, including Cascade and Donnelly, each of which is its own community and geographically separated from the others by some distance. The county is quite large and sparsely populated. The population in 2009 was 8,726. At 3,678 square miles, the county averages 2.4 persons per square mile, although 95 percent of the population lives at the northern tip around the McCall/Donnelly area.14 The ethnic makeup of Valley County mirrors the state generally. In 2009, 97.3 percent of the population was white, and 4.9 percent identified themselves as Hispanic. Native Americans constituted .8 percent of the county population, and Asians and Pacific Islanders each made up .3 percent. African Americans comprised .4 percent of the county population.15 Residents of Valley County are slightly more educated than people in other parts of the state. In 2009 26.3 percent of people had a college education, which was slightly higher than the state’s average of 21.7 percent; 88.9 percent had completed high school, compared to state levels of 84.7 percent. Residents were also slightly better off financially: the per-capita personal income in 2005 was $34,126, but the number of persons living below the poverty level in 2008 was 9.6 percent.16 As part of the reverse-settlement pattern common to the Intermountain West, west-central Idaho was one of the last regions to be settled in the United States. Following the advice of Sacajawea’s brother Cameahwait of the Lemhi Shoshone tribe, western explorers Lewis and Clark bypassed it in 1805 due to its ruggedness (Reddy 1995). French Canadian fur trapper François Payette, production, transportation, and material moving occupations 4.8 percent. Available on-line at http://www.factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ACSSAFFFacts?_ event=ChangeGeoContext&geo_id=16000US1648790&_geoContext=&_ street=&_county=McCall%2C+Idaho&_cityTown=McCall%2C+Idaho&_state=&_ zip=&_lang=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_ submenuId=factsheet_1&ds_name=ACS_2009_5YR_SAFF&_ci_nbr=null&qr_ name=null®=null%3Anull&_keyword=&_industry=. 14

Information available on-line from the U.S. Bureau of the Census QuickFacts at http:// quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/16/16085.html.

15

Ibid.

16

Ibid.

18

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

who worked throughout the Northwest with the Pacific Fur, Northwest, and Hudson Bay companies from 1818 until about 1844, is often given credit for exploring the area (or at least wandering through its outskirts) although, according to Forest Service historians, there is little evidence that he actually entered the region (Bean 1999). Rather, for most of the nineteenth century the primary populations were Northern Shoshone tribes and some Nez Perce, whose lands spread for hundreds of miles to the north and west and who traveled to the Payette Lakes area to fish for salmon. The region’s isolation ended with the discovery of gold at Pierce, north of McCall, in 1860. The gold boom that followed introduced the first major nonnative economy into the area, and mining is still an industry in the state.17 Other gold strikes soon followed in Elk City, Orofino, and Florence in 1861 and Warrens Diggings (Warren) in 1862, all north of McCall. The region’s population jumped to 21,000 between 1860 and 1863, and the region became the Territory of Idaho in 1863 (Ingraham 1992, 11). The influx of miners led to conflicts with the Nez Perce and Shoshone, culminating in war during the 1870s, which was true for many other western areas. The encroachment and constant reduction of Nez Perce land by the U.S. government eventually led to the Nez Perce War of 1877 led by Chief Joseph, which roused Native Americans throughout the Northwest. In the southeast of the Idaho Territory, the Bannock War of 1878, led by Buffalo Horn, also affected the Salmon River area. Native American refugees from the war joined Northern Shoshone in the central Salmon Mountains to fight in the Sheepeater War of 1879. A small band of Tukudika (otherwise known as Mountain Shoshone or Sheepeaters), who refused to move to reservation land, were chased by U.S. cavalry between the South and Middle Forks of the Salmon. During that war, the first U.S. government map of the area directly east of McCall (what would become the backcountry of Valley County) was created.18 Meadows Valley, west of McCall, and Long Valley, south of McCall, were the first sites of European American settlement in the Payette Lakes 17

The Thunder Mountain gold boom of 1902 near Long Valley “gave notoriety to this forested area” (Hockaday 1968, 15); Zane Grey’s novel Thunder Mountain is loosely based on that gold strike.

18

Another source of conflict over land affected early settlers and cattlemen. The area was originally free range for ranchers from the southern portion of the state. The trickle of settlers into the area in the late 1870s and early 1880s led to clashes in the mid-1890s and the cattle wars of Long Valley, which ended in 1907. For more information, see Hockaday (1968, 12–15); Callender (1992, 22–29); Ingraham (1992, 22–23); Showell (1995); Attebery (1984); and “Sheep and Cattle” (1981).

Introduction

19

area. Some of the first settlers arrived in Meadows Valley in 1877, and when the Osborn family came from the Warren mining district in 1880, their presence made a total of four cabins (Hockaday 1968, 17). When the U.S. Bureau of the Census famously declared the American frontier as having officially closed in 1890, a statement that led to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis in 1893, it was due to the settling of intermountain areas such as this.19 Long Valley stretches nearly sixty miles and is between five and eight miles wide. There were thirty households there by 1887, but most claims were abandoned after an extremely severe winter in 1889–90 (Larkin 2002).20 Finnish settlers arrived after that from mining towns in 19

Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper at the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893 entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which was wildly influential for generations of later scholars. Written only two years after the frontier was officially announced closed, the paper sought to explain the peculiarities of American democracy, economics, and development in terms of the frontier. At the time, Turner was arguing against two dominant schools of thought: one that sought to explain the United States in relation to the institution of slavery, and the other that viewed the country as an outgrowth of old Teutonic culture transplanted to the New World. Turner postulated that the frontier was the most formative aspect of the American experience and shaped American thought, particularly in relation to democracy. There are several important elements of Turner’s thesis. First, he saw the frontier as a “safety valve” for the urban cities of the eastern seaboard. He postulated that when the eastern cities became too crowded and dirty, and employment was scarce, workers could simply move out to the frontier and establish themselves on their own terms as free and independent members of society. Free land, in his view, became the key to solve social issues and conflicts between labor and management. Second, Turner employed dominant cultural evolutionary models of the late-nineteenth century. He conceptualized the frontier as a place where civilization and savagery met; beyond the frontier existed so-called primitives (Native Americans), while the settled parts of the country embodied the highest ideals of civilization. People actually living on the frontier were somewhere in between: not quite civilized, but not quite savage, either. It is important to note that in Turner’s model, the frontier was a constantly receding line of demarcation. In his critique of the thesis, Henry Nash Smith points out that Turner’s emphasis on the West and its relationship to democracy, as well as the undertones of geographical determinism, all constitute important elements of what Smith calls “the myth of the Garden” ([1950]1970), whose roots can be traced back to eighteenthcentury agrarian theory and which Thomas Jefferson elaborated on through his theory of agrarian democracy. Turner’s thesis also led to generations of scholarly critique for its problematic ideas about progress and presumptions about empty space that overlooked people already living there.

20

Local author Joe Larkin calls this the “misplaced winter” because the date usually cited is 1888­­–89. His archival newspaper research, however, reveals that the correct date is 1889­–90. See his chapter entitled “The Misplaced Winter” in the Valley County History Project’s book edited by Shelton Woods, Valley County Idaho (2002).

20

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

Wyoming, Oregon, Canada, and Finland and stayed. Many residents count their heritage as Finnish, and Finnish cultural influences can be seen in the emphasis on skiing (see chapter 4).21 McCall was founded relatively late for the region. Every local history book describes the village’s founding myth: Tom McCall was the first European American permanent settler on Payette Lake, and he traded land with a squatter named Sam Dever for a team of horses between 1889 and 1891 (Stoddard 2002). Signe Callender cites the date of McCall’s formally filed claim as 1899 (1992, 13), which, according to her research, made his the third formal claim in the Payette Lakes area. A sawmill servicing mines to the north was already in operation on the lake when Tom McCall arrived (Altork 1995; Rowland 1960, 4). McCall acquired the mill, and it became the economic lifeblood of the community. The creation of the national forest system, which had its roots in the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, also directly affected the area economically. The original Payette National Forest was established in 1905 and was very large; the Idaho National Forest was created out of the northern part of it in 1908. The headquarters for the Idaho National Forest was first in New Meadows, west of McCall; according to Peter Preston (1999, 6), Tom McCall paid eighty dollars and donated an acre of land to move the headquarters to McCall in 1909, and the Forest Service, along with the mill, became a major employer. Forest names and boundaries changed again and today the headquarters in McCall is of the Payette National Forest.22 Tom McCall sold the mill to Theodore Hoff, who eventually partnered with Carl Brown in 1914 to form the Hoff and Brown Lumber Company, and the mill employed many people. The Brown family fully acquired the mill around 1929 when it became Brown’s Tie and Lumber Company 21

Other original Long Valley settlements include Roseberry (1891), Van Wyck (1882), Crawford Center (1886), Alpha (1888), Lardo (1891–92), Elo (1905), Spink (1906), Thunder City (1901), Arling (1914), and Norwood (1914). These dates are taken from Duane Petersen’s Valley County (2002). Because of the undocumented nature of local history in this area, these dates are approximate and may not be exact.

22

P. Preston (1999, 5, 8, 27) has documented the changes in boundaries and names of the national forests of this region. Briefly, the original Payette National Forest was created in 1905, along with the Weiser National Forest. The Idaho National Forest was established out of the northern part of the original Payette National Forest in 1908. The Idaho and Weiser National Forests were consolidated and renamed the Payette National Forest in 1944, while the original Payette National Forest was incorporated into the Boise National Forest.

Introduction

21

(Jordan 1961, 101–3).23 In addition to the mill, ranching and mining also played important roles in the area’s economy. The area’s pioneer era arguably ended with the arrival of the railroads between 1911 and 1914 (Witherell 2002). The railroads not only made transportation of goods and people to and from the Boise Valley easier, but they also made or broke many of the settlement towns. The Idaho Northern and Pacific Railroad Company reached Meadows Valley in 1911, while at the other end of the Payette Lakes area, the Idaho Northern Railroad, also called the Oregon Short Line or the McCall branch of the Union Pacific (Witherell, 2002, 177) was built north through Long Valley and reached McCall (also called Lakeport) in 1914. The expansion of the railroad created a boom in the timber industry, in part because the mill produced wood for the railroad ties. McCall also had a long-standing economic foundation in the tourism, recreation, and real-estate industries in conjunction with its historical extraction economies. Local historian Nelle Tobias repeatedly told me, “McCall has always been a place for tourists.” Her continual insistence on this fact shaped my thinking. McCall has always been a tourist town; tourism has just become more important recently. The first summer cabin was built in 1906, not long after McCall established the town (Jordan 1961, 287 n. 31). Tom McCall immediately subdivided his homestead and began selling lots, establishing himself as town mayor, postmaster, and justice of the peace (P. Preston 1999, 6). Even in its earliest days, the town was a real-estate venture like most of the West. Photographic evidence from the early twentieth century depicts the town as a place for summer vacations. One photograph shows a tourist boat owned by “Jew’s Harp Jack” that took visitors around Payette Lake and hosted dances on the water (Cottrell and Ingraham 1987).24 McCall was a social hub for loggers in the remote backcountry camps, who came to town on weekends to spend their money. Gambling, alcohol, and women were available, indicating the village was always a site of recreation and leisure and a place where different kinds of people mixed. The original Winter Carnival began in McCall in 1924 as a means to attract tourists, but winter tourism was not well developed at that time. 23

The Brown family has been well documented in a number of local histories. See Warren Harrington Brown’s autobiography, It’s Fun to Remember (1999) and Grace Jordan’s King’s Pines of Idaho (1961).

24

Cottrell and Ingraham identify the boat owned by Jews Harp Jack as the Lyda. However, according to Rowland’s Founding of McCall, Idaho (1960, 19–21), Jew’s Harp Jack owned a wind-powered vessel while the Lyda was a later steamboat.

22

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

Winter Carnival originally was a sports event. It featured dog races and early forms of skiing like innumerable other winter carnivals that developed across North America in the late nineteenth century. The McCall event was largely a regional affair designed to feature local talent alongside national competitors. Like other winter carnivals, the festival set the stage for the development of a winter tourist season and the eventual rise of contemporary destination resorts. The development of the early Winter Carnival in relation to leisure, sports, and local history is discussed in chapter four. The 1960s ushered in changes in socioeconomic relations as logging and other extraction industries began to decrease in importance while tourism, particularly winter tourism, increased. The Brown family sold the local McCall mill to the Boise Cascade Corporation in 1964, transforming it from a locally owned operation to one run by a major international corporation. Boise Cascade owned mills throughout the region, including ones in the surrounding towns of Cascade, Horseshoe Bend, Emmett, and Council, and they were a primary source of employment. Boise Cascade closed the McCall mill thirteen years later in 1977. This event signaled the beginning of the deindustrialization and global restructuring of the timber industry, although many people found similar work in Boise Cascade’s mill in Cascade, thirty miles south. During the 1990s, deindustrialization became evident when Boise Cascade closed its remaining mills. The Council mill closed in 1995, the Horseshoe Bend mill folded in 1998, and the Emmett and Cascade mills ceased operating in 2001, shaking the timber foundations of the entire state. During this same period, McCall’s identity as a vacation area became more visibly promoted. Development, real-estate sales, and the recreation and leisure industries, particularly skiing, expanded. The Brundage Mountain ski area opened in 1961 with two fully mechanized lifts, and the newly formed McCall Area Chamber of Commerce revived Winter Carnival in 1965 as a means of increasing business during a slow part of the winter season and as a way of promoting Brundage. Real-estate mogul Douglas Manchester became interested in McCall in the late 1980s. Manchester, whose investments included resorts and golf courses as well as the development of San Diego’s bay-front area, was a prime example of Rothman’s (1998) initial visionary outsider industrialist. He acquired Shore Lodge, the only hotel on the lake, in 1989 and transformed it from a regular upscale hotel into an elite lakeside golf resort for members only (Williamson and Wilcomb 2007). This action frustrated some locals because it was the first

Introduction

23

real-estate development in the area based on principles of exclusivity, elitism, and conspicuous consumption. The action contradicted the egalitarian ethos and values of hard work that characterized McCall and that are typical of small towns (see Lavenda 1983, 1992, 1996, 1997). Manchester’s influence coincided with a general shift away from agriculture in Idaho’s economy during the late 1980s. He began to purchase additional local real estate, and development arguably increased as a result of his presence during the next decade (Altork 1995).25 Valley County fully emerged as a destination resort area in 2004 with the opening of the Tamarack ski area by French developer Jean-Pierre Boespflug outside the town of Donnelly, eleven miles south of McCall. The initial development of Tamarack Resort was tied up for years but ultimately approved by Valley County commissioners in the fall of 2001 and the Idaho State Land Board in 2002, likely as a direct result of the closing of the Boise Cascade mill in Cascade in June 2001. Tamarack also fit into the pattern of development that Rothman identifies for ski areas, which includes the creation of large, multinational, corporate resorts that offer luxurious experiences, extensive building of trophy homes, an increase in real-estate prices and tax liabilities, and stagnant wages (see Rothman 1998, 247, 262). Tamarack was the first year-round ski resort built in the United States in twenty years, it marketed itself as “world class,” and it actively sought to attract the rich and famous. In August 2005, President George W. Bush stayed at Tamarack during one of his holidays away from his normal vacation home in Crawford, Texas, and Marine One landed on the fourth hole of the golf course. Investor stars such as tennis players Steffi Graff and Andre Agassi planned to build a luxury hotel there, and the resort was rumored to have attracted visits from movie stars such as Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford. Tamarack stimulated an enormous burst of development between 2001 and 2007, which coincided with a national real-estate boom. In an area 25

Kathleen Altork (1995) took her information from the 1992 report of the Idaho Division of Financial Management. Between 1987 and 1991, Idaho’s nonagricultural wage and salary employment soared 27.5 percent, which was the fastest rate among all fifty states. There were 2,559 new structures built in the county during the 1990s, as compared to 1,464 during the previous decade, an increase of approximately 75 percent. Information taken from “County Profiles of Idaho, Valley,” a downloadable .pdf that was available from the Idaho Department of Commerce and Labor. The document is no longer available on-line as the entity split into the Idaho Department of Commerce and the Idaho Department of Labor and the websites have been reorganized.

24

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

where employment had always been scarce, local people found nearly yearround work in the construction business. Between January 2004 and 2006, for example, Tamarack sold 531 properties for a total of $359.3 million: cottages sold for between $899,000 and $979,000, and townhomes ranged from $899,000 to $1,049,000. Such sales dramatically increased the assessed value of Valley County properties. Total value was assessed at $511 million in 1990, $1.2 billion in 1997, $1.8 billion in 2004, and $6 billion in 2007. Values increased 50 percent between 2006 and 2007 alone. Lake-frontage prices almost doubled in 2007, up from $13,440 per linear foot in 2006 to $23,000.26 Sotheby’s International partnered with a local agency and started selling real estate in McCall in 2007. The boom stimulated a lot of media attention. The area was featured in a SkyWest in-flight magazine, SkyWest, in February 2006, and the New York Times featured an article about McCall that same year with the headline “Mud-on-the Boots Town Is Rising as a Resort.” McCall’s transformation into an area catering to the elite was also featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2008 in an article entitled “The New American Gentry.”27 The local population was both excited and ambivalent about these changes. Tamarack’s success and the visibility it brought to Valley County were a source of debate. Pros and cons about development were a constant subject of conversation and news stories. Most county residents acknowledged that change was inevitable. They embraced tourism and resort development as viable economic alternatives to the timber industry. Many people profited from the land and construction booms and were proud of the attention their region received in national travel magazines and international journals. They were excited when movie stars were rumored to have been spotted in town, eating at their local restaurants. Because the Payette Lakes area had long been a place for tourism and second homes, residents were used to visitors. Land speculation is also an integral part of western history, and so, as this cartoon indicates, the development surge in McCall simply was part of an ongoing cycle of boom and bust (fig. 6). At the same time, success brought new social problems of the kind documented by Rothman, particularly in the area of wages and affordable housing. Many families could no longer afford to buy a home in the area. 26

“Valley Valuations Soar to $6 Billion,” Star-News, 21 June 2007.

27

Matthew Preusch, “Mud-on-the-Boots Town Is Rising as a Resort,” New York Times, 22 December 2006, F7; Conor Dougherty, “The New American Gentry,” Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2008. Reprinted in the Star-News, 14 February 2008, B1, B10.

25

Reprinted with permission of the Star-News

Introduction

Fig. 6. Editorial cartoon.

Although the median county household income in 1999 was a modest $30,625, for example, between 1990 and 2000, the median value of owneroccupied housing in McCall increased from $66,500 to $151,300, nearly a 130 percent jump, and the disparity between wages and housing increased 41.85 percent for the same period. Between 2000 and 2004, the gap between wage and housing costs widened even more dramatically. The value of rural property increased 17 percent between 2003 and 2004, 36 percent between 2004 and 2005, and 58 percent between 2005 and 2006.28 The result was that it became difficult to recruit and retain middle-class professionals such as teachers and police officers due to rising housing costs and taxes. City council member Michael Kraumer, for example, resigned in 2008 because he could not afford to live in McCall and city residence was a 28

Information taken from “Idaho Community Profiles, McCall.” This document was available as a downloadable .pdf from the Idaho Department of Commerce and Labor in 2004. It is no longer available online as the entities have since split into the Idaho Department of Commerce and the Idaho Department of Labor and the websites have been reorganized; Housing Cost Gap in Idaho Counties, 1990–2000 was sent to me as a .pdf by Erik Kingston of the Idaho Housing and Finance Association and is not available online; Ben Salmon, “Value of Many Valley Parcels to Increase Again,” Star-News, 30 June 2005; Michael Wells, “Valley County Property Values Rocket Skyward,” StarNews, 8 June 2006, A1, A14.

26

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

requirement for his position.29 People fiercely believe in the right to private property, but ironically, many residents found themselves priced out of the real-estate market. The dramatic rise in taxes and housing costs led to various proposals for previously unthinkable solutions, such as subsidized housing initiatives (which were established and then quickly repealed), when a 2005 study indicated that nearly 87 percent of full-time residents needed public assistance to buy a home.30 There was also public debate over lake access and use, development of land, and traffic problems. In a 2006 survey, 84 percent of full-time residents thought that growth was important to the city’s vitality, but 80 percent also thought that McCall was expanding too quickly.31 The Planning and Zoning Commission initiated a moratorium on proposals for new developments inside the city of McCall in April of 2005 because it was overwhelmed and the city did not have the infrastructure to support new projects. A moratorium on new developments in the McCall Impact Area (the land directly outside the city’s boundaries) followed in July of the same year.32 Today the region is characterized by second, third, or fourth homes owned by the fabulously wealthy, who occupy them for a few weekends a year; an influx of retirees; an entrepreneurial middle class; and workers who cobble together part-time service or seasonal jobs, which to a large extent they have always done. At the time this book was finished in 2009, housing markets again had changed due to the global recession and Tamarack was bankrupt, but Valley County and McCall have become a destination resort area where the buying and selling of leisure is serious business. In economic terms, the Payette Lakes area has entered a postindustrial phase of capital in which industrial-based economies have declined and new, more-flexible, 29

Michael Wells, “McCall Council Member Resigns,” Star-News, 13 March 2008, A1, A10. See also Rothman (1998, 357).

30

The 2005 study indicated that the maximum price people with the area’s median income should pay for a house was $150,000, but, given current housing prices, it was difficult even for people who made more than that to buy a home. The study recommended that two-thirds of available subsidized houses should be earmarked for families making between $25,000 and $40,000, while one-third should be reserved for families making between $40,000 and $80,000. Ben Salmon, “Planner: McCall Needs up to 122 Affordable Homes Now,” Star-News, 21 July 2005.

31

Michael Wells, “Survey: McCall Residents Say Growth Is Happening Too Fast,” StarNews, 22 June 2006, A2.

32

Ben Salmon, “Development Ban Extended to Impact Area around McCall,” StarNews, 21 July 2005.

Introduction

27

service-oriented sectors have increased. This transformation entails a shift from an industrial basis, characterized by static, Fordist economies such as factory work and resource extraction (e.g., logging), to economic forms characterized in part by a globalized, flexible capitalism with service economies based on leisure as a commodity and a highly mobile workforce (Giddens 1990; Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994; Appadurai 1996). Whether viewed as positive, negative, or somewhere in between, these changes are important because they call into question ideas about place, identity, and community.

Winter Carnival, Community, and Change Winter carnivals conventionally are festivals featuring a variety of sports as well as the construction of snow and ice sculptures. Such festivals have existed since the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in North America in places such as Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and especially, Canada; outside North America well-known festivals include the Harbin Ice Lantern Festival in Heilongjiang Province, China; the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan; and snow festivals in various parts of Italy, to name a few. Winter festivals seem to excite the popular and tourist imagination rather than the scholarly one, because academic books on United States winter carnivals are practically nonexistent (except M. Harris 2003). Historical articles detail the origins of various late-nineteenth-century winter carnivals, particularly in Québec and Montreal (e.g., Spraker 1985; Geist 1984; Morrow 1996; Beattie 1984), but the majority of publications describing winter carnivals are tourist and college guides and photography, coffee-table, and children’s books (e.g., Gabbert 1999). Winter carnivals have been examined in terms of class (Lavenda 1992, 1997; Abbott 1988); as part of a broader context of the development of skiing and its culture (e.g., Lund 1977; Mazuzan 1972; Rothman 1998; Coleman 2004); and as a means of enacting national identity (Morrow 1988; D. Brown 1989; Poulter 2004). These orientations have influenced my perspective on the McCall event. A few winter carnivals in North America, such as the St. Paul Winter Carnival in Minnesota and the Carnaval de Québec in Canada, are vast enterprises that draw international audiences, but the majority of them, such as the one in McCall, are smaller affairs, and it was because local people specifically characterized their winter carnival as a “community festival” or as “good for the community” that I was primarily interested in it. Festivals

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

long have been associated with ideas about community because they are thought to bring people together and promote social bonding. According to Richard Bauman (2004), festivals are a complex genre that set up expectations for the accomplishment of community. Many local people saw McCall’s Winter Carnival as a community festival because it was organized and produced by local, unpaid, nonprofessional residents (e.g., professional festival event managers were not involved). It was also considered a community festival because it supported the community economically; although Winter Carnival was a tourist event, and so arguably produced for tourists, people considered attracting tourists (or more specifically, tourist dollars) as benefiting a larger, collective whole, a claim commonly associated with community festivals (Stoeltje 1996; Lavenda 1997). Because of this, the McCall Winter Carnival is a useful example for examining relationships between socioeconomic change and ideas about community and identity. Residents characterized Winter Carnival as a community festival, but they also frequently invoked something called “the community” in contexts outside of Winter Carnival as if it were an objective, concrete entity (Horton 2001). Debates about the effects of particular development projects on the community were common during my research period. An example during the latter part of my research was a proposal for the construction of a nine-thousand-foot private airstrip in a meadow. The rub is that there is no concrete reality that can be objectively identified in this way because community is a fuzzy term. When local people used the term community, they generally meant people who lived and worked in the area, but neither geography nor work was clearly demarcated. The geographic boundaries could be as large as the entire county or as small as the city of McCall, though concepts of community usually extended beyond the city. People who worked in the region frequently were considered part of the community, but so were retirees who lived in the area but did not work, people who lived there part time and worked elsewhere, or people who lived elsewhere but had a long-standing association with the region. There was a geographic component to the term as it was used locally, but the physical boundaries were more imagined than actual, complicating presumptions about isomorphic correspondence between geography and group (Shuman 1993; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Residence was also not a requirement for community membership, nor was it dependent on one’s length of residence. Old-timers and newcomers could be part of the community, although length of residence did give people status in some contexts (Gabbert 2007a). Status could

Introduction

29

be gained in other ways as well; money, for example, was important but not essential, and a public commitment to civic improvement, such as taking on a volunteer position, was interpreted as evidence of concern for the community and hence a badge of one’s membership. Consequently, local notions of community were open, fluid, and constantly shifting, rather than essentialized and static; they did not fall easily, for example, along lines of old-timer versus newcomer, geography, class, or insider versus outsider. Locals could identify community members based on length of residence or public visibility, but who was not a member of the community (one could be considered a “bad” member of the community, for example, but still be part of it) wasn’t really clear, and social change had only exacerbated the question of community boundaries and membership—and, by association, the notion of community good. Rather, community is a term that mediates geographical location, aggregates of actual people, and the world of ideas or the imagination (Noyes 2003a; see also Anderson [1983] 1991). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for example, defines community as both “a quality or state” and “a body of individuals,” suggesting, too, that the term swings between abstractions and observable realities. If the observable entity invoked by the term is fuzzy, community seems clearer as an idea, calling to mind good feelings, togetherness, consensus, shared values, bonding, unity, and a concern for the greater good. In the McCall area, ideas about community also included notions about the economy, moral obligations, neighborliness, reciprocity, and helping others. Taken together, these qualities impute to the term a positive, emotional, and moral valence (Glassie 1983). It is because of these positive ideas associated with community that Raymond Williams famously characterized it as a “warmly persuasive word” that “seems never to be used unfavorably” ([1976] 1983, 76). It is clear that the term has significant rhetorical power. Despite the fact that community is not an actual object that can be clearly identified, people in the McCall area took it to be so, and this was important because it motivated them to participate. Gerald Creed suggests that community is largely an “aspiration envisioned as an entity” (2006b, 22). As I explore in chapter one of this book, the general discourse of Winter Carnival was that it was good for the community, and most people stated this as the reason for their participation. Like other abstractions such as the state, a nation, or an organization, community doesn’t exist outside its enactment and representation (Kertzer 1988), and there was nothing else in the region that invoked, enacted, and symbolized community like Winter Carnival.

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

Problems arise, however, whenever a specific group of people attempts to enact and represent community, to make it real by putting the positive ideas associated with it into practice in the name of a larger whole that is thought to actually exist. The attempt to enact community through Winter Carnival generated positive feelings, fun, a sense of accomplishment and ownership, sociability, and togetherness. These positive, emotional attachments were important reasons why people participated. But Winter Carnival also inevitably generated ambivalence and even conflict, which are not dimensions frequently associated with community. The enactment of Winter Carnival in the name of community presumed common values, which frequently were those of the organizers and may or may not have been shared more broadly (Stoeltje 1993, 1996; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Whisnant [1983] 1995; Bendix 1997). Events designed to bind people together may be subject to multiple, sometimes conflicting, interpretations (Reed 1996), and they can be subverted for alternative, sometimes counterhegemonic purposes (Magliocco 2001; Borland 2006; Guss 2000; Lipsitz 1988). What makes festivals different from other kinds of public symbolic events designed to bind people together such as religious rituals or state ceremonies is that they are conducted under a rubric of play. Festivals are not serious, and people can dismiss them as unimportant if they choose (Lavenda 1996), although Jack Santino has pointed out in his study of public displays in Northern Ireland that fun is also subject to interpretation: what is interpreted as fun and harmless by one group may be taken as deadly serious by another (1996, 2004a). So it happened that the production, discourse, and performance of Winter Carnival made both the positive and conflicted dimensions of community visible (Stoeltje 1993). Frank E. Manning writes that “celebration does not resolve or remove ambiguity and conflict, but embellishes them” (1983b, 30). Exactly how and why Winter Carnival was good for the community was a subject of debate among some local people. What was this greater good? Who benefited? What about those who did not participate? On the one hand, most people supported the chamber and others’ claim that Winter Carnival was good for the community; on the other hand, many of these same people, including chamber members, organizers, participants, and residents, good-naturedly characterized Winter Carnival as something of a “pain in the neck” and said they did not personally benefit from it. Traffic came almost to a standstill and remained that way throughout the ten-day festival, particularly over the two weekends. Winter Carnival created chaos

Introduction

31

as swarms of visitors gathered around the sculptures, making it difficult to view them. Many locals hated traffic and crowds, and Winter Carnival forced these inconveniences on them with great intensity. Apocryphal stories were told about people who purchased their weekly groceries beforehand and vowed to “stay the hell out of town,” although despite such intentions, many allegedly crept in to look at the sculptures and wave to their friends in the parade. Others attended to their stores, conducting business as usual, answering questions, and attempting to protect their sculptures from tourists who frequently damaged them. For some local people, business was good. Others said they never made a penny, or they lost money; still others profited but complained about Winter Carnival’s inconveniences, such as street closures, anyway. So participants sometimes asked themselves, “Why are we doing this?” “Who is this really for?” Such questions were important queries about the nature of community, community identity, and what constituted a collective good. What these flurries of conversation and activities illustrated is that, although Winter Carnival engendered tension and controversy, this did not mean it had nothing to do with the community or that the community was somehow in crisis, despite recent socioeconomic changes. Gerald Creed notes that conventional ideas about communities (such as that they are homogeneous, static, bounded, and built on consensus, cooperation, and uniformity) are largely urban inventions about rural areas (2006a). This romantic approach excludes conflict from understandings of community or frames it as antithetical. In his own study of Bulgarian mumming, however, Creed found that local conceptions of community easily incorporated conflict, leading him to suggest that scholars should set aside a priori ideas and “examine community as a culturally contingent notion and document what it means to particular people in local and historical contexts” (2004, 57). In rural areas such as McCall, where community included a significant face-to-face component (see chapter one), it did not exclude conflict: to be involved, or not, in Winter Carnival was to be enmeshed in both the positive associations of community as well as debates and conflicts about what it was and should be. If community good was the primary topic surrounding the production and enactment of Winter Carnival, community identity was reified and represented in its events in various ways (Kertzer 1988). Émile Durkheim ([1912] 2001) argues that religious symbols represent society, that they reflect particular social arrangements. He notes that gatherings of people (the OED’s “body of individuals”) evoke powerful feelings (the OED’s

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“quality or state”) that transcend the individual and hence demand representation. Ideas are concretized and made visible to the public eye (Turner 1986, 24). In their study of the Luling, Texas, Watermelon Thump, Beverly Stoeltje and Richard Bauman illustrate the way highly abstract modernizing tendencies such as differentiation and centralization are concretized and made manifest in queen contests and the parade. They write, “These forces [differentiation and centralization] certainly represent powerful factors in the everyday life of the community, but the festival events give them a concreteness and immediacy that they do not have in daily life by making them into enactments and framing them as public displays” (1989, 170). Winter Carnival reified community identity. In ordinary life, community identity was in a state of flux and unclear. The primary debate in Valley County during my research period concerned community identity in relation to tourism and development, a subject that evokes opposing dynamics of change and stability, insiders and outsiders, and inward-facing or outward-facing orientations. These distinctions, however, are abstractions; reality is much more complex and muddy. As already discussed, it was difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish who was an insider and who was an outsider, and in each situation, it depended on who you were and whom you asked. In contrast to the indeterminacy and fuzziness of categories in ordinary life, Winter Carnival clarified and sharpened these oppositions in the identity debate by cleaving community identity into two clear and distinct halves—one representing a national and global (or outward, expansive) orientation, the other reflecting a more local or inward-facing one. This dramatization occurs in other festivals as well (e.g., Dundes and Falassi 1975). According to Dorothy Noyes, a festival “dramatize[s] actual or proposed social arrangements, especially collective identities and hierarchies, in order to win consent, force acquiescence, or destabilize other such representations” (2003b, 4). These two factors and the proper balance between them were at the heart of broader discussions of socioeconomic change and community identity, and Winter Carnival clarified these identity poles by making them visible and putting them on aesthetic display. Sabina Magliocco notes that “opposing elements in a society—order/disorder, nature/culture, and so on—are drawn more closely together in festival than at any other time of year” (2006, 10), and her study of the function of two Sardinian festivals within a context of socioeconomic change illustrates the way these separate, but complementary, festivals also acted differently and oppositionally: one was an event geared toward tourists, and one was a local event.

Introduction

33

Winter Carnival performed in a similar way by splitting collective identity down the middle. What might be termed “the local” manifested in festival performances featuring children, families, dogs, and nonprofessionals and events that articulated community values of neighborliness, reciprocity, and obligation. The more outward-facing dimensions of community identity were revealed in national and global representations of European sophistication, frontier ideologies, links to popular culture, the use of international folklore motifs, and the appropriation of a mass-mediated Mardi Gras style. The various manifestations of this identity split are discussed in chapters two through four, and I then explain the way they were united in the figure of Sharlie, the lake monster, in chapter five. The primary way Winter Carnival arranged these poles of collective identity was through festival energy, an idea that again ultimately can be traced back to Durkheim. Roger Abrahams writes that festivals redirect energy “through enforced confrontation; by role play . . . by making a lot of unusual noise and large-scale movement, including singing and dancing; by engineering arguments and developing heightened contests and notions of chance taking; and by invoking the spirit of nonsense and the topsyturvy” (1987, 180). Energy is also redirected through reversal, repetition, condensation, inversion, transformation, juxtaposition, and intensification (Stoeltje 1992). These are important devices of change (Smith 1975). To discern the ways festival energy was directed and for what purposes, I paid close attention to audience, contexts of use, and the role of contextualization, concepts foundational to performance theory as understood in folklore studies and derived from the work of Dell Hymes (1975a; see also Bauman 1977, 1986; and Paredes and Bauman 1972). The idea of contextualization (Bauman 1992; Bauman and Briggs 1990), for example, which refigures older notions of context from a reified situational surrounding to something indicated but not necessarily fully present within the event, was useful in helping me tease out links among local identity, popular culture, and national identity in the parades and the figure of Sharlie (see also Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Silverstein and Urban 1996). Paying attention to the audience at all the events helped me see the way Winter Carnival has, since the early twentieth century, quite clearly concretized the two poles that characterize the interplay of community identity in the Payette Lakes area (Georges 1969, 1981; Duranti 1986). Ultimately, the term community is complex, problematic, and difficult to define because it means different things to different people in different

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

contexts. Community was imagined, felt, reinforced, enacted, contradicted, and debated vis-á-vis Winter Carnival at a number of levels and in a number of ways, transforming it from a mere idea or enactment into a multilayered, multidimensional event.33 Community was symbolized as both an intensely local phenomenon and an integral part of hierarchical, abstract nesting levels, such as the nation (Kertzer 1988, 21; Errington 1987; Stoeltje and Bauman 1989; Stoeltje 1996). Positive emotions and ideals associated with community were generated through feelings of accomplishment, bonding, unity, and togetherness; however, collective grumbling about the amount of work and enormous hassle required to produce Winter Carnival also produced togetherness. The hassle, work, and effort led some people to question the validity and purpose of Winter Carnival and arrive at multiple and conflicting interpretations about what the event, and hence community, actually was and should be about. Paul Jordan-Smith and Laurel Horton (2001) point to the work of Etienne Wenger (1998), who, in his study of medical-claims processors, illustrates the way “communities of practice” reify ideas about practice and then modify what they do as a result: a feedback loop occurs. The same process occurred in Winter Carnival. Layers of belonging ultimately were created in multiple ways, starting with friends and family and then moving out into the workplace, the city, the region, and, ultimately, the nation and the rest of the world. These layers were produced, experienced, felt, and ultimately commented upon and assessed to shape future festivals: “Was it a good carnival?” “Was it successful?” “Did we put on a good show?” And, gingerly, “What will be next year’s theme?” Many people heaved a collective sigh of relief when Winter Carnival was finally over, and although some people swore they would never do it again, they also admitted that they probably would end up participating again in some way. Most people viewed Winter Carnival as a necessary civic duty, acknowledging tourists and tourism as an important part of life in a western resort town. They felt it was important for the town’s image because it promoted McCall by attracting media attention. Many people looked forward to (and back upon) the festival; they enjoyed it, but most importantly, they saw it as contributing to the community. And so the next year came around, and for a variety of reasons, people got involved again, annually fashioning and refashioning their society (Dundes and Falassi 1975). 33

Thanks to Lisa Gilman for this suggestion.

Introduction

35

Approach and Organization Though I attended all Winter Carnival events over the years, I do not analyze every single one in this book. Too many events occur over the course of the ten-day period, and many take place at the same time; such a project would be unwieldy. I do not, for example, discuss the private aspects of Winter Carnival such as the parties or reunions in people’s homes that were not open to the public. I chose to focus on those public events that most people considered the primary features of Winter Carnival and that ostensibly anybody could attend. These were the parades, opening ceremonies, the snow-sculpting and sports competitions, and the gambling events. These events gathered the most people together at the same time, and most of them were free, in contrast to events that were sponsored by private businesses and designed to raise money for them (see chapter one). I have, however, included the 2011 Schedule of Events as an appendix so that readers can see various types of events, some of which have changed since my research period ended. Since Winter Carnival is a story of interrelated parts, not a linear narrative, this book also is a story of interrelated parts rather than a linear narrative. Chapter one examines the framing of Winter Carnival as good for the community, and I explore this in terms of local ideas about economics (Joseph 2002). People had a range of responses to Winter Carnival, both positive and negative, yet they generally supported it and participated because they thought it was somehow good. I suggest that active participation, lack of participation, and talk about participation not only constituted a public discourse on the nature of community but also concretized classic American tensions between ideals of individualism and the demands of community. Chapters two though four discuss the ways Winter Carnival sharpened and clarified the oppositional poles of collective identity by splitting it into opposite and complementary halves. The theme of conflict is present here as well, particularly in chapters two and four. Chapter two illustrates the way festival energy split through the creation of snow sculptures in local and state competitions. Snow sculptures were McCall’s most prominent form of public art. Both the local and state competitions were situated in ongoing discourses about the nature of citizenship and belonging, but at very different scales. While the construction of snow sculptures in the local event was ostensibly for tourists, I argue that the real audience for this event was composed of neighbors, friends, and family (M. Jones 1997; Jordan-Smith

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

1999) and was an event where people evaluated each other’s level of civic engagement. In contrast, the state competition was outward oriented, used to situate local identity in national and international competitions. Chapter three examines the main Mardi Gras Parade and the Children’s Neon Light Parade in terms of style and audience. Both parades incorporated a Mardi Gras style that built on their respective previous logics, but for different purposes. The main parade commanded a hypothetically limitless audience and situated itself in a globally commodified field. The children’s parade signaled the beginning of Winter Carnival and, until very recently, was an event so local it barely required an audience. The incorporation of a Mardi Gras style into the children’s parade instead used transformations of light and energy to articulate a very different kind of identity. Chapter four examines the history of Winter Carnival as a sports festival. During the 1920s, organizers used Winter Carnival to give participants a role in the national development of winter sports. This national orientation apparently generated tension, however, and Winter Carnival split into two when the county seat of Cascade added its own Junior Winter Carnival for local children. When Winter Carnival was revived during the mid-twentieth century, sports (particularly skiing) again situated the area within national frameworks, this time through consumerism and manufactured associations with European ski styles. Chapter five is devoted to the relationship between McCall’s Winter Carnival and a local legend cycle about a lake monster named Sharlie. I argue that Sharlie is fundamentally an ambivalent, carnivalesque figure associated with play and laughter as well as seriousness and mystery. Sharlie showed up in a variety of ways in Winter Carnival and united, rather than split, community identity. As both a playful and ambivalent character, Sharlie also condensed many people’s feelings about Winter Carnival. In the conclusion, I outline the techniques of community making as manifested in Winter Carnival as well as the interrelationships and differences between the idea of community and its enactment. I suggest that the change that has transformed the Payette Lakes area appears to emanate from local people themselves and that ethnographically examining tourism-based expressive culture offers an inward-out perspective on community, identity, and change, rather than a top-down or outward-in one. In effect, it presents a perspective on tourism and transformation in the New West as understood by the people who actually live there.

1 Relations of Self and Community Participation and Conflict in Winter Carnival People aren’t neutral on the carnival. They’re either for it or against it. Tom Grote, editor of the Star-News Festivals are ultimately community affairs . . . . in which many of the basic notions of community are put to test. Roger Abrahams, “An American Vocabulary of Celebrations” Wherever I looked for community, what I found were nonprofits. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community

L

ocal people in the Payette Lakes area had a range of feelings about and responses to Winter Carnival. Some people loved it, others loved to hate it, but hardly anyone had no opinion about it. Simon Bronner (1981) notes that in Indiana, people were ambivalent about turtle hunting, butchering, and eating, yet they did these activities anyway for a variety of reasons that sometimes were contradictory. The McCall case is similar. Many people in the McCall area supported Winter Carnival because they thought it was important, they thought it was good for something they imagined as the community, and they thought it was fun. They had fond memories of past Winter Carnivals, and the event connected them to friends and family. Yet the festival was also rife with complaints and tension because Winter Carnival was very demanding. It required a lot of time, money, and effort to produce, and it disrupted daily life for ten days by increasing traffic, noise, and crowds. It pushed the limits of patience, tolerance, and generosity. The 37

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

result could be feelings of ambivalence: sometimes the very same people who hated the crowds and the interruption were the ones who helped make Winter Carnival a reality. Local resident Rob Lyons, for example, chaired Winter Carnival from 2001 to 2003 and codirected it two additional years as well. He expressed contradictory feelings in a quite good-natured way when he pointed out that although he was willing to chair, he usually did not attend: I don’t go to the carnival. There’s too many people [visitors]. Well, sorry! [laughs] [But] without the people, there would be nothing here in McCall. Not enough logging to support the town anymore; you have to have the tourists. I think most people know that; I mean, you know it’s kind of obvious. Everybody bitches. Very few people are excited that the carnival is coming, I mean, outright. They don’t say it. Maybe inside they kind of like it, but outright they don’t say it: “Oh, great! The carnival’s here!”1 In this chapter I explore these contradictory feelings about Winter Carnival, which seemed common. In doing so, I don’t want to give the impression that people thought Winter Carnival was bad—indeed, the opposite was true. Most people thought Winter Carnival was good, they supported it, they were proud of it, and they enjoyed it when it came around. At the same time, overlooking these contradictory feelings would ignore an important dimension of festival production, and I believe such feelings are common in other kinds of festivals; the McCall case is not unique. I examine them here in order to better understand how community actually works. The ambivalence that some people felt about Winter Carnival speaks to broader historic tensions in American society between the values of individualism and the perceived demands of community (Bellah et al. 1996). In a tradition of scholarship dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville, observers have suggested that Americans join voluntary associations and organizations more than their European counterparts, and de Tocqueville thought these practices led to the “habits of the heart” that made for a democratic society. Some scholars think such associations generate social capital and contribute to moral development, and they characterize them as 1

Rob Lyons, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 7 January 2001. All people interviewed for this chapter did so as private individuals. The views they represent are their own and not of the chamber of commerce or other organizations. All transcriptions have been lightly edited to remove filler words; otherwise they are untouched.

Relations of Self and Community

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community-generating institutions (e.g., Putnam 1995, 2000).2 At the same time, however, Americans apparently are ambivalent about joining these organizations because individuals place a strong emphasis on self-sufficiency and are hesitant about giving up some of their freedom for the greater whole. The question, therefore, of how and why people join, volunteer, or participate is important (Ogilvie 2004). Symbolic cultural performances like festivals speak to these broad tensions between ideals of self-sufficiency and the perceived restrictions of communal life (Errington 1990). Winter Carnival engendered the largest voluntary association in the region and was conducted explicitly in the name of community. This chapter explores the reasons why people participated in Winter Carnival by examining what the deployment of the term “community” accomplished (Creed 2006b). Miranda Joseph writes that “community is one of the most motivating discourses and practices circulating in contemporary society” (2002, xxx), and certainly the idea of community was a powerful motivating force in McCall. People who volunteered or supported Winter Carnival in other ways (such as through monetary donations) ultimately did so in the name of community. But calls for community through Winter Carnival were not obeyed unreflectively. The immediate, personal motivations for participation illustrate that the idea of community was broad and included a range of elements. People volunteered for and participated in Winter Carnival because they thought it was fun, they enjoyed it, and it connected them to family and friends; they also got involved out of self-interest, guilt, or because they thought no one else would do it. Some people did not enjoy Winter Carnival personally, but they took part anyway because they thought it was important for the greater whole. The call to become part of Winter Carnival in the name of community had a disciplining and regulatory function of which local people were quite aware. This meant that Winter Carnival was not simply an expression of boosterism, as sometimes commodified tourist festivals are thought to be, but rather a complex forum through which ideas about community were debated. Production of the event, whether any individual participated or not, annually called into question commonly held ideas about community: what it meant, and how it operated. By exploring 2

A number of scholars have vociferously challenged Putnam’s proposition that participation in voluntary associations has declined, as well as his assumption that this reduction represents less community. See, for example, McLean, Schultz, and Steger (2002), especially the essays by Shapiro, Steger, and Schultz.

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the dynamic tension between the commonly held belief that Winter Carnival was “good for the community” and the actual motivations of individuals who volunteered, this chapter reveals that not only were local conceptions of community broad enough to include conflict and dissent, elements that are often considered antithetical to community, but also that the conflicts that Winter Carnival engendered constituted a public discourse about the nature and meaning of community. It is little wonder that, given the weighted nature of participation, many people both loved and hated Winter Carnival.

Some Basics: Organization, Financing, and Structure of Winter Carnival To understand why people sometimes were ambivalent about Winter Carnival, it is first necessary to know how it was organized and financed because the organization of communicative resources is important to meaning (Stoeltje 1993; Bauman and Briggs 1990). According to Robert Lavenda (1983), community festivals in Minnesota are organized according to two models: a family style of organization where a single person is responsible for everything, and a corporate style that entails a clear hierarchy consisting of numerous subcommittees. Winter Carnival was a bit of both: it adhered to a corporate style of organization because a main organizing committee existed that had an informal relationship with the chamber of commerce, but it also followed family style because the chair of Winter Carnival was responsible for overseeing everything. Unlike a family style of organization, however, where the chair may serve for a long period of time, the chair of the McCall Winter Carnival rarely lasted more than a couple of years. Winter Carnival was not a formal organization. It was a for-profit event associated with the chamber of commerce, and it was the chamber’s primary way of making money apart from membership dues. The McCall Area Chamber of Commerce was a nonprofit, volunteer, private organization coordinated by a board of directors and designed to promote the economic health of the area. It was called the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce, rather than just the McCall Chamber of Commerce, because of the rural nature of the region: the city’s influence extended into a formally designated impact zone beyond the legal boundaries of the town. As an official program of the chamber of commerce, the McCall Winter Carnival was dominated by business and professional interests, suggesting that the festival was a topdown, hierarchically organized affair.

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But the relationship between the chamber, the festival, participants, and ideas about community was very complicated because Winter Carnival also depended almost entirely on volunteer efforts. The only paid chamber position, which did not officially have anything to do with Winter Carnival, was an office manager, who was responsible for day-to-day affairs year round and helped with Winter Carnival when it occurred. No one else was paid anything to make it happen. Organizers and volunteers might or might not be associated with the chamber, and prominent chamber members, such as people on the board of directors, might or might not be involved directly in Winter Carnival. As Star-News editor Tom Grote pointed out, there was not a clear, one-to-one correspondence between people who organized, volunteered, and participated in Winter Carnival and the chamber. This complicated the notion that Winter Carnival was merely, or only, a chamber event. The businesses that the chamber represented generally were small, local, family-owned ones. This was important for several reasons. First, most businesspeople in the region were shopkeepers. To say that Winter Carnival was dominated by business and professional interests means that it was run by working- and middle-class small-business owners, not CEOs of major corporations. Second, historically there have been very few national chains or franchises in the region. There were no national chains or businesses, apart from the Chevron gas station, the Napa Auto Parts store, two banks, and the Subway sandwich shop, in the town of McCall until the mid-1990s.3 The lack of national chains meant there was a long-standing sense of economic interdependence among people; businesses were a source of employment for residents, and local businesses depended on both locals and tourists for their economic livelihood. Businesses stood or fell on their own without the fallback support of a national headquarters, while the city and civic life generally depended on economic and volunteer donations from local businesses because the city was poor and tax revenue was small. Ideally the chamber met in late spring to choose a Winter Carnival chair and decide on a theme for the following January. The Winter Carnival chair usually was a member of the chamber of commerce and frequently on the board of directors, although this was not always the case and certainly not a requirement. The chair oversaw the entire festival. It was a problem to find a chair, but once that person was chosen, he or she began to organize 3

There is currently a much-debated city ordinance that limits business-chain franchises within the city. Michael Wells, “Comments Split over Franchises,” Star-News, 17 September 2009.

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

the Winter Carnival committee, which consisted of chairs for festival events, plus other necessary positions such as someone in charge of finding sponsors and prizes. The committee numbered approximately twenty people but varied annually. The committee and the chair reported directly to the chamber but had nearly complete autonomy in decision making. To put the committee together, the chair spread the word around town and advertised in the newspaper, announcing when the Winter Carnival meetings would be held. The Winter Carnival chair largely relied on goodwill; volunteers just showed up to the meetings, or not. Some carnival chairs held regular committee meetings so that the volunteers got to know each other as a group; other chairs simply met with event heads individually to get tasks accomplished. Two types of events ended up on the Winter Carnival calendar: chamber events and private ones. Chamber events were sponsored by the chamber and either made money for the organization or were free. Private events were organized by local businesses, which used Winter Carnival for their own profit. They paid a fee to the chamber to be placed on the festival calendar, and the money they earned from the event went to that particular organization. The chamber in 2009 charged $150 to place for-profit organizations on the festival calendar and $100 for nonprofit ones. Most of the major festival events, such as the snow-sculpture competitions and the parades, were free chamber events, and they were held consistently from year to year if the chamber could secure enough volunteers. Examples of private events in 2009 included snowshoe golf, which was sponsored by the McCall golf course, and an auction presented by a nonprofit organization called the Snowdon Wildlife Sanctuary. Organizers for these private events were not part of the Winter Carnival committee and did not usually attend the meetings, although they certainly were welcome. Rather, they stayed in touch with the Winter Carnival chair, but with little interference or direction. A new event ended up on the program if someone had an idea that the committee liked and there was room on the calendar. Comedy night, for example, which was held at the Alpine Playhouse, was a new event in 2007 and was popular enough that a second night was added in 2008. The chamber attempted to schedule several events on weekend nights so that festival-goers had a choice of possibilities. Each event chair was responsible for organizing a specific event, securing equipment and volunteers, and ensuring that the event ran smoothly. Chairs submitted their funding requests to the chamber and were reimbursed if

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they spent some of their own money. Depending on whether the event was large or small, chairing an event could be a big job. It was obviously desirable to have event chairs with previous experience. The Winter Carnival chair often contacted people who had previously overseen specific events. Some people such as Diane Wiegand, a realtor and resident of McCall who had organized the Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship since 1995, chaired the same event for years. These people knew the logistics of running a specific event, and those events were considered theirs until they opted out, illustrating that there was a sense of ownership in portions of the festival. Organizing and securing sponsorship for events took place throughout the late fall and early winter, right up to the moment that Winter Carnival began at the end of January. As an organization, the chamber formally helped the Winter Carnival committee by contributing the time of the office manager. Shirley Hicks was one of the office managers during my research period; she answered the phone, helped contact sponsors, did mailings, processed funds, wrote letters, and helped with advertising and coordinating chairs and events. It was difficult to get concrete numbers, but Hicks estimated that Winter Carnival needed about a hundred or more volunteers to operate successfully. Her husband, John, who cochaired Winter Carnival with her in 2007, put the number as high as three or four hundred. Although Winter Carnival was a for-profit chamber event, it did not always make money. In good financial times, the chamber had approximately twenty thousand dollars in its Winter Carnival account to begin preparations. Some years, however, for various reasons, the chamber started organizing Winter Carnival with no budget at all. In 2008, for example, the chamber experimented for the first time with hiring a professional eventmanagement company to ease the burden of the Winter Carnival chair. The decision, however, was not cost-effective since the profit margin for Winter Carnival is not large, and so the chamber began the 2009 Winter Carnival with no money. As another example, in 2004 the executive director of the chamber of commerce embezzled money so that the chamber actually had a debt before even beginning to organize the festival the following year. Shirley Hicks estimated that Winter Carnival brought in approximately seventy thousand dollars, a figure that included sponsorship and ticket and T-shirt sales. It did not include expenses or the start-up money for the next year, so it was likely that the chamber made between ten and fifteen thousand dollars in profit during a good year. But it was difficult to estimate how

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much money Winter Carnival brought in annually because chamber bookkeeping was sometimes spotty until very recently and, also, the success of Winter Carnival depended to a great extent upon the weather, so revenues varied greatly from year to year. Warm weather or rain could ruin the festival because the town turned to mud and there was no snow to build sculptures or run winter-oriented activities. It could also be too cold. But cold was preferable to warm weather or rain because many people would endure bitter cold to attend, although numbers might be fewer. In addition to relying exclusively on volunteers to organize and run events, the chamber depended heavily on sponsors and donations by local businesses to grease Winter Carnival’s financial wheels. Each event required money, and many, such as bingo, offered cash prizes. Late spring was ideal to begin Winter Carnival preparations for the following January because potential sponsors were in the midst of planning their fiscal year. If sponsors were contacted too late, such as in August, they might not have money to donate because they might have already planned their fiscal year. Sponsor money went into the Winter Carnival account and was designated for specific events. It covered the cost of food, supplies, or furniture rental, whatever was necessary to make an event run smoothly. Money left over went into the general Winter Carnival account for other events that might not have received enough underwriting. Sponsors were compensated for their donations through advertising and public acknowledgment; they could also be given a name and banner for the event. For example, at one point during my research if a business agreed to sponsor an event for five years, that event was named after it for that time. McCall Mortgage Company, for example, agreed to sponsor the Monster Dog Pull for five years, so in 2009, that event was called the McCall Mortgage Company Monster Dog Pull. If the sponsor did not pony up for another five years, the name of the event was changed. Structurally Winter Carnival began with the Children’s Neon Light Parade and opening ceremonies on the Friday evening of the last weekend in January. The event ran ten days, through Sunday of the first weekend in February. The local snow-sculpting competition always took place over the first weekend. The sculptures were completed and judged on Friday morning, and the opening ceremonies were held that evening. The opening ceremonies included a bonfire and musical performance as well as a beer garden and vendors, and it concluded with a fireworks display over the lake. There was also a comedy night. The main Mardi Gras Parade took place on the following Saturday at noon, and by 2009 Monte Carlo Night, a casino-style

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gambling event, had taken the Saturday evening spot, although in previous years a ball had been held occasionally. Sometimes there was also a teen dance. Events were mixed during the week and varied from year to year but included a snowshoe golf tournament, skiing activities, snowmobile races, a Monster Dog Pull, wine tasting, the Beard, Hairy, and Sexy-Leg Contest, and bingo. The Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship began during the middle of the week so that visitors had new sculptures to see on the second weekend. The events on the weekends drew the most tourists. They also attended events during the week, but some events, such as the Beard, Hairy, and Sexy-Leg Contest, were aimed at locals. Shirley Hicks also noted that if an event was a regular part of Winter Carnival, the chamber organized it whether it had a sponsor or not. In 2009, for example, Bingo Blackout did not have a general sponsor, although there was a sponsor for the fivehundred-dollar prize. In this case, the chamber simply made less money on the event. More importantly, as will be explained later, the structure was partly dictated by whether the Winter Carnival chair could secure enough volunteers for a particular event.

Folk Reaganomics Local residents knew that Winter Carnival was a fund-raising activity for the chamber of commerce, which contributed to some of the ambivalence about volunteering. Some McCall residents liked Winter Carnival and had no problem with the role of the chamber. Other people felt conflicted about the chamber because it historically was fairly ad hoc and disorganized. I talked to members of the chamber who loved Winter Carnival but ironically disliked the chamber. I talked to chamber presidents who thought that the chamber was making Winter Carnival too commercial, and to other chamber or board members who wistfully wished the chamber would abandon Winter Carnival altogether. All this clearly made the relationship between the chamber and the actual production of Winter Carnival complex. The duty of the chamber president, for example, as 2007 president Don Parker put it, was “to mostly stay out of their [the Winter Carnival committee’s] way.”4 Tom Grote frequently said that Winter Carnival was too big to be under the umbrella of 4

Don Parker, interview with the author, digital recording, McCall, Idaho, 17 July 2007.

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

the chamber of commerce: “I’ve always advocated Winter Carnival should be its own separate nonprofit corporation. . . . It has to be year round, its own board of directors, its own executive director, because people who are necessarily into Winter Carnival aren’t necessarily into the chamber.”5 Grote’s statement is true in that people tended to treat Winter Carnival more as a nonprofit community organization than a profit-generating event for the non-profit chamber of commerce. No one, including chamber members and presidents, volunteered for Winter Carnival out of dedication to the chamber of commerce. Rather, the single most overarching reason for volunteering was that people thought Winter Carnival was good for the community, what Carole Farber (1983) identifies as an official town myth. By myth I do not necessarily mean that it was untrue; I mean that it was a sacred idea. It was a claim that allowed people to negotiate their ambivalence about the chamber by claiming ownership of the festival that was more broadly based; it is also a claim frequently made by formal nonprofit organizations, although Winter Carnival was not one of these. People commonly said that the reason Winter Carnival existed was to make money by bringing tourists to the area during a slow part of the winter season; nobody considered the fact that the chamber made money on some festival events a justifiable reason for its existence. Local resident, businessperson, and snow sculptor Nancy Krahn explained why her family, who owned a business called Krahn’s Home Furnishings (see chapter two), supported Winter Carnival through monetary donations, volunteer efforts, and building snow sculptures: Winter Carnival is supposed to be a community effort to bring tourists to the area, so we feel like it’s really important that everybody participate. And so that’s probably the main reason we do it. We don’t do it because we want to win the Grand Prize, and we don’t do it because it brings us so much business. We do it because it’s part of participating in the community and being involved in what’s going on. And it’s good for the rest of the community regardless of whether we benefit from it or not. We will in some way, whether it’s immediate or not.6 Jane Sager was a retired realtor and resident who sculpted and had been heavily involved in Winter Carnival for many years. Originally from 5

Tom Grote, interview with author, digital recording, McCall, Idaho, 26 January, 2008.

6

Nancy Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 19 February 2001.

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Michigan, Sager moved to McCall in 1980 and built her first sculpture in the local competition in 1981. As a person who, when I met her, spent her winters in warmer climates and occasionally returned to McCall to build a sculpture for Winter Carnival, she was a good example of someone who was a member of the community but no longer lived there full time. She said that the reason she built sculptures was so that “business would benefit. Obviously my individual sculpture wasn’t going to get anybody up here, but a successful carnival would. . . . How much business is May Hardware [a local business] going to get during carnival? They [visitors] are not buying nuts and bolts and paint. But it’s a long-term investment . . . it was just a real sense of community and being involved and helping out.”7 The idea that Winter Carnival was good for the community was espoused by the chamber of commerce as well as nearly every single local organizer, volunteer, and festival bystander that I talked to, whether they were associated with the chamber or not. Even those people who really disliked Winter Carnival felt that it was good for the community and therefore something of a necessary burden that they were willing to tolerate. Community benefit was the single-most-important factor that people gave for its existence. When I asked people in McCall what they meant by community when they said that Winter Carnival was good for it, the majority said that they specifically meant the economic community, and so Winter Carnival was implicated in discourses of development. This notion of an economic community encompassed two meanings. In the narrowest sense, it referred to a very specific group of businesses that immediately benefited from Winter Carnival tourist dollars. These included restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and other tourism-related businesses; interestingly the chamber usually was not listed among the businesses that benefited. The definition of community in this narrow context was an acknowledgment that the primary regional economy was based on tourism—rather than, say, forestry, as it had been thirty years before—and its usage excluded nontourism-based sectors of the local economy, such as the Forest Service. Jane Sager’s daughter, realtor Diane Wiegand said, “I look at it from a business standpoint; that’s how I survive. That’s how I make my living—on tourism. You want to make it [Winter Carnival] the best that you can.”8 7

Jane Sager, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 19 July 2005.

8

Diane Wiegand, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 19 July 2005.

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

This position represents the interests of the entrepreneurial and professional class. Lavenda (1992) notes that the majority of people in small towns go along with what the businesspeople say, so class issues are usually muted in small-town festivals. Miranda Joseph (2002) goes further, arguing that discourses of community exist in a supplemental relationship to capitalism. Joseph believes that communities do not naturally emerge from features such as geographical location or shared identity but rather are constituted by consumption and production. Capitalism, in turn, depends on the production of new identities and social formations, including communities, for its continuance. Nonprofit organizations, for example, which “often stand in for community metonymically,” may not profit directly, but they promote flows of capital, and many theorists consider them to be hegemonic institutions that legitimate social hierarchies (Joseph 2002, 70). The McCall Area Chamber of Commerce was a nonprofit economic-development organization that relied on volunteer efforts and the rhetoric of communal good to produce Winter Carnival, which was an event designed to generate profit for itself and others. It could therefore easily be argued that in this context community was a form of resource mobilization to benefit the few (Creed 2006a). Indeed, some people in McCall wondered why they worked so hard for Winter Carnival when only a few businesses immediately profited, and this uncertainty created tension. But to stop here would be to understand only one level of the complex relationships linking the festival, the local economy, and ideas about community. Joseph is careful to emphasize that community cannot be reduced merely to an element of capitalism. Nonprofits, for example, articulate desires outside of capitalism such as reciprocity and shared values, which is why Joseph feels the relationship of community to capitalism is supplementary (2002, 72). In the McCall case, although the notion that Winter Carnival was good for the community reflected class interests, it certainly did not represent all of them, illustrating that even small class-based groups are diverse. Some businesses, such as restaurants, gas stations and hotels, for example, made money during Winter Carnival, but a lot of McCall’s businesspeople said they did not earn additional income from Winter Carnival; in some cases, they lost it. Former resident and local businesswoman Barbie Burke owned a spa and built sculptures annually for Winter Carnival, but she actually closed during the festival because nobody came and closing was easier than constantly denying people bathrooms. Patty and Dean Hovdey, owners of a sporting-goods store called Hometown Sports, noted that their

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regular weekend customers avoided McCall during Winter Carnival and many people pointed to May Hardware as a classic example of a business that did not make money during Winter Carnival. To justify this lack of income, most people I spoke with subscribed to a kind of “folk trickle-down economic theory” that drew people together through imagined economic interdependence and a strong belief about money that can be summed up by the proverb, “What goes around, comes around.” It was this second, more broadly based idea to which the phrase “economic community” more commonly referred, rather than the narrower one just discussed. People firmly believed that money circulated locally, which meant that if your neighbor was doing well financially, you ultimately would benefit too because that person would spend money in your store, hire you or a family member as an employee, or support your business. In other words, the attention generated by Winter Carnival was perceived to benefit everybody, so what was good for others was ultimately good for oneself. In a study of a midwestern town he called by the pseudonym Appleton, Hervé Varenne (1977) found that people joined groups because they were individuals and perceived these groups would benefit them personally: individualism and community could be two sides of the same coin. Local articulation of utilitarianism and self-interest as being connected to the success of others was a theme that ran throughout my research. Nancy Krahn’s husband, Dan, said: “[Winter Carnival] is a boost for the local economy. A lot of the merchants need that . . . it services them. But in a community, the dollars turn over enough that it really is important to everybody.”9 Hometown Sports owner Patty Hovdey said, “we couldn’t not be involved. Dean [her husband] and I are the sort of people who like to know what’s going on and be a part of everything, and Winter Carnival is very important here.”10 Jane Sager agreed: “The economy of this town affects everybody, absolutely everybody. Everybody here who lives here is affected by the success, or failure, of local businesses because this is where we live.”11 This second and broader definition of an economic community was not restricted to only the entrepreneurial or professional classes or to tourist-based businesses. It meant anyone who had to work for a living—in other words, anyone who was 9

Dan Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 21 February 2001.

10

Patty and Dean Hovdey, interview with the author, field notes, McCall, Idaho, 16 July 2005.

11

Jane Sager interview.

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

not retired or independently wealthy—and so implicitly drew on already-felt class divisions between the haves and have-nots typical of resort towns, where class differences between visitors and residents can be noticeable (Rothman 1998; Coleman 1996, 2004). Don Parker described Winter Carnival as a means of economic survival: “It’s easy to forget that there’s no law that says a town like McCall has to survive. . . things have been pretty good around here—Tamarack going in, and there’s a lot of for-sale signs and a lot of helpwanted signs. But you go back five to eight years, you couldn’t—there was no work . . . It is survival. It’s easy to forget it can be on those stark of terms . . . we could die. We could, and we still could.”12 This perceived economic interdependence was reinforced by the way community was imagined and experienced outside of Winter Carnival. Community in McCall entailed a “web of connectedness to others that continue[d] beyond special events” such as Winter Carnival (Feintuch 2001, 149), and, as in other local, face-to-face communities, these connections were partially imagined (O’Rourke 2006). Everyone did not literally know everyone in McCall, but people could usually place others into some kind of social configuration—they usually had friends or acquaintances in common—and this lent a social dimension and a sense of obligation to ideas about community. People living in the area traditionally had postoffice boxes rather than mail delivery, for example, so the post office, along with the grocery store, was a social place. People visited and exchanged news as they do in any small town. They knew who had gotten married, who was in jail last weekend, who had lost his or her job, and who had moved away. The level of knowledge people had about each other was vividly illustrated to me once during my fieldwork when a new friend enthusiastically stopped me on the street and said, “I know your schedule today!” She then proceeded to tell me, precisely, whom I planned to interview and when. Therefore, despite the fact that some businesses made less money, or even lost money during Winter Carnival, the perception that community involved economic interdependence encouraged businesspeople to participate because they believed that what was good for the community was good for them in the long run. Burke explained, “I own a spa. If people in this town don’t have money, nobody is going to come in and get a manicure. So it’s also selfish in a way; ultimately, it’s good for me.”13 Former Winter 12

Don Parker interview.

13

Barbie Burke, interview with the author, field notes, McCall, Idaho, 15 July 2005.

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Carnival cochair John Hicks pointed to May Hardware as an example of a business that did not make money yet fully supported Winter Carnival, saying, “You know it’s just not a business-positive time for them at all. But they do it because they think it’s the right thing to do. They support it.”14 A presumed shared idea about how money circulates obviously was an important motivation for producing Winter Carnival, but Hicks’s interesting phrase, “it’s the right thing to do,” also implied the existence of a moral imperative laid on top of economic interdependence. Local notions of community connoted a set of obligations and neighborliness that complicated simple utilitarian frameworks (Errington 1990; Glassie 2006; Cashman 2008). Community constituted a set of imagined relations based on what Robert Putnam calls “generalized reciprocity” (1995), which meant that people were willing to contribute to public good without the expectation of something specific in return. Tom Grote explained that Winter Carnival was about promoting McCall’s image, and that was economically good for everybody. “People [tourists] don’t spend any money [during Winter Carnival]. They come in, and they walk around, and they leave, and they usually buy from street vendors, not the established businesses.” His newspaper generated lots of advertising revenue, for example, but he said he thought Winter Carnival mostly put the idea of McCall in people’s minds so they might return later: “I don’t think Winter Carnival is that much of an economic boost for the ten days. They sell a lot of gasoline. The convenience stores do well, but it’s the buzz that it generates that makes people come back.”15 Don Parker echoed these thoughts: “Maybe they [businesses] don’t get anything immediate, except for too many strangers using their bathrooms. But grandmother or uncle or dad—while the kids are running around— window-shop and look at things and remember. Anecdotally, we’ve had dozens of people, businesses, or individuals that ended up moving here because of carnival.” Parker told a story about his own experience as a visitor to Winter Carnival when he lived in Boise, saying that his ex-wife once returned to McCall after Winter Carnival to buy furniture: “She used to drag me up to carnival every three to four years or something like that, and I would whine and grumble and groan and hang around the hotel room and drink a lot of beer. But during one of the obligatory ‘let’s go see the statues walks’ . . . we just went into Krahn’s just to sit down for a little bit and she 14

John Hicks, interview with the author, digital recording, McCall, Idaho 16 July 2007.

15

Tom Grote interview.

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

saw an odd recliner. . . . about six weeks later she bought it.”16 It was this absolute belief in generalized reciprocity, coupled with a kind of local version of Reaganomics, that undergirded local ideas about community and, hence, the entire festival.

Why People Volunteered The proposition of an actual entity called the community and the notion of a community good based on generalized economic reciprocity were the main reasons people gave me for why they volunteered for or otherwise participated in Winter Carnival. The abstract notion of community good, however, usually was not quite enough to get people involved as individuals. Rather, ideals of community good were coupled with and justified a range of more specific and immediate motivations, ranging from emotional attachment and personal investment to social pressure. This suggests that while the idea of community was a powerful motivating force, it was only set into motion by a range of more immediate social and contextual factors. One of the most important reasons people participated was because they had positive emotional associations. Connections to one’s childhood and family, for example, were important reasons for getting involved. John Hicks said that he wanted to create memories for children: “I look back on my life, [and] there was an old fishing pole or something that I remembered, or there was something that happened in town like the county fair or something like that. Those things just stay with you. . . . that’s the stuff that kids grow up with; they’ll always remember those.”17 Former chair Rob Lyons participated in Winter Carnival because of his father. His dad worked at the Shore Lodge for twenty-five years and helped build many of the early large sculptures, including a number of the Grand Prize winners, so his sense of obligation to Winter Carnival stemmed from familial connections. Gabbert: Why is it that you feel for you personally the carnival is important? Lyons: Memories of how it was—my dad. He passed away a couple of years ago. And I’d love to have him here because he’d have a wealth of knowledge. . . . it’s incredible.18 16

Don Parker interview.

17

John Hicks interview.

18

Rob Lyons interview.

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Diane Wiegand was also involved because her parents, Jane and Hal Sager, were instrumental in making Winter Carnival happen for so many years. Wiegand said, “Why do it? Because it’s a tradition; it’s been done for so many years. I take it personally because it was very much part of my family. So for me personally, it’s something I have to carry on because I know how much it means to them. Whether or not I can get my daughter to do it—who knows? [laughs]”19 Many people also had an altruistic sense of community spirit, which was another important reason for volunteering. Fred Drake once noted, “There’s more civic contributions by individuals in McCall than most other towns that I’ve seen.”20 When John and Shirley Hicks cochaired in 2007, they did it partly because they thought Winter Carnival was important for community spirit and they liked volunteering. Hicks explained his involvement: Hicks:

Well, I was on the chamber board for a number of years, and just nobody stepped up this year. That’s the usual way that things happen. I talked to my wife to see if she was willing—she’s always been a longtime enjoyer of Winter Carnival and wanted to see it go well. Nobody was stepping up so we decided to give it a try. Gabbert: Can you tell me a little about what made you decide to do it? Hicks: Uh, oh, just community spirit. We wanted to see it continue on and wanted to see somebody that tried to do a good job.21

In identifying community spirit as his reason for participation, however, Hicks pointed out several times in our interview that he volunteered because no one else was willing to chair that year, suggesting the important role that obligation plays in motivating people. The idea that there was “no one else to do it” was pervasive when I asked people why they volunteered. People felt Winter Carnival was important, but many people said that they only actually participated when they thought that a specific event (or Winter Carnival in general) possibly might not occur. The possibility of Winter Carnival not happening due to lack of volunteers was important. Many people I talked to were not necessarily eager to volunteer, but they were also unwilling to let some aspect of Winter Carnival go. Fred Drake was president of the chamber of commerce in 2001 and an engineer by training. He originally became involved in Winter Carnival because there was nobody 19

Diane Wiegand interview.

20

Fred Drake, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 12 March 2001.

21

John Hicks interview.

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Winter Carnival in a Western Town

else to build the stage and he had the necessary skills. Rob Lyons recalled, “I did the snowshoe golf last year [2000], and if I hadn’t stepped in on that, it would have never happened.”22 This motivation was important because people framed their participation in the name of a community good, but in practice participation often was dictated by a perceived lack, suggesting that enactments of community were engendered not only through boosterism or a sense of generalized reciprocity but also by an alleged impending crisis or a perceived lack of initiative on the part of others. The immediate (frequently dire) needs of Winter Carnival activated an underlying sense of obligation, feeling of responsibility, and perception of the importance of community that already existed among a network of individuals (Noyes 2003a). Tom Grote explained, There is a sense of obligation in the community to do it. Whether it’s intimidation or greed, it doesn’t matter really because it’s going to happen anyway. It can’t not happen because you couldn’t cancel it if you tried . . . it’s a cultural event. It’s almost like Chinese New Year. It’s on the calendar, you get ready to celebrate it, and you just do it. . . . There’s a sense of obligation . . . to carnival, to the community. And in the end, we’re a tourist town.23 Don Parker owned a small print shop and was another example of someone who became involved because there was no one else. Parker got involved originally when he printed all of the Winter Carnival media for free. He said, “There was nobody else to do it. You know, it was the only print shop [in town, and] they needed the printing. It was six weeks before carnival was supposed to happen, and there was no budget. So it wasn’t like there were a whole lot of options. Either we did it, or it didn’t get done.”24 Obligation to the good of the community was also partly achieved through pressure, belying the notion that Americans volunteer entirely through their own free will (see Ogilvie 2004). Various forms of duress sometimes secured necessary festival volunteers, illustrating that community was partly accomplished through compulsion. Most people in McCall worked hard. Many people worked two, sometimes three, jobs, so putting in extra time did not come easily, particularly if they were struggling financially. People were tired, and they valued their free time. However, they 22

Rob Lyons interview.

23

Tom Grote interview.

24

Don Parker interview.

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sometimes could be cajoled into participating because it was easier to say yes than no to the requests of friends and neighbors. Finding someone to chair Winter Carnival, for example, constituted a major problem every year. No one wanted the job because it was so burdensome. The chamber occasionally exercised pressure by refusing to adjourn its meeting until someone volunteered (see Magliocco 2006, 52–56).25 Don Parker laughingly recalled, “[For] two years in a row, we had what amounted to the last person left standing in the room being the chairman.”26 I interviewed five chairs, and all of them echoed the same mantra—they did it because no one else would. In 2005 Morgan Gonzalez eventually volunteered to chair. Jan Kangas then agreed to cochair with him so that he would have help and not have to be fully responsible. Gonzalez’s wife also took on the responsibilities of co-chairing that year. Interestingly, the Winter Carnival chair often was someone relatively new to the chamber or McCall—apparently someone who did not fully know what he or she was getting into, so the position functioned structurally as a way of quickly and publicly incorporating newcomers by having them take on a large and prominent public role. One important job of the Winter Carnival chair was securing enough volunteers for all of the individual events. Volunteers could be scarce, depending on the year, so in those cases social pressure sometimes was used to secure enough people. In 2001, for example, the lack of volunteers was so dire that organizers Rob Lyons and Fred Drake were unsure if Winter Carnival would actually happen. Lyons said he had to “beg, borrow, and plead” to get volunteers and explained that the most effective method was talking to people personally. People did not step up and volunteer themselves, but going directly to individuals worked. “A lot of it is going out there and catching them face to face—almost twisting their arm to volunteer,” he recalled wryly. 25

Sabina Magliocco (2006) notes a similar, though perhaps less extensive, change in attitude toward the role of the primu/a (festival chair) in Italy. Whereas previously the position was considered an honor and entailed sacred work, now it is much more likely to be viewed as an imposition and something to be avoided (52–53). One important difference, however, is that in McCall, people eventually volunteer themselves whereas in Monteruju (Sardinia), the position is bestowed, sometimes as punishment, and difficult to refuse. Magliocco also notes that the intrusion of a consumer economy and a shift away from an agricultural base have led to increasing burdens on the role of the primu/a (56).

26

Don Parker interview.

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Lyons and then-chamber president Fred Drake also placed ads in the newspaper threatening to cancel Winter Carnival if people didn’t chip in to help. Lyons told me, “I heard a little bit from people—grumblings and rumblings: ‘Well, you can’t do that; who does he think he is?’ [I said to them], ‘Well, . . . put your name on the [volunteer] list, and we’ll have the Winter Carnival.’” He sent his mother out to secure volunteers, a kind of ritual begging (or “enforced charity”; see Lindahl 1996a, 140) to procure festival resources (e.g., people) that has been noted in other festival contexts (Lindahl and Ware 1997; Mire 1993; Magliocco 2006, 54–55). Lyons explained, “She went door to door, basically around [carnival] time, [to] all the businesses and talked to them with the list. And we got a pretty decent list . . . [of people] willing to help out.”27 People apparently said yes, like it or not, if the chair sent his mother out to do the asking. Legal offenders could be recruited. People who were on probation sometimes fulfilled their community-service requirements by volunteering for Winter Carnival, illustrating concretely Joseph’s point that communitybased nonprofits may discipline potentially resistant subjects (2007, 59). John Hicks recalled a time when the courts forced a young man to volunteer for Winter Carnival. The results were quite positive because the young man had never volunteered for anything before, indicating that even forced participation in hegemonic structures generated positive feelings: The probation department usually furnishes people who are working off a little community time to do different tasks. Every year . . . there’s two or three people that just shine. They just come out of their shell, they get involved in the community, they didn’t know it was fun to do things. . . . We had one young man this year who said, “Call me next year! Even if I’m not on probation! Even if I don’t have community service!”28 Some people participated in Winter Carnival because they felt guilty. One person who worked for the Forest Service and had sculpted for several years told me she continued because she felt guilty about abandoning her teammates. She illustrated good-naturedly the power of community pressure, saying that inevitably a co-worker would ask whether she was planning to sculpt that year: “Oh, hi there! It’s that time of year again.” 27

Rob Lyons interview.

28

John Hicks interview.

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“What time?” “Oh, it’s time for the snow sculpture. You will be there, won’t you?” When I rather naïvely insisted that sculptures must have something to do with community spirit, she responded emphatically, “It’s guilt! Guilt! You do not understand [laughs]—community spirit has nothing to do with guilt.” “Why do you do it?” I then asked. Her cheerful response was, “I forget how awful it [sculpting] was the year before!”29 Don Parker also mentioned guilt as a potential motivating factor. He compared Winter Carnival to a calendar holiday, saying matter-of-factly that it would be somewhat embarrassing if the festival did not happen: It’s one of the events in Idaho that everybody knows [about]. It’s like Christmas or New Year’s. So the idea that, you know, that Santa just decides not to do it one year—there are some things that you just don’t consider the alternative, and carnival’s kind of that way. Even the people that don’t like it—I don’t think that anybody thinks there’s any point in not doing [Winter Carnival] . . . . there would be a certain amount of shame associated with it. Nobody wants to be the first one to fail.30 These examples illustrate that there were a variety of reasons why people actually volunteered for or otherwise participated in Winter Carnival. Nearly everybody believed it was good for the community, and most people participated because they had a very strong sense of community spirit or positive emotional attachments having to do with friends and family. But people also frequently only got involved in moments of crisis, such as when they thought the carnival might not happen, or because they felt guilty, or they succumbed to social pressure. The actual enactment of community visà-vis Winter Carnival was achieved through a variety of means, and ideals of community were invoked to justify the enormous expenditure of time, effort, and money by individuals.

The Results of Participation Once people became involved in Winter Carnival, problems occurred, largely because volunteering was very demanding. The notion that Winter Carnival was good for the community was powerful in part because it tapped 29

Anonymous, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, July 07, 2005.

30

Don Parker interview.

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into an already-established value system connecting volunteering and civic duty. The spirit of volunteerism in McCall was high even outside of Winter Carnival. Most people who volunteered for Winter Carnival had a history of volunteering in other areas, and they thought it was important. McCall was largely built on volunteer efforts and donations. Civic niceties—and sometimes necessities—came from community volunteers and business donations. To beautify the downtown area, the community’s master gardeners planted donated flower pots and baskets, which were watered daily by volunteers. Private donations acquired public art like the bear statue in Art Roberts Park and paid for the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. Volunteers ran sports teams, the local ice rink at the edge of the lake, the animal and wildlife shelters, and the food bank. The public library originated as a volunteer effort. Businesses constantly donated to local causes. People were also publicly applauded for volunteer efforts; they were featured in the newspaper, made grand marshals of the parade, given civic awards, and lauded by their neighbors. The problem was that Winter Carnival extended and intensified this ethos of volunteerism to its breaking point for some people. Robert Lavenda suggests that community festivals in Minnesota are an easy way to create community, meaning that spectators can participate and bond in a superficial way through such activities as eating together and shopping. He writes, “One of the essential features of the festival as it builds community is precisely that it is undemanding. . . . It does not require sacrifice, significant financial investment, or a public declaration of membership in the community. . . . community festivals cannot press too hard. They need to make participation easy while reminding people of what they have in common” (1997, 45–46). Lavenda’s comment, however, refers to participation in the final event. Attending events such as the main Mardi Gras Parade at Winter Carnival easily generated broad feelings of community with a larger social body (see chapter three), but exactly the opposite was true in its production: Winter Carnival was too demanding. It required sacrifice and significant financial and individual investment. Winter Carnival demanded not only a large number of volunteers but frequently an enormous amount of work from each person, which sometimes led to frustration and burnout. People also contributed in multiple ways: business owners, for example, became event sponsors, offered free services, and donated prizes as well as volunteering personal time and physical labor. Constructing a snow sculpture or paying to have it done added up to thousands of dollars or several weeks of time

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in addition to any money or additional time donated. Volunteers literally put hundreds upon hundreds of hours of effort into the festival. Part of the reason that Winter Carnival required so much work and so many resources was that it was ten days long. This had not always been the case. Between 1965 and 1984, Winter Carnival was held over a single long weekend. In 1985 organizers lengthened it to ten days, and it has remained that way ever since. Jane Sager (formerly Jane Volk) was an organizer who was involved in this decision, and she said that the idea was debated at that time: “[It was] very controversial because we were going to drag things out for ten days instead of three days! But the people who understood what we were trying to do were very supportive.”31 Tom Grote, who supported the decision, recalled some of the reasons for the change: “The reason they went to ten days was because the last year they had three days the parade almost couldn’t get through the crowd because there were so many people. They all came up on one weekend. [If we returned to three days], traffic would be out to Lakefork [a town south of McCall], literally. It’s bad now.”32 In other words, current issues of crowds and noise were problems then as well. Traffic had grown heavy over the years. Cars choked the streets, making it impossible to drive into or out of town. Lines for gas and groceries in stores were long, and local people were irritated with the delays. Furthermore, the crowds made it nearly impossible to participate in the events or see the sculptures. It was thought that expanding Winter Carnival to a ten-day event would disperse the crowds, solve the traffic problem, and provide opportunities for other people to participate during the week. Organizers also presumed that expanding Winter Carnival would generate more revenue for local businesses by stretching out the event over two weekends. The Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship was added in 1987 to attract more visitors over the second weekend. Grote linked the expansion of Winter Carnival to McCall’s growing tourism, indicating the very close relationship of the festival to economic changes. [Winter Carnival] really got big in the mideighties because . . . McCall finally took off as a tourist town after the mill closed. People decided this was really something we needed to get serious about. . . . The mideighties were the golden era for the Winter Carnival. They built it 31

Jane Sager interview.

32

Tom Grote interview.

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up. It was originally a three-day event, and in the mideighties this group expanded it to ten days, added events, started the midweek sculpture contest, and really got the thing pumped up. So that set it off.33 The expansion of Winter Carnival to a ten-day event, however, also required more work and commitment on the part of volunteers and organizers than it had previously. Maintaining a snow sculpture over a tenday period, for example, demanded much more time. Sculptures were very delicate. They melted quickly in the sun, looked bad when they were snowed on, and were easily damaged. When the carnival was a three-day event, sculptors finished the pieces on Friday morning and simply left them up over the weekend. By Monday the snow sculptures started to look bad, but because Winter Carnival was over, nobody cared. The reorganization of Winter Carnival to a ten-day event required sculptors not only to make a sculpture but also ideally to maintain it throughout the ten-day period. This necessitated yet-another week’s worth of work. Many people thought this was too much time. Sculptor Nancy Krahn felt that this maintenance was the worst part of sculpture creation because it was boring, and most members of the Krahn snow-sculpting team disliked it (see chapter two). Many more events and fund-raisers were also needed to fill a ten-day event than a three-day one, so there was an increased demand for volunteers and other resources. For some the demands on time seemed unreasonable, and the extended duration contributed to a high burnout rate, which is very common in festival production (see Thoroski and Greenhill 2001). The first time I volunteered in 2001, chamber president Fred Drake did much of the labor. He was in his sixties at the time, putting in eighty- and ninety-hour work weeks to make carnival happen. He said, “I don’t know where Winter Carnival is going to go. It’s become more and more difficult because the amount of free time that people have is disappearing. Volunteerism is the only way to succeed; I’m not sure that working two jobs to make ends meet in McCall that you can afford to take the additional time and make snow sculptures or volunteer.”34 His comments illustrated the difficulties for the working and middle classes to produce a large, all-volunteer event. The position of Winter Carnival chair was the most extreme example of the problems of an overburdened volunteer position during my research 33

Ibid.

34

Fred Drake interview.

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period.35 The reason people were reluctant to chair Winter Carnival was because it was an enormous amount of work. Duties included securing permits from the city and state for road closures, selling alcohol, bingo games, and vending. The chair was also in charge of arranging for portable toilets, outdoor water supplies and electrical outlets, and prizes for the various competitions. The chair ensured compliance with insurance regulations and found volunteers to head each individual event. She or he was in charge of doing some of the advertising, finding a venue to hold the state sculpture competition and house the vendors, hiring bands and other forms of entertainment, ordering tents, securing the stage, setting up electrical equipment such as microphones and speakers, locating sites for other festival events, and finding tables and chairs. The chair had to ensure that each event complied with fire codes, although in the past the fire and police departments had “contributed” to Winter Carnival by occasionally looking the other way when codes were not exactly met. Parking was always a big problem, and new solutions had to be found. People sometimes promised the use of a space and then backed out, leaving the chair to find alternatives. The chair organized the fireworks and decided on Winter Carnival pins and plaques. Where should snow be dumped? How do you keep toilets from freezing? There were other duties as well. Chairs were given few guidelines, and each person reinvented the job. There was no “how-to” Winter Carnival handbook, records were not kept regularly, and paper trails from year to year could be thin. Chairs usually got things done through personal connections and word of mouth. Don Parker described the method of organization as one of crisis, which he thought of as positive since it allowed people to be creative and new ideas to flourish. Unsurprisingly, Winter Carnival chairs quickly burned out. People who chaired gained respect and status but they also frequently refused to be involved except at a minimal level in subsequent years. At the time of our interview in 2001, Rob Lyons said, “I’ll probably help out on a couple of things next year, but I’m sure not going to be the director [chair], I tell you that much.” Don Parker affably said of former chairs, “Their only interest after it’s done is making sure that nobody ever calls them again,” which illustrates that the key position was one that pushed individuals to their absolute limits.36 On the other hand, despite 35

The chamber of commerce started paying people to chair to offset some of the work after my research period ended.

36

Rob Lyons interview; Don Parker interview.

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his misgivings, Lyons ended up organizing Winter Carnival for an additional four years, which was a much longer amount of time than most people. As he told me later, “It’s hard to give up what you work so hard to build up.”37 Excessive burdens sometimes caused tensions. People complained about the demands Winter Carnival made, about the nature and amount of their involvement. Organizers complained that there weren’t enough volunteers and the community was not “stepping up” while volunteers complained that they were overworked and unappreciated; some members of the general public complained about Winter Carnival’s existence. All groups then wondered whether Winter Carnival was worth the hassle. Some business owners charged the chamber of putting commercial interests ahead of those of local participants, an interesting allegation considering many businesspeople were chamber members and the festival was designed to benefit the business community. Such complaints about Winter Carnival were difficult to document. There was a cultural injunction in McCall against criticizing people publicly, so I was not able to formally record them. One informal but typical example, however, illustrates the complex attitudes toward Winter Carnival among local residents. I was at a local meeting during the 2009 Winter Carnival that featured a speaker from Boise. The speaker told the crowd that she had specifically requested to schedule her engagement during Winter Carnival. The chair of the meeting, a local resident, immediately interrupted her to respond in a humorous and sarcastic tone, “Why?” This same person, however, also left the meeting early to attend a Winter Carnival event that was about to begin. Residents also willingly talked to me about the problems of Winter Carnival in a general way. The complaints were never their own but came from “other people.” The same issues arose again and again: people got tired, or burned out, and every year it was a challenge to find enough volunteers to run Winter Carnival because it was exhausting. While few people felt it was realistic to return to a three-day schedule, they frequently talked about whether making the festival a ten-day event had been a good choice. The fact that the decision was being discussed twenty-five years later suggests that it and its results touched on central concerns about the limits of community and generosity. Don Parker said that the biggest question about Winter Carnival was whether it was worth it to have the town taken over for two weeks. And in answer to my question about festival conflicts, organizer 37

Rob Lyons, e-mail communication with the author, 17 November 2009.

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Diane Wiegand replied, “Conflicts? The conflict is that some of the locals just don’t appreciate it at all; [they] don’t think we should have it.”38 These hard-to-document, informal conversations that fell in between and around the more formally organized events were important because people’s responses to the festival’s excessive demands constituted an informal forum for thinking and learning about the limits of volunteerism and, by extension, the good of the community. Volunteering was only one of the areas where Winter Carnival made excessive demands, but it touched on a core value. If the belief that Winter Carnival was good for the community justified time, money, and effort, people who asked, “How much is too much?” were questioning the limits of community and what it meant. Ironically, although complaints abounded about Winter Carnival, they also sometimes increased participation. There was an ethos in McCall that said it was not nice to sit back, do nothing, and criticize your neighbors who were doing the best they could with what little time they had. This is why it was difficult to record complaints formally. People felt that if you were going to complain, you needed to do something. So sometimes complaints about Winter Carnival led directly to involvement. Rob Lyons, for example, became Winter Carnival chair because he felt the festival had declined from what he remembered as a child: “Part of the reason I got . . . involved in it was . . . it seemed to go downhill a little bit from what it used to be. And so of course, I made mention of it—you know it just wasn’t—the theme just wasn’t up as much as it used to be, as far as the atmosphere and everything. And of course by saying that, I had basically volunteered myself.” 39 Complaints also led to calls by those already involved for further public commitment. Organizers constantly reiterated that people who complained should help. Jane Sager said that she did not pay a lot of attention to conflicts: “Whatever you do, somebody will complain. If anybody wants to complain about it, let them take it over and do it the way they think it ought to be done.” Fred Drake felt the same way: “[It’s an] ‘if you are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’ attitude. Put your effort in and don’t bitch in the community unless you’re doing something to help the community.”40 In fact, Rob Lyons’s least-favorite part of organizing Winter Carnival was situations when people made suggestions but did not offer to help. He explained, 38

Diane Wiegand interview.

39

Rob Lyons interview.

40

Jane Sager interview; Fred Drake interview.

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People [came] up with all these great ideas, but they want somebody else to do it. They say, “Well, why don’t you bring this [festival event] back?” [and I say], “Well, why don’t you—are you going to volunteer for it?” [and they respond], “No—I don’t have time.” [and I say], “Well, you want the event!”. . . You know, I opened my big mouth . . . but you know, I did something about it. I don’t just bitch and let someone else fix it.41 Complaints were both a motivating factor for actual involvement as well as a justification by people already involved to encourage others to participate. I hope that in exploring the conflicted aspects of Winter Carnival I have not overaccentuated them. The enactment of community through Winter Carnival encompassed a range of experiences. I explored conflict both because it existed, and because scholarship links festival to community. In doing so, I illustrate the important role that conflict plays in community (W. Wilson 2000), which I do not consider to be negative, but rather a healthy airing of differences. And I want to emphasize again that people largely felt very positive about Winter Carnival. Many organizers and volunteers felt that the process of assembling Winter Carnival created a sense of accomplishment and togetherness, which was interpreted as community. Morgan Gonzalez, cochair of Winter Carnival in 2005, told the following story about an emergency, that generated a feeling of community: You know Sharlie, right? [an Asian-style dragon prop used in the parade that represents a lake monster; see chapter five]. Well, we got around to looking for things for the parade, and we couldn’t find Sharlie’s head. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. It wasn’t in the storage. I told you things are pretty disorganized around here! Anyway we spent like weeks looking for Sharlie’s head and couldn’t find it. I mean, how can you lose something like that? It’s huge. Anyway nobody had seen it, and nobody could find it, and it was only a couple of weeks before Winter Carnival, and we were getting kind of desperate. So finally I ran into Dave—you know Dave, the radio guy? I asked Dave if he could put out an announcement over the radio, basically asking if anybody knew where Sharlie’s head was. He was like, laughing, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ But he did it. And within fifteen minutes, somebody had called in who knew where it was. . . . So that’s an example of the community really pulling together.42 41

Rob Lyons interview.

42

Morgan Gonzalez, interview with the author, field notes, McCall, Idaho, 15 July 2005.

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Jane Sager also thought that simply doing Winter Carnival created community: “I think common goals add to a feeling of community. If you and I agree on something, we are more likely to work together. I think that people do get a sense of community by working together and being proud of a successful result. I think that adds to a sense of community.” Diane Wiegand also felt that simply getting it done created community: “It brings everybody together on the same page, on the same playing field. The participants, the people who get involved in it, it brings them all together. Not everybody can get along all the time, but that’s the time of the year that people—you put away your feelings and stuff like that if you don’t get along with somebody and just have fun. Get it done.”43 For both Sager and Wiegand, community meant getting along and accomplishing something. Organizing, volunteering, and participating in the festival was also fun, creating feelings of goodwill, satisfaction, and a sense of ownership that was interpreted as community. Tom Grote noted that Winter Carnival was the one time of year that people came together: To try and bring some community mindedness to it, to try to pull us together a little bit. To get people to cope, to at least understand that we are part of a community because we are so disjointed the rest of the time—we’re so busy serving people. . . . [It’s the] one moment we can all stand on the street and watch the parade together and just sort of enjoy something that’s ours. And that’s the fun thing about it. But mainly it’s just for the image.44 For Jane Sager, Winter Carnival was a good time, at least for those who participated. She said, “What is Winter Carnival really about? Fun. That’s the word that comes to mind. I think the people who put it on have a tremendous amount of fun. We did. The planning parties were better than anything! Camaraderie, community, sharing, economy. All of those things all mixed together.”45 Morgan Gonzalez simply stated, “Winter Carnival is a great thing, and . . . everybody should participate in some way if they really want to know what it is about.”46 Tom Grote added, “You ask people why they do it, and they really can’t say why. They just say, ‘God, it’s a big thing, but you know, it happens, and we’re glad when we get it done. And it works 43

Jane Sager interview; Diane Wiegand interview.

44

Tom Grote interview.

45

Jane Sager interview.

46

Morgan Gonzalez interview.

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out super; we’re just happy to help, to be part of the festival.’ That’s kind of what we do.”47

Self and Community: Some Final Thoughts Festival organizers, who mostly represented business and professional interests, called on people to produce Winter Carnival in the name of community. In doing so, they substituted class interests for something more general (Lavenda 1997, 79). This generalized notion of community entailed individuals who imagined themselves and others to be bound together by economic interdependence, which in turn implied moral obligations of mutual support. In the name of community, people stepped up and pitched in, whether because they thought volunteering was important or because they were pressured, or for other reasons. People also had strong emotional attachments to Winter Carnival: they connected it to family and friends, and they enjoyed it. Writing about women’s dances as political tools in Malawi, Lisa Gilman (2004) notes that traditions only can be used hegemonically when people internalize them, attach emotional importance to them, and deem them important in their own lives. Winter Carnival in a narrow sense served the immediate economic interests of only a few people because only specific types of businesses earned money during Winter Carnival. But people knew that and it wasn’t the reason they volunteered. For most people, Winter Carnival was good for the community through a process of folk Reaganomics. And, whatever the reality, the variety of reasons and attachments combined with the general discourse that Winter Carnival was good for the community made it a powerful force in people’s lives. The lesson in this is that enacting community through a forum such as Winter Carnival was a messy business that generated debate. It was not easy; it took effort. McCall’s Winter Carnival was a mechanism for getting large numbers of people involved (Noyes 2003b). Organizers encouraged people to get out when it was much easier to stay home, and they used a variety of methods to do so. Everybody was drawn into public discourse about the nature of socioeconomic interdependence, the value of generalized reciprocity and neighborliness, and tourism in general. A person engaged in the debate either by participating or not participating and through talk about the nature and limits of participation. Saying yes to a request for help from a 47

Tom Grote interview.

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neighbor was to acknowledge the moral and obligatory dimensions of community, to actively participate in the debate over whether Winter Carnival was good for the community, to be forced into association with people, and to consider the relationship between self and community. People’s talk about Winter Carnival was a conversation about whether community was worth the effort, what its nature was, and what its limits should be. Don Parker explained: It makes a big difference just as far as the cohesion of people around here. It’s kind of a time of the year where everybody is sort of in the doldrums or depths of cabin fever, and it kind of gives everybody a purpose and something to look forward to. Even if they just love to hate it. . . . even if people just have a meeting to decide to get rid of carnival, at least they are motivated to get together and talk and think about it. The events all do take quite a bit of effort.48 Winter Carnival provided a framework for bringing the idea of community into the open to be publicly enacted and hence openly debated. And so it was here, as Noyes writes, that “community is effected in performance” (2003a, 28). Tom Grote also emphasized that Winter Carnival was a choice when he said, “Winter Carnival is our local thing. . . . You can’t [get] rid of Fourth of July or the other [holidays]. But you could get rid of Winter Carnival.”49 This question of whether Winter Carnival was worth it was the issue that was posed, debated, and answered again every year.

48

Don Parker interview.

49

Tom Grote interview.

2 Sculpting Relationships Aesthetics, Citizenship, and Belonging in Winter Carnival Art I think in any town with six months of winter you can go a little nuts. . . . That’s the whole idea of the carnival is something to do in the middle of winter, to keep you from going stir crazy. Karen Morris, sculptor

Snow sculptures were a primary attraction of Winter Carnival and

constituted the area’s most visible and developed form of public art. Two separate kinds of snow-sculpting events took place: the local competition and the Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship, both of which were formal competitions where sculptures were judged and winners were chosen. The local event was the older of the two. It began with the revival of Winter Carnival in 1965. The Idaho championship was a more formally regulated event that led to integration into higher levels; winners could go on to participate in national and international competitions. It was added to the program in 1987. If the organization and production of Winter Carnival questioned and complicated local notions of community by generating positive feelings as well as conflict, then the local and state sculpting competitions constructed community in other ways. Each event articulated notions of citizenship and belonging but at different scales, in different ways, and for different audiences. The local competition occurred outside of the official framework of the festival. It was framed as both local and amateur, and was oriented toward local people as the audience. The sculptures in the local competition relied on imagination and fantasy, connecting the local community 68

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to national and mythological spheres, but the sculptures’ primary context of use lay in their making (Malinowski 1923). In other words, the most important aspect of these sculptures was not the final product but the process of constructing them. The Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship was framed as professional and geared toward outside audiences. It followed national regulations and was embedded entirely within the festival structure, situating McCall as a cosmopolitan part of a wider realm. Differences in the organization, structure, and production of each event led to aesthetic and stylistic differences, different audiences, and different frames of reference.

Part I: The Local Snow-Sculpting Competition Classifying Local Sculptures People began constructing snow sculptures for Winter Carnival in 1965. It is likely that more than fifteen hundred snow sculptures were built between 1965 and 2009.1 Pictures of some of them appeared annually in the newspaper; others could be found in the historical files at the public library. The chamber once had a small archive of photographs stored in a shoebox, and pictures of snow sculptures were preserved in private albums as well. The sculptures when viewed collectively over time present an array of images that offer a variety of angles, viewpoints, and perspectives on the construction of communal identity. Residents created a collective imaginary of their village that certainly exhibited variation, yet at the same time constituted a remarkably consistent set of images found not only in the snow-sculpture competition but also many other festive events. These images constructed overt ties to national and popular culture and mythological realms, and made extensive references to children, playfulness, the imagination, leisure, and sport. To better understand the ways local sculptures represented identity, it is useful to describe some general classifications into which many snow sculptures fell. It is important to note that Winter Carnival usually had a theme. The theme influenced the kind of sculptures people built in the local competition because pieces were judged partially on whether they articulated it. One of the earliest carnival themes, for example, was “Winter Wonderland.” Another popular one used frequently in the 1970s and 1980s 1

The number of sculptures varies from year to year but ranges from as few as twentyfive to about fifty. Thirty to forty sculptures seemed to be most common number constructed. This estimate is based on an average of thirty-five sculptures per year.

Winter Carnival in a Western Town

Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

70

Fig. 7. Sculpture by Shore Lodge, 1965.

was “Fantasies in Ice.” More recent themes included “Childhood Fantasies” (2001), “Wonders of the World” (2007), “Wild, Wild West” (2008), and, returning to an earlier theme, “Fantasies in Ice” (2009). Mythological monsters and beasts drawn from both legendary oral tradition and the mass media constituted one prominent category. An early example was a painted, red Pegasus that was constructed in 1965 (gallery fig. R). That same year the Shore Lodge sculpted King Neptune on a dais surrounded by mermaids (fig. 7), a creation that remained vivid in the memory of many residents. Bigfoot pieces were also sculpted. One year a sculpture of Godzilla emerged from the lakeshore to attack a city skyline (fig. 8) and there was a sculpture of King Kong, constructed in 1994. The most popular legendary beast was Sharlie, the local lake monster, said to inhabit Payette Lake. Most residents knew who or what Sharlie was, and many had a friend or family member who claimed to have sighted something mysterious, albeit frequently under dubious circumstances (see chapter five). Sharlie sculptures appeared frequently enough to become a discernable type, a recognizable

71

Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

Sculpting Relationships

Fig. 8. Godzilla, 1995.

form with variation.2 The earliest Sharlie sculpture was the high school’s 1965 creation (fig. 9), which was painted green and won a prize, and Sharlie has been sculpted nearly every year since. These sculptures articulated a common idea of what Sharlie looked like. Sharlie was serpentine or dragonlike and often had humps, fins, or spikes along the back (gallery fig. A). A number of sculptures were also Sharlie-like in appearance, such as dragons and dinosaurs. Although they were not literally Sharlie sculptures, their appearance was similar enough that they evoked the local monster in many people’s minds. No matter what the theme, Sharlie was made to fit. Pieces that drew from children’s literature and children’s popular culture constituted a second prominent sculpture category (fig. 10). Children were foregrounded throughout Winter Carnival. They were used to signify the event as family friendly and to signify locality. Children are associated in certain forms of folk art (such as yard art) with playfulness and the imagination (Thomas 2003), and so children’s themes fit together nicely with the sculptures evoking myth and legend. The Krahns, for example, a local snowsculpting team with whom I worked extensively, purposefully constructed playful sculptures that appealed to children, and their pieces often referenced 2

The notion of type is drawn from international folktale scholarship. See Stith Thompson’s revision of Antti Aarne’s classification system, The Types of the Folktale (1961).

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 9. The first sculpture of Sharlie was made in 1965 by area high school students and painted green.

children’s popular culture. Hence, in the local competition there were many sculptures that tapped into literature associated with children or youth. Scenes from Alice in Wonderland, for example, were popular in the 1970s; one undated photograph showed a sculpture of Alice standing in front of the Cheshire cat, who was lying on a mushroom smoking a hookah. The Grand Prize winner for 1998 was a scene from Where’s Waldo (gallery fig. B), and the 2000 winner was a rendition of Where the Wild Things Are, featuring Max riding a monster in the wild rumpus, both of which were made by the same team. Dr. Seuss books, such as Horton Hears a Who (gallery fig. D), were sources of inspiration as well as scenes from The Wizard of Oz. Characters from the comic strip “Peanuts,” particularly Snoopy, as well as Sesame Street figures and Warner Brothers cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam all were popular. Disney’s influence was apparent in sculptures of Mickey Mouse and in scenes from Peter Pan, Fantasia, Donald Duck, and Bambi. Aladdin, Jack and Jill, Mother Goose, Humpty Dumpty, Rip van Winkle, and the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe appeared as well, illustrating the influence of children’s nursery rhymes (fig. 11). Other children’s pop-culture figures included Darth Vader, Darth Maul, and Batman, and characters from Harry Potter, such as Hedwig and the Sorting Hat, among many others. Few fairies or princesses were constructed, but ice castles were common. The construction of ice castles or palaces has been popular in North

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Photos courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 10. Mr. Magoo, ca. 1973.

Fig. 11. The old woman in the shoe sculpture by Shore Lodge, 1969.

American winter carnivals since the nineteenth century. The idea of building ice castles was apparently borrowed from eighteenth-century Russia, and they were constructed in Québec for entertainment in the 1860s, for winter carnivals in the 1880s in Montreal, and in St. Paul, Minnesota, more recently (Abbott 1988, 184; M. Harris 2003). Ice castles also call to mind the traditional fairy tales of Russia and parts of Scandinavia, and so too suggest fantasy and the imagination. Today people pay large sums of money to sleep in the grandiose Hôtel de Glace, an ice hotel built annually outside of Québec. In the initial years of the revived McCall Winter Carnival, chamber organizers built the city sculpture that functioned as the ice stage for activities and was often in the shape of an ice castle (fig. 12). This ice castle/stage was sometimes located in Art Roberts Park directly overlooking Payette Lake. All stages had snow steps leading up to a snow platform, which was used for performances and nonsporting competitions. A Snow Queen contest (no longer held) originally took place there as well as musical performances and emceed events. Due to insurance and fire regulations, the Winter Carnival stage was no longer made of snow and ice during my research period but had become a regular performance platform. Sculptures also commonly drew on romanticized western themes and images that mythologized frontier settlement. In his examination of the development of Turtle Days, a community festival in Indiana, John Gutowski aptly illustrates “how a local community expresses its participation in a national

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 12. Ice castles frequently served as the stage for opening ceremonies, ca. 1988.

culture through its folklore and how its own local collective representations depend upon nationally constituted symbolic values” (1998, 63). National culture exemplified in western settlement was also important in McCall’s sculptures. Myths of the West as a Garden of Eden and an empty landscape where settlers could hammer out an authentic democratic society are more ideology than reality (e.g., Kolodny 1984), but such images resonated in the minds of some people. For many local people, settlement history was not the distant past but their family’s story. People’s parents and grandparents homesteaded in Idaho, and they identified strongly with nationalistic images of the frontier West because these were also local and personal. At the same time, mythologizing frontier history as a way of promoting tourism is common to resort areas throughout the West. Highly stylized and commodified Old West themes are found in gambling casinos in Reno (Barber 2003) and in the marketing of Jackson Hole (Culver 2003) and Steamboat Springs (Coleman 2004). This intersection of local settlement history, the national imagination, and an already-existing tourist theme played out in the sculptures in the

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form of cowboys with hats and rifles as well as sculptures of horses and bucking broncos. There were also log cabins, wagon trains, and sculptures of local explorers and fur trappers such as François Payette. A number of sculptures depicted technology during the Age of Expansion. Trains were the most popular. One sculpture was titled “Casey Jones,” a reference to the Illinois Central Railroad engineer who was immortalized in a popular ballad as a folk hero after he was killed trying to save his passengers from a collision in 1900. Other sculptures showed trains loaded with lumber or emerging from mountain tunnels, celebrating both the logging and mining histories of the area. “The Little Engine That Could” piece melded trains and children’s culture and was sculpted in 1996. Cars were common. The winning sculpture in 2005, for example, showed a Model T stuck in the snow, illustrating the difficulties of living in remote areas in the past. Native Americans were a popular sculpting subject that also tied into the general category of romantic western images (fig. 13). Chief Joseph passed near the region as he made his way toward Canada in an attempt to save his band of Nez Perce, and the Mountain Shoshone occupied the interior portion of Valley County. Few Native peoples live in the area today; most were forcibly removed to the Lemhi and Fort Hall Reservations during the wars of the 1870s (Reddy 1995), although recollections by Anglo residents of Nez Perce coming to the area to fish exist in the oral history files in the library. Native Americans remain prominent in national, local, and tourist imaginations of the West, and so they appeared in conventional forms in the sculptures. There were totem poles, for example, as well as busts of Native American figures, often in full headdresses. There was a teepee village and a sculpture of an Indian-head coin that dated from the 1970s. One undated photograph showed a sculpture of the encounter between Pocahontas and Captain Smith, illustrating links between Native Americans and exploration. While Lewis and Clark, with their guide Sacagawea, figure more prominently in regional history, the two sets of explorers with their female guides indexed each other. Native American motifs were often associated with animals such as bear and buffalo in the sculptures; rabbits, fish, and eagles were very common. Occupational sculptures, particularly those depicting forestry and logging, constituted another prominent category. These were interesting because references to traditional regional extractive economies such as ranching, mining, forestry, and logging were not visible in other Winter Carnival events. Winter Carnival largely referenced leisure, recreation, and sport,

Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

Fig. 13. Sculpture of Native American in headdress, 1997.

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 14. Sculpture of the mill burner, ca.1978.

rather than labor; images of the working past (and present) were largely erased except in the local snow-sculpture competition, where they appeared in romanticized, nostalgic form. A lumber mill operated continuously on the lake until 1977, and for most of the twentieth century, it employed many townspeople. The mill eventually was sold and then burned, and the mill burner was constructed as a sculpture (fig. 14). Festival organizer Bob Scoles created one of the most popular Winter Carnival sculptures of all time in 1968, when he and his team from the drugstore built a fifteen-foot sculpture of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox (fig. 15). Since then there have been many sculptures of loggers as well as the mill itself. The Forest Service has also been a major employer in the region. It has used McCall as a headquarters since 1909, and it established an elite smoke-jumping base (smoke jumpers fight wilderness fires by parachuting out of airplanes) in McCall in 1943 (P.  Preston 1999). To local children, smoke jumpers were close to superheroes; they save trees and practically fly. Firefighters and smoke jumpers were both depicted in snow sculptures; Shore Lodge/ Whitetail resort built a recent one of a smoke jumper in 2005. The influence of the Forest Service’s popular icon, Smokey Bear, which created an association among bears, forestry, and logging, should not be overlooked. Bears often substituted for people in logging scenes; they were depicted sawing down trees, sitting atop fallen logs, or napping during a lunch break. Mining also played a smaller historical economic role, so mining and miners were also depicted in the sculptures, although less frequently. Both miners and loggers have reputations as heavy drinkers, and in the early twentieth

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Fig. 15. Sculpture of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, 1968.

century, the county was a site for moonshining (see chapter four). Hence, one occasionally saw sculptures of drunken loggers in the past, though nowadays much less frequently. Overall, if work was depicted in the sculptures, it was manual labor. There were very few—if any—depictions of contemporary occupations associated with tourism such as real-estate agents, hotel workers, or restaurateurs, illustrating concretely the ways tourist events such as Winter Carnival render labor by local people invisible at the symbolic level. One class of sculpture that linked both occupations and western frontiers in a more modern context was space. An early sculpture depicting the moon landing was constructed in 1970, and space is associated with mythologies of exploration, but McCall also had a personal connection to NASA, further illustrating the melding of local and national associations. In 1985 a local schoolteacher named Barbara Morgan was chosen as Christa McAuliffe’s backup candidate as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space Project. Morgan left McCall as a local hero to train with the Challenger crew, and someone made a replica of the shuttle for the 1986 Winter Carnival to honor her. The Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, exactly at the beginning of Winter Carnival. The explosion was both a national and intensely local trauma for the people of McCall, and residents transformed the existing Challenger sculpture into a spontaneous shrine for the crew as a response (Santino 2004b) (fig. 16, fig. 17). Morgan became next in

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

Fig. 16. Sculpture of the Challenger space shuttle, 1986.

Fig. 17. Sculpture of Challenger space shuttle transformed into memorial after 1986 disaster.

line to ride a space shuttle as an educator/civilian. She dedicated her life to NASA and was finally given the opportunity to go into space in 2007. This history, Morgan’s dedication to the space program, and her twentyone-year wait to ride the shuttle continuously made headline news in the area. Hence, there were sculptures of space shuttles, explorations of the moon, and even a tribute to Morgan, linking local histories and peoples to national agendas.

Winter Carnival in a Western Town Photos courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce (left) and by author (right).

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Fig. 18. Many sculptures commemorate winter sports and the area’s Olympic champions.

Fig. 19. A sculpture that functioned as a miniature golf course, 2005.

Sports and recreation constituted another salient category, highlighting the town’s resort identity. Winter sports were most commonly featured. The area has a long history of skiing and has produced Olympic skiers (see chapter four). There were tributes to these Olympians, sculptures of the Olympic rings (fig. 18), and many, often humorous pieces depicting skiers generally. There were skiers falling down hills, skis strapped to the back of a VW bug, and ski jumps representing the area’s history of competitive sports. One early sculpture depicted a skier behind a NASA space shuttle. Another showed someone skiing the great potato (a popular 1970s state slogan referred to Idaho as “the great potato”). Other winter activities that were depicted included sledding, snowmobiling, and snowshoeing, and sculptures were also constructed as interactive slides. Summer recreation activities were also represented, though perhaps less frequently. Boating and waterskiing sculptures were popular. Teams also constructed full-scale miniature snow-and-ice golf courses where one could actually golf (fig. 19). Themes of patriotism, nationalism, and loyalty to the state comprised the final category. The patriotic content of some pieces was overt. The Statue of Liberty is a relatively straightforward figure that was sculpted several times; an early example is a statue that the Shore Lodge constructed in 1967. Other sculptures must be read in conjunction with the organization

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Fig. 20. Eagle sculpted by the Forest Service, 2001.

creating them. In 2001, for example, the Forest Service built a giant eagle, an amazing engineering feat (fig. 20). Eagles are common in western states and a popular Winter Carnival subject, but the fact that a federal agency sculpted it and that eagles are the national bird gave the sculpture a more nationalistic slant. Some sculptures exhibited state pride: the shape of the state of Idaho was made, and once artists sculpted a full replica of the state capital, complete with the state flag (fig. 21). Others signified allegiance to the local high school and the University of Idaho by sculpting the shared mascot, a vandal. To sum up, the sculptures on the one hand reflected local concerns. They commemorated local heroes, recalled local history, represented local occupations, and depicted local life and legendry. On the other hand, such sculptures were juxtaposed to images from a broader realm of mythology, popular culture, children’s literature, and nationalist fantasy. The resulting assemblage (Santino 1992a)—an array of constituent elements in which the whole is more meaningful than the sum of its parts—was one where local history and identity were inserted into broader realms of signification. That these broader realms largely were affiliated with fantasy and makebelieve suggests that these are productive arenas: through play people imagined themselves, their history, and their identity as part of something that extended well beyond the local.

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Fig. 21. Replica of the Idaho State Capitol building, 1988.

A Gift to the Community Examining categories of snow sculptures is a starting point for analysis, but it does not provide a full picture of the way they fit into Winter Carnival or community life. If the content of local sculptures situated local identity within broader realms, making the sculptures worked out notions of citizenship and belonging at a very local level. To see the way this played out, it is necessary to examine the processes of creation. How and when were the sculptures made? Who made them and why? What choices and problems did they face? What made a good sculpture? Who was the audience? Such questions focus on processes of production and use, rather than final products (M. Jones 1989; Glassie 1999b; Vlach and Bronner 1992). The original idea of building snow sculptures as part of Winter Carnival is attributed to local community leaders Warren Brown and Bob Scoles who drew upon already-established Winter Carnival traditions to bolster their project. A prominent pioneering family, the Browns originally hailed from New Hampshire where fraternities began practicing snow sculpting as part of Dartmouth College’s Winter Carnival (F. Harris 1920). The Browns

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 22. Snow family in front of private home, ca. 1969.

apparently had seen snow sculptures in Sun Valley, and Scoles said that he had written to Dartmouth and Montreal to obtain information about building them, but had never gotten a reply back. Local people had to figure out how to do it on their own, and over time they developed their own sculpting methods. The first 1965 sculptures were built both by local businesspeople in front of their stores and families in their front yards, illustrating that Winter Carnival was partly a family event at its roots (fig. 22). The chamber awarded prizes, a practice that continues today. Memories of early Winter Carnival sculptures are dear to many people, and these initial attempts were a source of pride as people experimented with techniques such as painting the snow and using various kinds of internal supports. Bob Scoles built sculptures for nearly thirty years, and he had an entire photo album dedicated to the pieces he helped create. He showed me a picture of the ice castle that was to be used as the 1965 Winter Carnival stage, saying, “This is the first sculpture that the chamber of commerce did that first year. We worked hours, five businessmen. . . . We worked for three days getting this one tower up—and we finally learned how to do it. It took us quite a while; it was pathetic [laughs].”3 Very few sculptures were made in front of private homes when 3

Bob Scoles, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 9 March 2001.

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I did my research. Most were constructed in front of local businesses, and they functioned as an advertisement for the establishment since the object attracted visitors to the spot. Only a few rules guided the local snow-sculpting competition. The first was that all entrants must officially register with the chamber of commerce if they wanted to be judged. The second rule was that only lathe, wire, rebar, and PVC pipe could be used as internal supports; cardboard, plywood, and sheet lumber were not allowed. The third rule was that all sculptures had to be finished by 8:00 a.m. on Friday of the first weekend of Winter Carnival, which was when judging began. The winners were announced that evening as an important part of the opening ceremonies. Teams of three or four people constructed most of the sculptures, but there was no numerical requirement; teams could have any number of members. They could also start whenever they liked, so some teams began as early as two weeks before Winter Carnival; others started only a few days prior to the judging. The judges, who had the power to select winners and whose identities were largely secret (Stoeltje 1996), spent Friday morning traveling around to view each sculpture. There were numerous prize categories. The Grand Prize was the highest award: in 2009 the cash prize was $950. First-through-fifth prizes carried varying cash amounts. Small cash prizes were awarded for a number of additional categories. These included student built, first-timers, home built, child appeal, most photogenic, best maintained, best college-student built, and two honorable mentions. Some awards, such as first-timers, home built, and best maintained, were designed to encourage greater participation in the competition. Given that the organizational structure allowed teams to spend several weeks making their sculpture if they chose, it was clear that the time people spent on their pieces before Winter Carnival began was important. These preparations and rehearsals constituted an unofficial time frame for the enactment of festive behavior (Bauman and Ritch 1994), what Peter Tokofsky (2000) identifies as local’s time. The beginning of this time period was unmarked; it began whenever people decided to start their sculptures, so it was not the same time for everyone. But people did feel Winter Carnival coming on when evidence of snow building, such as collecting snow and constructing platforms, became evident throughout town. During this period—before Winter Carnival officially began on Friday evening of the last weekend in January according to the chamber of commerce schedule— people who had decided to build sculptures socialized with their neighbors,

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Reprinted with permission of Folklore Forum

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Fig. 23. Some of the members of the 2001 Krahn snow sculpting team. Front (left to right): Lisa Gabbert, Dan Krahn, Nancy Krahn, Ron Hines. Back: Karen Morris, Marilyn Krahn, Pauline Hines, Sue Anderson. Missing: Mark Bennett, Marlee Wilcomb, Gaylord Krahn.

worked hard on their projects, and talked about who was building, who was not, and what techniques they were using. I first learned how important this period was when I joined the Krahn snow-sculpting team, a large, prominent group in 2001. We got along well, and I have talked with them about sculpting many times since, returning to become part of their team again in 2008. A loose network of relatives, friends, employees, and storeowners of a local business called Krahn’s Home Furnishings, the Krahns had participated in snow sculpting every year since 1979 and were considered by many residents to be excellent snow sculptors. They were easily recognized by their red jackets, which had their team name embroidered across the back, and they were famous for making very large sculptures in the parking lot next to their store (fig. 23). At the time of my research, Marilyn and Gaylord Krahn owned the store. Their son, Dan, and his wife, Nancy, moved to McCall to manage it in 1978 after they were married. Nancy explained that they began making sculptures for their first Winter Carnival in McCall:

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Gabbert: How did you start making sculptures? N. Krahn: The first year we came up here, it was like, OK. Everybody builds sculptures, so it’s Winter Carnival time, so you guys need to build a sculpture, and we were like “OK.”4 The Krahns were also prominent citizens. Dan Krahn was involved in the Rotary Club and sat on the hospital auxiliary board; Nancy volunteered at the high school and was heavily involved in local sports when I first met her. Store owner Marilyn Krahn, was a lovely woman also known as “Bammer,” who donated time and money to local organizations and causes and knew everybody in town. I met the Krahns by asking if I could volunteer to help them. Bammer laughed at my request and said they would take any help they could get. The Krahns intended to build a Sharlie sculpture that year (gallery fig. E). The festival theme for 2001 was “Childhood Memories,” and for the Krahns, Sharlie was an icon of childhood. Sharlie was appropriate for the Krahns to make because they focused on family-oriented sculptures. They frequently replicated large commercial and popular images to accomplish this goal; they had, for example, constructed “Peanuts” and Disney characters in the past. They had never made a Sharlie sculpture, so it seemed time. The title of the sculpture was “McCall’s Oldest Resident.” Bammer introduced me to the other 2001 team members. In addition to Dan and Nancy, they included Mark Bennett and Karen Morris, both of whom were store employees.5 Sculptor and artist Marlee Wilcomb was a friend, and Ron and Pauline Hines were former customers. Sue Anderson and Gaylord Krahn watched the store. After ensuring I was dressed properly (in waterproof clothing with industrial rubber gloves taped over the coat), Bammer put me to work cleaning and collecting snow. The collection of raw material is important in many traditional arts such as pottery and basketry (Burrison [1983] 1995; Glassie 1999a, 48), and snow sculpting in the local competition was no exception. Sculptures required massive amounts of material. One common way for teams to obtain snow was to order it from the city of McCall. City snowplows and backhoes arrived upon request to dump piles of snow wherever a team wanted. The Krahns, however, considered themselves to be “snow snobs,” so they 4

Nancy Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 19 February 2001.

5

Mark Bennett has since passed away.

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avoided ordering city snow if at all possible because they felt it was too dirty. Snow brought by the city was filled with grass and dirt. The number-one rule of snow sculpting for the Krahns was using clean snow since any foreign object, such as small rocks, dirt, grass, or other debris, melted that part of the sculpture faster. As Nancy pointed out, “It looks a lot better when you are done if there is no dirt in it.”6 The Krahns had other ways to collect snow. Dan borrowed a backhoe by trading favors with its owner, so he occasionally brought in his own load of snow, illustrating that building a snow sculpture activated networks of reciprocity and obligation. Additionally the roof of the furniture store was flat and collected large amounts of snow, free of grime and dirt from the street. Part of Mark’s job was to climb on a ladder to the rooftop and shovel snow onto the ground with a two-man shovel. Team members then spent hours cleaning the snow they had collected by picking out tiny pebbles and rocks and bits of dirt, a process again similar to preparing raw clay for pottery (Burrison [1983] 1995, 80–81). The process rendered naturally dirty snow clean and made it unnaturally, glaringly white. The end result was that the sculpture also was extraordinarily white and clean. This additional step of cleaning the snow marked the Krahns as a master team; not all teams were willing or able to do it. Learning the importance of clean snow was one of Marilyn Krahn’s first lessons: Gabbert: What other kinds of things did you learn at first? M. Krahn: How much water it takes, I think. That and any dirt or—that was in the days when people smoked quite a bit . . . and if their cigarette ashes got in your ice sculpture, that was very maddening because you had to dig it out. They didn’t realize that it would stay there and it would magnify once it’s frozen. So I think that’s your first big lesson: don’t let any dirt or a rock or pebbles or sand or grit get in your ice.7 Teams built forms once the initial pile of snow had been collected. Forms were pieces of plywood that were nailed together (fig. 24). The forms were filled with snow, and then water was added. The entire mess was then packed solid by climbing in and stomping down the mixture. “It’s like making wine,” Mark told me and grinned. The mixture froze during the night, creating a solid base upon which to build. “The goal,” Nancy later explained, 6

Nancy Krahn interview.

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Marilyn Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 8 February 2001.

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Fig. 24. Plywood forms help teams build up the base for snow sculptures.

“is ice.” The plywood then was removed, and the frozen snow formed the base layer of the sculpture. The base was then built up and refined using buckets of slush in what was sometimes called the “slush-on” method of sculpting. Slush was a mixture of snow and water and had the consistency of very wet clay (fig. 25). The slush was added to the sculpture and shaped. It was left to freeze into place, although how quickly this happened depended on the temperature. Snow sculptures were made almost entirely of frozen slush, which added bulk and shape to the basic form as well as creating the final details. The quality of the slush varied depending on the type of snow used. Heavy, wet, or old snow, such as the kind gathered from sidewalks, cars, and the parking lot, made lumpy, chunky, ice-filled slush because the snow did not melt evenly when the water was added. This poor-quality slush was used in places where bulk was needed, such as adding height or width to the basic form. Nancy explained that fresh, powdery snow made the best slush because it melted evenly, creating a product that spread smoothly without lumps of ice. This finer-quality slush was used for delicate details like scales and fins and was highly valued. Nancy often sent team members great distances to gather buckets of powder for slush. Once, when Mark was working, he called to Nancy, “Hey, Nancy, great slush!” “Thanks!” Nancy replied. “It’s your snow, you know,” meaning that Mark had collected good-quality powder snow.

Fig. 25. Nancy Krahn making slush.

Photo reprinted with permission from Idaho Yesterdays 49, no. 1 (2008)

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A good portion of our work consisted of shoveling snow into buckets, filling them with water to make slush, and hauling the slushy buckets to some part of the sculpture for shaping. The garden hose, which provided water to make the slush, kept freezing up due to the subzero temperatures, and we spent a lot of time unfreezing it. Sometimes the Krahns used a small, portable butane torch to get the job done. In particularly bad cases, we unscrewed the hose from the spigot, hauled it downstairs to the basement, and ran it under hot water in the sink until it spat out the chunks of ice that blocked the flow of water. Local sculptors strove for a realistic, rather than an abstract style, so good detail was important. The best sculptures were always very specific, and adding realistic details indicated a high level of skill. Most members of the Krahn team identified good detail along with clean snow as necessary aesthetic elements in making a good sculpture. Nancy offered an example of good detail: “[Do you remember when] they [another team] did ‘A Star is Born’? And they had this actress, and she was gorgeous. It was a beautiful sculpture. Eyelashes and everything. That’s the kind of thing—you can get that kind of detail. Fingernails. When you can see the nails on the thing ’cause there’s that much detail, the lines with the knuckles.”8 To obtain these kinds of details, the Krahns used a variety of interesting tools and techniques (see M. Jones 1989). The most useful tool was a meat cleaver, which easily hacked through a mound of frozen slush to create a basic rough shape. Any item could be appropriated, but kitchen implements seemed particularly common. Plastic spatulas were used to create a smooth surface. Mark said that in the past, they had used the butane torch to carve parts of the sculpture, but they had abandoned the torch because it was too slow. “I always thought it was kind of interesting to carve ice with fire,” he mused.9 Other useful tools included metal files, a log peeler, and all manner of knives. Small round Jell-O molds were used to add detail and decoration around the neck and for the eyes. Mark spent most of his time creating Sharlie’s tail as well as helping Karen and Marlee with the head. Other team members piled up slush to form spikes along the creature’s back (fig. 26), a task that sometimes entailed either standing on a ladder or actually climbing on top of the sculpture to reach the highest parts of the main hump. The final days of work on the sculpture were spent adding fish scales. After some debate 8

Nancy Krahn interview.

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Mark Bennett, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 21 February 2001.

Photo by author

Fig. 26. Marilyn Krahn making spines along back of a Sharlie sculpture.

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and failed attempts, it was decided that small round cake pans should be used to make them. Each cake pan was filled with fine slush, packed down tightly, and applied to the body of the sculpture to create fishlike scales. The final step in completing a sculpture for the Krahns was a process called glazing, which produced a finish similar to pottery. The uppermost layer of snow on the sculpture was slightly melted by rubbing it with warm water. The thin layer of water immediately froze, creating an iced, shiny look. Glazing gave a sculpture a smooth, finished appearance that reflected light and sparkled. It also was functional because a solid icy coating made the sculpture last longer. Marilyn said that she thought glazing was the most important part of sculpting: “I think the finishing, the glazing [is the best]. And the shininess of it and smooth edges and not having a rough texture on it. Because then it just shines beautifully, and everybody likes to see that. It looks like a jewel practically. It just glistens.”10 The result was much prettier and more striking than mere snow. Nancy also emphasized the importance of the glaze: “I like the real shiny glaze. Now [local competitors] never looked quite as shiny as ours. But there is something with the way they finish theirs—it’s extremely smooth. They do a lot of filing and stuff on theirs. And they do get that ice buildup, but it’s not the ice that looks like it’s coating it. Ours almost looks like it’s been dipped in ice.” Part of the reason glazing was important was because it produced a smooth finish. Nancy explained, “I like them shiny, but they don’t HAVE to be shiny. But they have to look like you have really worked on either making them really smooth and flat and finished looking, not jagged and bumpy, and like the slush has been brushed off and then just [not] froze there in spots. . . . And no icicles hanging from it.” 11 Dan agreed. When I asked him what made an excellent sculpture, he said, “[I ask myself ] is it shiny, smooth, hard? Does it have a nice glaze to it? When you put lights on it at night, they really just shine. They look crisp and clean and smooth. You can see some [teams] that haven’t done as many sculptures; the slush isn’t rubbed smooth. So it’s packed on there, but it’s wavy and bumpy, and it’s got little clumps on it. That’s stuff that I look at.”12 Achieving this shiny, smooth look was a delicate, time-consuming process. To begin the glazing process, Dan stayed every night after we finished 10

Marilyn Krahn interview.

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Nancy Krahn interview.

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Dan Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 21 February, 2001.

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Fig. 27. Dan Krahn spraying snow sculpture at night to create glaze.

working to mist the sculpture down with the garden hose. This light misting of water froze during the night, creating a layer of ice (fig. 27). The last eighteen hours of work was spent glazing the sculpture by hand. The main method was using buckets of warm water. We dipped our bare hands in the water or used rubber gloves and rubbed the sculpture down from top to bottom. Another, less-effective way to glaze was to iron the snow with a small, traveling clothes iron (fig. 28). This method was very time consuming, however, because the snow cooled the iron, and you had to wait for it to reheat. During the construction process, team members worked together and socialized intensely (Gabbert 2002). The result was a strong sense of bonding and community among team members within a workplace environment: Gabbert: What’s your favorite aspect of sculpting? M. Krahn: I think the camaraderie of sculpting with people. You exchange unimportant details that generally reveal a lot about a personality, and just plain making new friends. It’s a nice thing . . . and then the first time you win anything it’s so exciting! And the years of disappointment are so devastating. And you know you quickly forget it ’cause everybody that comes by your sculpture thinks it’s great. So, I think camaraderie and the fun of doing something—doing a real project together—is fun. 13 13

Marilyn Krahn interview.

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Fig. 28. Nancy Krahn ironing snow.

Nancy felt the presence of and interaction with people transformed a difficult job into one that was fun and provided an occasion for talk and interaction: The first few days when we go out there, and there’s only one or two of you out there, it’s really boring. I hate it . . . just because it’s so much work. You’re stomping all that snow in, and if you’re the only one out there, it’s just really boring. You don’t feel like you get anything done ’cause there’s nobody to mix slush for you, and there’s nobody to get something for you or hand you up a bucket of slush so you don’t have to climb down off of whatever you’re on. So that’s why I think the building as a group is more fun. And you know it’s amazing how much you find out about the people that you’re working with ’cause you have nothing to do but visit.14 14

Nancy Krahn interview.

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Building a snow sculpture also generated a sense of festivity, camaraderie, and community with other sculpting teams. Marilyn explained, Everybody in town—everybody who makes sculptures anyway—has a feeling of kinship or camaraderie, or you—you know, if it’s raining, why you all cry together, and if it’s good sculpting weather like this year, why you all celebrate together. It’s a sharing of the same circumstances; I guess that you comment on each other’s skills. And you know you’ve all been—if you’re a first-timer, why we’ve all been there! So you know you share those feelings.15 The most intense time of sculpting for all teams was Thursday evening. It was during this pre-festival time period that most bonding, socializing, and community building occurred. The work pace for all sculpting teams peaked as each one feverishly worked in subzero weather to complete its sculpture before the 8:00 a.m. judging. Many teams worked the entire night (see Nordberg 2001). Across town people used bright construction lights, ladders, and moving equipment; pockets of people sculpted, ate, drank, and socialized. The Krahns did not work all night, but they frequently worked until at least midnight to get their sculpture as perfect as possible. Nancy thought that Thursday evening was important enough that visitors might enjoy it: “I almost was thinking that would be kind of a fun thing—to encourage people to come up before Winter Carnival when people are out working on the sculptures—because it’s really pretty fun. And you see that more and more on Thursday night and stuff; people do go out and watch as people are building ’cause they’ve figured out that that is a lot of it.”16 Snow sculpting was fun for many people, but it also required a lot of work and sacrifice. These too, produced feelings of camaraderie and community bonding. Snow sculpting was extremely time consuming. The Sharlie sculpture took approximately three hundred “man hours” (an emic local term) to make.17 It also was hard physical work, akin to shoveling snow for six hours a day. Team members sometimes got soaked from the water in subzero weather. The work was somewhat dangerous. People hauled buckets of slush up ladders, and it was easy to slip and fall on the ice; accidents had happened in the past. Krahn team sculptor Karen Morris, for example, once 15

Marilyn Krahn interview.

16

Nancy Krahn interview.

17

A man (or woman) hour equals one hour of work per person. For example, eight man hours could be achieved by four people working two hours each.

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slipped on the ice, cut her eye, and had to be taken to the emergency room for stitches. Therefore, team members sometimes sighed about the amount of work still left to do, worried about and fought inclement weather, and talked about past sculpting disasters (such as years when pieces had to be rebuilt several times due to rain). Bammer acknowledged the sacrifices made by her team members by buying lunch and offering hot drinks at the end of the day “for fortification.” It also cost a lot of money to make a sculpture, depending on its size. The slush-on method required enormous amounts of water, and water was expensive in McCall. Consequently, snow-sculpting teams considered their pieces and the sacrifices they entailed as gifts to the community because sculptures were the most important element of Winter Carnival. Most people believed that without them, Winter Carnival would fail. As discussed in the previous chapter, business owners were very involved in community life. The traditional role of local businesses was that of a patron. Businesses were asked to donate money to local charity functions and support school fundraisers, music groups, Scouts, the Optimist Club, churches, sports teams, and many other activities. Business owners were also expected to donate time by volunteering, including serving on the board of the chamber of commerce. These donations of money and time were considered a business’s way of giving back to the community that supported it (Lavenda 1997, 72–73). In this general context of business patronage and obligation, snow sculptures were a contribution to the community, another way of supporting civic life. The public responded to the sculptures as gifts by actively showing their appreciation for sculpting efforts. Team members became public figures during the construction process because they worked outside and hence were visible. Teams engaged in sculpting attracted the attention of residents who walked by as well as the media, such as the newspaper and television. Not many tourists were in town during sculpture construction since Winter Carnival had not officially begun, so the people who stopped usually were locals whom the Krahns knew. People walking by frequently paused to talk and admire our project, or friends sometimes encouraged the team by bringing small gifts or hot chocolate. Nancy’s sister, Victoria, for example, brought cookies to the team. The local paper frequently interviewed team members. Journalists from other cities, such as Boise, stopped by. Passersby took pictures. That they received public attention and that people expressed

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appreciation for their efforts was important to most Krahn team members. This appreciation instilled a sense of pride and ownership among sculptors. Nancy especially liked talking to people on the street. N. Krahn: People would stop by, especially since we work in the daytime. They would always stop by when we were building. Gabbert: And what would they say? N. Krahn: Oh, you know, just came by to visit and see how we’re doing.18 Mark Bennett also acknowledged the importance of public support for building sculptures: You spend so much time explaining to people the process and how the sculpture is built and how this individual sculpture was built—because it kind of varies from year to year exactly how you do it. People are funny—you get a lot of encouragement from people walking by while you are actually doing the building—the people who live in town and you know. They’re just very supportive of you doing this work. And then after the sculptures have been made and you, like, are doing the repair work or maintenance, the people walking by. You can spend— it’s very appealing to my vanity to be able to talk to all the people who want to know, “How do you do this?” And it’s just like going on and on about it and repeating the same thing over and over. But people are truly interested, and they’re very flattering about how they’re receiving the sculpture, so that’s very cool.19 There was a sense of reciprocity between snow-sculpting teams and the general public that was not official but was felt to be appropriate in some way. The attention and appreciation made the effort of sculpting worthwhile. Sculptures were a gift to an imagined collective; they were also somewhat obligatory. Winter Carnival was an event that was supposed to help local businesses, so businesses were expected to contribute to its success. Building a snow sculpture was looked on as one of the most important ways of supporting Winter Carnival. The obligation to build a sculpture existed even if Winter Carnival did not benefit a specific business directly. Several members of the Krahns’ team pointed out that, as a furniture store, they did not immediately benefit from Winter Carnival because nobody bought furniture during the festival (see chapter one). Yet they felt it was important to participate anyway. Nancy said, “We do it mostly because we like to be 18

Nancy Krahn interview.

19

Mark Bennett interview.

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involved in whatever is going on with the city, and we think it’s important to participate in the things that are going on.”20 The complexity of sculptures as both gift and obligation meant that the primary audience for snow sculptures in the local competition was other locals, rather than tourists. Increased tourism was the final product; it was what happened as the result of sculpting. In small towns like McCall, every business was not just a what but also a who since most people knew who owned and worked at each establishment. Local people talked about and evaluated which businesses (and therefore who) had contributed a snow sculpture, who had not, and how. Locals were the primary audience because constructing a sculpture was a visual, public means of staking a claim of belonging; by making a sculpture, one was being generous, neighborly, and fulfilling obligations of good citizenship. In this sense, anybody could stake a claim of belonging by building a sculpture. The community boundary was based on evidence of participation, rather than class, old-timer/newcomer status, or other conventional markers. The audience also evaluated a sculpture’s aesthetic qualities as visual evidence of concern for communal welfare. The specific aesthetics reflected particular sets of values (Del Negro 2004; Shukla 2008; Posey 2008). Generally organizations and businesses that made sculptures, especially first-timers, were applauded for their attempts, no matter what the result. Businesses that had a history of participation in Winter Carnival and experience building sculptures were more carefully scrutinized. For example, sculptures that seemed last minute, sloppily executed, or slapped together just for the sake of doing something were not considered very valuable contributions. Participants were thought to be just “skating by.” Such judgments, however, were tempered by an understanding of who had made the piece. Sculptures built by children or students, for example, or people who were new and inexperienced, were not subject to such criticisms. Conversely, excellent sculptures—those that illustrated good detail, smoothness, shininess, cleanliness (clean snow), symmetry, and were extraordinarily large or particularly clever—were highly praised. Leslie Prosterman (1995) closely examines home-economy aesthetics exhibited at county fairs in the Midwest, arguing that the criteria by which they were evaluated constituted an eighteenth-century value system that leaned toward balance and centeredness in community life. The aesthetic criteria she identifies are similar to those 20

Nancy Krahn interview.

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in the local snow-sculpting competition. When they were evident in a sculpture, they became proof of a team or business’s concern for communal welfare. The sculptures were considered valuable contributions both because of their beauty and the amount of time, skill, and care it took to make them. The participants’ status increased as a result, at least temporarily. Conversely, not building a sculpture staked a different kind of claim. Stronger criticisms were reserved for businesses that did not build sculptures at all.21 The Krahns, for example, shared a parking lot with another store. For many years, the neighboring business was a sports shop called Mountain Regatta, and the two businesses built their sculpture together. They considered it a mutually beneficial act since the sculpture attracted visitors to their shared business space. Eventually, however, Mountain Regatta closed. A new shop, which sold art, opened in 2001. The new owners opted not to participate in constructing a snow sculpture—they neither built one of their own nor helped the Krahns. Rather, they simply waved a friendly hello as they walked past into their store. Nearly every member of the Krahn team commented on their lack of participation. The business owners were perceived as unfriendly. Krahn team members were incredulous that anybody would walk by a team of hardworking snow sculptors every day for two weeks without stopping to offer to help; that indicated in their eyes, a complete lack of community spirit. This oversight on the part of the owners of the art store (which has since gone out of business), illustrates that not only could the construction of sculptures intensify social relationships but also lack of participation could potentially damage them. One team member said that the owners obviously had no idea of the way to fit into a small town. Another stated flatly: [Those people next door] did benefit by having Sharlie. . . . They were very poor neighbors, very poor neighbors. . . . They could have put in 21

These judgments were tempered, however, by how much volunteer work a person did around town, illustrating the importance of volunteerism to notions of community as discussed in chapter one. People who were perceived as contributing to the community in other ways were excused. Business owner Rob Lyons, for example, owned a local restaurant named Sharlie’s and felt somewhat guilty about not making a sculpture in 2001 since restaurants benefit directly from carnival crowds. On the other hand, Lyons pointed out that since he was chairing Winter Carnival (a difficult and thankless job), he had an excuse; others agreed. Bob Scoles, a founder of Winter Carnival, no longer made sculptures but also was excused because he had put in his time. The contingent nature of such judgments further illustrates the complex relationship between building sculptures and contributing to community.

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five hours and made a lot of points, and just the sheer thing of, like, helping. . . . [They] are doing . . . art in a place that has snow eight months of the year, and then they don’t even help on one of the major things that brings people into their walkway. Right next door! . . . I’m sure they’re probably very nice people, but it was either a complete miscalculation of what the community is about, or how a community really runs, works, and interacts, or. . . .22 Stronger criticisms were targeted toward businesses that did not participate in any way in Winter Carnival but directly benefited from tourist crowds. They included bars, restaurants, motels, gas stations, grocery stores, and other service-oriented businesses that generated income from an influx of visitors, even if only for a single day. The fact that some of these businesses did not build snow sculptures was seen not merely as not doing one’s part or lacking a sense of community, it was interpreted as taking advantage of the generosity of other people’s time, effort, and hard work for personal gain. This was considered a much bigger affront than simply lacking community spirit. Whitetail Resort was the most salient example in 2001 of a service-oriented business that did not participate in making a sculpture that year. Its lack of involvement was interpreted both as a lack of sense of community and as evidence that the owner was taking advantage of people. The owner, Doug Manchester, who was board member, chair, and/or director of Manchester Financial Group, Manchester Resorts, Inc., and Summit Resources, Inc., among many other businesses, had been a controversial figure since he began investing in McCall in the late 1980s. He was one of the first out-of-town entrepreneurs to push accelerated development in McCall.23 Manchester purchased the historic Shore Lodge in 1989. It was the only place in town with a ballroom large enough for dances, banquets, fund-raisers, and other social functions, and it held memories for many local people. Manchester renamed the hotel Manchester-at-Payette-Lake after he bought it and transformed it into an exclusive private club with annual membership dues, leading some residents to feel that Shore Lodge had been taken from them.24 22

Anonymous, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, February 17, 2001.

23

For more information on Manchester and his projects, see the Web site at http://www. dougmanchester.com/Vitae.html

24

The hotel was eventually sold and the original name restored. For the 2009 Winter Carnival, the building sported a banner that read “Welcome Back Shore Lodge.”

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The owners and managers of Shore Lodge had always actively participated in Winter Carnival by building large, elaborate sculptures. Shore Lodge managers and employees built some of the most popular sculptures in the 1960s, such as “King Neptune” and the “Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” Managers and employees continued making sculptures for a decade after Manchester’s 1989 purchase. But the hotel, which had been renamed Whitetail Resort by 2001, stopped constructing sculptures between 2000–2004, likely due to the fact that the building was being remodeled. Although the actual time frame that the hotel stopped making sculptures was relatively brief, the public noticed. Many people commented to me about the hotel’s lack of participation in those years, which was interpreted as evidence of Manchester’s perceived lack of commitment to the community and yet another way he was taking advantage of it. Not building a sculpture was one important way that people identified Doug Manchester as an outsider and framed him as somebody who was uninterested in the welfare of the whole. Complicating the Local A number of elements framed the local competition as amateur. People did not describe it as amateur—they used the term “local”—and might have taken offense at that description. By amateur, however, I simply mean nonprofessional and in no way imply a lack of talent. First, there were a number of excellent snow-sculpting teams, but most local people who sculpted did not consider themselves professional artists or even artists at all. Some teams had members with artistic backgrounds. Marlee Wilcomb was a member of the Krahn team who also was a professional artist. Karen Morris, who was a team member, had a background in design. Sculptor Mark Bennett had worked in theater. But many people I talked with said that they liked sculpting because they felt they didn’t need to be an artist to participate. Several people actually insistently claimed the opposite, saying specifically that they weren’t artists but enjoyed making sculptures, and this was one important reason why they liked participating. This act of purposely claiming nonprofessionalism or nonartistry as an indicator of localness has been documented in other contexts, such as wood-chopping competitions in the Northeast (Kruckemeyer 2002). Many people thought snow sculpting easy or forgiving because it could always be redone. Marilyn Krahn, for example, did not consider herself artistic but still enjoyed sculpting: “Well, I thought I would be wonderful at sculpting,

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and I’m really poor. But I’m a good sweat person, and I can haul buckets, and I can get the stuff out and water it, and I have the perseverance to stick with a project. And so it doesn’t always take a sculptor. Some people who don’t have a creative tendency are very good at sculpting. So I don’t think you know until you try it.”25 When I asked Nancy Krahn if she considered herself an artist, she replied,

Not at all. I don’t. I would say that of the two of us, Dan has the artistic talent. I can tell what colors go together and things like that. I have a good enough eye to tell when something does or doesn’t look right. But actually to sit down and draw or do anything like that, no, I don’t consider that I have any artistic talent at all. Gabbert: But snow is OK. N. Krahn: Snow is OK. But it’s only because there’s enough other people there to tell you, “OK, that’s pretty good, but let’s shave this down here, or add some there,” and so other people help you along, like Karen. Karen especially is good.26 Dan Krahn also did not consider himself an artist: “No, I don’t consider myself artistic. I can do the larger detail and the work part that needs muscle. . . . We’ve done log houses, brick houses for the Three Little Pigs— and we’ve made a river-rock chimney—yeah, I do something like that and carve that in, but nahh, . . . I really don’t do the artistry stuff.”27 Most people who sculpted in the local competition were not artists, so in fact the local competition exhibited a range in the quality of sculptures that further framed the event as amateur. Not all sculptures were good. The ones that won top prizes were always excellent, but many sculptures were fair-to-middling. Such pieces might have been constructed by children, or people with little or no experience in snow, or those who simply did not do a good job. These run-of-the-mill and sometimes even poor-quality pieces were still considered valid contributions to Winter Carnival and entered into the competition for judging. The local competition was democratic with respect to talent. The local competition also did not adhere to national regulations for snow sculpting. Rules evolved locally over time. Unlike national competitions, for example, some internal supports were allowed in the local competition, and 25

Marilyn Krahn interview.

26

Nancy Krahn interview.

27

Dan Krahn interview.

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there was no set time limit. Additionally the slush-on method, which is a process of addition, is not the standard competition method. Residents therefore evolved their own set of aesthetic criteria for determining good sculptures as a result of this localized construction process. As already mentioned, these included clean snow, good detail, smoothness, shininess, and, when possible, extraordinary size, which could only be achieved with the slush-on method. Nationally regulated competitions begin with prefabricated blocks of snow, so the final pieces do not exceed a particular size; furthermore, there are strict time limits in regulated competitions, so teams usually do not have time to glaze or smooth their pieces. The slush-on method and resulting local criteria meant that most pieces in the local competition were staunchly realistic. Abstract sculptures were viewed as having less detail and therefore considered less complicated and skillful. They were not commonly constructed in the local competition, and they rarely won prizes or were considered favorites when they were built. Tensions between the local evaluative criteria and the tastes of professional artists were evident historically in debates over who should judge the local snow-sculpting competition and what standards they should use. Organizers frequently tried to find judges who did not live in the area to avoid appearances of favoritism, and their identities were usually kept secret. Sometimes (though not always) they were professional artists. Yet the judges did not always or necessarily pick the sculptures that were most popular with local people because they sometimes used a different set of artistic criteria (Lavenda 1996). Judges might have had artistic backgrounds, but they did not necessarily have snow-sculpting experience. People who sculpted said that the judges sometimes did not understand what made a really good sculpture—they were unable to appreciate the pieces because they did not understand the importance of, say, good detail or smoothness and the way these criteria indicated the skill level of the team in the minds of local people. To remedy the ongoing tensions between locally developed aesthetics and the judges’ ideas about art, the chamber of commerce gave judges score sheets containing criteria that were supposed to balance the two. In 2009 the criteria were visual impact, artistic merit, originality, detail, difficulty, and theme presentation. Sculptures earned up to ten points for each criteria: a maximum of sixty points was possible. The score sheets continued to be a point of debate, and the criteria were revisited frequently. One factor that began to muddy amateur/local and professional/artist distinctions in the local competition was the practice of outsourcing

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sculptures. Stoeltje (1989) notes that the professionalization of rodeo occurred during a time of significant historical transformation in the nation, when western settlement was completed. Similarly in McCall, most sculptures until the 1990s were made by teams of people associated with a local business, including store owners, employees, and friends and family, such as the example of the Krahns. Over time and for a variety of reasons, businesses began to outsource their sculptures, which meant that, rather than making them, businesses sponsored the sculpture by paying somebody else to do the work. Most sculptors today are actually paid to make sculptures because outsourcing has become common. There were a number of reasons for outsourcing. Some businesses had made sculptures since 1965. Founder Bob Scoles said that nobody ever expected the revival of Winter Carnival to last so long, so people grew old or tired of doing it. Other participants lacked the necessary people power and time. Patty Hovdey and her husband, Dean, owners of Hometown Sports, participated in Winter Carnival by building snow sculptures starting in the 1970s. They began sponsoring sculptures in 1998 because they decided they could no longer in good conscience ask their employees to make the sacrifice a sculpture demands. Both Patty and Dean believed their employees had more obligations than they had had in the past. The Hovdeys pointed out that even in the past, building a sculpture had always created a little tension between those employees that participated and those that did not. The Hovdeys eventually found it better practice to outsource the work.28 Outsourcing was a practical solution that allowed businesses to still claim belonging by giving a sculpture without the enormous investment of time and energy required to make one; it was a way to accomplish community without the labor. Most people in McCall have made sculptures at some point and know how much time, effort, and energy they required; they understood why businesses decided to outsource. The Krahns, along with the Forest Service, were examples of the few teams left in town that still sculpted their own pieces, and this was largely because both organizations had large social resources— staff, family, friends—upon which they could draw. Outsourcing had the effect of introducing a wider variety of participants into the local sculpting competition. Initially, businesses outsourced sculptures to local groups that wanted to earn money, such as the Boy Scout 28

Patty and Dean Hovdey, interview with the author, field notes, McCall, Idaho, 16 July 2005.

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troop or a school athletic team. During my research period the chamber of commerce sometimes advertised across the state for potential sculptors on behalf of businesses that wanted to sponsor them because finding people who were willing to make sculptures, even for money, could be difficult. The reasons were that first, sculptures were a lot of work, and second, a successful event demanded a large number of sculptors. Paid sculpting teams came from all over the state. Art classes at Boise State University, fraternities and sororities at the University of Idaho, and professional artists all participated in the local competition at some point. By the end of my research period in 2009, there was even a company called Ice Is Nice that people could hire to build their sculpture. Outsourcing constituted a commodification of social relations that shifted, though did not entirely change, some of the previously discussed social dynamics. People still evaluated whether or not a business contributed to Winter Carnival by sponsoring a snow sculpture, so the audience for the local competition was still strongly local. The nature of the evaluations changed somewhat, however, because this newer financial arrangement required an investment of capital, rather than an investment of time and labor. In 2009 it cost between two thousand and five thousand dollars to hire a person or team to make a snow sculpture, a sum that many businesses could not afford. Tom Grote, editor of the Star-News, for example, paid two thousand dollars, plus motel and travel expenses, for the two-person team he hired in 2008 to make a sculpture entitled “The Duel: Sharlie versus Bigfoot.”29 Businesses that did not sponsor sculptures claimed that they simply could not afford it, so the debate shifted to whether such claims were justified, or whether people were simply using lack of finances as an excuse to get out of making a sculpture. The other way outsourcing shifted local discussion over snow sculptures was by heightening the strain between professional artists and nonprofessional locals. Paying people to make sculptures naturally attracted professional sculptors. Key Bank was one of the first businesses to hire a professional sculptor, but contributions by professional artists were commonly part of the local competition by the time my research period ended. Some of the sculptors used the local competition as a forum to practice for state championships. Some residents felt that the inclusion of professional sculptors enhanced the local competition by giving it weight and significance 29

Tom Grote, e-mail communication with the author, 19 June 2009.

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that it did not previously have. Others felt that it was unfair for local participants to have to compete against professional artists (see Kruckemeyer 2002). Karen Morris felt that professionalizing the local competition could make people feel less confident about sculpting their own and that it might lead to making Winter Carnival more of a professional event, akin to some other winter carnivals. On the other hand, she understood the necessity of expanding participation, suggesting that one solution might be to have distinct professional and non-professional categories.30 The result of this shift was that the local competition wasn’t strictly local in a geographical sense, nor was it entirely amateur. Rather, it remained local because locals organized and paid for the sculpture production (JamesDuguid 1996), local people were the primary audience, and the production of sculptures remained a source of local talk. It was unclear to me whether building snow sculptures had always been a source of debate in Winter Carnival, but whether this discussion was a recent development misses the point. What is important is that sculptures generated talk about the nature of belonging in the present and their construction and display were complex acts involving aesthetics and politics. To build (or sponsor) or not build (or not sponsor) a sculpture was an active choice for which one’s neighbors, coworkers, and friends were the primary audience. The actual creation of sculptures and the discussions surrounding them occurred before Winter Carnival officially began, outside its framework. Tourists became the primary audience for sculptures only after Winter Carnival began as sculptors finished making them and returned to work. What was left for display were icy manifestations of ideas about social relationships that had obtained during that year and that reflected people’s relationship to a larger, imagined collective whole. *** The Krahns finished glazing their Sharlie sculpture late on Thursday evening. The sculptures were to be judged early in the morning on Friday. The final step was for them to take a picture. This was the moment when the sculpture was the most perfect; it was finished, and it had not yet been ravaged by the weather or damaged by enthusiastic visitors. The picture was later framed and hung on the wall of their business, joining a host of other photographs of other sculptures and sculpting teams from the 30

Karen Morris, interview with author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 19 February, 2001.

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Photo by author

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Fig. 29. Pictures of past snow sculptures hang on walls of businesses across town.

past (fig. 29). These pictures became the basis for telling stories about past Winter Carnivals and fond memories. They reminded the Krahns of friends and coworkers and their experiences of building sculptures together. Other businesses had walls of photographs of their sculptures, too, a history of participation and concrete evidence of good citizenship.

Part II: The Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship In 1987 festival organizers planned the first annual Idaho State SnowSculpting Championship, which added an additional competition to the original Winter Carnival activities. The new event was the brainchild of Jane and Hal Sager, who had participated in national competitions and were important festival organizers. The addition of the Idaho State SnowSculpting Championship was directly linked to the expansion of Winter Carnival from a three-day weekend to a ten-day event in 1985, a decision in which Jane was involved. She explained that the primary reason for initiating a state competition was so that tourists would have a fresh set of sculptures to look at over the second weekend of carnival. Sculptures are delicate and difficult to maintain for ten days, so the local pieces started to look worn by the end of the festival. Sager said, “[We] got much better crowds the second weekend because there were fresh sculptures to look at.

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The people before who came up the [second] weekend were seeing week-old sculptures, and not many city sculptors would maintain theirs [because] it’s hard to do.”31 Sager’s comment suggests that visitors and tourists were the primary audience for the Idaho State Championship. The organization, aesthetics, and position of the state competition within the festival supported her contention because they worked to frame the event as a serious and professional competition geared toward outside audiences. Organizationally, for example, the Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship was a highly regulated event that generally followed national rules and guidelines. Many states across the country have state championships that abide by similar rules. Teams consisted of three people, and a sign identified the teams publicly according to their geographical residence. The teams that competed in the state competition were rarely from McCall. Most came from towns scattered throughout the state such as Sandpoint, Cascade, Boise, Star, Indian Valley, and Emmett. But teams did not have to be from Idaho to compete. In 2005, for example, one team came from Minnesota. All teams competed for the title of Idaho Snow-Sculpting Champion. Teams submitted a drawing of their sculpture beforehand, and it had to be approved by competition organizers (at the time of my research Sager’s daughter, Diane Wiegand), illustrating a greater centralization of authority. Many teams also constructed scale models in advance (fig. 30, fig. 31). Teams did not gather their own snow but worked with prefabricated blocks that measured five-by-five-by-eight feet. And, as in other regulated competitions, no supports or armatures of any kind were allowed; the final sculpture had to be made entirely out of snow. Teams were given three days to finish their sculptures. The competition began at noon on Tuesday during the middle of Winter Carnival week and ended at 11:00 a.m. on Friday of the final weekend. Teams worked as much as they wanted during that period. The high degree of regulation defined the state event as a serious competition. Sager pointed out that “[the] local level can use armatures and have as many people as we want, and we can take as long as we want. [The state competition is] a real competitive event; in this case it’s three days, three people, no armatures, no power tools. Work as many hours within the three days as you want. It’s a different type of thing.”32 31

Jane Sager, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 19 July 2005.

32

Ibid.

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Photos courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 30. Models may be built by artists prior to sculpting in the Idaho Snow Sculpting Championships.

Fig. 31. Finished sculpture based on model.

The regulated organization of production was reflected in both the style and content of the finished sculptures. Because sculptors began with large blocks of snow and did not add slush, the sculpting process was one of extraction, rather than addition, like working with stone rather than clay. The finished sculptures were somewhat blocky and relatively the same size, reflecting their structural origins in the prefabricated blocks. None of the sculptures were glazed due to the time limitations, and they were frequently less clean and white than the pieces in the local competition since artists did not have an opportunity to gather and prepare their own snow. State sculptures were also not compelled to follow the festival theme, and the result was a greater number of abstract pieces. Professional artists actively participated in this competition, so abstractness may also have represented professionalism to some people. The state competition reversed many of the dynamics in the local competition because it symbolically transformed strangers and professionals into locals. It accomplished this in two ways. First, unlike the local competition,

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 32. Artist working from block of snow in the Idaho State Snow Sculpting Championship.

the state one was embedded entirely within the official festival structure. It highlighted the artists and the construction process, giving sculptors a major festival role (fig. 32). People and labor were on display because artists began and ended their projects during the festival. Winter Carnival began on Friday, and state teams arrived the following Monday night. There was an opening breakfast for them on Tuesday morning, which provided an opportunity for people to meet and interact. Teams began to sculpt at noon, and they finished on Friday; the sculpting teams were also concentrated in a single area, unlike the local competition, where they were scattered about (fig. 33). This centralized organization of time and space allowed visitors to view the process of making a sculpture, rather than merely looking at the final product, and created an additional attraction. Sager said, “[We knew] if

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 33. Finished sculptures for the Idaho Snow Sculpting Championships, ca. 1993.

there was something going on midweek, we would get people up here to see what was going on. Our experience in building sculptures for the McCall event [was that] people would stand there in awe watching what we were doing because it is a very interesting process. With an actual sculpting event going on, people would come up to see it.”33 Competition organizer Diane Wiegand agreed: “It’s a big event that people can actually watch from beginning to end in a short period of time. People come and they stay longer now. You can go down there on Thursday night—most of them work through the night—we do hand-dipped corndogs for anybody who’s walking around there.”34 To passersby, state competitors assumed the role of locals while the artists also felt local because they contributed to the festival by making a sculpture and received attention from and interacted with festival visitors. At the same time, the state competition provided local residents an opportunity to be entertained, taking on the role of visitor and guest, rather than host. Wiegand noted that at any particular time, “You’ll find fifty to one hundred people [watching the event], and a lot of them are from here.”35 A second reason that the state competition transformed strangers into locals was because participation generated a sense of belonging to the area. According to Wiegand, some of the sculptors considered McCall their second home, and they looked forward to participating annually. Sager 33

Ibid.

34

Diane Wiegand, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho 19 July 2005.

35

Ibid.

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added, “The state competition creates ties to the area. Absolutely. They [the state sculptors] love McCall. It becomes part of you if you spend any time here.” State teams, Sager said, are treated to a kind of “working vacation.”36 Reciprocity existed between the state teams and the city, much like the dynamic between the general public and teams in the local competition. Teams were given free lodging, meals, and T-shirts; a local hotel donated rooms, and a local restaurant prepared free meals. Wiegand said that many participating teams saw the state event as a kind of free vacation in a beautiful resort in exchange for a sculpture. “The whole time that they are here they are wined and dined and catered to,” she said. Additionally participation created a sense of belonging among the sculptors because many of the same teams returned year after year and formed a sense of community based on their participation in the competition (Kruckemeyer 2002, 314). Returning teams grew to know each other and looked forward to their annual weeklong trip to the area. Wiegand said “I have some people who have been doing it for fifteen [years].” She emphasized, however, that “some teams are brand new. I always like to have at least three or four brand-new teams if I can.”37 Sager told a poignant story about a state team that didn’t want to leave its sculpture because one of the team members was dying of cancer and knew that she would not be back. “Th[is] kind of thing stick[s] with you,” she said. “Those kinds of experiences are what it’s all about.”38 The event, therefore, was a mechanism for producing a team that was at once local, professional, and tied to the state. At the same time that they symbolically were made local, winners of the competition received the title of Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Champions. This newly invented, professional, local/state team was then inserted into national and international contexts that were both nested and hierarchical. Winners, for example, were eligible to compete in the U.S. National Snow-Sculpting Competition, which is usually held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. They also participated in international events, such as the well-known snow-sculpting competition at the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan and the Olympic Winter Games Arts Festival International Snow-Sculpting Competition. Sager explained, The artists who have won the Idaho competition have won the nationals. They went to the Calgary Olympics—the Olympics have 36

Jane Sager interview.

37

Diane Wiegand interview.

38

Jane Sager interview.

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an artistic thing, beyond the athletics. Hal [Sager’s husband] just judged the team to go to the 2006 Olympics. He was asked to be a judge for that. We have sent people to Sapporo, where they have an international event, and we won that. This is coming out of the Idaho competition. I think it is a significant type of thing and it enhances McCall’s reputation.39 The champions that were created through the state-sculpting competition allowed the community to shape a cosmopolitan identity by participating in increasingly important and structured events. Festival organizers used nationally established levels of competition to insert themselves as equals into a hemispherewide series of related affairs. *** The local and state competitions were at once complementary and oppositional, and they worked out notions of citizenship and belonging at different scales and in different ways. Tourists were important in both cases, but the primary audience for the local competition was other locals. In McCall social relations hovered between obligatory and voluntary. The local competition concretized conventional values that had been challenged by resort development and were openly questioned and debated through the construction and display of sculptures. Debates about local citizenship and belonging were enacted through participation in and talk about the production of art, while broader realms of belonging were imagined through the content and form of the sculptures themselves. The state competition, in contrast, was a device for producing a team that was at once local and professional, conflating categories that were seemingly opposed in the local competition; the primary audience for this event was visitors and tourists. Having merged these categories and crowned a winner, McCall then used the champion team to situate the town in a global environment. The two competitions worked in tandem through differently organized processes of production. In doing so ideas about social relationships with respect to a larger whole were debated, contested, and explored here on an annual basis using art. But the relationships and identities constructed were temporary—though remembered, photographed, and talked about— because the public art was impermanent and created within a framework of play. Winter Carnival ended on Sunday evening of the second weekend. All sculptures were demolished with backhoes by early Monday morning, and city spaces were reclaimed for everyday life. 39

Ibid.

3 On Neon Necklaces and Mardi Gras Beads Style and Audience in Winter Carnival Parades It is now necessary when planning a parade or a demonstration to consider the media first, to secure maximal coverage. Conversely, if a parade or demonstration receives no media coverage, it may as well not have happened… Susan Davis, Parades and Power

Snow sculptures were arguably Winter Carnival’s biggest attraction,

but the two parades, the main Mardi Gras Parade and the Children’s Neon Light Parade, were also core elements. Parades are gathering events or happenings (Casey 1996, 24–27) that accomplish their communicative functions by assembling festival participants in predetermined spaces and then moving bodies in particular ways. Winter Carnival parades transformed and redirected collective festival energy as marchers placed themselves on display through costumes, masks, makeup, dancing, and noise. Other people became spectators who were obliged to demonstrate their appreciation and admiration by shouting, clapping, and whistling. The relationship between marchers and audience members was very important in understanding the range of functions and meanings in the two parades. The Children’s Neon Light Parade was held on Friday evening, the opening night of Winter Carnival. Local children, dressed in Mardi Gras style, sporting glow-in-the-dark neon necklaces and accompanied by their parents, wound their way through the downtown streets to the area designated for the opening ceremonies. Once the parade arrived, the opening ceremonies started, and Winter Carnival officially began. Usually spectators were few, suggesting that the parade’s purpose was not necessarily (or primarily) to attract an audience. The Mardi Gras Parade followed on Saturday 114

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at noon. As its name suggests, the parade incorporated a Mardi Gras theme and was quite colorful (gallery fig. G). People wore boas, masqueraded, and threw beads, and the parade attracted a large crowd. It was a highlight of Winter Carnival, attended by locals and visitors alike. Susan Davis (1985) argues forcefully that parades and their styles are important forms of communication. She places her study of parades in Philadelphia between the American Revolution and the Civil War in the context of quickening industrial capitalism. I am primarily concerned with style and audience in the context of late capitalism as they inform constructions and interpretations of community identity. Both the main and the children’s parades recently adopted a Mardi Gras style, yet neither historically were Mardi Gras parades. The main parade has been part of Winter Carnival since 1965, but it only adopted a Mardi Gras theme in 1995. The Children’s Neon Light Parade originally had a torchlight format and has also long been part of Winter Carnival. It adopted an overt Mardi Gras approach in approximately 2007. Is this new style merely a superficial borrowing from other celebrations? Richard Bauman has pointed out that the re-entextualization of texts in new situations generates new meanings (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Bauman 2004). What has the recontextualized style actually accomplished, and can anything be learned by examining its appropriation? Mardi Gras traditionally is a late-winter to early-spring Catholic celebration oriented toward the cycle of death, renewal, and rebirth associated with the coming of spring, Easter, and the resurrection of Christ (Santino 1994). It is the culmination of the pre-Lenten carnival season, which is celebrated throughout Europe and the Americas. Lent, which begins on a Wednesday and lasts approximately forty days until Easter Sunday, is characterized by self-control such as fasting. Mardi Gras takes place on the Tuesday before Lent. It is also called Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday, and marks the end of the festive carnival season and the beginning of Lent’s period of restraint. The most famous Mardi Gras celebration in the United States takes place in New Orleans, but well-known festivities occur elsewhere, such as in Mobile, Alabama (Kinser 1990) as well as throughout southwestern Louisiana, which is sometimes called Cajun Country (Lindahl and Ware 1997). In contrast to subdued Lenten behavior, Mardi Gras celebrations are carnivalesque, a term drawn from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin ([1968] 1984) that suggests social structures are temporarily inverted or burlesqued. Mardi Gras historian and carnivalesque scholar Samuel Kinser writes that “the carnivalesque quality traditionally most emphasized is transgression. Festive actions that

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satirically, ironically, abusively, overturn everyday norms, like many of those occurring in carnival and Halloween, meet this . . . criterion” (Kinser n.d., 2). Throwing Mardi Gras beads, displaying elaborate floats, wearing colorful costumes, and engaging in extensive social interaction conventionally characterize Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans: playfulness, parody, irony, excess, and humor predominate. Neither McCall nor that region of Idaho is predominantly Catholic, which makes the adoption of a Mardi Gras style for the parades an interesting choice, although certainly pre-Lenten celebrations such as Shrovetide take place in non-Catholic areas of Europe. Anglican, Lutheran, and nondenominational Christian churches predominated in McCall. The main Catholic church, Our Lady of the Lake, was part of a parish that covered nine thousand square miles, illustrating the far-flung nature of the Catholic population and the remoteness of the region. Father Don Fraser estimated Our Lady of the Lake’s congregation as approximately 250 people, about 10 percent of McCall’s population. Father Fraser confirmed that Mardi Gras as it appeared in Winter Carnival parades did not have any connection to the Catholic Church or any other religious organization. The importation of New Orleans Mardi Gras imagery into McCall’s Winter Carnival increased participation on the part of both the marchers and the audience, suggesting that Mardi Gras was a useful festive style. But Mardi Gras as it appeared in McCall was exactly that—a celebratory style— and therefore not the same as the New Orleans Mardi Gras or other carnival celebrations. Instead of signaling the beginning of Lent and burlesquing or inverting social structures, a Mardi Gras theme signaled fun. This makes sense because Mardi Gras invokes a playful framework. Felicia McMahon (2000) even suggests that play should be considered an essential aspect of carnival aesthetics. Play is an “amoral medium” (Huizinga in Handelman 1990, 69) that introduces uncertainty. It can undo and redo social order and therefore can be terrifying (Handelman 1990, 63–81). It is only under the rubric of play, a framework that ostensibly doesn’t count and where the imagination predominates, that the transgressions typical of traditional carnival can be accomplished. Carnivalesque transgression did not exist in the Mardi Gras Parade, but a playful attitude predominated, suggesting possibilities for change and transformation. The transformations that did occur by appropriating a Mardi Gras style were built onto already-existing parade logics, extending their social functions. Susan Davis notes that “parades are public dramas of social relations,

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and in them performers define who can be a social actor and what subjects and ideas are available for communication and consideration” (1985, 6). Just as the snow-sculpting competitions clarified collective identity by facing primarily inward or outward and directing festival energy toward different audiences, the two parades worked together by splitting energy between them. The Mardi Gras Parade reached out, like the Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship, using playfulness and a commodified Mardi Gras style to attract as wide an audience as possible, create new sets of social relationships, and insert participants into contexts of global festive tourism. In doing so it performed emerging economic relations, so the parade was therefore in part about the economy. The Children’s Neon Light Parade historically faced more inward, and the audience played a minimal role. Its logic was based on transformations of light and the performance of local values based on the display of children and families. Both parades presented images that, through the act of parading, inscribed and transformed public space (de Certeau 1984).

The Mardi Gras Parade The Mardi Gras Parade took place at noon on Saturday of the first weekend of Winter Carnival. It was an “anchoring” point of the festival because it gathered more people into a single designated space than any other event and was an occasion that people looked forward to and back upon (Bauman 1986). Simply attending the parade created positive feelings interpreted as community that extended beyond people one knew to include tourists and visitors: people publicly socialized with both friends and strangers, and they were excited to see the participants they knew in the parade. By noon city spaces were crowded with visitors viewing the sculptures, vendors, and parked cars (fig. 34). For Dan Krahn, as for many other people, the Saturday of Winter Carnival during the main parade was an important experience. Krahn sold chorizos for the Rotary Club outside his store and had done so for more than twenty-five years. He described the atmosphere during parade day: “The great weather, the streets are packed, everyone is out walking around having fun. The smell of food from the vendors—that’s Winter Carnival. We get kids come by every now and then—sometimes they don’t have money—and we give them a hot dog.”1 1

Dan Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 21 February 2001.

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 34. Crowds gather for the main parade.

The parade route, which remained the same annually though sometimes changed directions, was circular, outlining the heart of the downtown area, which was also the main commercial district (fig. 35). During my research period it started at the local high school, headed east down Stibnite Street and then north on Idaho Highway 55, which was temporarily closed for the parade and led to the center of town. The intersection of Highway 55 and Lake Street constituted a central area, and here the parade turned west onto Lake and continued for several blocks until it turned south onto First Street to head back toward the high school, completing an east-northwest-south loop. It was what Louis Marin calls a “closed circuit” or circular route that established an ideal limit and protected the enclosed space with a symbolically closed border (1987, 224).2 Spectators arrived in the downtown area beginning as early as 10:00 a.m., depending on how cold it was outside, to secure a good spot along the parade route. I observed the main parade six different years—in 2001, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2010—and marched in it once. Many people I talked to said that the Mardi Gras Parade was their favorite Winter Carnival event. Sculptor Mark Bennett, for example, told me that he looked forward to taking his mom to see the parade, and it was the only Winter 2

In 2010 the parade route remained the same but reversed direction to take advantage of photo opportunities using Payette Lake as the backdrop.

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Courtesy of the Star-News

On Neon Necklaces and Mardi Gras Beads

Fig. 35.

Carnival event he was sure to attend. People lined the streets three or four deep, jockeyed for key viewing positions, and even brought small ladders or stepstools to ensure they had a good view. The police sometimes put up a yellow plastic “do not cross” boundary on both sides of the street for crowd control, but it was frequently ineffective because spectators leaned into the street to see the marchers, who did not seem to mind. A primary purpose of this event was to amass as large an audience as possible. Spectators consisted of both visitors and locals. Chamber of commerce office manager Shirley Hicks estimated that thirty-five thousand people were in town for parade day in 2009, an enormous achievement for a town of about twenty-five hundred residents.3 Judging by the license plates of the parked cars that year, visitors were mostly from other regions of Idaho. In-state visitors represented a wide range of counties, including Ada, 3

This estimate by the chamber of commerce was based on aerial photographs.

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Canyon, Payette, Nez Perce, Twin Falls, Bonneville, Adams, and Idaho. The majority of out-of-state visitors came from Oregon; Washington was second, but there were also license plates from Utah, California, Wyoming, New York, and Colorado. Local people who did not march in the parade used the time before and after to party. The Krahns, for example, had a primary spot inside their store from which to view the parade. The storefront faced Lake Street, so the parade passed directly in front of their large display windows. The Krahns chose to watch the parade from inside, where it was usually much warmer. Friends and family, including me, took advantage of this primary viewing spot, so there was a crowd of people inside the store talking and socializing both before and during the parade. Tom Grote, editor of the local newspaper, the Star-News, also used his business as a gathering place for friends and acquaintances during parade time. The newspaper building was located along the parade route on First Street, and Grote usually threw a party. He grilled chorizos and hot dogs, and provided chips, coffee, hot chocolate, and beer for people who wanted to come by and hang out. Importantly, both the Krahns’ furniture store and the Star-News office had indoor bathrooms that people could use, rather than the cold porta-potties available around town. People gathered inside before the parade to stay warm, and as it passed by, they moved outside to watch, or they looked out the windows, or they stood on the porch. These “festival[s] within the festival” (Lavenda 1997, 85) reinforced social ties among friends and acquaintances, illustrating that shared participation in the festival created social bonds. At the same time, however, these parties were not open to the general public. A Mardi Gras style was evident among all the spectators, primarily through the display of Mardi Gras beads. Parade day was the time when most people dressed up by wearing as many layers of beaded necklaces as possible (fig. 36). These were obtained primarily through purchase. Bead vendors, volunteers who sold beads on behalf of the Rotary Club, could be found throughout town during the entire festival, but they were most visible the day of the parade. Bead sales generated significant revenue. When I began researching Winter Carnival in 2001, the money from the sale of Mardi Gras beads went to the chamber of commerce. The Rotary Club eventually took over selling the beads and used the money for scholarships, although a black market for beads also existed: some people or organizations ordered Mardi Gras beads from the Internet, sold them, and kept

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Photo by Krisjan Hiner

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Fig. 36. Many people wear layers of beads during the Mardi Gras parade.

the money for themselves, challenging the Rotary’s claim to this significant source of revenue. Mardi Gras beaded necklaces seemed to be a way both for people to elaborate aspects of personal identity as well as participate collectively in the festival. There were innumerable different kinds of Mardi Gras beads to buy. The simplest beaded necklaces were large, colored, and metallic. They usually sold for one dollar. The elaborate beads were more exciting. There were traditional New Orleans–style Mardi Gras colors of green, purple, and gold with carnival-style masks and jester dolls dangling from the end, but every other color and style were available as well. I saw hot pink beads with ladybugs that jiggled on springs, shiny white beads with snowmen, black Harley

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Photos by author

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Fig. 37. Mardi Gras beads for sale. Proceeds supported Rotary scholarships.

Fig. 38. Snowman Mardi Gras bead.

Davidson beads, and beads with real working slot machines and roulette tables, to name just a few variations (fig. 37, fig. 38, fig. 39). Many parade spectators arrived wearing Mardi Gras beads; those who did not soon found themselves purchasing them. Anticipation rose as noon approached, when the parade began. Children especially pushed into the street to get a better view, despite the efforts to contain the crowd on the sidewalks or the sides of the streets. In some years there was an announcer at the corner of Highway 55 and Lake Street, which was the most crowded spot along the parade route. People could hear the announcer in that area, while the rest of the audience spread out along the route could not unless they brought radios to tune in. I did not observe many people doing this, however. The parade was organized by a chair, who was responsible for ensuring that all participants filled out the proper entry forms and organizing marchers to line up in a prearranged order at the high school. Anyone could march in the parade as long as he or she filled out an entry form by the deadline. Frequently the parade had a sponsor, so there was no fee for participation. In 2009 the parade did not have a sponsor, so each parade entrant paid ten dollars to march. In general parade participants were associated with .

Photo by Krisjan Hiner

Fig. 39. Parade participant displaying Harley-Davidson and American-flag Mardi Gras beads.

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local businesses, civic organizations, government branches, or nonprofits. There were also parade-specific groups, such as the Wacky Women or samba dancers, that marched from year to year but were only associated with the parade. Although the parade always began with the fire and police departments, color guard, and American Legion, Shirley Hicks determined the order of the rest of the parade in 2009, managing requests by marchers for particular positions and, at the same time, attempting to balance types of performers, for example by not putting two marching bands back to back. As she noted, “They get juggled around until it looks like a good lineup,” meaning that the order was balanced between serious and fun entries.4 In other years, the order was determined by the date participants turned in their entry forms. The parade entries and floats had a homemade look and frequently were funny. They were not lavish or professionally constructed; rather, the entries intentionally “lack[ed] polish and focus[ed] on home-made props, costumes, and performance” (Lawrence 1987, 130). Many organizations made a themed float that announced their name and hence served to advertise it; those who did not construct a float usually marched in some kind of semi-coordinated costume, parading a banner bearing the name of the group. Costumes and floats, however, were not required, and although festival organizers and other parade participants encouraged adherence to the Mardi Gras style, it was also not necessary. Parades are narratives that unfold in space and time, so their component parts and sequential order are important in understanding the story being told. What follows is a description of the complete array of 2009 parade entries. Though people fully used the language of New Orleans Mardi Gras, by throwing candy and beads to the crowd, for example, these references were mixed with other, somewhat-odd elements, such as wearing ski clothing and displaying winter sports equipment (gallery fig. F). Mardi Gras in McCall was decidedly winterbound, and the New Orleans Mardi Gras colors of purple, green, and gold were displayed alongside high-end performance skis, Gortex parkas, and snow boots. There were also Hawaiian, Rastafarian, and beach themes; effigies of Sharlie, the lake monster; and a number of patriotic and nationalistic motifs, such as American flags and military symbols. Each of these seemingly incongruous elements, however, fit into an overall parade logic and situated the economic health of the community within a global context. 4

Shirley Hicks, e-mail communication with the author, 22 March 2009.

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Photo by Krisjan Hiner

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Fig. 40. Members of the American Legion.

The city fire department opened the parade by flashing lights and sirens and making as much ear-splitting noise as possible. In 2009 they were followed by a children’s color guard of blue and yellow flags, which were then followed by police cars, which also flashed lights and sirens. Representatives of the American Legion bearing the national and state flags came next, and the audience politely applauded (fig. 40). The next entry was a float by Adaptive Wilderness Sports of McCall, consisting of a truck with a fake snowman on an adaptive ski (a specialized ski designed to accommodate people with disabilities). A woman in a pink wig, fuchsia ski parka, and metallic pants followed the truck throwing beads and candy, along with a teenager who was not costumed. An undecorated KDZY Heartland County radio truck followed. Next came Kit Worthington, the 2009 grand marshal, in a black jeep decorated with balloons and the American flag. The grand marshal was always a well-respected citizen. Kit was more costumed than grand marshals I had seen in the past: he wore a gold crown, a Hawaiian shirt, a cape, beads, sunglasses, and a scarf and stood in the car, waving to the crowd. Capes were quite common in the parade, perhaps indicating the royalty associated

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with more conventional carnival festivities. Hawaiian shirts and other references to warm-weather locations were also popular, suggesting an orientation toward not only spring (and hence, warmer weather) in the festival but also to other tourist-resort locations, particularly beaches. The Activity Barn pickup truck came next, sporting a float depicting a sledding tube and a snowmobile. It was decorated with balloons, and marchers threw beads. Then came a blue and purple Winter Carnival flag and a large gold Mardi Gras mask, each mounted on a pole and held aloft by marchers. McPaws, the local regional animal shelter, came next. Dogs, along with children, are important in McCall, so McPaws is a popular organization. Many people in McCall own dogs and display them by taking them to work and the store and bringing them when they socialize with friends. The McPaws marchers were dressed in red metallic grass skirts and Hawaiianstyle leis; they walked a variety of dogs, which were also outfitted in Hawaiian leis and metallic grass skirts. Their float featured a dog on a beach. Because the shelter tries to find homes for all its animals, the dogs were allowed to interact with the crowd. Children reached out to pet them, and the marchers encouraged the dogs to stop for friendly pats. Next came the Children’s House Preschool (“now enrolling”), illustrating overtly that one of the main purposes of the parade was economic. This float featured children dressed as colorful flowers sitting on hay bales. They held balloons and waved metallic pompoms. One adult, presumably a preschool teacher, stopped and retraced her steps to talk to someone she knew on the sidelines. This kind of interaction and socializing between marchers and audience occurred frequently, illustrating that onlookers played an important role in this parade. The pervasive presence of beads and candy also allowed a good deal of social interaction. As each parade entrant threw beads and candy, spectators, particularly children, scrambled to retrieve the goodies. Children darted out into the street, and many spectators shouted to the participants whom they seemed to know personally. The Lord and Lady of the Lake, Winter Carnival royalty, were next. The Lord and Lady of the Lake are associated with the McCall Senior Citizens Center, and they walked alongside a van. The lord sported a blue cape and a white crown, while the lady wore a purple cape and purple crown; each carried a multicolored-rainbow feather duster as a kind of ironic royal staff. Patriotic and nationalistic elements were also an integral part of the McCall Mardi Gras Parade (gallery fig. L). Patriotic displays are found in

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more traditional Mardi Gras celebrations, for example, in Cajun Country (Mire 1993). The entries that followed the royalty were good examples. The first consisted of an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) with snowshoes in front and an American flag in back, driven by a man dressed in rabbit ears and a bunny tail. He was wearing Mardi Gras beads and stopped the ATV in the middle of the parade to get out and hug someone in the crowd. World War II combat veteran Walt Nourse was next. He drove an ATV covered in American flags and sporting a hand-lettered sign that read, “I may be old, but I’m still running.” Nourse was followed by the Valley County Democrats. Buoyed by the recent 2008 election of President Barack Obama, some of the marchers waved small American flags. The truck displayed hand-lettered signs, saying “Three million new jobs,” “Affordable heath care for all,” “Tax cuts for the middle class” and “Energy independence,” and it had a picture of President Obama on the side. These patriotic elements were followed by a series of business entries; some were humorous, and others were not. These included a jeep advertising the Hotel McCall, which towed a boat and was decorated with balloons and streamers, followed by a banner for Idaho First Bank. Then came the Jughandle Water Company marching drum band, a crowd favorite because of its playfulness. Jughandle was a water-supply company. Its drum corps consisted of costumed women and men beating in time on empty water jugs and wearing a variety of hats, wigs, beads, and capes; one man wore a Rastafarian cap with fake dreadlocks sewn on it; another sported a red, white, and blue spiky hat. The women were dressed in matching red, gold, and blue vests; white and red majorette caps; and white skirts over afterski boots. They drummed in formation and stopped occasionally to dance to the enthusiastic response of the crowd. The next entry was a banner for Highland Christian Academy decorated with red, white, and green balloons. Their float was a scene from the The Chronicles of Narnia and was followed by a float decorated with balloons and beads with a snowmobile, skis, and fake snow, sponsored by a business called Hot Shots. The following entry, concocted by Gans Excavation, built on popular images of Sharlie and was one of two Sharlie entries in the 2009 parade. Gans Excavation wrapped a digger (a construction machine used for excavation) entirely in green plastic; there were spiky fins along the spine, and the shovel had been transformed into a movable red mouth. The monster had red eyes and wore a straw panama hat. The operator, who was hidden inside, swung the digger’s neck two and fro and opened and closed the monster’s

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 41. Past Winter Carnival Queen and her royalty.

mouth. He roared through the microphone, “I like candy! Yummy!” and “Hello, little boy!” to riotous laughter and screams from the children. The next float consisted of an array of state beauty queens, including Mrs. Idaho, Miss Idaho, Miss City of Trees, and Miss Boise. These, along with the Lord and Lady of the Lake, were the royalty in the Mardi Gras parade. The festival used to have a conventional queen contest, in which a high-school Snow Queen and her court were crowned. The queen and her court were announced at the ice stage during the opening ceremonies and were a highlight of the main parade. Past queens were also duly noted in Winter Carnival programs and brochures (fig. 41). The Lord and Lady of the Lake were added in 1988 or 1989 as an entry sponsored by the McCall Senior Citizens Center. Seniors entering the contest placed cans around town, and the couple that collected the most money were crowned lord and lady. The original queen contest dropped off the program in 1995, was briefly reinstated in 2007, and disappeared again in 2009. Meanwhile, the Lord and Lady of the Lake were given central position as Winter Carnival’s royalty, and they retained a prominent place in the parade. Studies of queen pageants suggest that community festival queens represent significant transitions in the life cycle; high-school queens, for example, represent the transition into womanhood (Lavenda 1997, 25–27; see also Lavenda 1996; Stoeltje 1996 for analyses of queen-pageant ideologies). The replacement

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Photo by Krisjan Hiner

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Fig. 42. The local high school band.

of high-school queens by senior citizens, who represented a different period in the life cycle, not accidentally coincided with the period of time when the community’s demographics began to shift to a wealthy retirement and second-home population. The McCall Ski Racing Team (MSRT) float came next. The team trained local children for downhill racing, so it was one of the most important local sports organizations. The float consisted of local children wearing matching blue racing outfits and waving and throwing beads. They were followed by a Napa Auto Parts truck; someone riding a horse and wearing a black cape and hood; another float advertising motorcycles with skis; and Project Filter, which advertised classes to quit smoking. Then came the Vandals, the local high-school marching band, which played music on the back of a flatbed truck (fig. 42). Some of the musicians wore beads; others waved red and blue pompoms.

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An Asian-style dragon representing Sharlie was next (gallery fig. H). This effigy of Sharlie paraded every year. It was commissioned by parade organizers in 1995, the first year that the main parade incorporated a Mardi Gras theme. It was approximately 30–40 feet long, colored yellow, green, and red, and manned underneath by local schoolchildren, who undulated the long nylon body. The head was resin, and the overall look resembled a Chinese dragon. This Sharlie dragon was also a crowd favorite, and people shouted and applauded when it went by. The next entry was called “Penguin Express” and consisted of children dressed in black wearing penguin caps and Mardi Gras beads; they were followed by a green Forest Service truck with a person in a Smokey Bear costume on top (fig. 43). Smokey was also a local favorite because many local people worked for the Forest Service or were seasonally employed as wilderness firefighters. Smokey waved to the crowd while the truck honked its horn. The Blackhawk Equestrian Center came next. It consisted of three men on horses bearing a banner and a wooden sleigh with children throwing beads. One child wore a rainbow-colored wig. Girl Scout Troops 59 and 269 came next. Girl Scout Troop 269 wore costumes made from boxes, each one representing a particular kind of Girl Scout cookie. Then came a U.S. Navy entry towing a replica of a military ship—one boy from the sidelines shouted, “I want to join the navy!”—followed by a blue truck with six American flags, an orange and blue Boise State University flag, a BMX bike, and a stuffed gorilla wearing ski goggles. This entry confused spectators, so few people cheered or interacted with it the way they had with other entries. The samba dancers were next (gallery fig. K, gallery fig. J). Samba dancing exists all over the world, but it is typically associated with the lavish carnival celebrations in Brazil, where highly competitive samba schools rival each other. The McCall samba dancers combined samba style with concern for winter warmth. The female dancers dressed in black tops and black ski pants, tights, or skirts and snow boots. Each dancer also had a silver triangle fringe along the waist and sported a white feather boa and headband and Mardi Gras beads. Mostly male percussionist players followed the dancers with drums, rattles, and wooden sticks (fig. 44). Some percussionists wore hats; others were dressed in metallic purples, greens, and golds. The dancers shouted to the audience, who cheered back. There were also children, mostly girls, dressed in metallic pink; some carried homemade signs that said “Samba.” One dancer gave a high five to someone along the street. The

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Fig. 43. Forest Service employee sporting Mardi Gras beads.

group stopped frequently to samba in formation; the man standing next to me said that they practiced beforehand for several weeks. Next came two blue and green Mardi Gras-style masks held aloft on poles and decorated with tinsel. The samba connection to Brazil may partly explain some of the other, seemingly incongruous tropical references throughout the parade. The next float, for example, by a business called Mayfield and Friends, had a stylized Latin American tropical theme, which was duplicated in other floats. There were gigantic flowers, and several women danced in ruffled skirts of yellow,

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Fig. 44. Musician.

orange, purple, and blue, wearing baskets of tropical fruit on their heads and bunches of grapes for earrings in a manner reminiscent of Carmen Miranda, a Brazilian samba singer popular during the mid-twentieth century. One man also wore a fake Rastafarian-style hat with dreadlocks, sunglasses, and a Hawaiian shirt; the float was a palm tree made of green tinsel and a parrot. The dancers threw beads and candy to the crowd. Next came the Paul’s Market drill team, another popular entry (gallery fig. M). Paul’s is the main local grocery store, and its drill team consisted of

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employees and friends who marched with shopping carts in parodic drillteam formation, although in 2009, they mostly abandoned the formation and instead threw candy and beads due to the wet snow in the street. They were dressed in blue shirts with white banners draped across the front and matching marching-band caps. They were followed by the Keebler elf, who hugged spectators and posed for pictures. The next entry was a white pickup truck sporting Boise State University colors of orange and blue; it towed a flatbed truck with a man sitting atop a snowmobile in a leather horse saddle and dressed in white fur cowboy chaps. He was also wearing a cat-in-thehat style hat. The organization was Heartland Community Improvement Association. Next came another group of dancers; one person was dressed in a gorilla costume with a homemade sign that read “Fallacies on Ice,” a joking reference to the 2009 Winter Carnival theme, “Fantasies in Ice.” These were followed by more fire trucks flashing their lights and sirens, signaling the end of the parade as well as communicating to people to use caution because the street was now open to cars. Volunteers walked alongside the trucks, rolling up the yellow police boundary signs, and the street was quickly filled with traffic once again. *** The amalgamation of ski fashions and winter sports equipment, beach themes, nationalistic references, and other elements created a highly modified Mardi Gras style in the main parade that revealed an ongoing, evolving parade logic based on playfulness and parody, and the association of Mardi Gras with winter-to-spring transitions. To understand this dynamic, however, it is first necessary to know how the parade evolved over time. Originally called the Grand Parade, the first 1965 parade included horsedrawn sleds and cutters, and participants were encouraged to wear old-time costumes.5 Founder Bob Scoles said that the original parade was rather small but attracted about five hundred people: “The first parade was an oil truck with crepe paper on it. We did have an honor guard from Mountain Home Air Force Base, a school band, the Girl Scouts—the younger ones, the Brownies—and the boys, too. We had one guy walking a dog, and it was really kind of cute, and everybody enjoyed it. They enjoyed the concept. And we felt really gratified. We had at least five hundred extra people in town that weekend.”6 That theme of old-time styles of clothing and modes 5

“Workshop Started for Winter Carnival Rigs,” Payette Lakes Star, 21 January 1965, 1.

6

Bob Scoles, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 9 March 2001.

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Fig. 45. Early parade photograph illustrating display of old-fashioned clothing.

of transportation continued for several years, lending commemorative and heritage dimensions to the parade and denoting it as traditional (fig. 45). Floats were the main attraction, and the top creations received prizes. Humor, fun, and parody were also an integral part of the original main parade, and these elements remained prominent later in the range of Mardi Gras costumes and parade entries (fig. 46). The figure of Sharlie the lake monster was one way in which playfulness was integrated into the parade early on. Sharlie stories were a source of laughter for many people (see chapter five), and she was a figure that people played with, both in and out of the parade. McCall resident Dalene Lemberes, who marched in the main parade as a clown for more than forty years and whom I met through Marilyn Krahn, recalled that in the early parade days, somebody always dressed like Sharlie, usually by putting a cardboard box on his or her head and adding a snout and some fins or spikes to create a creature that looked like a dinosaur. Sharlie-like figures were also found on early homemade floats.7 A second way in which playfulness, humor, and laughter were incorporated into the original parade was the presence of parade clowns. Lemberes 7

Dalene Lemberes, telephone interview with the author, 29 November 2007.

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Fig. 46. Early parade photograph of weather hanged in effigy.

was a self-described “clown at heart,” and she and her neighbor, Mary Benson, became clowns to help with crowd control. Benson recalled their initial participation, which entailed putting a clown costume over typical heavy winter clothing: Dalene had somehow discovered that the chamber of commerce had a stash of soiled, tattered, and seriously neglected clown costumes. She recruited me and my sewing machine to help her refurbish the costumes, and somehow during this process, we decided to clown in the parade. . . . We collected donations of candy to offer children along the parade route, donned costumes (over snow-machine suits), face paint, laced up our Sorrels [snow boots], pulled on our gloves, and led the parade. John Lyons was chief of police and was seeking a method to urge the crowd back onto the sidewalk (read roadside; McCall didn’t have sidewalks) and safely away from the vehicles in the parade. Dalene took one side, I took the other, and we must have done well because John asked us to come back next year and requested that we bring friends.8 Lemberes and Benson gave out candy, performed funny pranks, and engaged in crowd control. The clowns became very popular, and the two 8

Mary Benson, e-mail communication with the author, 7 December 2007.

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women started sewing costumes for themselves and others. Clowns are associated with playfulness and foolishness and so frequently are considered liminal figures. Don Handelman writes that “the clown type is an ambivalent figure of enticement and danger, hilarity and gravity, fun and solemnity” (1990, 236). Through laughter, clowns and other liminal figures embody an “alternate kind of moral order” (Turner 1969, 110). Clowns can be subversive because they defy conventional categorization, and they may also embody special skills or knowledge (Stoeltje 1982). Lemberes and Benson’s clowns became important in a number of ways. First, other people began dressing as clowns for the parade, creating a sense of bonding or community among participants. Lemberes recalled, “We began in October and built clown suits for the entire month for people!”9 Second, the clown suits that they made were used not only in the parade but other community events such as the school carnival, so their efforts extended out to other kinds of volunteer activities. Lemberes therefore considered her participation in the parade as a community contribution: “You have to be community minded,” she said. “You have to pitch in, or you become a nobody.”10 Third, Benson used the clowns as a way to make newcomers feel welcome and incorporate them into the community: For years after I’d stopped participating in the parade, I continued to maintain the costumes. The last time we counted, there were over thirty costumes between our two collections. Dalene and I both opened our homes to assist the clowns with dressing and face painting on Grand Parade morning. We live within easy walking distance of downtown, and the crush of traffic made this a logical choice. Clowning in the parade was great fun. I was working as an operating room nurse at McCall Memorial and was able to recruit many newcomers to the nursing staff into the clown ethic. McCall is not just a tiny and remote village . . . it’s a frame of mind. I knew if newcomers were going to commit to living/working in the high country, they’d need to invest themselves in it.11 The clowns therefore became a means of enacting community through the festival in a variety of ways: marching in the parade, organizing and sewing costumes for themselves and others, helping the police with crowd 9

Dalene Lemberes telephone interview.

10

Ibid.

11

Mary Benson e-mail communication.

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control, encouraging others to participate (even simply as spectators), and incorporating newcomers. Lemberes and Benson’s statements clearly indicate that they thought there was a difference between simply living in a place and being part of a community; dressing up and marching as a parade clown was one way to be an active member. Lemberes and Benson eventually gave up being clowns; Benson became involved more heavily in snow sculpting, and Lemberes became part of a parade group called the Wacky Women, which consisted of Forest Service employees, spouses, friends, and neighbors. The Wacky Women were funny. They engaged in clownlike activities, but they extended the antics to include more parody and irony and a wider range of costumes. The Wacky Women frequently spoofed or parodied conventional parade entries. “When you put on a costume, you become somebody else,” Lemberes says. “You can change your behavior.”12 One of the most memorable years for Lemberes and Benson was the “Wanna-Be Drill Team,” complete with electric drills and male marchers as drill “Chucks” (a pun on the name for part of a drill): one male marcher named Chuck wore a sign that read, “Every drill has a Chuck.” Other years, Wacky Women parade entries included the Wanna-Be Pirates, Wanna-Be Ballerinas, and Wanna-Be Cowboys. Denise Lawrence notes similar kinds of entries in the Doo Dah parade in Pasadena, California. This alternative (and response) to the conventional Rose Parade included such entries as the “Synchronized Briefcase Drill Team,” the “Dull Men of Newport Beach” (complete with leaf blowers), and the “Stewardesses,” who offered spectators coffee, tea, or milk (1987, 132). The Wacky Women, who employed similar strategies, quickly emerged as a crowd favorite. The costuming, candy, humor, spoofing, parody, and parade antics exemplified by the clowns and the Wacky Women were codified into a new parade theme in 1995. Organizers decided to incorporate Mardi Gras imagery, a move that mapped new sets of meanings onto this event. The primary reason for incorporating a Mardi Gras theme was to make the parade more interesting and attract as wide an audience as possible. Local resident Barbara Schott was involved in this reorganization. She said that the old parade was rather small. It was fun, she said, because local people dressed up and did whatever they wanted to. But parade organizers also felt as if something could be done to improve it, so they introduced Mardi Gras elements 12

Dalene Lemberes telephone interview.

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because they wanted something colorful. “Someone we knew was going [to Mardi Gras],” Schott said, “and so we said, ‘Let’s give it a try and see how it works.’”13 In 1995 the parade was still called the Grand Parade, but newspapers announced that it had incorporated a Mardi Gras theme. That year the Wacky Women paraded as the “Wacky Women Beauty Busters,” sporting wigs, giant sunglasses, and the kinds of exaggerated, protuberant, phallic noses found in more traditional carnival celebrations that can be traced to the early modern period.14 Although the primary impetus for adopting a Mardi Gras theme for the parade was a desire for improvement, the decision was not made out of whole cloth. The choice had multiple precedents, both within local tradition and in other contexts. McCall Winter Carnival brochures from the 1960s document occasional Mardi Gras elements in the festival, although these events seem to have been small and not a main part of the festivities. As early as 1966, for example, the year after Winter Carnival was revived, Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church sponsored a Mardi Gras spaghettisupper fund-raiser, which became an annual event for the church. According to Father Fraser, it eventually became too much work for the church’s small group, and they abandoned it. One inspiration for the original 1924 McCall Winter Carnival (see chapter four) may have been a pre-Lenten Finnish winter-sports festival known as Laskiainen. McCall’s Winter Carnival originally focused on winter sports, and Valley County was settled partly by Finnish immigrants. Laskiainen in Finland traditionally is a sledding and winter-sports festival that dates to the early 1500s and is associated with Shrovetide (Vennum 1980), an English word that refers to the last days of the carnival season and is derived from to “shrive” or “hear confessions.” The word laskiainen is translated as either derived from the Latin laskia, meaning “to settle down” as in “to settle into Lent” (Vennum 1980, 14) or as “sliding downhill” (Babiracki 1980). It is a private family celebration where “family members gather together for an evening of sledding, followed by traditional foods such as pea soup, rice pudding, and pulla, a type of Finnish sweet bread” (Rahkonen 1986, 221). Finnish immigrants brought this 13

Barbara Schott, telephone interview with the author, 20 February 2007.

14

“Winter Carnival Gets Started with Great Weather, Great Snow Sculptures, and Big Crowds,” Long Valley Advocate, 8 February 1995, 1. For examples of protuberant noses as part of costuming during Mardi Gras in Cajun Country, see Carl Lindhal and Carolyn Ware’s book Cajun Mardi Gras Masks (1997) as well as the 1993 film Dance for a Chicken: The Cajun Mardi Gras by Pat Mire.

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celebration to the United States in the early 1800s, and Laskiainen today is celebrated primarily as an expression of Finnish ethnicity in Palo, Minnesota, as a public event, featuring activities such as skating, sledding, skiing, and tobogganing (Penti 1988; Santino 1994).15 Many participants in the sports events of Valley County winter carnivals during the 1920s were Finnish or of Finnish descent as indicated by their surnames, so the connection between the pre-Lenten Laskiainen and the origins of Winter Carnival, although conjectural, is not unlikely, providing an historical perspective on the incorporation of Mardi Gras themes into the contemporary festival. Winter carnivals across the northern hemisphere also frequently exhibit Mardi Gras or carnival elements, although they are not necessarily Mardi Gras celebrations per se. As in McCall, they are held at approximately the same time of year as the pre-Lenten carnival season, usually during late January or early February, but they are not tied specifically to the date of Ash Wednesday. These festivals historically have been described in language associated with Mardi Gras, so there is semantic slippage between the meaning of the word “carnival” as simply a general festival and one that refers specifically to the pre-Lenten celebration, an uncertainty that may have stemmed from translations from French to English in Québec (Abbott 1988, 185). Don Morrow, for example, notes that the influential 1883 Montreal Winter Carnival was described as a “mardi gras” of winter sport (1988, 36), and the Montreal Daily Star described the 1889 Montreal Winter Carnival as a “Mardi Gras of costumes, masks and make-up” (1996, 186). This reference to Montreal’s Winter Carnival as a Mardi Gras was followed by an editorial cartoon depicting King Carnival, a reference to traditional carnival royalty (fig. 47). An 1886 winter carnival held in Burlington, Vermont, also referenced King Carnival (Beattie 1984, 8). The association of kings and other royal figures with Mardi Gras and carnival celebrations is common. A 1920 National Geographic article also refers to the winter carnival organized by the newly formed Dartmouth Outing Club as the “Mardi Gras of the North” (F. Harris 1920, 158). Contemporary winter carnivals in North America continue these associations. The Carnaval de Québec, which is held in the Catholic city of Québec, Canada, is an obvious example.16 When I attended the Carnaval 15

Apparently Laskiainen was laid onto an already-existing winter-frolic structure in Palo (Penti 1988).

16

My thanks to Dr. Samuel Kinser, who pointed out the existence of hybrid festivals blending winter-carnival and Mardi Gras elements.

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Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

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Fig. 47. Sculpture of King Carnival, 1985.

de Québec in 2006, the festival exhibited snow sculptures and ice castles, and winter sports figured prominently. It also was a celebration with jesters and carnival-style costumes and floats in the main parade. Yet the official festival icon was “Bonhomme Carnaval,” a giant snowman who was “the living incarnation of the snowmen that have enchanted children of Québec City for generations,” a winter figure not necessarily associated with conventional Mardi Gras or carnival celebrations.17 The St. Paul Winter Carnival, one of the oldest in North America, also incorporates Mardi Gras elements, yet it is a decidedly secular event. The most public, popular carnival figures in the St. Paul celebration are Vulcan/ Rex and King Boreas, who represent summer and winter, respectively. I met St. Paul’s 2004 Vulcanus Rex LXVII (motto: “Burnin’ down the house palace!”) and some of his “krewe” (attendants) in the airport in Québec; they had been invited as official ambassadors to the Québec celebration, and Vulcan explained St. Paul’s festival traditions to me. Vulcan and Boreas engage in public battle annually; Vulcan, dressed in a red cape, ski goggles, crested hat, and Mardi Gras beads always wins to ensure the coming of summer. Vulcan and his krewe embody chaos, as evidenced by their traditional 17

Information available on the Web site http://www.carnaval.qc.ca/bonhomme-andknuks.html

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festive behavior of kissing strange women and smearing them with grease paint, a practice similar to the Trinidad carnival custom of mass, which consists of kissing strange people and covering them in mud.18 Vulcan’s title of Rex also references New Orleans Mardi Gras. The term means “king” in Latin. Rex has been the king of New Orleans Mardi Gras since his first appearance in 1872 and is steeped in pageantry and tradition. Both the New Orleans Rex and Vulcan/Rex in St. Paul are associated with krewes, parade organizations that support their festive characters (M. Harris 2003; Spraker 1985). There also are a growing number of connections between Mardi Gras and winter sports. Jack Santino ([1986] 1992b) notes that traditions can converge, tracing the way house displays combined holiday images with nationalistic ones through yellow-ribbon symbolism and illustrating the way meanings change when objects are placed close to each other. A similar process is at work in converging Mardi Gras style, winter-sports resorts, and winter carnivals. Cathy Preston (2007) points to the creation of “bead, bra, and panty trees” at ski areas across the country as an example of Santino’s (1992a) community-based folk assemblage. The trees are created by skiers who throw underwear, bras, and Mardi Gras beads from ski lifts onto the branches of nearby trees, thereby decorating them in a way reminiscent of New Orleans Mardi Gras. In New Orleans, female participants may obtain beads by removing or lifting up their shirts to expose their breasts. By combining bras and beads on a tree, skiers who throw such objects suggest visually to others that something untoward has happened during the long ride to the top of the hill. Preston documents variants of such trees in ski areas across the United States, such as Breckenridge, Colorado; Windham, New Hampshire; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and Snowbird, Utah, as well as at Brundage, McCall’s local ski area (gallery fig. I). According to Preston, there is a general consensus that the panty-tree tradition started at Vail, Colorado, although this claim is contested by skiers at Aspen. The ongoing debate Preston describes about which place created the original bead, bra, and panty tree as a sign of its ski identity further cements associations among winter sports, skiing resorts, and Mardi Gras. Today numerous ski resorts purposefully incorporate Mardi Gras winter carnival celebrations as part of their resort identity. A few examples include Ellicottville, New York, 18

Thanks to Christie Fox for pointing this comparison out to me.

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and Snowmass and Keystone, Colorado. SUNY-Brockport also held a winter carnival that incorporated Mardi Gras imagery in 1949.19 People in McCall have never articulated associations among Finnish Laskiainen, a skiing-resort identity, winter-carnival celebrations across North America, and Mardi Gras. These connections are my own, but they do shed light on the way these elements combine within a single interrelated complex. Overt associations with New Orleans were minimal in the McCall event. New Orleans Mardi Gras provided the stylistic prototype, but that model also suggested drunkenness, nudity, and out-of-bounds behavior while the McCall Winter Carnival was a decidedly family-friendly affair. People in McCall also did not place Mardi Gras in any kind of religious context. Most residents were either entirely unaware of that connection or viewed it as unimportant. Father Fraser of Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church referred to the celebration as a “pseudo Mardi Gras” since it did not occur within the proper Lenten time frame. When I asked my friend Frank Eld if he thought that people associated the Mardi Gras parade with religion, he laughed. “Not at all,” he said. “I know of one woman who is Catholic who seems somewhat offended about the whole thing, but most people don’t think of it at all.”20 Eld’s comment not only illustrates that Catholics might not approve of the appropriation of Mardi Gras into Winter Carnival but also reminds us that not all Catholics celebrate Mardi Gras. Some orthodox churchgoers may even find Mardi Gras offensive, and certainly tensions have existed for hundreds of years between ecclesiastical authority and parishioners over the excesses of carnival. Instead, when I asked what Mardi Gras meant to her and what she thought it meant to others, Nancy Krahn replied, “When people think of Mardi Gras, they think beads. People think of beads.”21 Coworker Karen Morris agreed: “It doesn’t mean much except that it’s fun to wear beads,”22 and both of them explicitly stated that they didn’t think of New Orleans when they thought of Mardi Gras in McCall. When I asked them to explain, Krahn added, “Beads allow people to participate! You can buy them, you can yell for them at the 19

Information available on the Web site http://www.brockport.edu/~library1/winter. htm. My personal experience as a lifelong skier supports Preston’s observations about the development of bead, bra, and panty trees at various ski resorts.

20

Frank Eld, personal communication, March 01, 2008.

21

Nancy Krahn, personal communication, August 10, 2008.

22

Karen Morris, personal communication, August 10, 2008.

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Fig. 48. Parade participant.

parade—people even collect them you know.”23 Marilyn Krahn, for example, prided herself on having collectible beads that could no longer be purchased, and she showed them off on parade day, wearing every single strand. The purchase, wearing, and display of beads allowed wearers to participate actively in the festival, even if they were simply watching events. They provided a unifying theme to Winter Carnival because people attended other events wearing beads, not just the Mardi Gras parade, so the beads were an avenue for broadened participation and a way to signal fun. Beads, in other words, were paradigmatic: they signified festivity (fig. 48).24 23

Nancy Krahn, personal communication, August 10, 2008.

24

Thanks to Jack Santino for pointing this out.

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Everybody I spoke to thought of the adoption of the Mardi Gras theme as a positive change because the parade was more visually interesting and attracted more people. Frank Eld pointed out that Mardi Gras gave the main parade an identity that it had not had previously: “It was kind of the same thing year after year,” he said. “The Mardi Gras theme has made the parade a lot more interesting and fun. It gives it a thread that it didn’t have before.”25 At the same time, however, marchers did not stick strictly to the Mardi Gras theme, as discussed earlier (gallery fig. N, fig. 49). Over the years, I observed pirate and cowboy hats, tinsel wigs, large Mexican sombreros, numerous Mardi Gras beach-themed floats, many military elements, undecorated old-time cars, children dressed like dogs, dogs dressed like humans, references to Disney characters such as Tinkerbell, adults sporting fairy wings, parading llamas, and children dressed like cookies and milk. One year there were giant tie-dyed slinkies. Mardi Gras apparently was even a broad-enough category to encompass stylized images of the Old West, which, as mentioned earlier, frequently occurs in marketing western tourist towns. The parade theme in 2008 was “Wild, Wild West,” resulting in an imaginative melding of Mardi Gras with stylized images of the Old West to produce elements such as gigantic Styrofoam cowboy hats. One elaborate float was the “Pink Flamingo Saloon,” featuring a western undertaker or piano player with a lettered sign: “You shoot ’em; I plant ’em.” The float was preceded by a woman in a shockingly pink feathered hat that was part Mardi Gras style and part western saloon call girl. The apparently cacophonous, all-inclusive imagery engendered by the appropriated Mardi Gras style, however, belies the fact that not just anything was acceptable in the Mardi Gras Parade; order and control underlay the apparent visual disorder, and in this way, the parade was like traditional Mardi Gras celebrations in Louisiana (see Lindahl 1996b). Like all parades, this one presented a selective vision of social relations and was not all inclusive. Susan Davis (1985) emphasizes in her study of parades in Philadelphia that they are highly selective, exclusionary, and class based, despite the illusion of openness they engender since they occur in public spaces. One example of this in the Mardi Gras Parade is the absence of images of labor that were found in earlier incarnations of the parade. I saw historical pictures of old parade floats that depicted loggers and numerous references to forestry, as well as floats or entries related to ranching, but I never saw these kinds 25

Frank Eld, personal communication, March 01, 2008.

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Fig. 49. Parade onlooker.

of entries in the Mardi Gras Parade except for the Forest Service. Instead, businesses predominated. These exclusions suggest that images of labor are not appropriate, at least within the context of modern tourism, and indeed, tourism is understood as an industry that purposefully masks conditions of labor, class, and inequality. There was also little evidence of serious transgression or mockery of social structures found in more traditional Mardi Gras celebrations or other carnivalesque parades such as the Halloween event in Greenwich Village (Kugelmass 1994). Sam Kinser specifically cautions against describing winter carnivals as carnivalesque, despite their name. He writes, “There are sixty or seventy ‘winter carnivals’ in the United States . . . [but] winter carnivals

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are primarily devoted to sports and snow sculptures. They are often venerable, generating considerable local patriotism, as in the case of those at Québec City, Canada, and on [the] Dartmouth college campus in Hanover, New Hampshire, but they are rarely transgressive or devoted to imaginative disguises of roles and identities” (Kinser, n.d., 3).26 McCall Mardi Gras Parade entries could be parodic and humorous—and the most popular ones were, like the Wacky Women—but real satire, political protest, and significant reversals of behavior were not possible.27 Public drunkenness, for example, or removing one’s shirt to obtain beads as women frequently do in New Orleans would have resulted in arrest, and were not practical, given the weather. The only political critique I saw occurred in 2008, when a group paraded as “The Death of Winter” to protest global warming. The marchers wore white carnival-style half-face masks with ski hats, dressed in somber colors, and carried a coffin bearing Old Man Winter. One marcher carried a large sign that said “NO” in black letters. Mardi Gras does mark the death of winter in the annual seasonal cycle, so the entry was appropriate from a symbolic perspective, but the display spawned a letter of protest to the editor about its inappropriateness because it was critical and political, effectively illustrating that the parade was not an open public sphere. Both Susan Davis (1985) and Stanley Brandes (1988) argue that parades and fiestas are less about public freedom than maintaining hierarchies and forms of social control. The McCall Mardi Gras Parade was well organized, featured many prominent citizens, and reflected and supported a variety of civic organizations, businesses, and corporate sponsors. Structurally (although not stylistically), the parade closely resembled a Fourth of July parade, beginning and ending with that pillar of the community, the fire department (fig. 50). It also included the obligatory array of civil servants, politicians, and local businesses that are normally found in Fourth of July celebrations. McCall only sporadically held a Fourth of July parade during my research period, although the Fourth of July was the biggest tourist weekend during the summer. Winter Carnival was the largest tourist event of the winter, so the two time periods formed a logical frame of reference. 26

For Kinser the only winter carnival that contains elements of the carnivalesque is St. Paul’s because of the transgressive actions of Vulcan and the Brimstone Society.

27

For example, for the parade to exist, it must be accepted by the state since a parade permit must be obtained. Participants must also fill out forms, and these forms are controlled by the parade chairs. Hence, participants must pass through two layers of control before they can march.

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Fig. 50. Firefighter enjoying the parade.

Participants in the Winter Carnival parade simply incorporated the missing Fourth of July elements. This was perhaps why Mardi Gras in McCall included the military, Smokey Bear, the Barack Obama campaign, and a significant number of American flags. Rather than burlesquing, mocking, or reversing existing social structures, the adoption of the Mardi Gras style extended the means by which

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the parade supported already-existing social relations by performing emerging economic ones. Ray Cashman (2007) suggests that commemorative parades in Northern Ireland do not merely reflect sectarian ideology but, by putting people through sectarian motions, may also help inculcate it. The wide net cast by Mardi Gras imagery presumed the centrality of the mass media and operated within a field of globalized consumption, positioning participants as part of a world media tourist event. Mardi Gras in pre–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans was a highly commodified, media-saturated tourist event that linked consumption and travel to a celebratory style. In examining the commodification of Mardi Gras and the use of its images as marketing strategies by multinational corporations and other economic groups in New Orleans, Kevin Fox Gotham notes that “it is the appearance of the Mardi Gras commodity that is more decisive than its actual use value and the symbolic packaging of otherwise diverse commodities—clothes, food and so on—generates a Mardi Gras image industry and commodity aesthetics” (2002, 1747; italics in original, underline added). Mardi Gras celebrations are commodified elsewhere as well. In southern Louisiana, for example, some rural Cajun Mardi Gras celebrations, known as runs, have been marketed to tourists by emphasizing the ways they contrast with (and therefore are allegedly more authentic than) Mardi Gras in New Orleans (Ware 2003), and certainly other Cajun Mardi Gras runs have consistently attracted media attention (Ancelet 1989). Not only is Mardi Gras commodified in New Orleans and southwestern Louisiana but due to mass-media venues such as the Internet and MTV, the New Orleans–style Mardi Gras was a globally distributed meaningful style by 1995, when it was adopted in McCall. Mardi Gras was an exportable commodity, a global style that could be adapted to nearly any commercial context. Mardi Gras, along with MTV-style Spring Break, signified the ultimate party and as such had the capability of exporting and recontextualizing itself into highly unique situations. These included not only a year-round (and hence, de/recontextualized) Mardi Gras catering to tourists in parts of the French Quarter in New Orleans but also phenomena such as endof-school-year Mardi Gras celebrations on college campuses or the “World Mardi Gras” bar in Indianapolis (Gabbert 2007b, 268). The association of Mardi Gras as an “ur-party” or “ur-festival” may then also explain the numerous references to beaches and tropical vacations, which obviously figure prominently in the tourism industry because they promote resort/party locations. Tropical images also prefigure the coming of warmer weather, a more traditional function of late-winter festivals.

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McCall’s adoption of the Mardi Gras theme occurred around the same time that its economy was taking off, introducing a globalized, commodified element into the parade that indexed shifting economic patterns (Fox 2003). Barbara Schott, for example, said that before the adoption of the Mardi Gras theme, Pepsi-Cola was the only parade sponsor. After the change, many more sponsors came on board. The influx of more sponsors, more money, and more people was considered a sign of the parade’s success, and the result was a significant increase in entries and numbers of spectators. A Mardi Gras style allowed residents to call attention to themselves and successfully attract a large, potentially unlimited audience through significant media attention. The parade increased in size and became more visually attractive, and the audience grew accordingly. The Mardi Gras Parade attracted the most television cameras and newspaper photographers of all the Winter Carnival events, and its images were usually featured in the news. This led to increased pride, a sense of ownership of the event, and general feelings of community because of the parade, suggesting that commodification may have positive effects. The centrality of audience for this event was evident from the way the parade ended. Spectators packed the streets that lined the initial portions of the parade but were much thinner at the end. Thus, although marchers technically were supposed to complete their circular route and return to the high school, in reality many of them headed for their cars once the parade had reached a certain point and spectators were fewer. With no one to march for, there was little point in continuing.28 The audience was a core element of this parade—a coauthor of the performance (Duranti 1986)— and without it, the performance ceased to exist. Susan Davis (1985) concludes her study by suggesting that parades tended to lose their critical edge as they became more commercialized in the late nineteenth century. The Mardi Gras parade in McCall was a highly commercialized event that, despite gestures toward the carnivalesque, did not engender social criticism but, rather, appropriated a style that embodied global social order to attract the attention of as many people as possible. In their analysis of the Luling, Texas, Watermelon Thump parade, Beverly Stoeltje and Richard Bauman note that “the people of Luling present themselves at the center of the macro-system, not on its periphery. . . . it is they who incorporate and assimilate the higher level structures, bringing them 28

Thanks to Paul Jordan-Smith for his suggestions here.

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right onto the main street of Luling to be displayed and enacted as part of [a] Luling-eye view of the world” (1989, 169–70; italics in original; see also Bauman 1983). In the McCall parade, participants utilized commercialism, boosterism, the media, and a commodified traditional style to insert themselves physically into global dialogue and expand their parade exponentially. Participants grounded these international symbols territorially in their local place, making them their own by embodying and musicking them. At the same time, local symbols of identity such as Sharlie, winter clothing, and sports equipment were aligned with global festivity. People, colors, lights, sounds, smells, music, dancing, marching, singing, socializing, mixing, world celebration, masks, feathers, boas—every device imaginable screamed “pay attention!” to this event. Energy was both embodied—bodies were decorated, musicked, danced, and were made loud; they screamed, sang, and talked—and spatialized: spectators stayed put while parade participants moved. The parade territorialized global celebration to situate this festival in transnational contexts of world revelry. Positing a particular kind of relationship to world celebration, the audience, tourism, and mass media allowed participants to situate themselves prominently within the broader, festive world.

Changes in Style and Audience in the Children’s Neon Light Parade The Children’s Neon Light Parade opened Winter Carnival. It was alternatively called the Children’s Neon Necklace Parade, the Children’s Parade, or simply the Neon Light Parade in festival programs and advertisements, but what was consistent over time was that local children gathered on Friday evening at a designated spot, such as the public library, a now-extinct business called the Merc, or the Congregational Church, and marched to the site designated for the opening ceremonies and the traditional Winter Carnival bonfire, which for several years was the parking lot of a grocery store called Shaver’s. When the children arrived, Winter Carnival officially began. Like the Mardi Gras Parade, the style of the children’s parade changed significantly over time. From 1965 until 1995, it was a torchlight parade but did not always feature children; it was then reorganized into the Children’s Neon Light Parade, which meant that children wore neon necklaces instead of carrying lighted torches. When I first observed the Children’s Neon Light Parade in 2001, it was a small, quiet affair, at least for a parade. There were

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perhaps fifty children, who varied in age from infants carried in backpacks by their parents to teenagers who might or might not have been accompanied by adults. Most of the children wore neon glow-in-the-dark necklaces. Some only wore one, others wore several layers, and many carried glowing light sabers. All were dressed in warm clothing such as ski pants, heavy parkas, hats, and gloves. The neon necklaces and light sabers were the only festive accoutrements that the children displayed. Parents milled about, but they were not the primary focus of the parade, which started at dusk in front of the library. The children marched somewhat quietly down the street to the abandoned Shaver’s parking lot downtown, the location of the opening ceremonies that year. By 2009 the parade style had changed. It had grown bigger, noisier, and more visually dramatic, largely due to importing a Mardi Gras style and by 2010, the torches had been reintroduced, this time carried by fire department personnel. The evolution of style over time in the children’s parade had logical, contiguous links. It occurred mainly through transformations of light, suggesting that this parade, like the Mardi Gras Parade, subtly prefigured the coming of spring. The Children’s Neon Necklace Parade was originally a torchlight parade when Winter Carnival was revived in 1965. Although Winter Carnival was not formally associated with Brundage Ski Mountain at the time, part of the purpose in reviving it was to attract visitors to the ski area. Torchlight parades are often part of the celebratory repertoire for places with heavy winters, including ski areas and winter resorts.29 They take place at night and usually entail a procession of people skiing in formation down mountainsides with lighted torches to produce moving rivulets of firelight; the viewers are usually some distance away so they can see the effect. Morrow (1988) mentions a torchlight parade in Montreal in 1873 on top of Mount Royal as a way of welcoming a visiting dignitary, while organizers for the 1883 Montreal Winter Carnival not only held a torchlight parade but also built a fire inside the ice palace and had toboggan races on runs lit by torches (Morrow 1996). The 1894 Québec Winter Carnival had a torchlight parade as well (Abbott 1988). Today torchlight parades are part of many winter carnivals, including in Québec and St. Paul (Cloutier 1964); they also are held during holidays such as Christmas or New Year’s in 29

They also are common in mountainous areas without snow. The Torciata, for example, happens at night in Pitigliano, Italy, in mid-March (around St. Joseph’s Day), and people gather in town to watch the torch procession from nearby hills. Thanks to Steve Siporin for this example.

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ski areas such as Alta in Utah and Purgatory, Breckenridge, and Copper and Monarch Mountains in Colorado, further cementing links between torchlight parades and celebrations. They are a prominent part of international winter-sports events such as the Olympic Games and also a part of some pre-Lenten carnival celebrations (Tokofsky 2000). The first 1965 Winter Carnival torchlight parade drew on these associations between festivity, winter sports, and torchlight parades by functioning as the prelude to the opening ceremonies, and it has continued in that role, albeit with many changes, since that time. The first few torchlight parades, identified as the “Winter Wondertrek” in early festival brochures, do not appear to have been associated with children. According to one newspaper article, “The Scoleses were two of the 12 or 15 persons who marched in that first torchlight parade, they and two or three others plus the band, he [Bob Scoles] said. There may have been one or two kids walking alongside their parents, said Jayne Brown.”30 Scoles, an original founding member of Winter Carnival, recalled in an interview,

The first real torchlight parade that started the carnival, and that was the first one and continued until a few years ago. They dropped [it] I think because of insurance or something. But anyway we got two dozen torches this fellow made. It was twenty degrees below zero, and we had the band up on a wagon—the slide trombones weren’t sliding, the keys on the trumpets weren’t moving—and there were six of us that started at what was the Merc then. It’s Paul’s now. We started there and walked down to the Shaver’s building parking lot to have a bonfire. We had all these torches and six people carrying them. . . . And a lot of [people] were sitting in their cars—they didn’t want to get out because it was so cold. So we got a big bonfire started, and they started getting out of their cars, and we ended up having a sing-along there. . . . The band was playing as well as they could. And it was just a great evening. And the torchlight parade always opened the carnival until just a few years back. I’m not sure exactly how long ago, but it was always quite a big event. The kids carried the torches. Gabbert: Now did the kids carry the torches the first couple of times, too? 30

Ray Stout, “Winter Carnival Older Than ‘30th Annual’ Suggests,” Long Valley Advocate, 19 Janurary, 1994.

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Scoles: I think we had two or three kids there. And we didn’t know that much; we were afraid to have them do it at that time. And then it proceeded to where it was primarily kids. The torches were lit ones, and that’s what we made the bonfire with. So we had a spectacular bonfire that lasted for two days, I think.31 The parade began in the evening. Until 1995 the fire department gave lighted torches to the children, and they marched down the street accompanied by either their parents or department volunteers to the area designated for the opening ceremonies and the initial Winter Carnival bonfire. During some early years, the bonfire was lit in the middle of Lake Street. The children’s torches were used to ignite the bonfire, and its lighting officially signaled the start of Winter Carnival. Mary Benson said that she once was told that children originally paraded on skis, carrying flaming torches: “On Friday night (of the three-day carnival), opening ceremonies began at dark with a torchlight parade and ended around a huge bonfire while the sculpture winners were announced. I was told that these torch-bearing preteens, marching the two blocks from the library to Art Roberts Park, had at one time done this on skis.”32 I was unable to verify this, but even if it is not true, it suggests an ongoing association between torchlight parades, skiing, and children in the minds of local residents. Krahn sculpting-team members Dan Krahn, Mark Bennett, Marilyn Krahn, and Nancy Krahn all said that the children’s torchlight parade had been one of their favorite parts of carnival in the past. Marilyn explained, The kids would start at the public library, and your mom or dad could be with you but didn’t have to be with you. . . . It was usually little kids, under eight years old or so. And the firemen made torches and then would light the end for you. And each kid got to carry a torch, and I think firemen accompanied them. And of course little tiny kids weren’t allowed to carry a torch—there were safety measures taken. And then they walked from the library down to the center of town, which was straight toward the lake, and it was right in the middle of the street. And they had a bonfire built in the middle of the street. Stopped traffic. And when the kids threw those torches into that bonfire, it just went way high in the air. And it was so exciting, and that 31

Bob Scoles interview.

32

Mary Benson e-mail communication.

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signaled the beginning of the carnival. Carnival didn’t start until the bonfire was lit.33 Once the bonfire was ignited, the opening ceremonies began. The most important part of the opening ceremonies was (and continues to be) announcing the winners of the local snow-sculpting contest. In the past, the winner of the Snow Queen contest also was announced, and volunteers and staff were thanked; this was followed by a musical performance or a singalong and an outdoor dance. Between 1995 and 2010, the Children’s Neon Light parade was not torchlight. Increasing insurance regulations, coupled with growing concern that allowing children to carry lighted torches was unsafe and worries about potential lawsuits prompted festival leaders to reorganize the parade in 1995, the same year the main parade adopted the Mardi Gras theme. Children instead wore neon glow-in-the-dark necklaces and carried plastic neon glow-in-the-dark light sabers, which referenced the original torchlight parade but in a modified way. Mary Benson was one of the people relieved about the change: “The torches were real . . . long wooden brands with a wad of flaming fabric on the tip and were tossed onto a bonfire at the conclusion of the brief journey. I learned how long this mother/nurse could hold her breath to avoid the smell of singed hair as the ranks closed on the rows ahead. I was horrified at the potential for disaster and greatly relieved when the torches were replaced with glow sticks.”34 The arrival of children at the site of the opening ceremonies still signaled the official beginning of Winter Carnival, but since the children no longer carried torches, they did not light the initial bonfire. In some years I observed, the bonfire was lit before the children arrived to help those waiting at the site of opening ceremonies to stay warm; the fire was lit other years after the children arrived but not by them. A regular torchlight parade on skis sometimes was held on the ski hill. The organization, style, and role of the audience for this parade was very simple until recently. The children’s parade occupied a liminal position in the overall festival structure. Winter Carnival did not officially start until the children arrived at the opening ceremonies, so while the parade 33

Marilyn Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 8 February 2001.

34

Mary Benson e-mail communication.

Photo by author Photo by author

A. Sharlie/dragon.

B. Where’s Waldo? Sculptures drawn from children’s books were common in Winter Carnival.

Photo by author

C. Gods of Fire.

D. Horton hears a Who. Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

Photo courtesy of Krahn’s Home Funishings

F. Mardi Gras parade participant with ski gear.

Photo by Krisjan Hiner

Photo by Krisjan Hiner

E. Sharlie.

G. Mardi Gras parade participant.

Photo by author Photo by author

H. Sharlie as Asian-style dragon in Mardi Gras parade.

Photo by Krisjan Hiner

I. An example of Cathy Preston’s “bead, bra and panty tree.” Located at Brundage Mountain, McCall.

J. Young samba dancer.

K. Samba dancers.

Photo by Krisjan Hiner

Photo by Krisjan Hiner Photo by Krisjan Hiner

L. Mardi Gras parade participant.

M. Paul’s Market shopping cart drill team.

Photo by Krisjan Hiner

O. Children’s parade participant.

Photo by Elfriede Gabbert

Photo by Elfriede Gabbert

N. Mardi Gras parade participant.

P. Children’s parade participant with Sharlie.

Photo by Elfriede Gabbert Photo courtesy of the McCall Area Chamber of Commerce

Q. Torches were revived for the 2010 Children’s parade.

R. Pegasus painted red.

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functioned as an important part of the events, it existed outside the official time frame, much like the preparations for the local snow-sculpting competition. There was a parade chair, but until 2007, no application was required for participation; any child who wanted to march could simply show up as long as he or she was accompanied by an adult if the child was very young. And while parade participants formed a line, there was no particular designated order for the children to march. Furthermore, the parade style was somewhat plain with few visual or aural devices to attract attention apart from the original torches and newer glow-in-the-dark neon. Between 1995, when the neon necklaces were introduced, until about 2005, the children merely dressed in regular, heavy, outdoor winter clothing, wore necklaces, and carried light sabers. The kids had fun, but there were few noisemakers, music, masks, or other attention-getting elements. When I observed the parade in 2001 and 2005, both the organizational casualness and the plainness of the parade style gave me the impression that this was not an event designed to attract a lot of attention. This impression was reinforced by the minimal role of the audience. In dramatic contrast to the Mardi Gras Parade where both the immediate and mass-mediated audience played an important role, the number of actual spectators that lined this parade route were few. When I first observed the children’s parade in 2001, parents, who presumably would constitute the bulk of spectators, walked with their children or followed them along the sidelines (and so, in essence, marched with the parade anyway). The number of spectators along the route increased minimally as the parade reached its destination at the site for the opening ceremonies, but the majority of festivalgoers were already there, waiting for the parade to arrive so that Winter Carnival could get under way. Few of these spectators paid any attention to the children’s parade; most were huddled around the already-lit bonfire trying to stay warm. The emphasis was on the arrival of the children and the conclusion of the parade, rather than the process of marching. Since the parade did not depend on spectators for its efficacy, there was little need for costumes, jewelry, or regular parade pageantry. The parade also generally received little space in Winter Carnival media coverage, again indicating the lack of emphasis on audience attention. The local newspaper, the Star-News, gave good coverage to most Winter Carnival festivities, but as recently as 2007, it hardly devoted any space to the Children’s Neon Light Parade. There were no photographs, and while

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the program section of the paper did mention its existence, no story was associated with it as was the case for other events. The chamber of commerce also historically did not include much information on the children’s parade in its promotional material. On the 2007 Winter Carnival web site, for example, the children’s parade was listed in the schedule, but unlike other Winter Carnival events, it had no contact information and no separate link to click. The lack of spectators, media attention, and promotion, and the shortage of attention-getting devices in the parade itself defined the children’s parade as a very local event—so local, in fact, that the media and festival promoters did not consider it worth publicizing to visitors or outsiders. The assumption seemed to be that those who were interested knew about it anyway, making it an inward-facing, local event. Symbolically the parade united children with light, a form of pure energy. Children carried torches in the parade’s earlier incarnations or wore neon necklaces in its contemporary ones and moved through the central street of town to formally open Winter Carnival. Both Carolyn E. Ware and Robert Lavenda, who have written about children’s parades, suggest that they are about the community’s future. In examining the growing importance of children’s Mardi Gras runs in places like Basile, Louisiana, Ware writes that many “women and men view the kids’ run as their tradition’s future” (2007, 82) while Lavenda suggests that “if children are our future, then the kiddie parade . . . provides one view of that future, affirming that it will be in good hands” (1997, 37). As representatives of the community’s hopes and future, the McCall light/energy-bearing children themselves were performative, which is why there was little need for costumes or other attention-getting devices. Margaret Yocom (1993) suggests that the Doll Carriage Parade in Rangeley, Maine, which parades dolls and children, is a statement of local values in the context social and economic change. Children then, signify locality and community in a variety of contexts. The neon necklaces the children wore replaced the original torches they once carried.35 For some people, the disappearance of actual torches was a source of regret and nostalgia during my research period, evidence of the result of growing legalism and the increasing bureaucracy in society. Bureaucracy is a problem for festivals everywhere. But the choice of neon necklaces was appropriate, for the chemical glow mimicked the light from 35

Interestingly, a New Orleans torchlight parade tradition called flambeaux also now uses neon. Available online at http://www.mardigrasdigest.com/html/history_of/ flambeaux.htm. Thanks to Christie Fox for this comparison.

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the torches that had burned away the blackness of winter nights (Glassie 1975). The traditional parade began at the local library, the community’s edifice of enlightenment, sharing, and cooperation.36 This energy, whether in the form of torches or chemical neon, moved through the public spaces of the town to the opening ceremonies. Like the merging of candle flames in a marriage ceremony, the children’s individual torches once united into a bonfire, transforming individual energy into a welcoming collective warmth. The opening ceremonies bonfire, which continued to burn throughout the night, was the official beginning of Winter Carnival and an event that both locals and tourists attended. Between 2007 and 2009, the organization, style, and role of the audience in the children’s parade grew decidedly more elaborate. In 2007 parade chairs Jodi and Jerry Frederick required all participants under the age of eighteen to sign release forms for the first time, intensifying parade bureaucracy. This was because the parade marched on Idaho Highway 55 for a short period of time. The Fredericks formally applied to the state to officially close the highway, and releases were required. Although the children’s parade had always marched on the state highway, no one had previously bothered with the formal application process. Participants who signed a release form in 2007 also received a number that determined their order of march, so one side effect of obtaining state approval was a more formalized structure. The result of the Fredericks’ efforts was a dramatic increase in the number of marchers—from approximately fifty to more than two hundred—suggesting that increased regulation, bureaucracy, and centralization can increase as well as decrease participation (see Glassie 1975), although by 2010, children were not given an order in which to march. 37 Additionally, and likely as a result of more formal organization, the parade style became more elaborate, yet the emphasis on transformations of light remained. In 2005 there were a few balloons, some face paintings, and a modest banner. By 2009 the parade had grown much larger and noisier, and it had adopted many features of the Mardi Gras Parade (gallery fig. P, gallery fig. O). The starting point had moved from the library to the Congregational Church right down the street, where hot chocolate and release forms were available in the basement. Children of all ages milled around outside, playing on snow berms, while parents sipped hot chocolate, chatted with friends 36

Thanks to Kate Holbrook for this suggestion.

37

Jerry Frederick, telephone interview with the author, 19 February 2007.

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Fig. 51. Gathering at dusk for the children’s parade.

and neighbors, and attempted to keep track of their children’s hats, gloves, and scarves (fig. 51). There were many babies in backpacks and toddlers in strollers, and even sleeping infants were likely to sport layers of neon glowin-the-dark necklaces. Many more adults participated in the parade than I had noticed in previous years. They were generally not costumed, although a few people wore sets of beads or a neon necklace. The parade was slated to begin at 6:00 p.m., but people began gathering as early as 5:00 p.m. and, as the dusk deepened, the flash and light from the children’s neon necklaces became quite noticeable. Many more children were wearing Mardi Gras necklaces than I had observed in the past (fig. 52). The most popular kind was a battery-operated nubby plastic ball attached to the end of metallic beads that, when squeezed, blinked a brightly colored pink, blue, green, and white light. Importing Mardi Gras necklaces into the Children’s Neon Light Parade made sense because both beads and neon glow-in-the-dark necklaces are worn around the neck, and many kinds of Mardi Gras beads, such as the plastic nubby balls, emit light like the neon necklaces. Even the nonbattery-operated Mardi Gras beads were shiny and metallic and reflected light.

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Fig. 52. Child attired for the children’s parade.

Some of the props from the Mardi Gras Parade had been imported. Some children wore Mardi Gras-style masks, such as bird ones with feathers and beaks, and jester-style ski hats (fig. 53). The Asian Sharlie dragon had also become part of the parade as well as the large carnival masks, propped upon large poles, carried by hand, and decorated with sparkling tinsel in red, green, and gold. There were also several large dogs, part of the McCall family, usually wearing some kind of blinking necklace. In 2010 the parade grew even more elaborate, as the fire department reintroduced the flaming torches (gallery fig. Q). In addition to the proliferation of Mardi Gras references, the amount of noise connected with the parade had increased exponentially. As the parade began, the children began to scream and make noise with whistles, noise-making rattles, and their own voices. They hooted and hollered and screeched and imitated sirens—OOH WAAHH SQUEE WEE WEE—and this cacophony continued for the entire fifteen-minute walk to the site of the opening ceremonies, which was on the east side of Hotel McCall near the lake.

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Photo by author

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Fig. 53. Author’s daughter, age 5, attired for the children’s parade.

The audience also increased from earlier years. There were few spectators at the beginning of the parade, but by the time it arrived at the downtown area, there were many more spectators than I had observed previously. They increased in density until the parade arrived at the opening ceremonies, where it was so crowded it was difficult to walk. The children and their parents then dispersed and blended into the crowd that was already gathered and waiting around small, contained fires already lit across the opening ceremonies site. The history and function of the children’s parade was acknowledged publicly during the 2009 opening ceremonies. Master of Ceremonies and Carnival Chair David Carey gave the audience a history of the way the children’s parade had evolved:

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[The purpose of the parade] was to start the initial bonfire for the McCall Winter Carnival. Well, we got a problem with doing it. What they did is they’d bring their torches and put it on the bonfire. The problem with that is everybody’s wearing nylon and all this fiber stuff, so kids carrying torches over their head—everybody’d go up like a Roman candle. So we’re not doing torches; we’re doing neon. But it was the power of the kids that started that bonfire every year, decades and decades ago.38 Carey’s phrase “decades and decades ago” situated the original torchlight format of the children’s parade in the remote, nearly mythological past and made a contrast with the safer, more modern practices of today. At the same time, he explicitly articulated the significance of light and energy in the parade by speaking of the “power” of the children as the basis of the bonfire and Winter Carnival as a whole. Winter Carnival was rightly characterized as a family event; children were its symbolic origin. Carey not only recalled this past but also performatively reclaimed it by asking the audience to shout loud enough to “wake up the spirit” of Winter Carnival to light the bonfire (Magliocco 2001). “It’s [the Winter Carnival spirit] been asleep for a long time,” he said. So what we are going to do now—instead of somebody going over with a cigarette lighter and lighting it [the bonfire]—is we are going to call on the spirit of the McCall Winter Carnival from a long time ago to come and light that fire. Think we ought to give it a try? [shouts and applause] So what I want you to do is—I’m going to count to five. I’m going to count to five, and when I finish on five, everybody’s got to wake that spirit up. He’s been sleeping now for over a couple of decades. It might be a guy or a girl, I’m not sure—I’m not that old; I didn’t see. So when I hit five, you guys have to hoot, holler, whistle, do a little dance, do whatever you got to do and wake him up. And let’s see if we can’t get the spirit of the McCall Winter Carnival to light that fire.39 Carey counted to five, the audience clapped and screamed, and a flaming roll of toilet paper, soaked in lighter fluid and sent down on a wire hidden from view, landed in the pile of wood to light the fifteen-foot-high bonfire. Winter Carnival had begun. The Winter Carnival bonfire and opening ceremonies were held near the lake. The evening concluded with fireworks that visually echoed the 38

David Carey, fieldwork videotape, McCall, Idaho, 30 January 2009.

39

Ibid.

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bonfire by throwing light and fire from the ground into the sky over the water, offering a unity of oppositions: light/dark, day/night, heat/cold, fire/ ice/water. Fireworks were important one other time—during the Fourth of July celebration at the opposite end of the calendar year—when summer was at its peak and the tourist season was in full force. Winter Carnival fireworks, then, like Mardi Gras and many other winter celebrations, were also a reminder of other times, that winter would eventually end. Many people stayed until the fireworks, after which they headed either home or to the comedy performance at Alpine Playhouse, leaving the bonfire and musical band for the teenagers and younger, more boisterous crowd, who drank beer from the beer garden, huddled around the fire, and shopped among the traveling food and clothing vendors who were across the lot. The story of the children’s parade continues to be elaborated and transformed. A Mardi Gras style and more rigorous, formal organization increased participation in both the number of the marchers and size of the audience. Interestingly, Carolyn Ware also notes that in places in southwestern Louisiana, such as Eunice, children’s Mardi Gras runs have become increasingly popular the weekend before Mardi Gras. The presence of women and children creates an alternative to the more boisterous men’s runs, allowing for expanded participation by creating a family friendly event (Ware 2003, 159, 165). Despite all the changes, the McCall children’s parade remained focused on children, light, and life; Mardi Gras imagery merely extended these symbolic dimensions. Both Mardi Gras and Winter Carnival occur when days are short and cold, and nights are dark and long. Traditional symbols and meanings of Mardi Gras orient explicitly toward physical and spiritual renewal: longer days, more warmth and light, the coming of spring, and the resurrection of Christ, the light and hope of Christianity. McCall Winter Carnival was less explicitly oriented that way, but the movement of light and the display of children in the Neon Light Parade suggest symbolic parallels to traditional Mardi Gras meanings. The children who paraded moved, rearranged, and transformed energy and light in continually renewed forms. And even with increased adult participation, the children’s parade consisted mostly of young people, contrasting with the main parade, where many participants were middle aged or older. The emphasis was on children and families—in other words, on life and on the future. ***

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The Winter Carnival parades were dramatic acts of social relations. They split, separated, and manifested different, but complementary, sets of ideas. The Mardi Gras Parade used that style to purposefully cultivate a large, potentially unlimited audience and reference as wide a range of associations as possible. This style highlighted, dressed up, and linked businesses, civic organizations, and other local symbols of identity such as Sharlie to the festive, mass-mediated world. The Children’s Neon Light Parade displayed local children and families, who marched through the street to meet the waiting crowds. The audience played less of a role, and the primary emphasis was on the movement and exchange of light. Like the snow-sculpture competitions, the two parades worked in tandem (Farber 1983), articulating ideas about community identity in relation to a broader field of social relationships. The Children’s Neon Light Parade marched to meet and welcome the world into its quiet community; the Mardi Gras Parade demanded participation and a central place in the world’s festive affairs.

4 Creating, Remaking, and Commemorating History in Games of Skill and Chance Winter Carnival as Historical Process No sense of play is manifested in discussions of identity. Roger Abrahams, “Identity”

T

he dramatization of an identity split between inward- and outwardfacing poles illustrated in the snow-sculpting competitions and the parades also was also evident in Winter Carnivals of the past. During the 1920s, organizers used Winter Carnival as a means of inserting local players into a nationally developing winter-sports scene. Winter-sports competitions were first held under the rubric of the festival, and local people made history: world records were broken, people experimented with skiing technologies, and gender norms were pushed. This outward focus apparently strained social relations between McCall and the county seat of Cascade, and Winter Carnival split into two festivals. Cascade, which actively participated in the McCall event, added a Junior Winter Carnival that established a very local, inward orientation through an emphasis on area schoolchildren, free admission, and nonprofessionalism, articulations of identity evident today in the local snow-sculpting competition and the children’s parade. When Winter Carnival was revived in 1965, organizers again used the festival to link local identity to national contexts, this time by appropriating mass-mediated marketing images that associated European style and sophistication with skiing (Coleman 2004). This historical refashioning continued in recent years most prominently in a gambling event called Monte Carlo Night, which indexed the region’s past but remade it to conform to popular images of Europe. 164

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165

Winter sports were important, but secondary, in celebrations of the festival during my research period. Winter Carnival no longer serves as a primary umbrella for formal winter sports as it did in the 1920s since competitions are now conducted by modern professional organizations. It did, however, sometimes feature ski events and other sports activities such as a Monster Dog Pull and sled-dog demonstrations, and the festival sometimes ran in conjunction with more formally organized competitions, such as the Idaho Winter Games. The skiing events in particular recalled the region’s early place in making sports history and therefore were commemorative, highlighting the community-based and historical nature of regional winter sports. Using Winter Carnival to make history, remake history, and commemorate history suggests that people in McCall employed games of skill and chance to shape their identity as a site of recreation and leisure and creatively reinvent the past for present and future purposes. In the hands of locals, Winter Carnival was an active agent of change.

Articulating Two Poles of Identity: Winter Carnivals in McCall and Cascade, 1924–39 A Victorian belief in muscular Christianity, which promoted physical strength and health as a means of achieving moral certitude, combined with progressive reform movements in the late nineteenth century, led to the rapid development of winter sports in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth. Visible efforts to promote winter sports to the public included the construction of ski jumps, outdoor skating rinks, and slides and chutes for sledding and tobogganing. Formal organizations also proliferated. The National Ski Association, for example, was established in Michigan in 1904, and the Intercollegiate Winter Sports Union was founded in 1924 (Allen 1993). Lake Placid and Minneapolis became important winter-sports centers, while developers purposefully encouraged the expansion of skiing in the West to develop real estate. Winter carnivals played an important role, springing up during the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries anywhere snow and skiing could be found. Most winter carnivals, such as those that took place in Montreal between the years 1883 and 1889, were established with the help of ski or snowshoeing clubs and were designed to increase interest in winter sports as well as attract visitors (Morrow 1988). Burlington, Vermont, for example, held a winter carnival associated with its coasting club in 1886 and 1887

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Photo courtesy of the Nelle Tobias Research Center

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Fig. 54. Early skiing in Valley County.

(Beattie 1984); the 1911 Winter Carnival organized by the Dartmouth Outing Club (established in the winter of 1909–10) is another well-known example in the Northeast. Some of the many early winter carnivals in the West include Steamboat Springs (1914) and Hot Sulphur Springs (1911–12) in Colorado (Rothman 1998) and Banff in Canada (Lund 1977). Other winter carnivals, such as the 1896 Leadville, Colorado, event, were more specifically designed to attract tourists (Geist 1984). Skiing and winter sports in these places were closely linked to community identity and local tradition, but these early winter carnivals also helped transform skiing from a utilitarian necessity to a form of play, setting the stage for the eventual development of the ski industry. Valley County was always a skiing culture and more broadly one oriented to snow (fig.  54). Scandinavian immigrants brought snowshoeing and cross-country skiing with them to Idaho, and the presence of Finnish immigrants in Valley County likely influenced the development of early Winter Carnival.1 Skiing was an important part of the history and economy of the Idaho Territory since the “long snowshoe” was necessary for transportation and settlement in the 1860s. Skilike contraptions were used to haul supplies to remote mining towns, and mail carriers relied on skis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Skiing also was a form of recreation, sport, and gambling. 1

See chapter three for a discussion of the possible influence of the Finnish sledding festival Laskiainen on early McCall winter carnivals.

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People raced for money in the Idaho Territory as early as 1865, following national trends (Watters 1979). Annie Coleman notes that in Colorado “[the avid local] level of enthusiasm and support, combined with an annual schedule of carnivals and competition, set the stage for the growth of Alpine skiing and winter tourism” (2004, 40). Participation in winter sports also articulated a sense of national identity and northernness, particularly in Canada. Snowshoeing, for example, was originally a Native American practice, but, as Gillian Poulter points out, when appropriated by Anglophones, treks were not merely exercise; they also became a means of imagining a new national identity within an emerging Canadian nationalism: “Through the act of snowshoeing, they became the native figures in the national landscape” (2004, 76; italics added). Participation in winter sports signaled hardiness and even racial superiority; the bright eyes, clear complexions, and sound minds that allegedly portrayed the Canadian national character were attributed to the superiority of climate and vigorous outdoor exercise, ideas that were codified in the early Montreal Winter Carnival (D. Brown 1989). McCall’s first Winter Carnival was held in 1924. The invention of Winter Carnival in McCall was never a purely local affair but situated squarely within these broader developments. By the 1920s, the Golden Age of Sports, sports had become a national consumer pastime, due largely to the influence of mass media such as radio and popular magazines, which brought activities like baseball into people’s homes (Dyreson 1989). Called both a Winter Carnival and a Winter Sports Carnival, the 1924 McCall celebration included ski jumping, ski racing, skijoring, horseracing on ice, cutter races, barrel ski races, snowshoeing, tobogganing, and a Finnish sulky (sleigh) race, and local newspapers actively promoted it.2 Historian Hal Rothman (1998) notes that due to lack of adequate transportation, the audience for early ski carnivals in the first decades of the twentieth century in places like Steamboat Springs, Colorado, was primarily local, and he characterizes the events as community rituals. Rail lines were fully developed in Valley County by 1914, so the region’s period of extreme isolation had ended by the time Winter Carnival was established in 1924: skiing certainly was a local community pastime, but the festival 2

Skijoring consists of skiing behind a horse or, today, a dog, which early McCallites did on the frozen lake. The excitement of the activity apparently increased greatly when Austin Goodman connected an airplane propeller to a sled to tow skiers (Rowland 1960, 19).

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was clearly designed to attract visitors. Its primary impetus was economic because the newly formed Commercial Club was the principal organizer.3 The county seat of Cascade publicly supported the movement to establish McCall’s Winter Carnival by passing a formal resolution to back the event, agreeing to close local businesses so that people might participate and making transportation arrangements on the railroad for residents who desired to attend.4 The first paragraph of a 1924 Cascade News article states with the optimism typical of boosters “that a large crowd of Cascade people will attend the Winter Carnival to be held at McCall on February 29 and March 1 is practically assured and everyone is of the opinion that it will be a big success and a great thing for McCall and Valley County in general.”5 One possible reason for holding the first Winter Carnival may have been that a Universal Studios crew was in town filming snow scenes for an upcoming release entitled The Free Trader, starring William Duncan. The film crew stayed in the area for several weeks and was in McCall when the first carnival took place. The presence of a California film crew would have been big news at that time; some locals were hired as extras.6 The first Winter Carnival races drew participants from towns within a one-hundred-mile radius, so the festival was successful in achieving its goal of attracting visitors. Dog racing and ski-jumping competitions were the most popular events. Dog teams were used in Valley County and other areas throughout the Intermountain West to carry mail, supplies, and other freight to the backcountry until the mid 1930s (fig. 55). These teams were often entered into racing competitions. The McCall Dog Derby, as the race was called, was a professional dog race and dominated McCall’s Winter Sports Carnival throughout much of its existence. The derby was part of a broader regional dog-racing circuit that included Ashton, Idaho; Ogden, Utah; Mt. Hood, Oregon; and Jackson, Wyoming. During the 1920s and 1930s, local competitors such as Fred Printz, Roy Stover, Warren Brown, 3

“McCall Winter Carnival to Be Big Affair,” Cascade News, 18 January 1924, 1. Information about the early days of Winter Carnival in Valley County was derived primarily from issues of the Cascade News. Issues of the Payette Lakes Star, which would have provided additional information, are unavailable for the 1920s and 1930s because of a fire.

4

“We’re All Going,” Cascade News, 1 February 1924, 1.

5

“Cascade Will Attend Winter Sports en Masse,” Cascade News, 25 January 1924, 1.

6

The reference to the William Duncan film is in the newspaper article, “McCall Carnival Goes Over Big; Weather Conditions and Settings Perfect,” Cascade News, 7 March 1924. The film is not listed in the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com).

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Fig. 55. Teams of sled dogs in Valley County.

Thula Geelan, and others traveled to these regional locations to compete, and the McCall Dog Derby attracted drivers from outside the valley. The first derby was held on Payette Lake “in full view at all times from the shoreline”7 (fig. 56). The local newspaper played an important role in framing Winter Carnival as a mediating event that squarely situated the region in national contexts. The participation of national competitors granted legitimacy and prestige to Winter Carnival, so the newspaper emphasized their attendance whenever possible. The first 1924 dog race, for example, attracted Tud Kent of Ashton, Idaho, and Smoky Gaston of Nampa, Idaho, both of whom the newspaper identified as “nationally known” racers.8 The newspaper also promoted the talent of local competitors whenever opportunities arose, using participation in the festival as a means of linking outward. Winter Carnival was a way for locals to make history by breaking world records, for example, situating them in national and international realms. When Earl Kimball of Cascade broke the world’s record 7

Residents of Valley County apparently favored Irish setters for the sled teams. “McCall Winter Carnival to Be Big Affair.”

8

Kent won the fifteen-mile 1924 race while Gaston placed second. “Two Big Days at McCall,” Cascade News, 22 February 1924, 1.

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Photo courtesy of the Nelle Tobias Research Center

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Fig. 56. Early Winter Carnival.

for the twenty-mile dog course in 1928—running it in one hour, twentyseven minutes, with a team of seven Irish setters—the news headline read, “McCall Carnival a Good Show: Dog Derby the Lead-Feature. World’s 20-Mile Record Broken by Four Minutes.”9 Local competitor Roy Stover also broke the world’s record for the thirty-mile dog course during the 1932 Winter Carnival, running it in two hours, twelve minutes, and sixteen seconds.10 Female contestant “Whooping” Thula Geelan, who won the McCall derby in 1931, attracted attention since her victory stretched gender roles of the day (Coleman 2004, 67). Perhaps the biggest dog-racing story of this era for local people, however, was the 1926 race, when an unlikely victor, local thirteen-year-old Warren Brown, placed first, beating out national competitor Smoky Gaston to the delight of the area’s residents.11 Being a child, young Brown was a powerful symbol of local identity and community, and his victory against a national champion is still mentioned in local histories. Brown (1999) himself describes it in the first chapter of his autobiography. Ski jumping was very important, offering an opportunity to experiment with and push the limits of modern technology, situating the region as not only part of a national scene but also as modern. When organizers 9

Cascade News, 17 February 1928, 1.

10

“Sixty-Mile Dog Derby Big Feature of Winter Carnival,” Cascade News, 4 March 1932, 1.

11

“M’Call Youth Wins in Big Dog Derby,” Cascade News, 19 February 1926, 1.

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Fig. 57. Child ski jumper in an early winter carnival.

constructed a ski jump for the 1925 competitions, the newspaper responded by declaring, “They have prepared a jump that is extremely steep and one over which a good skier ought to be able to make a distance of nearly 200 feet.”12 As it did with dog racing, the newspaper took every available opportunity to juxtapose and highlight local talent alongside world-class figures. Children in particular were promoted as examples of exceptional local talent (fig. 57). McCall child ski sensation Lloyd Johnson was acclaimed “the youngest ski jumper in the world” and expected to attract a lot of attention. Johnson was mentioned alongside Arthur C. Romstadt of the Mt. Rainier Ski Club of Seattle, who was brought in as a professional exhibition jumper. The newspaper also hinted that jumpers from British Columbia were expected to attend, further enhancing the event’s reputation, although it is unclear whether they actually came. Ski jumping continued to grow in popularity, eventually replacing dog racing as the primary sport of interest. A new ski hill was completed by the Strand Ski Company and approved by the National Ski Association in 1926, and it attracted national amateur exhibition jumpers from the Denver Ski Club and Steamboat Springs that year. The paper 12

Originally ski jumping took place at Blackwell Hill, formerly the York homestead, on the east side of town. According to Frank Rowland (1960, 18), jumping was moved to a second site northwest of town at the edge of Rock Flat; “McCall Winter Sports Carnival Next Month,” Cascade News, 20 February 1925, 1.

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proudly noted that new ski hill placed the jumping competition on par with similar ones in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Revelstoke, British Columbia.13 It also emphasized the skills of local competitors on the new jump, focusing particularly on a local five-year-old boy named Johnny Shaw, who took third prize for his jump of thirty-six feet, seven inches, in 1927. Alluding to the growing importance of skiing nationally, the paper also remarked that the ski-jumping events attracted more attention that year than the dog race.14 That early Winter Carnival mediated between local and national realms in the world of winter sports becomes even more clear by looking at the evolution of the early festival. Winter Carnival split into two distinct halves in 1927, one representing an outward orientation and the other a more local and inward facing orientation, suggesting that people used the festival to play out competing ideas about identity and what was considered good for the region. The town of Cascade that year held its own Junior Winter Carnival in addition to the one in McCall. The newspaper did not explain the reasons for the decision. It is possible that McCall received a lot of attention and business due to carnival activities and Cascade wanted a share; it is also possible that the people of Cascade were somehow dissatisfied with the McCall event. What is certain, however, is that the orientation of the Cascade Junior Winter Carnival was quite different. The McCall event promoted the region and local people by placing them alongside regional and national competitors, ensuring a place in winter-sports history and securing a future in recreation and leisure development. The Cascade Junior Winter Carnival was designed specifically as a local event. It was limited to children from Valley County, it was amateur because it purposefully excluded professional racers and participants, and it was free. The 1927 Junior Winter Carnival program stated that professional dogs were barred from the Junior Derby and defined professional as “having participated in either Ashton or McCall, or any other place,” effectively excluding young teen racers such as Warren Brown. Here again the newspaper played an important defining role, this time by emphasizing the local nature of Cascade’s festival with multiple references to children and free admission, both of which supposed authenticity: 13

“Winter Carnival Bigger Than Ever, Professional Ski Jump for Championship of Idaho to Be a Big Feature,” Cascade News, 22 January 1926.

14

“Tud Kent Wins Dog Derby, Winter Sports Carnival at McCall Premier of Western Winter Sports Attractions,” Cascade News, 18 February 1927, 1.

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“[The Cascade Junior Winter Carnival is] a real winter sports affair, with no admission charges to either spectators or contestants and is open to any and all school children in Valley County.”15 This emphasis on the Cascade event as a “real” affair contrasts with an implied inauthenticity of the McCall festival, and this focus on children (and, hence, nonprofessionalism) and free admission was repeated each year, suggesting tensions between the ways the two communities sought to define Winter Carnival and themselves. Headlines reveal much. In 1930, for example, the newspaper reported on the McCall Dog Derby/Winter Carnival as one element in a series of regional competitions: “Earl Kimball Wins Again at Ashton—Groom at McCall” while it described the Cascade Junior Winter Carnival as a uniquely local event symbolized by male children and dogs: “Junior Sports Carnival Proves Usual Success: Small Boys and Dogs Take the Town for a Day.”16 The repeated emphasis on free admission suggests that Cascade was uncomfortable with the consumer orientation of McCall’s festival, which reflected the national mass-mediated orientation toward sports at the time: “Although this Junior Winter Carnival is put on each year primarily for the kids, it has proved to be one of the biggest times of the year for the people of Cascade. And incidentally, there is no admission charge.”17 Cascade held its Junior Winter Carnival throughout the 1930s. By the middle of the decade it expanded participation to include all school-age children, adult events, and even professional dogs while the McCall event declined. Eventually, all the early winter carnivals in Valley County faded into obscurity as skiing developed rapidly outside of festival contexts.18 Alpine skiing grew tremendously as both a national and international sport during the 1920s and 1930s while dog racing declined due to the introduction of airplanes for carrying mail to the backcountry; the dog teams 15

“Cascade Junior Winter Carnival February 22,” Cascade News, 14 February, 1930, 1.

16

“Ear Kimball Wins Again at Ashton—Groom at McCall,” Cascade News, 28 February 1930, 1; “Junior Sports Carnival Proves Usual Success, Small Boys and Dogs Take the Town for a Day,” Cascade News, 14 March 1930, 1.

17

“Third Annual Junior Winter Carnival,” Cascade News, 8 February 1929, 1.

18

In 1932 Cascade, Donnelly, and McCall cosponsored the dog derby. Billed as a professional dog race, the Cascade-McCall Professional Dog Derby was a sixty-mile two-day round trip. The Cascade News announced the derby as an additional feature of that year’s Junior Winter Carnival: it seems to have been considered separate from the regular carnival because it was not listed on the program. McCall did not hold its Winter Carnival annually after this year, although winter ski carnivals, organized by the Payette Lakes Ski Club, did occur sporadically after the Little Ski Hill was constructed in 1937.

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that participated in the derbys were maintained primarily for mail delivery.19 The establishment of the first Olympic Winter Games in Chamonix, France in 1924, the scheduling of the 1932 Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, and the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, which were the first Olympics to hold an alpine skiing event, fueled skiing passion. Eastern developers turned their eyes westward during the 1930s for new places to market so they could attract tourists and sell ski vacations to their wealthy clients. Sun Valley, Idaho, for example, was a Union Pacific Railroad project developed by executive Averell Harriman in consultation with Count Felix Schaffgotsch, an Austrian ski enthusiast and banking financier. It boasted the world’s first chairlift and opened in 1936 with stunning success as a glamorous ski resort that exuded a sophisticated European aura specifically designed to attract high-end clientele, including celebrities such as Gary Cooper and Clark Gable (Coleman 2004, 74; Rothman 1998; Service 1993). Although Sun Valley was not the first United States resort to emulate Europeanness, it purposely cultivated this image to compete with established European ski resorts, such as St. Moritz in Switzerland. Harriman hired marketing mastermind Steve Hannagan, who had developed Miami Beach (Service 1993, 19), recruited Austrian and Bavarian ski instructors, and built a luxurious lodge as well as the smaller Challenger Inn, described by visitors as in “picturesque pseudo-Swiss, neo-Austrian, [and] quasi-Bavarian” style (cited in Coleman 2004, 70). Other ski resorts imitated this European alpine style. Plans for full-scale resorts touting the Rockies as somehow being like Europe—the American Alps—eventually followed in areas that had been developing a skiing identity for years, such as Lake Tahoe, California, and Aspen, Colorado. The Cascade organizers undoubtedly were aware of these broader skiing developments when they permanently canceled the Junior Winter Carnival in 1940. Gesturing toward the development of other regional ski areas, the Cascade News pointed out that, although the various past sites for Winter Carnival had been sufficient for the junior competitors, the more experienced skiers were now passing them by for other areas with longer slopes and jumps: “Business men and skiers of this community have been searching for a suitable site for building all the courses necessary for a really good winter sports area. Forest Service aid has been promised if such a location is 19

“Cascade’s Annual Winter Sports Carnival to Be Held March 7,” Cascade News, 21 February 1936, 1; “Colorful Dog Teams Disappearing in West,” Cascade News, 9 February 1940, 1.

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found.” The article continued on to say that “until such improvements can be made in the skiing facilities around Cascade it is doubtful that further work will be done to maintain these annual junior ski carnivals, according to representatives from those organizations in charge of the affair.”20 Winter carnivals continued to be held sporadically in McCall at the Little Ski Hill, but skiing in the region became more formally organized through the development of facilities, ski clubs, and ski schools, rather than festivals. The Little Ski Hill, the area’s first mechanized facility, opened in 1937 outside of McCall, only one year after the opening of Sun Valley. Former dogsled champion Warren Brown and his father, Carl, who together owned the Brown Tie and Lumber Company, donated land to the Forest Service for its development. The Forest Service sent Norwegian ski sensation Alf Engen, who established Alta ski resort in Utah and helped develop Sun Valley as well as other resorts (Service 1993), to choose the site. The Little Ski Hill was established as a nonprofit organization and has been run that way ever since by the Payette Lakes Ski Club. It had its own lodge and brought skiers to the top of the 405-foot hill in a mechanical sleigh, which was powered by a diesel engine. A youth ski team was established, and children rode a bus from school to the hill so they could practice. Alf Engen’s brother, Corey, moved to McCall to become the Little Ski Hill’s ski instructor and coach.21 His Norwegian accent and good looks brought to McCall an aura of European sophistication, masculinity, and style reminiscent of Sun Valley (Coleman 2004). The Engen brothers were already famous skiers before Corey arrived in McCall; Corey Engen began professionalizing skiing activities, and his presence brought attention to the area. He was picked for the 1940 Winter Olympic United States Nordic Team;22 became captain of the United States Nordic Team for the 1948 Olympics in St. Moritz, where he won a silver medal; and was inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame in 1973.23 Engen also designed a fifty-five-meter jump 20

“Cascade Not to Hold Winter Sports Meet, Reports Indicate,” Cascade News, 23 February 1940, 1.

21

This account of the Engen family is largely taken from the Corey (Kaare) Engen papers, located in Special Collections at the Marriott Library at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

22

The 1940 Winter Olympic Games were cancelled due to World War II.

23

Penny Eberle, “Little Hill Notes 50th Season,” Winter in Idaho’s Heartland, 1987–88, an insert for the McCall Star-News; Christie Gorsline, “Cradle of Olympians Notes 70 Years,” Star-News, 7 December 2006.

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for the Little Ski Hill, which became the site of the 1973 National Junior Nordic Championships. Under his guidance, the Little Ski Hill became the site for national ski championships, and the ski team produced a number of Olympic skiers of whom residents are still quite proud.24 It is important to point out that skiing in Valley County remained solidly rooted in local traditions and a significant part of community identity. Annie Coleman (2004) describes skiing in Colorado prior to World War II as largely community based, participatory, family oriented, working class, and local. This aptly characterizes skiing in the McCall area too. Hal Rothman points out that “these natives of small-town working families were the vanguard as skiing spread to a multiclass, national audience” (1998, 229), while Coleman writes that skiing was “characterized more by cooperation than by private investment or upper class leisure” (2004, 74). In the McCall area, skiing was (and still is) strongly associated with children and families and ideally open to all. Locals today proudly point out that youngsters in McCall know how to ski as soon as they can walk, and used or free equipment is readily available for children who cannot afford their own. McCall adopted the moniker “Ski Town U.S.A.,” which was displayed for years on its welcome sign as a symbol of its unique identity (Zelinsky 1994), and the Little Ski Hill functioned as McCall’s community center for many years (fig. 58, fig. 59). Skiing was even an informal part of the school curriculum since a bus was available to transport children directly from school to the Little Ski Hill. “[It was] a continuation of elementary school,” said former Olympic skier and local resident Patty Boydstun-Hovdey. “We did our homework in the lodge and skied until the lifts closed.” Little Ski Hill volunteers provided babysitting services (one newspaper photograph shows a crib in the lodge), organized weekly potluck meals, and even helped young skiers with their homework. Hovdey said, “Every Wednesday night was a community potluck and night skiing. 24

Championships include the 1952 National Nordic-Combined Championships, the 1958 National Ski Team tryouts for the world championships, the 1973 National Junior Nordic-Combined Championships, the 1983 U.S. National Collegiate Championships Collegiate Ski Association National Championships, the 1987 national biathlon tryouts for the Calgary Olympics, and the 1995 U.S. Collegiate Ski Association National Championships. Gorsline, “Cradle of Olympians Notes 70 Years.” The Olympic skiers associated with McCall are Mack Miller (1956, 1960 Nordic combined), Frank Brown (1960 alpine team), Patty Boydstun Hovdey (1972 women’s slalom), Lyle Nelson (1976, 1980, 1984, 1988 biathlon), Glen Eberle (1984 biathlon), Alison Owen-Diesel, Dave Engen, and summer Olympian Greg Randolph (1996 cycling).

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Fig. 58. Sculpture displaying town moniker “Ski Town U.S.A.,” 2005.

It was a happening; families skied and played together.”25 She also added, “The Little [Ski] Hill is so much more than a place to go skiing; it’s a sense of community.”26 Mack Miller, a 1956 and 1960 Nordic-combined Olympic competitor, echoed Hovdey’s sentiments, noting that “the Little Ski Hill was McCall’s community center.”27 Lyle Nelson, a Winter Olympic biathlon competitor, recalled that “a little kid with no family there was completely provided for. Someone helped you put your gloves on.” He added, “The Little Ski Hill is about families. It started with the Brown family’s efforts to create community recreation. It was a family effort then, and it is still is.”28

25

Christie Gorsline, “Hovdey Says Little Hill Was a Family Affair,” Star-News, 2 November 2006, B1, B14.

26

Roger Phillips, “Little Ski Hill Celebration Recalls Past Glories, Star-News, n.d.

27

Gorsline, “Cradle of Olympians Notes 70 Years.”

28

Christie Gorsline, “Nelson Remembers Everyone at Little Ski Hill Had a Buddy,” Star-News, 22 November 2006, B1, B14.

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Photo by author

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Fig. 59. The Little Ski Hill lodge.

Remaking History into Popular Culture: Skiing and Gambling The newly formed McCall Area Chamber of Commerce drew on the historical relationship between winter sports, tourism, and festival when it revived Winter Carnival in 1965 as a commercial venture. Organizers once again used Winter Carnival as a tool to promote skiing and to situate the town in wider contexts of affiliation. When Brundage Ski Mountain opened in 1961 with its two modern mechanized chair lifts, the chamber wanted to promote it to visitors, so they held Winter Carnival the same weekend as Brundage’s University of Idaho Ski Invitational. The invitational events, such as slalom racing, cross-country skiing, and ski jumping, were considered part of Winter Carnival activities. A variety of other winter sports events also took place, including web (snowshoe) races, snowcat races, and rides on dogsleds brought in from Sun Valley.29 The media and advertising images of the revived festival promoted skiing in new ways by actively linking activities to European images, elite fashions, and consumer culture. Skiing had been associated with consumer culture and fashion since the 1920s, but after World War II, links 29

“Winter Carnival Plans Very Nearly Completed,” Payette Lakes Star, 28 January 1965; “Community Participation and Ideal Weather Keys to Carnival Success,” Payette Lakes Star, 18 February 1965, 1.

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between skiing, leisure, and consumerism became especially pronounced. The chic, elite, celebrity-tinged resort model established at Sun Valley in the 1930s and ’40s and extended by places like Aspen after World War II was enormously influential, and the ski industry heavily promoted images of European-style alpine villages to foster a culture of consumption and consumer interest in not only skiing but ski clothing and European dining, fashion, beauty, leisure, and health. The language of destination ski resorts in the mid-twentieth century was one emphasizing European sophistication, celebrity, wealth, ethnic northern-European whiteness, and class (Coleman 1996). This attempt to remake themselves in the image of Europe was not limited to destination resorts; even tiny places like Kellogg, Idaho went “old Bavarian,” in an attempt to recover from a devastating mining and logging slump, apparently to the consternation of some residents in 1989 (Limerick 2001, 53–54). Brundage attracted mostly local and regional skiers so it was not an elite destination resort, but the festival programs throughout the 1960s mirrored national trends by emphasizing, extending, and refashioning the area’s historical connections to Europe. Activities in the 1960s linked McCall to Europe through images of ski fashions and consumption. The Progressive Club, for example, hosted a ski fashion show in 1965 with clothing from the local Ski Haus—a name suggesting Austrian, Swiss, or German ethnicity—and models included Olympic skiers Jean Saubert and Corey Engen, who helped establish Brundage and was Norwegian. The club also showed ski films such as All the Way to Innsbruck, a reference to the 1964 Winter Olympics in Austria, and Training Camp at Vaile—1965 [sic].30 Ads for the 1965 Winter Carnival feature thin, fashionably dressed male and female skiers, images that continued as promotional devices for many years (fig. 60). The symbolic ties linking destination ski resorts and manufactured auras of Europeanness today are quite pronounced in many ski resorts across the county. Tamarack Resort, which opened in Valley County in 2004, did not market itself as specifically European but espoused exclusivity by focusing on wealthy clientele, intermediate skiing, exclusive club memberships, realestate sales, and shopping and other après-ski activities, patterns identified by ski-history scholars as typical of modern corporate skiing (Coleman 2004, 144; Rothman 1998, chaps. 7–10). The linkages between ski resorts and 30

“Progressive Club Plans Style Show and Ski Movies for Winter Carnival,” Payette Lakes Star, 11 February 1965, 1. The paper also identifies the film as On the Way to Innsbruck.

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Reproduced with permission from the Star-News

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Fig. 60. 1965 advertisement.

suggestions of alpine Europeanness were so overt historically that they became the basis for the 2008 annual April Fool’s issue of McCall’s Star-News, which always features an untrue story that seems both outrageous and somewhat plausible. In this case, the joke hinged on linking Tamarack Resort to the Middle East, rather than Europe. The headline was, “Tamarack Gets New Partner: United Arab Emirates to Pay off $250 m Debt, Build Hotel,” which, according to the article, was to be built in Lake Cascade and modeled after the Hydropolis in Dubai. The mock quotation, attributed to Tamarack’s CEO, French developer Jean-Pierre Boespflug, stated, “One of the concepts our new partners were able to get us to embrace is that the whole Rocky Mountain European theme is so—as you Americans say—‘yesterday.’” 31 31

Star-News, 27 March 2008, 1. The strategy for the April Fool’s issue of the Star-News is to suggest something that seems wildly inappropriate for the area that also plays off of actual tensions and fears. The 2008 headline tapped into fears about the future of Tamarack, which was in serious financial trouble due to the global economic crisis.

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Fig. 61. Advertisement for Monte Carlo Night.

In Winter Carnival, popular media images of Europeanness manifested during my research period in the most popular gambling event, Monte Carlo Night (fig. 61). Monte Carlo Night featured a variety of games, including blackjack, roulette, craps, and Texas hold ’em. Guests paid a cover charge of thirty-five dollars (2008 prices) and received poker chips to play with for the evening; food and music were included in the cover charge. Dealers, who were local volunteers, wore white, collared shirts with black ties or vests; some people mixed styles and wore cowboy hats as well. Players exchanged their winnings at the end of the night for gift certificates to restaurants and merchandise from local stores. There was also a cash bar. The event was quite popular and one of the most important fund-raising occasions for the chamber of commerce. Like sports activities, Monte Carlo Night and other Winter Carnival gambling events were rooted in McCall’s past. Gambling was part of a broader context of illicit activities such as illegal alcohol consumption and

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prostitution that occurred in McCall in the twentieth century. One favorite story in oral tradition concerns the house of ill repute that was located at the eastern end of Lake Street. According to oral tradition, McCall’s businesses used to be connected through a series of underground tunnels, which were supported by timber beams. The snow in the streets was not plowed in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, and the tunnels allegedly allowed residents to walk around during the winter months without having to exit onto the street and fight the large drifts. Stories about mysterious underground tunnels are common in oral tradition and therefore the McCall example draws on this wider folkloric realm.32 Many cities across the world are rumored to have them, and stories about alleged tunnels can be found in the Fife Folklore Archives at Utah State University. Elizabeth Tucker (2007) notes that underground tunnels are supposedly popular sites of ghostly activity according to university students. According to Bob Hill, one of two current owners of May Hardware, the original hardware store was located on Lake Street near the house of ill repute that benefited from the tunnels. Gentlemen could enter a reputable business establishment, go downstairs, and use the tunnels to frequent the seamier one, away from the eyes of the public. Hill remembered that original store owner Roy May, who lived upstairs, used to say that he knew how good business had been the night before at his neighbor’s establishment by the number of towels hanging out to dry on the deck in back the next morning.33 Martha Chitwood, a lifelong resident of McCall, recalled that when she was a young girl, her mother forbade her to talk to any of the women who worked there. Drinking alcohol both legally and illegally had long been a popular activity associated with gambling. The production of moonshine or “mountain dew” existed in Valley County during prohibition, and the McCall library archives contain stories of hidden stills and the resulting bootleg wars that occurred. The Fulton Hotel, for example, which included a pool hall and café, was raided in 1924, which led to the seizure of two gallons of moonshine and whiskey. The Fultons and moonshiner Gail Standish, 32

The notion of mysterious underground tunnels can be found in the Motif-Index of Folk Literature Thompson (1955-1958) as motif F721.1 underground passages. For a good article on the folklore of a specific raliroad tunnel, see Hall (1980). Many European cities, particularly in Italy, also have folklore about underground tunnels. Thanks to Steve Siporin for these points.

33

Apparently the tunnels were also used to store wood chips from the mill, which businesses used for heat. Bob Hill, telephone conversation with author, 20 May 2008.

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immortalized in a local ballad, were arrested.34 Sam Hamerick was another infamous bootlegger during the later part of the 1920s. His partner was a man named Bird Billings, who had an illegal still located near Smiley Bridge in the county. The men quarreled over a missing jug, and, as revenge, Billings led County Sheriff Robert Wilson to Hamerick’s still. The sheriff arrested Hamerick, but he escaped as they traveled to the vehicle—many people presumed that Sheriff Wilson allowed Hamerick to escape. Billings then decided to kill Hamerick but instead was killed himself by Tom Burnside, who owned the ranch where Hamerick’s still was located.35 The consumption of illegal alcohol was so prevalent that a local ballad entitled “When McCall Went Dry” was penned during this time. Traditional ballads tell a story and frequently name specific people who were important to the event (McDowell 2000). “When McCall Went Dry” not only names well-known whiskey makers of the era but was written by one of them as well (Rowland 1960, 22–23)36:

When McCall Went Dry By One of Us Gail Standish and Charlie Cummins Shal White and Eino Hill Were making a little moonshine, When Fred Diggs came over the hill. Fred had two deputies with him, They weren’t needed at all, Dr. Hurd was a small man, Lisenby big and tall. They had a nice warm breakfast, As the sun came over the hill, Fred cached the whisky, Dr. Hurd smashed the still. 34

He brought them to McCall They promised to be good, But their minds ran in circles, Thought to fool him if they could. They brought some whisky with them, All that they could pack, But didn’t bring it all, So decided to go back. They went to the livery barn, Hired a team and sleigh, Roy Stover to drive it, And speed them on their way.

“Before U.S. Commissioner,” Cascade News, 23 May 1924.

35

Lester Scheline, “Bootleg Wars Marked Area’s History,” Star-News, 21 April 1994.

36

Rowland cites the Cascade News as the original source.

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Now the two that sneaked away, Back to their little still, One was old Shal White, The other Eino Hill.

They waived their prelim, And laid in jail for a while, ’Till Judge Varian came up, And gave an unbiased trial.

They lifted Fred’s cache and started home, Were coming on the run, When they met Hurd and Lisenby With a flashlight and a gun.

Four of them pled guilty to the Charge and error of their ways, The old Judge said, “200 Dollars,” . . . “sixty days.”

Hurd said, “Drive on Roy. To the Hotel Lakeview, You have two hours to get ready, You are coming with us too.” They made a lot of explanations. All to no avail, For they were taken to Cascade, And lodged in the county jail.

The teamster hadn’t done anything very bad, So they took his team and sleigh, “Varian” gave him hundred dollar fine [sic], And put him in jail for thirty days.

Gambling also was part of McCall’s lively reputation. The Idaho state constitution of 1890 made all gambling illegal, but enforcement apparently was lax, and references to gambling in McCall can be found throughout the twentieth century. One popular arena for betting was sports races— particularly dog racing. Betting on the outcome of the McCall Dog Derby, for example, was a main side activity during early Winter Carnivals. Card playing was also popular. A pictorial history of Long Valley features a postcard from the early 1900s that shows four women beside a mule. The caption “Four queens and a jack” references the extensiveness of the activity (Cottrell and Ingraham 1987, 60). The photo and caption link women to gambling, reinforcing connections between gambling and the services of prostitutes. In 1947 the Idaho State Legislature authorized municipalities to license slot-machine gambling as a local option; some authorized card rooms as well. McCall’s historic Shore Lodge, which opened in 1948, took advantage of this option, offering guests not only slot machines but also other games of chance such as Peg Board and roulette tables. Nearly half of the city’s income apparently came from license fees (Williamson and Wilcomb 2007, 28). Roger (Rod) Davidson, a smoke jumper based in

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McCall, remembered the various gambling parlors available during the late 1940s, including Shore Lodge: They still had gambling or something when we were there [in the late 1940s]. There was not really anything exotic, but there were some great characters there. There was a place called the Lake Club that was overseen by Nick and Scotty Eubanks, which was a primary hangout for jumpers. They were both part owners, and it was a scene of great riots [chuckles]. And they had slot machines. . . . There was a lot of nightlife . . . McCall had a mass of clubs because of the gambling. . . . There was not a lot in McCall besides bars. He continued, I think Shore Lodge started with fairly elaborate gambling. They had a roulette table, a blackjack dealer, and slot machines. I did not see where poker was big, but I am sure you could have played poker. . . . I do not even remember a faro wheel there, but I remember roulette. And of course, the big one was dice; everybody has a dice table, and that is what most people would play unless they were going to play a slot machine.37 The gambling option was formally repealed in 1953, but illegal forms of gambling apparently continued in the area, constituting an underground attraction for visitors. Betting also persisted in modified legal forms. The most popular local game was the ice breakup contest, common in other winterbound areas such as Anchorage, Alaska. Records of the date when Payette Lake thaws have been kept since the winter of 1909–10. A contest about when the ice would melt—to guess, in other words, when spring would come—quickly evolved. An airplane dropped a barrel into the middle of Payette Lake sometime during the winter once the lake was frozen. Participants bought chances, guessing the exact date and time the barrel would reach the shore after the ice melted. The contest had had various sponsors since 1965, including the local radio station KMCL and the Star-News. The sponsor was responsible for documenting the correct moment and announcing the winner who received a prize, which in the past ranged from cash to automobiles. Betting on the results was officially illegal but it happened anyway. In 1973 KMCL sponsored the contest. Station manager Jim McCall had been helping in a countywide manhunt for a person suspected of kidnapping and shooting a 37

Roger (“Rod”) Davidson, interview by Troy Reeves, 27 June 2000, OH#1580, Idaho Oral History Center, Boise, Idaho.

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deputy sheriff. When the barrel became stuck, McCall chose to forego the manhunt and baby-sit the barrel, rather than incur the wrath of townspeople.38 His decision illustrates the importance of this contest and games of chance in general to community life. Festivalgoers continued McCall’s traditions of gambling in Monte Carlo Night, various bingo events, and other games of chance. These events constituted a commemorative practice by recalling some of this early history. This memory was not a cognitive recall of historical facts, but rather an experiential one recreated within the festival context (Connerton 1989). Participants who played bingo or rolled the dice at the crap tables during Monte Carlo Night participated performatively in McCall’s history, indexing local activities of the past and at the same time reconfiguring them for the future. Many of the seniors who participated in bingo sponsored by the McCall Senior Citizens Center, for example, were old enough to recall earlier forms of gambling. Often Winter Carnival sponsored some kind of snowmobile fun run, and in 1983, organizers transformed it into a Snowmobile Poker Run, effectively combining athletic skill with chance. Riders stopped along the way to collect cards, and the thousand-dollar grand prize went to the winner with the best hand who also completed the course.39 Snowmobile contestants also collected raffle tickets. Given the area’s decidedly western history of whiskey, women, and gambling, the choice of Monte Carlo Night was interesting. Frank E. Manning (1983a) points out that gambling is both money and symbolism and casino gambling specifically has two essential features: the rapid acquisition and expenditure of money, and the heady ambience and social style of the environment. Money is highly visible in casino environments, creating an exciting and risky attraction that is enhanced by drinking and beautiful women, who intimate the possibility of sex. The fact that organizers chose to name the event Monte Carlo Night, rather than Old West Night, for example, was important because of the way the symbolism of money was framed. An Old West Night would have extended and mythologized local gambling history, but Monte Carlo Night remade it entirely, albeit with some ties to the past. The city of Monte Carlo is located in Monaco and has been internationally famous as a glamorous resort for decades. Its gambling facilities are associated with the 38

Tom Grote, “Break-up Contest Breaks Up Winter,” Star-News, 16 March 1983, C1, C3.

39

“Poker Run to Test Luck,” Star-News, 9 March 1983, B4.

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ultrarich, including royalty and film stars. Ian Fleming set his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, in Monte Carlo, and several Bond films, which highlight wealth, beauty, sex, and glamour, have been filmed on location there. By linking to popular images of Monte Carlo rather than the Old West, Monte Carlo Night rekeyed the area’s history to stylized images of international wealth, beauty, and European sophistication, connecting the tiny town of McCall to international resorts as well as other gambling locations like Las Vegas that also are themed to Monte Carlo (Barber 2003, 206, 212; Rothman 1998, 299). Money, women, and drink were all part of the history of McCall, but these were veneered with imagined European glamour and an aura of celebrity. It is also interesting that, like elements in the Mardi Gras Parade, Monte Carlo Night suggested a warm-weather location. The link to Monaco replicated marketing strategies that associated western ski resorts with European alpine glamour. In McCall these images were not part of a formal strategy; the town did not actively market itself as either the Wild West like Jackson or Steamboat Springs (Culver 2003) or as a European alpine community like Vail, though alpine flavor existed. But Monte Carlo Night conflated local histories of western gambling with an international Monaco style, suggesting that Winter Carnival was doing heavy symbolic and transformative work accomplished by advertising executives in other places. This sophisticated style situated McCall among a range of resorts and emphasized its emerging identity as a place of leisure. In an event such as Monte Carlo Night, there was no need to establish authenticity—do they play Texas hold ’em in Monaco?— because no one thought that McCall had any real links there. Yet the area’s gambling history and recent real-estate speculation attracted the attention of international investors, so Monte Carlo Night suggested socioeconomic change. By participating in Monte Carlo Night, festival attendees actively and symbolically made ideas of wealth, sophistication, and style concrete and real, at least for the duration of the event. As people participated in Monte Carlo night, they also enacted McCall’s transformation to a particular kind of resort.

Commemorating History The need to promote skiing through the festival grew less important over the years because skiing and ski tourism became central aspects of McCall’s regional identity. The area attracted world-class events—a recent example

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was the 2008 Masters World Cup. Winter sports played only a secondary role in the festival schedule during my research period. Many people were unaware that Winter Carnival originated as a sports festival. Many, though not all, of the winter-sports events that remained in the Winter Carnival schedule were commemorative, recalling the region’s historical participation in their national development.40 These included the Little Ski Hill night skiing and dinner, dog races, and dogsled demonstrations, none of which were held annually. Paul Connerton (1989) argues that commemorative ceremonies play an active role in perpetuating collective memory. In other words, one of the most important ways a society recalls its past is through public events that claim explicit continuity with that past. In McCall no formal histories were written about the area’s sports participation or its Olympic heroes beyond extensive articles in the local paper and self-published books. Yet simply because this history was not formally recorded does not mean that it was not inscribed in other, moreperformance-based ways. And, unlike a history book, commemoration does not require historical accuracy: a commemorative act dwells on and adorns significant moments of local history (McDowell 1992), offering meaningmaking aesthetic dimensions that are selective and not strictly based on fact (Guss 2000; Norkunas 1993). Commemoration also advances propositions about community (see McDowell 2000). Ray Cashman, for example, suggests that commemorative activities in Northern Ireland help people “com[e] to terms with change and mediat[e] division by re-imagining and enacting local community and shared identity” (2008, 252). Connerton also writes that community identity is an essential aspect of commemoration: “Part of the answer [of what is being remembered] is that a community is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master narrative” (1989, 70–71). Ski events that in the 1920s were used vis-à-vis Winter Carnival to create change by inserting local identity into broad national contexts swung toward the opposite end of the spectrum in the twenty-first century. They were smaller affairs that proposed a model of winter sports that people imagined had existed in the past and that they were still striving for today: community based and child and family oriented. They recalled the area’s participation in the development of winter sports and the communal aspects of its winter-sports identity 40

For example, ice hockey events became incorporated into Winter Carnival after the Manchester Ice and Event Centre was constructed in 2003.

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by offering participatory, aesthetic connections with the past. The most apt example was Winter Carnival’s Little Ski Hill night skiing and dinner. It was an event presumably open to everyone, but Winter Carnival tourists did not attend it, and it coupled skiing with sharing a communal meal. In doing so, it not only recalled the afterschool ski potlucks geared toward teaching schoolchildren to ski described by Boydstun, Miller, and Nelson, but did so by using the body, both through participating in a sport and sharing food (Neustadt 1992). The body is important in creating social memory and identity. Connerton specifically emphasizes the importance of enactment— the reanimation of the original event—and the role of the body in collective memory (1989, 63). Through bodily enactment (skiing) and incorporation (eating), cultural knowledge and social memory were physically manifested and incorporated, naturalizing and biologizing communal forms of identity, rather than remaining merely cognitive (Noyes 2003a,b). Other events that were commemorative included ones that involved dogs. Maintaining teams of dogs for transportation had been unnecessary since the 1930s, yet dogs were displayed frequently, commemorating their role in sports history and reinforcing their role in community life. Some Winter Carnival programs featured dogsled races, recalling the heady racing years of the 1920s. Other years scheduled the Warren Brown dogsled demonstrations, which specifically commemorated his 1926 childhood win. Other, newer events also suggested continuity. The Monster Dog Pull, where participants’ dogs were harnessed to a full keg of beer, classified by weight, and competed against the clock, was an event borrowed from a winter festival in Colorado. It was not overtly commemorative but fit anyway because it united dogs, alcohol, and winter activities. Although winter sports once expanded the region’s identity outwardly, many recent events contracted it inwardly to recall history and reinforce a sense of local identity. People preserved and remembered community-based aspects of skiing and winter recreation. Other important parts of McCall’s history that could be commemorated, such as its logging history, were recalled in other ways outside Winter Carnival, such as museum displays, illustrating that all commemoration is a selective representation of the past. To sum up, Winter Carnival was an active historical process. Local residents used it to create history and imagine the future; it also was a means of recalling and reshaping past events for present purposes. Scholars have understood for some time that change begins at the symbolic or expressive level: symbolic change precedes, rather than follows, actual change. Residents

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used Winter Carnival to imagine new types of identity. Once transformation occurred, the events that precipitated it were no longer necessary and hence no longer part of the festival program. What took their place were either events that continued to shape a future identity or ones that commemorated the past, that reenacted foundational events and recalled processes that had already occurred.

5 Laughter, Ambivalence, and the Carnivalesque Lake Monsters and Festive Culture Sharlie and Winter Carnival are like Christmas and Santa Claus. They just plain go together. Marilyn Krahn

Images of Sharlie, the serpentine monster that allegedly lives in Payette

Lake, permeated McCall’s Winter Carnival, yet the festival was not specifically about Sharlie, and the chamber of commerce did not purposefully map her onto the event. The residents decided that Sharlie was appropriate, and they incorporated her in various ways. This chapter suggests that Sharlie was an important, complex symbol of identity that mediated both inward and outward dimensions of community and encompassed a broad range of meanings. She manifested locally in memorates and legends; she also was tied to international folklore complexes, national ideologies, and the mass media (Gutowski 1998). Because of these wide-ranging associations, Sharlie united rather than split the expression of community identity as insular or expansive that characterized the dynamics of other Winter Carnival events. Sharlie sightings have been reported regularly since at least the 1930s and likely before (fig. 62). Most people thought of Sharlie as benign, and they lovingly embraced their local mystery, considering it part tall story and part half-believed reality that no one could fully explain. Local sculptor Karen Morris said, Sharlie has been around McCall forever. It used to be on all of our maps, our Winter Carnival maps. It’s just a local legend, the serpent in the lake. And over the years, different people have had sightings of Sharlie. And some people say it’s a wave or a ripple in the lake, and other people 191

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Fig. 62. Early drawing of Sharlie.

see the head moving along in the lake and see humps moving along in the lake. There’s a million different stories about Sharlie.1 Morris’s comment illustrates the ambivalence that surrounds Sharlie, an ambivalence that mirrors many people’s attitude toward the festival itself. Ambivalence here means of two minds. Stories of Sharlie sightings were taken seriously. At the same time people also treated them as jokes, tourist gimmicks, or as drunken hallucinations. Sharlie also was used as fodder for pranks and tall tales, and she was part of a more general frontier mythology. This ambivalent attitude frequently was expressed in laughter; local people played with the idea of Sharlie across a variety of contexts. The presence of ambivalence and laughter evoked by Sharlie suggests that she was carnivalesque. Carnivalesque figures create chaos and are not easily fixed. They invoke laughter as a transgressive, transformative resource to break down classifications, generate various meanings, overturn or invert established orders, and rearrange social and ontological categories; at the same time, they are ambivalent figures because of the potential danger inherent in reassembling these categories (Bakhtin [1968] 1984). This is especially true of 1

Karen Morris, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 19 February 2001.

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monsters because they create disorder and straddle boundaries in a variety of ways (Westrum 1975). One strong indication of Sharlie’s indeterminacy is the fact that people used all three pronouns—he, she, and it—to refer to Sharlie in interviews.2 As a carnivalesque figure, Sharlie was useful for thinking about and reassembling local identity, playfully mediating distinctions between insiders and outsiders, truth and lying, and fact and fiction.

Sharlie in Winter Carnival The Sharlie images in Winter Carnival have been described in previous chapters, so they are not covered extensively here. Sharlie was not part of the original incarnation of Winter Carnival during the 1920s, although I found anecdotal evidence in state archives suggesting that the legend existed in the early twentieth century. Ann Fitch, for example, interviewed seventy-yearold McCall resident Minnie Osburn in 1972 as part of her student project, and Osburn said that when she was little, her mother told her that Sharlie ate bad little girls. Presumably her mother told her that story by the time she was ten years old, so the legend hypothetically dates to at least 1912.3 But Sharlie was not associated with Winter Carnival in the 1920s because it was specifically a winter-sports celebration (see chapter four); the revived 1965 festival, however, was a broader affair designed to attract tourists, and it was in this context that Sharlie became appropriate festive material. Sharlie was immediately incorporated into the 1965 festival through the snow sculptures. Local high-school students built the first Sharlie sculpture in 1965, and people in the local competition subsequently made Sharlie sculptures nearly every year. Examples include domesticated images, such as Sharlie driving a fire truck (fig. 63), swimming in a coffee cup (fig. 64), a baby Sharlie (fig. 65) and sleeping alongside Mrs. Sharlie. Sharlie also was 2

I follow Star-News editor Tom Grote’s usage in this chapter of the female pronoun, which is also the way I thought of Sharlie when I was a child.

3

Ann Fitch, “Sharlie: The Search for an Identity,” 1972, a student folklore project originally deposited in the Northwest Folklore Archive. The archive has since been renamed the Archive of Idaho Folklore Papers, 1963–1972, MG126, Special Collections, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho. The project is in series 5, box 8, folder 221. The estimate that the legend dates to at least the early 1900s is further supported by a 1953 Payette Lakes Star newspaper article, where Mrs. S. S. Frozy is quoted as saying that she grew up in the Payette Lakes area some forty years earlier and had heard the story then. “Serpent Naming Contest to Close December 31,” Payette Lakes Star, 24 December 1953.

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Fig. 63. Sharlie in fire truck, 1988.

made as an astronaut alongside a space shuttle (fig. 66). There also have been a variety of more ferocious, dragonlike images (fig. 67). One sculpture depicted Sharlie with green eyes and a red forked tongue; the sign next to it read, “Sharlie, the fantasy of Payette Lake.”4 That Sharlie was a symbol of local identity and considered to be a member of the community was obvious from my interviews. The title of the Sharlie sculpture that the Krahns made in 2001, for example, was “McCall’s Oldest Resident,” indicating that they considered her an old-timer. In casual conversations, people described Sharlie as a “friend,” someone or something that “everybody knew about.” I asked Marilyn Krahn why she thought Sharlie was a popular topic in the local snow-sculpting competition. She said that she saw Sharlie as a source of creativity that people could draw upon and that everybody liked: “Because he belongs to everybody, probably. Sharlie can be different in everybody’s mind, so you don’t have any pattern you have to follow or anything that you have to build him like. You can build him large or small, and you can make him funny or whimsical. You can make him mean. But I think it’s just that everybody likes Sharlie. He’s a friend of everybody.”5 4

Photograph published in the Adams County Record, 29 January 1998.

5

Marilyn Krahn interview.

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Fig. 64. Sharlie in a coffee cup.

Dan Krahn thought Sharlie was part of McCall, fun, and both recognizable and appropriate: “It’s just part of McCall. People know about it, they talk about it. It’s recognizable. So somebody does one. It’s part of the fun. It’s like Popeye, Snoopy, like the space shuttle. . . . That’s part of what people enjoy, what it triggers in their own upbringing. Like Popeye and Charlie Brown. . . . [But] even if it’s a cartoon character, it must be appropriate. . . . I wouldn’t do [sculpt] Beavis and Butthead.”6 Krahn’s comment that Sharlie was an appropriate sculpting subject as compared to Beavis and Butthead (cartoon characters from the 1990s known for their stupidity, violence, and antiauthority attitudes) indicates again that Winter Carnival was considered to be a family-friendly affair, and most activities and sculpture subjects were supposed to be appropriate for children. Sculpting subjects, therefore, could be fun and creative but not controversial. The most locally famous example of a controversial sculpture was made by Carl Whitaker, a longtime festival participant, in 1981. He recreated Manneken Pis, the famous seventeenth-century statue in Brussels of the peeing boy. City officials considered the sculpture inappropriate, and the 6

Dan Krahn, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 21 February 2001.

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Fig. 65. Baby Sharlie.

mayor ordered it razed, inciting laughter and comments throughout the community. Sharlie, however, was frequently associated with children and playfulness and therefore judged appropriate. Not only was her first statue made by high-school students, but the theme of Winter Carnival when the Krahns sculpted her was “Childhood Memories.” Many people also thought that Sharlie was appropriate for Winter Carnival because she was part of McCall’s history. Former Winter Carnival Chair Rob Lyons said,

It’s [Sharlie] always just been a part of it [Winter Carnival]. I don’t know why or how it got involved in it. I don’t know how it got started. [It was] years and years ago as far as the myth of the something in the lake. I think it’s just ’cause

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Fig. 66. Sharlie as an astronaut.

it’s part of town. So . . . they decided it’s part of carnival. I mean, you know, you always see sculptures. Almost every year there’s two or three Sharlies around of some sort or shape. Gabbert: Lots of times they win. Lyons: They do win. I don’t know how it got involved; I think it’s just part of—you know, if there was Bigfoot in town—if we had a Sasquatch—then you’d see that in Winter Carnival. . . . It’s just part of McCall’s history, I guess. It’s the Loch Ness monster of McCall, so that’s part of it, and it has to be in the sculptures, or in the carnival, or as part of the carnival.7 Sharlie was also part of the main Winter Carnival parade, from its early incarnations as the Grand Parade through its evolution into a Mardi Gras Parade. Local people occasionally dressed up like Sharlie in homemade costumes in the early parade years, and an Asian-style Sharlie was paraded annually by various children’s school groups in the Mardi Gras parade. The Asian 7

Rob Lyons, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 7 January 2001.

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Fig. 67. Sharlie

Sharlie was also recently incorporated into the children’s parade. The Mardi Gras Parade sometimes featured additional Sharlies as well. As described previously, for example, an excavation company decorated its digger to look like Sharlie by covering it in green plastic in 2009. The shovel became a moveable mouth, and an operator inside drove the monster along. The chamber of commerce occasionally used Sharlie as an official Winter Carnival icon, although not every year. The chamber held a design contest in 2001 for the Winter Carnival T-shirt among local schoolchildren,

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and the contest specified that Sharlie had to be used in some way. The winning entry depicted a child building a snowman at the edge of the lake; Sharlie held the snowman’s head in its mouth. According to the child artist, Sharlie was helping put the snowman’s head on, although, as was typical with Sharlie, there were multiple interpretations: many people thought the picture showed Sharlie stealing the snowman’s head off its body. In addition, Sharlie was an image on Winter Carnival pins, and her likenesses appeared on Winter Carnival maps that identified where snow sculptures were located throughout the city and surrounding area.

Sharlie outside of Winter Carnival Contexts Sharlie images permeated Winter Carnival, but her original existence in McCall was as a legend and memorate, and a source of folkloric beliefs and associations surrounding lake and sea monsters. These associations led to generic affiliations with a variety of joking traditions as well as to the mass media. Richard Bauman (2004) emphasizes the importance of contextualization strategies, which means that it is important to trace the multidimensional web of interrelationships toward which a particular text points as well as the ways these references contextualize and inform each other. To fully understand how and why Sharlie was a carnivalesque figure that generated both laughter and ambivalence for local people and so was easily incorporated into the festival, it is important to examine more closely how people regarded Sharlie outside of Winter Carnival. Sharlie is most properly identified as a dite, a term coined by C.W. von Sydow to describe elements of popular prose traditions that are not formal narratives but remain prose.8 “The word,” von Sydow writes, “is intended to denote what people have to say about one thing or another without characterizing that which is said as true or false, believed in or fictitious” (1948, 107). The term is useful for its flexibility. A primary way that people evoked Sharlie outside of Winter Carnival was narratives of sightings, but there was no single, coherent Sharlie tale. Sharlie sightings also did not have a plot, so they are difficult to characterize as stories (Georges 1971), although legend scholar Linda Dégh (2001) points out that legends index extranormal ideas and so do not have to be fully developed narratives. Narratives of Sharlie sightings suggested mysterious phenomena, and there 8

My thanks to Richard Bauman for guiding me to von Sydow’s term.

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were ideas about Sharlie, the environment she inhabited, and proper conditions for sightings, as well as explanations of what she might really be, all of which constituted aspects of the Sharlie complex locally and lake-monster traditions more broadly. Everybody in McCall knew somebody who had seen something odd, and archives in Idaho contained examples of narratives of Sharlie sightings. These stories rearranged conventional categories and questioned de facto assumptions about the natural world. They were taken both seriously and lightly, and they were linked to more overt joking traditions, illustrating a complex community relationship to Sharlie and the ways people used her to refigure identity. The term dite is also useful because it relieves tellers, audience members, and researchers from the burden of proving or disproving belief. Linda Dégh (2001) has long insisted that just because people talk about extraordinary subjects such as lake monsters does not mean they actually believe what is being discussed (see, for example, Dégh 1971, 1996; also Mullen 1971). Belief, in fact, is variable, flexible, and context dependent (Dégh and Vázsonyi 1971). As I present the following narratives, therefore, I do not suggest in any way that the people who shared their stories with me overtly believed in lake monsters; most tellers would likely deny it, although more than a few people did think there was something in the lake. Rather, the extraordinary content of the narrative was what was interesting. To tell a story about a sighting was to engage in a discussion about the proposition of something in the lake. It did not imply endorsement but was something of a philosophical discussion about the ontological nature of the world based on perception and interpretation of experience (Hufford 1982).9 One main type of Sharlie stories was memorates, a term von Sydow uses to describe traditional firsthand accounts of extraordinary experiences. In memorates the experience is individual, but the content of the narrative is stable and widely distributed. The term memorate was further defined by scholars such as Reidar Christiansen, Gunnar Granberg, and Juha Pentikäinen, who relaxed von Sydow’s rule that memorates must be strictly firsthand accounts (E. Slotkin 1988; Dégh 2001, 58–79). The vast majority of Sharlie memorates recounted experiences on Payette Lake that the teller 9

Hufford (1982) proposes an “experience-centered” approach to stories of the supernatural, suggesting that beliefs may be determined by perceptions of experience, rather than only by culture, as had been previously supposed. Hufford suggests that tradition frequently provides an explanation (although not necessarily a correct one) of common perceptions of experiences.

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described as somehow mysterious but not overtly dramatic; in her study of ghostly narratives, Jeannie Banks Thomas describes this kind of story, common in oral tradition, as “slightly dramatic” (Goldstein, Grider, and Thomas 2007, 29). In these accounts, the narrator did not claim to have seen a lake monster directly, but the stories invoked ideas of a mythic landscape by reporting unusual, mysterious activity on the lake that could not be fully explained. Marilyn Krahn told a typical, slightly dramatic example: “I’ve never seen the body. But in the summertime when there is no one on the lake waterskiing or jet skiing and no boats out, and there is no wind, I—not frequently but at least four or five times a summer—you see a ripple, a long ripple, and the ripple continues and moves, and there are no ducks— there’s not anything that can cause that. And that’s what I think is Sharlie. And I think Sharlie is a large, elderly sturgeon.”10 Krahn’s hypothesis that Sharlie was a landlocked sturgeon was a common explanation and appears in other lake-monster traditions as well since sturgeon may attain enormous sizes, up to 5.5 meters long.11 According to Michel Meurger (1988, 47), Professor Vadim Vladykov of the University of Ottawa cited overgrown sturgeon as the cause of lake-monster rumors in Lake Pohénégamook in 1957 and also in Lake François. Louis-Phillipe Roy, a member of the Sauvage River Hunting and Fishing Club, explained to Meurger that “there are sea sturgeons here, as well as sturgeons of the lake. . . . Sturgeons can take on enormous sizes” (1988, 62; italics in original). These rational or “alternative explanations” are also part of legendry (Oring 2008, 136). Other traditional rationalist explanations for Sharlie included a submerged log, the wake of a boat, a flock of ducks, and the lake turning over during particular parts of the season, all of which can also be found elsewhere (Meurger 1988, 49). Dan Krahn offered another slightly dramatic narrative of a Sharlie sighting, one that emphasizes the importance of both fun and mystery surrounding Sharlie: But with Sharlie I would actually have to say, I have been out back of the store, summer mornings, fall mornings. Nobody on the lake, not a single boat. And it’s a single wave. It doesn’t even go in both directions 10

Marilyn Krahn interview.

11

Grace Jordan notes that this idea was given further validity when a former conservation officer publicly stated that fertilized sturgeon eggs had been planted in the lake (1961,151).

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like a boat wave. This can be one wave coming toward the beach, and the rest is smooth. You know? It may be a fairy tale, whatever, but something is in the water. A rock doesn’t make that size of a wave. So I don’t know. It’s fun to have the myth, the mystery.12 Other memorates I documented were more dramatic. In these stories, the narrator actually saw something she or he could not identify in the water, although the person may or may not have labeled the phenomenon as a Sharlie sighting. Ron Thompson shared this memorate, a sighting when he was on a camping trip with his son. [My son . . . ] got up early in the morning. I mean, I was laying around, it must have been fairly early in the morning. . . . He got out to do his thing out there. And after a couple of minutes, he said, “Dad, there’s a big dog in the water.” And a couple of minutes later, he was still watching it; he thought it was a big dog. He said, “Dad, are there alligators in Idaho?” And I said, “No, not that I’m aware of.” And I thought, well, I better get out. And I wear glasses, so I hunted for my glasses, and I got out on all fours, and I poked my head out of the tent, and he said— “See it out there?” And I looked, and there was this something going along in the water. From my right to left. But it was much bigger than an alligator. I thought it was a log at first. ’Till I really looked at it, and it was moving—I mean it was moving pretty fast. And I started to get out of the tent, and what I saw at that time—what I thought was a log was about ten to fifteen feet long. And as I was getting out and standing up, this thing started to rise out of the water. So I grabbed Zachary thinking—what the heck is this? You know, it didn’t rise completely out. But what I saw was the top of its head, bulging eyes, and three distinct humps. I mean it was incredible. Three distinct humps. So it rose up and was scooting along the top; so it rose out of the water, and I scrambled to get the camera, and I realized that I had just taken the last picture the night before; I had run out of film.13 The fact that the narrator ran out of film for his camera caused us both to laugh because it was typical enough of lake-monster sightings to constitute a distinct motif. In addition, the fact that he described the creature with “three distinct humps” suggests Euro-American tradition at work since the number three is pervasive in a variety of genres (Dundes 1968). In the next example, the narrator (name withheld) told about a similarly dramatic experience (and also used the number three): 12

Dan Krahn interview.

13

Ron Thompson (a pseudonym), interview with the author, tape recording, Boise, Idaho, 22 August 1997.

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It was probably around—the sun was just starting to go down, shadows in the trees . . . maybe around six or seven at night. The sun was still up; it was light, but you know it was getting to be evening, but you know the days were longer then; the sun wasn’t going down until ten or eleven. Let’s see, it was me, D., and S.—we were all sitting there under the trees drinking beer. [The others] were—I don’t know— around back. We were the only three sitting on the shore. I was leaning against a tree, S. had her feet in the water, and D. was just sitting down somewhere. We were all just kind of looking out at the water. The only thing I really saw was, uh—well, we all laughed and thought it was a log. I don’t know. It appeared to be something that undulated through the water. Maybe had three humps. I don’t want to call them humps. I don’t know what they were. But there was something out there. I’d say it was at least six feet long. Uh, a hundred feet from the shore.14 A second common type of Sharlie narrative is one in which the narrator tells of another person’s experience; this third-person narrative is closer to what is commonly considered a formal legend (see E. Slotkin 1988). Rob Lyons told the following story about his father’s experience: There in the lake in the mouth of the river—both of them were together, and they were doing something, talking, I don’t remember what, but they were kind of up high. And they said they saw something. They didn’t see it; they just saw the V in the water it created. It was underwater. And uh, like if this is the mouth of the river, kind of came in, buzzed out around the mouth of the river, and went around like that, and went back out. And they looked at each other: “Did you see that?” John was an Englishman—“Bloody hell, yes I did!” . . . They looked at each other. “Are we going to tell anybody?” And they thought that if they told anybody, they were going to think one of two things: One, they were drunk, or they were doing it for publicity. And so they never reported anything, but he said, “There’s something out there, and it’s big. You can’t be under the water and create that big of a wake without being a pretty good size. And we weren’t drinking! (But we did afterwards!).”15 In this type of story, the narrator reports the alleged experience of a credible witness, such as a father, grandmother, other close relative, or good friend. This closeness shores up the authenticity and reliability of the story (Oring 14

Anonymous, interview with the author, tape recording, Boise, Idaho, 15 June 1996. This transcript has been previously published (Gabbert 2000).

15

Rob Lyons interview.

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2008, 131) since presumably relatives and friends of the teller would never lie. To doubt the credibility of the story casts distrust on the authority of the narrator, dramatically increasing its overall rhetorical effectiveness. Sharlie memorates and legends were based on perceptions of personal experiences, but they were also traditional because they articulated commonly held, widespread ideas associated with European lake monster complexes and therefore were another way, in addition to ski styles, Monte Carlo Night, and Mardi Gras, that McCall linked itself to Europe. These ideas were not necessarily present in a specific Sharlie text, but they were called to mind through association. Sharlie is a lake monster, and lake and sea monsters constitute an old and international folk idea (motif B91.5.2 Lake Monsters & Sea Serpents) that has existed since antiquity. Aristotle in Historia Animalium, for example, noted that Libya had been attacked by a sea serpent in the fourth century BC; references to sea serpents also appear in Virgil’s Aeneid and in Pliny (Bright 1991). In Europe the most famous lake monster is the Scottish Loch Ness “Nessie,” but lake-monster traditions are also found in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Lake Storsjön, which is located in the northwestern province of Jämtland, Sweden, even had its local monster, first mentioned in print in 1635, taken off the endangered species list as recently as 2005.16 Sharlie keeps company in North America with the likes of the monster of Bear Lake in Utah, first rumored to have existed in 1868, and Lake Champlain’s “Champ,” which was first sighted in 1609 and again as recently as July of 2005. Canada also has widespread lake-monster traditions, particularly in southern Québec. Creatures are rumored to exist there in at least ten lakes, including “Ponik” of Lake Pohénégamook, first sighted in 1873, and “Ashuaps” of Lake Saint-Jean (Meurger 1988). Michel Meurger (1988, 128) suggests that European lake-monster complexes entail what he calls a “mythic landscape” and he identifies a cluster of environmental motifs common to them. One important one is Motif F713.2 Bottomless Lakes, Pools, and Bogs, and Meurger points out that bottomlessness is supposedly characteristic of Lake Pohénégamook, Lake Maskinonge, Lake Okanaga, and Lake Aylmer in Canada, all reputed to have serpents. Noting also that Loch Ness at one point in time was thought to have “a deep abyss, deeper than any abyss in all of Scotland,” Meurger writes, playing on words, “Unfathomability, then, is a condition favourable 16

“Mythical Swedish Monster Loses Endangered Status,” Charleston Daily Mail, 11 November 2005. My gratitude to Steve Siporin for directing me to this reference.

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to the existence of a monster, according to the European-American tradition” (1988, 130). Sharlie folklore drew upon this mythic landscape. Her dwelling place, Payette Lake, had long been rumored to be bottomless, a theory that likely dates to the first survey in 1885, when the territorial controller simply and soberly announced that its depth was unknown. Geologist Edward Rhodenbaugh published a 1925 newspaper article stating that he had sounded the lake to 290 feet and hoped this information would put to rest the bottomless-lake speculation that had been circulating for some years.17 But the idea that Payette Lake was bottomless persisted, despite Rhodenbaugh’s rationalist hopes. Payette Lake was mentioned in a regional survey of bottomless lakes in the Pacific Northwest (Person 1960), and references to its mysterious depth were available in archives through the early 1970s.18 Other environmental motifs that Meurger identifies as associated with mythic lake-monster landscapes include “dark water,” “sucking currents,” and “lake does not render up its drowned” (1988, 130). Payette Lake was considered uncommonly cold, dark, and somewhat dangerous. People were very careful about walking on the ice in winter due to warm pockets of water and apocryphal stories circulated about times in the past when horses crashed through the ice during winter and their bodies were never found, a story that dovetails nicely with the motif of the water’s possessiveness. One story in oral circulation tells of an airplane that allegedly crashed in the lake and was never found. Motif G308.4, lake made dangerous by haunting serpent, seems to underlie these ideas. Underwater caverns and connecting lakes are other common landscape motifs for lake-monster complexes (Meurger 1988, 135), and the supposed existence of hidden underwater tunnels replicates the idea that there were secret tunnels under the city of McCall (see chapter four). Payette Lake was 17

Edward F. Rhodenbaugh, “Payette Lake’s Deepest Spot 290 Feet,” Idaho Statesman, 4 October 1925, sec. 2, 1.

18

According to Henry A. Person’s 1960 “Notes and Queries” contribution in Western Folklore, bottomless lakes across the Pacific Northwest include Lake Crescent, Offut Lake, and Long Lake near Olympia, Washington, as well as Lake Chelan in the central part of the state. American Lake, Gravelly Lake, and Steilacoom Lake near Tacoma also are reputed to be bottomless and connected by underwater passages. Wapato Lake is known to be somewhat shallow but apparently has a bottomless hole in the middle. Hoodlum Lake, although now apparently drained, used to be bottomless; it was also thought to be connected to the Puget Sound by underground tunnels.

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rumored to have underwater caverns that connected it through aqueducts to lakes in Oregon and other parts of the state, and this sometimes explained why Sharlie could not be found. Grace Jordan, for example, writes that due to the volcanic nature of the area, Sharlie lived in caverns in Payette Lake warmed by underwater hot springs and “ventured to the surface only after warm weather made the upper waters pleasant” (1961, 150). In a short overview to her 1971 student project entitled “Sharlie, An Idaho Lake Monster,” Cindy Anderson writes, “They have supposedly never measured the bottom of Payette Lake.” One of Anderson’s informants, Kathy Johnson, also mentioned that the lake was deep and, in fact, the bottom had never been found, indicating that the idea was alive and well in the early 1970s.19 Writer Mary Jane Williams mentions the depth of the lake and the difficulty of sounding it because of the many shelves and underwater caverns (1971, 12). The underwater cavern motif appears in John Gutowski’s study of the giant turtle hunt of Churubusco, Indiana (1998, 42), and these motifs are found in Utah’s lake-monster legends as well. The motifs associated with mythic lake-monster habitats usually were not apparent in any specific narrative performance but were called to mind any time someone told about a Sharlie sighting. McCall resident Karen Morris said that she was familiar with such motifs: “I’ve heard that over the years, that there’s a place out in the lake that they’ve never been able to find the bottom of. And, uh, that there’s springs all over the place . . . that Sharlie can hide in and stuff, underground caves and stuff.”20 The concept of a mythic landscape was not merely a local phenomena or even one only associated with lake monster traditions. It was also an important element in American frontier mythology and so tied the Sharlie complex to the national imagination. In his study of American folklore, Richard M. Dorson (1982) identifies sea serpents and lake monsters as linked closely to the national landscape, which was thought to contain oddities of nature, including monsters and giant beasts. People felt that nature, particularly in the West, was both unlimited and threatening, so sea-serpent stories were part of a larger national repertoire of exaggerated tales of vast natural resources and fabulous creatures. Gutowski’s (1998) study of the development of Turtle Days in Indiana demonstrates, for example, how the 19

Cindy Anderson, “Sharlie, the McCall Monster,” 1971, a student project originally deposited in file 03177137 of the Northwest Folklore Archives. Now at the Idaho State Historical Society in the Idaho Folklore Collection, 1959-1990, IFA 83/118.

20

Karen Morris interview.

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hunt for Oscar the turtle put into practice national ideals of individualism, a heroic quest, and a Protestant work ethic, effectively illustrating the way folkloric behavior enacts national ideologies. Local sculptor Mark Bennett echoed these ideas, seeing a direct connection between Sharlie and the surrounding Idaho wilderness: I think that it is a unique thing to our lake, you know. You don’t hear about a lot of other—there is Loch Ness, of course, but I’ve never heard of other people when talking about their lakes of having their little sea serpent. . . . It’s a character thing of McCall that it has this sea serpent in this lake, and I just love the idea [of ] that, you know. I would guess that because this used to be such a primitive and hard-toget-to area, it kind of fit. You know, you are way out in the wilderness, and you know, there could be sea serpents in the lakes here.21 Beliefs about the landscape’s abundance, its oddities of nature, and its expansiveness were not just innocent ideas in the nineteenth century. They provided ideological justification for frontier exploration, conquest, and domination and created a national narrative steeped in violence, exclusivity, and feminization of the landscape (Kolody 1984; Kaplan 1993; R. Slotkin 1992, 1993). Landscape that was described as excessively bountiful was also, for example, portrayed in the national imagination as uninhabited, despite the fact that Native Americans lived there. Native Americans either were discursively erased entirely from people’s minds or framed as on the verge of extinction in this vision of the nation’s Manifest Destiny, easing the way ideologically for Anglo-American conquest and settlement. Interestingly Sharlie’s origins were sometimes (although not commonly) attributed to a Native American story, what Jared Farmer calls “Indianist” origins (2008, 244), suggesting further symbolic ties to national myth. The story concerned a couple whose canoe was overturned on the lake, presumably by the lake monster. They drowned, so the story had a tragic outcome. Native Americans frequently represent wildness in Anglo-American folklore and have a close, tragic connection to the landscape. Discursively situating Sharlie’s origins as somehow both Native American and tragic linked her directly to national frontier imagery. Native American origins also supply a veneer of antiquity and authenticity (Neustadt 1992) and are a relatively common strategy in the western United States for lake-monster stories and 21

Mark Bennett, interview with the author, tape recording, McCall, Idaho, 21 February 2001.

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Photo by author

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Fig. 68. “Buckaroo Bear,” sculpture of Sharlie and Smokey Bear by the Forest Service, 1998.

other kinds of tales, such as legends about buried treasure. That Sharlie was partly situated in national mythology became clear to me in a sculpture constructed by the Forest Service for the local competition in 1998, which combined the civilizing influence of the Forest Service with images of the cowboy and evoked ideas about the dominance of man over nature. The sculpture depicted Smokey Bear dressed like a cowboy in full chaps, cowboy boots, and spurs riding Sharlie like a bucking bronco. The title was “Sharlie and the Buckaroo Bear” (fig. 68). The associations that narratives of lake-monster sightings prompted were important in understanding the full range of Sharlie’s signification, but the attitude, or the “intonation, countenance, and demeanor” (Oring 2008, 138) people revealed when they listened to and told these stories was also important. These attitudes, particularly irony and sarcasm, offered a range of metacommentary. People listened to stories of sightings carefully. Stories about sightings were fundamentally mysterious because they questioned ontological categories: they rearranged and reclassified reality. Like all accounts of the extraordinary, they challenged rational presumptions about the natural world (Dégh 1991). They intimated the possibility of a mythic landscape, one that contained a creature science was unable to find,

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undetectable underwater caverns, bottomless lakes, and sentient, possessive waters. These stories implied that the world might not be exactly the way it appeared and that our understanding of nature was inadequate. Sharlie stories therefore were risky for both tellers and listeners (Oring 2008, 133), first because they suggested the possibility of a reclassification of reality, and second because issues of truth and falsehood permeated them. Richard Bauman (1986) has closely examined the way personal-experience narratives, tall tales, and generic expectations intersect in Texas dog trading circles to create perceptions of lying. Traders seek to dispel the appearance of lying by insisting they are telling the truth about dogs they want to sell, which heightens perceptions among participants that they are indeed lying. Sharlie stories postulated a degree of truth yet recounted something fantastic. Drawing on the work of Susan Stewart, Jeannie Banks Thomas notes that what is ambivalent exists in more than one domain at once; its identity is not clearly fixed (1997, 48). In performing Sharlie narratives, both narrators and audience members were aware of the tension between fact and fiction created by stories that reorder the world. The audience had no firsthand knowledge of the recounted experience—nor, frequently, did the narrator—yet these narratives invited the audience to believe them at some level, or temporarily suspend disbelief, or at least consider the possibility of truth even if they immediately rejected it. Audience members ran the risk of being fooled by these narratives and the extraordinary claims they made. Narrators were also at risk because they might be labeled fools, drunks, or crazy—that is, reclassified by their audience. Rather than insisting on truth, as do Bauman’s dog traders, participants minimized risk by creating distance from the ontological propositions of these accounts. The most common distancing strategy was laughing. Jeannie Banks Thomas (1997) notes that laughter frequently occurs in non­humorous narratives that challenge conventions because it is a way to distance both teller and listener from the topic. Sharlie stories were not funny; they were mysterious, and they were frequently treated as a little joke or with uncertainty. The second anonymous story of the Sharlie sighting, for example, was told to me by the person who experienced it. Yet even the narrator did not really believe what he saw was Sharlie, and he told the story in a highly joking, sarcastic, and defensive manner. He laughed while telling the story, and I laughed as well. We were both nervous. Such paralinguistic meaning is difficult to render orthographically, but the attitude of the narrator and the audience is essential in understanding the way that Sharlie

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worked. The result was ambivalence and laughter about both the narratives and the experiences they related. This attitude cast doubt on the stories, which contrasted with the powerful claims of first-person accounts or those by trusted third persons. It protected narrators from being reclassified by their audience as fools or worse. Laughter also was part of a second distancing strategy, which associated Sharlie sightings with alcohol and therefore reframed the stories as unreliable. References to inebriation within the Sharlie complex were so common that drunkenness might even constitute an additional motif. An old joke in the area postulated that one could only see Sharlie in the mirror of the back bar of the Yacht Club. The Yacht Club was a popular bar at the edge of Payette Lake, so presumably anyone who saw Sharlie there also had been actively drinking. Local resident Marlee Wilcomb associated the naming of Sharlie with a story about two drunks that her grandmother (who was a teetotaler) told her: Two drunks were on the dock the Yacht Club. One of them, who was named Charlie, fell off. His friend, who was so inebriated that he slurred his words, went looking for him calling “Shhharlie”? 22 Other people echoed Wilcomb’s appraisal. Cindy Anderson’s informant, Kathy Johnson, noted that “it seems to take the right combination of martinis and company for Sharlie to make his appearance”—and indeed, Sharlie was once sculpted as playfully curled up in a martini glass in Winter Carnival. Ann Fitch also notes that her informant Jack Tanes had been “enjoying a few beers” when he spotted Sharlie in 1963,23 and the narrator of the second anonymous story told to me had been drinking as well. Sharlie stories (and lake-monster traditions in general) generate tension by mediating truth and lying, and they generate nervous laughter. They therefore are affiliated with other traditional genres that also manipulate, exaggerate, or make potentially false claims about reality, which are funny or playful, and where an audience may be deceived. These genres include jokes, windies, tall tales, pranks, and hoaxes (fig. 69). Dorson (1982) suggests sea serpents and other traditional American monsters are comic because of their association with joking traditions. These genres fool unknowing victims, so they mediate not only truth and lying, fact and fiction, but also the categories of insider and outsider. Tall tales and bragging, for example, frequently 22

Marlee Wilcomb, personal communication, February 03, 2011.

23

Anderson, “Sharlie, An Idaho Lake Monster”; Fitch, “Sharlie: The Search for an Identity.”

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Reprinted with permission of the Star-News

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Fig. 69. A humorous early incarnation of Sharlie.

play off actually-existing characteristics of the landscape, but they exaggerate them to preposterous proportions, so they are also lies (C. Brown 1987). Barre Toelken (1990, 25) notes that hyperbole and exaggeration are important modes of western expression that accurately articulate extreme experiences, and insiders know exactly where reality starts and exaggeration begins (see also Danielson 1990). These stories are frequently used to fool outside audiences, who are unaware of the line between reality and fiction; employing them may incorporate a newcomer into the group (S. Jones 1976). Drawing on the rhetoric of the traditional tall tale and western bragging traditions, local resident Barry Binning once commented on Sharlie: “If I ever got him, I’d jump on his back. I would. I’d ride that SOB. I wouldn’t kill it, but I’d sure get a good hold,” illustrating that Sharlie was sometimes described locally in the language of a tall tale.24 24

Barry Binning, interview with Elfriede Gabbert, fieldnotes, McCall, Idaho, January– April 1987. My mother, Elfriede Gabbert, did a semester collection project on Sharlie for a folklore class in 1987, and her interest in the subject piqued mine. It was she who first noted that Sharlie frequently appears in Winter Carnival.

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Jokes, hoaxes, and tall tales about fantastic animals, the weather, and other aspects of nature have long been part of traditional, usually male, frontier behavior and rely on notions of a mythical, or at least extraordinary, landscape (Rourke 1931). William Wright, for example, was an associate of Mark Twain who wrote for the Nevada Territorial Enterprise from the 1860s to the 1890s. His pseudonym was Dan DeQuille, and he was a famous nineteenth-century trickster who used traditional complexes of mythic landscapes and mysterious creatures to generate chaos. His famous hoaxes have been well documented, including his discovery of four-inch Washoe shooflies, a black bug of the genus hum, singing stones, spring water that tasted like chicken soup, and solar armor to protect the wearer from desert heat. DeQuille apparently sent a fake bug to the curator of the Smithsonian Institution, which the scientist bought, ruining the man’s career (Loomis 1946:26–71). Mody Boatright ([1942] 1961, 56), in his study of frontier humor, describes these practices as “loading the greenhorn”: filling a newcomer’s ear with lies to make him appear foolish. Local people therefore unsurprisingly sometimes used Sharlie as a joke when tourists (outsiders) were present. Rob Lyons explained that he once used Sharlie to scare a group of visiting teenagers who were swimming in the lake. He recalled, “I don’t remember how or why they were here. They had a week. I think it was at one of the camps. But they were from Indiana. And they were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen [years old] probably. I told them about it [Sharlie] . . . [and they asked me], ‘[Do] you go swimming?’ [I replied no] Uh huh. I waded out there, [but] I wasn’t going swimming.” As was typical with Sharlie stories, Lyons was having fun. He explained, “I kept a straight face, super seriously. It’s something for the locals to play with if you find somebody fairly gullible.” At the same time, in our interview Lyons maintained an ambivalent attitude typical of legends. “I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind that something’s out there—I personally think it’s a sturgeon. But it’s fun.”25 Sharlie inspired pranks. A prank is similar to a hoax because both depend on an unknowing victim that is fooled. Hoaxes, however, such as those perpetrated by Dan DeQuille, depend on public victims—they frequently use the media—while pranks are more personal. In the following example, the recipient of Mike Dingle’s prank was not a regional outsider, but its impact still depended upon a victim who wasn’t in on the joke. Dingle owned a cabin on Payette Lake and recalled a prank he played using Sharlie: 25

Rob Lyons interview.

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Some friends and I were touring around in the Wellcraft [boat] late at night during the summer circa ’87/’88. We skimmed by Shore Lodge. To our surprise, we saw a very large Sharlie floating in the water and moored near the dock. I think it was completely made out of foam. I was very familiar with the Sharlie legend. For reasons that seemed good at the time, we could not resist and decided to take its head (I remember it slid off easily). It measured plus-or-minus two feet by two feet. It adorned our bow as the figurehead for the remainder of our tours around the lake that night (it must have been a full moon or close to it—I remember the lake was very lit up). . . . We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it. I think we were devising some master practical joke, but we didn’t finish our plans that trip [and hid it]. We returned a week or three later. It wasn’t where we stashed it; I never saw it again.26 These joking traditions reordered perceptions of reality in some way and then revealed what they described as real to be false, at the expense of an unwitting victim. The result was laughter and ambivalence as well as a reinforcement of insider group ties and identity. The association of Sharlie with jokes, tourists, pranks, and tall tales not only shed doubt on the credibility of the Sharlie memorates and legends but also cast her further toward laughter, trickery, and a temporarily reordering of the world, all qualities that are associated with the carnivalesque.

Sharlie and the Media: Ensuring Celebrity and Fame Tall tales, jokes, and pranks are part of oral culture, but they have also long been used to market regions and commodify regional identity and so are the tools of capitalism and boosterism (fig. 70). Tall-tale postcards, which picture gigantic vegetables, fruit, fish, or other agricultural products, are a good example (Siporin 2000). It is unsurprising, therefore, that as a kind of tall tale, the media used Sharlie to endorse regional identity by promoting her to outsiders and linking her to national realms (Gutowski 1998, 46). One early national reference comes from a Time magazine article and refers to Sharlie as “Slimy Slim” since she had not yet been officially named. The article was written in the jocular, folksy manner typical of journalists attempting to imitate the style of oral narratives (Dorson 1976). The tongue-in-cheek article begins, “From time to time over 15 years, people have seen an enormous sea serpent glubbing about in Idaho’s Payette Lake. . . . Since July 02, some 30 people 26

Mike Dingle, e-mail communication with the author, 13 March 2007.

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Fig. 70. Sharlie is associated with boosterism.

(including Republicans and teetotalers) have found themselves staring at his periscope-like head” (Slimy Slim 1944, 22).27 The article includes a number of references to traditional motifs, such as explanations of Slimy Slim’s existence as related to sturgeon and drunkenness, and it situated Sharlie within national mythology by noting one possible source for her origin, a Paul Bunyan legend in which Paul and Babe the Blue Ox were fishing for sturgeon. The story says that Babe pulled the huge fish out of the water so hard that it sailed all the way into Payette Lake. The article concludes, “A jerk like that could well have given the creature a curvature of the spine” and states in parentheses that the serpent is supposed to have three humps. The local media played a large role in giving Sharlie a concrete identity, using the dite for booster purposes. Payette Lakes Star newspaper editor Boone McCallum held a naming contest in 1953 that attracted nationwide attention when the Associated Press and United Press wire services picked 27

The comparison of the creature’s head to a periscope is interesting given the publication date of 1944, when fears of German invasion by submarine were gripping the nation.

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up the contest. McCallum offered a five-dollar prize for the best submission, an amount that was supplemented by a Boise newspaper. A total of seventy-five dollars was awarded: forty dollars for first prize, twenty dollars for second, ten dollars for third, and five dollars for fourth. Judges included Idaho Governor Len Jordan; state senator Frank Freeman; state representative Ralph L. Paris; noted citizen Arthur C. Jones, MD; McCall Mayor Art Roberts; Roy May, president of the McCall Rotary Club; Mrs. Grace Hoff, president of Payette Lakes Business and Professional Women’s Club; and Mrs. Wayne Webb, president of the Payette Lakes Jay-C-Ettes. The contest generated 203 submissions.28 A woman named Le Isle Hennefer Tury, a former Idahoan living in Springfield, Virginia, submitted the winning entry of Sharlie, which was apparently a reference to a popular comedy routine by radio personality Jack Pearl. Pearl played a character named Baron Munchausen, which was loosely based on based the real Baron Münchhausen, who lived from 1720 to 1797 and whose lies and extravagant stories became sources for literary tales published about him.29 As the baron, Pearl told outrageous stories over the radio in a fake German accent. His standard reply when challenged on the veracity of his stories by his interlocutor was, “Vass you dere, Sharlie?” and the phrase became known nationally. Referencing, as it did, a context of unbelievable lying and tall tales, the highly appropriate name stuck, and McCall’s lake monster has been Sharlie ever since.30 The local newspaper also promoted Sharlie by printing narratives of sightings when people were willing to claim publicly that they had seen 28

“Let’s Give Our Sea Serpent a Name of Its Own,” Payette Lakes Star, 19 November 1953; “Let’s Give Our Sea Serpent a Name of Its Own,” Payette Lakes Star, 26 November 1953; “Idaho Statesman Joins Star to Give Name to McCall Sea Serpent,” Payette Lakes Star, 3 December 1953; “Serpent Naming Competition Stretches Across Nation; Facecious [sic] Letters Come, with Names to Puzzle Even a Webster,” Payette Lakes Star, 17 December 1953; “Hundreds of Names Come for Serpent of Payette Lakes; Prominent Persons to Serve in Selecting Most Appropriate Entries,” Payette Lakes Star, 31 December 1953; “Names for Serpent to Go to Judges; 203 Entries,” Payette Lakes Star, 7 January 1954.

29

See the Wikipedia entry on the baron online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_ Münchhausen.

30

The name Boon received second prize, Finnigin got third prize, and Watzit took fourth prize. “‘Sharlie’ Is Name Selected for Famous McCall Serpent by Group of Judges,” Star- News, 21 January 1954; see also Tom Grote, “Lake Watchers Ask, ‘Are You Dere, Sharlie?’” Star-News, 3 July 1985, A5; Tom Grote, “Sharlie ‘Lives’! Payette Lake Serpent Makes First Reported Appearance Since 2002,” Star-News, 13 August 2009, A1.

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Fig. 71. Editorial cartoon associating Sharlie with tourism.

something. Alongside these news stories, the cartoonist for the Star-News frequently used Sharlie as the basis for editorial cartoons, linking news (e.g., truth) and humor together within the same contextual framework. One 1985 example depicted two Utah tourists, one with camera in hand, the other drinking a made-up (but obviously alcoholic) beverage called “Aqua-Zipper.” Both were oblivious to the lake monster looming behind their Tourist-U-Rent-A-Boat. The caption read, “I don’t believe in any this ‘Sharlie’ stuff . . . what fool would believe in a lake monster!?” (fig. 71). This single frame depicted associations with tourism, drinking, insiders and outsiders, and tall tales as well as an ambivalent stance toward belief. Current newspaper editor Tom Grote continued the media tradition of promoting Sharlie to tourists by annually sponsoring a Sharlie statue in the Winter Carnival local snow-sculpture competition during my research period. Grote thought of Sharlie as an aspect of local identity that needed to be remembered, something that was fun for children, and a tourist gimmick to promote McCall. The sculpture he sponsored in 2008, called “The Duel,” highlighted humor, monstrosity, and Old West popular culture by depicting Sharlie and Bigfoot in a movie-style High Noon western shootout (fig. 72). The monsters stood back to back, guns drawn from holsters, about to count off their paces before turning to fire. When I first asked Grote about

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Photo courtesy of the Star-News

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Fig. 72. “The Duel: Sharlie vs. Bigfoot.”

the connection between Winter Carnival and Sharlie, he flatly answered that there was none. When I pointed out that he currently had a Sharlie sculpture outside his business, he made the point that Sharlie wasn’t an essential element of the festival saying, “She’s not organic to the . . . [Winter Carnival]. But we use the opportunity to promote her and keep her legend alive.”

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I asked Grote to clarify this point. He indicated that he felt Sharlie was becoming lost as a part of local identity, and he purposefully commissioned Sharlie sculptures to keep the idea of her going: “We’ve lost Sharlie, so we need to get her back. . . . So many new people in Idaho and McCall. Sharlie is hanging on, but we need to keep her going. Gabbert: And that’s why you’ve been doing Sharlie sculptures? Grote: Yeah. It’s fun. Again it’s part of the tourist culture [e.g., for outsiders], and we want to keep that going. Gives some people something to remember. And the kids. It’s a kid thing, too. Grote also added somewhat seriously, “We believe in Sharlie since nobody has disproved her existence.”31 Then he laughed. Despite Grote’s impression that Sharlie was being forgotten, she was sold as a symbol of local identity in tourist objects and therefore also had a solid presence in mass-marketed consumer culture. Sea-monster likenesses appeared on restaurant menus, in bars, and for sale in local shops. A serpent or dragonlike creature was portrayed lurking below the water, waiting to trip up water skiers, or lounging on the rooftop of a cabin, smoking a cigarette, both of which identified the area as a summer resort. I also observed dragonlike figurines as an icon on summer tourist maps produced by realestate companies, stuffed animals, windsocks, and other artwork for sale in local shops. One restaurant offered a Sharlie burger, and Rob Lyons used to own a restaurant called Sharlie’s. Interestingly, however, none of this Sharlie paraphernalia was highlighted during Winter Carnival, nor were images of Sharlie sold as souvenirs. Sharlie was primarily featured in snow sculptures, the parade, and occasionally (but not always) as a symbol of Winter Carnival on chamber of commerce buttons and T-shirts. The featuring of Sharlie in the news media, her existence as an object of mass consumer culture, her ties to European lake-monster traditions, and her links to national mythology suggest that she was not merely a local community member or symbol of local identity but also a national and international celebrity. Sharlie received a lot of attention. She was regularly featured in the paper, occasionally made national news (Time magazine), had European cousins (the Loch Ness Nessie), and had restaurants, entrees, and other miscellaneous items named after her. She was a prominent community 31

Tom Grote, interview with the author, digital recording, McCall, Idaho, 26 January 2008.

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member—a bigwig. Marilyn Krahn explained, “He’s very famous and wonderful. And I guess if you lived as long as he lived, why you deserve to be famous. It’s a wonderful legend from the lake. ’Course Sharlie is sound asleep in the deep in the wintertime, but he’s such a big part of the town and the lake, he’s always there for us.”32

Sharlie, Laughter, and the Carnivalesque In his classic study of Rabelais’s depictions of pre-Lenten carnival celebrations in medieval Europe, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin ([1968] 1984) identifies a folk tradition that he calls the carnivalesque and that is incarnated in laughter. Carnivalesque laughter is not ordinary laughter. It is transgressive laughter that temporarily mocks, parodies, overturns, and even temporarily destroys established social orders and presumptions about reality. It is evoked by a style that Bakhtin calls “grotesque realism,” and “the material bodily principle” in which images of the body, food, drink, defecation, and sexual life become exaggerated. Grotesque realism accomplishes its effect by thrusting all that is exalted by society into the lower material bodily stratum: the belly and digestive and reproductive organs (19–23, chapters 5 and 6). Portrayed most aptly in the monstrous bodies of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the grotesque body is out of control. In her study of nonhumorous narratives, Jeannie Banks Thomas points out that the body and the horrible things sometimes done to it may prompt laughter (1997). Gargantua and Pantagruel are giants that are alternately rude, funny, stupid, and dangerous. Huge bellies, protuberant noses, gigantic sexual organs, excessive food and drink, beatings, violence, dismemberment, blood, urine, and excrement characterize their physique and actions and provoked laughter. Bakhtin argues that these acts and the laughter they generated temporarily overturned or confounded established social orders, such as the Church, and opened up new possibilities. Carnivalesque laughter, therefore, is a source of both destruction and renewal: a powerful, ambivalent force. Bakhtin’s ideas about the carnivalesque have been important in theorizing festivals. The idea that some types of festivals and celebrations may reverse or invert the normal social order is commonly accepted today. Terms 32

Marilyn Krahn interview.

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that suggest a reordering of the social world include reversal, inversion, and world upside-down (Babcock 1978). The traditional pre-Lenten carnival celebrations, as well as Mardi Gras and Halloween, are examples of festivals that are considered particularly carnivalesque, although the degree to which social order is reversed or upheld remains a matter of debate (Abrahams and Bauman 1978; Lindahl 1996b). But all festivals, even those such as Winter Carnival that are not overtly transgressive or inversive but instead boosterish, create an atmosphere of playfulness and fun and therefore partake in an alternate reality to a certain degree because play is associated with laughter and temporarily transforms reality or the social order. Frequently in play, taboos are broken, boundaries are crossed, and categories can be mixed up; it is therefore a realm for experimentation. Play also is fundamentally ambiguous (Sutton-Smith 1997). As a genre that invokes play, festivals open up a range of possible meanings and interpretations as well as generate new ideas, and this is why ambiguity is one of their characteristics (Turner 1983). Winter Carnival did not reverse or invert established social orders, but Sharlie was a carnivalesque figure nonetheless. Like Gargantua and Pantagruel, Sharlie was monstrous. She was considered benign and mysterious rather than terrifying, rude, or dangerous, but her body was supposedly gigantic, and when she was made into a snow sculpture, the bigger, the better, was the unspoken rule. The laughter and ambivalence inspired by Sharlie was different from the laughter of medieval carnival prompted by the bodies and actions of Rabelais’s giants, yet there were similarities. The earthiness, violence, and excessiveness that characterized medieval carnivalesque laughter were not factors, but Sharlie was used to reassemble reality, confound categories, ensure celebrity through the media, and make fools of people all at the same time. Narratives of Sharlie sightings proposed a serious, fundamental mystery—the possibility of a local, mythic landscape—but the seriousness and awe these stories suggested were reframed through laughter, joking attitudes, and the suspicion of alcohol. Sharlie was also a source of jokes, pranks, and tall tales; a tie to national mythologies; and a tourist attraction. These usages mediated between reality and fiction, truth and lies, and insiders and outsiders, confusing preconceived categories and generating new meanings. This combination of laughter, playfulness, and ambivalence is characteristic of carnivalesque and similar figures (such as tricksters) that overturn or reassemble reality (Sutton-Smith 2005). It is little wonder then that Winter Carnival and Sharlie went together like Christmas and Santa Claus, as Marilyn Krahn originally suggested to

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me, even though Sharlie did not appear overtly carnivalesque in Winter Carnival. Roger Abrahams writes that in festival, “the transforming figures tend to be clowns or magicians, performers not to be taken seriously” (1987, 179). Sharlie was a boundary crosser, mediating past and present; narrative and event; popular culture, folklore, and the mass media; myth and history. She existed within a broad framework of joking and playfulness. If the serious business of imagining and reimagining community was actually to work, none of it should count. Other Winter Carnival events split the poles of community identity into the very intensive and broadly extensive; Sharlie mixed them up in multidimensional ways. *** Scholars frequently situate figures in tourist festivals within a framework of the commodification or invention of tradition (Hobswam and Ranger 1983). Tradition is reworked into a cultural commodity that is consumed by an outside audience; capital drives the production of difference, poaching on the traditional to reproduce itself. It would be easy to suggest that incorporating Sharlie into Winter Carnival was an example of how local identity is marketed to promote tourism because this was true to some extent. Sharlie’s entrance into the revived festival during the 1960s occurred during a crucial moment of socioeconomic transformation. But tourism, boosterism, and capital are only three of several frames of reference. Tourism and boosterism were quite closely linked with more traditional carnival laughter, the rearrangement of categories, and ambivalence, belying conventional notions that tradition works separately from commodification (Goldstein, Grider, and Thomas 2007, 171). Sharlie is a rich, meaning-making resource, and incorporating her into the festival allowed new meanings to generate by putting old ones into new contexts. While tourists who viewed Sharlie sculptures or saw the Sharlie dragon in the parade might not have had the benefit of local knowledge and therefore viewed her merely as mythic in a general sense, McCall residents recalled the newspaper stories and oral accounts they had heard over the years, and their associations. The year I worked with the Krahn snow-sculpting team on their figure of Sharlie, one man walked by and said jokingly, “Hey—he wasn’t that big when I saw him!” Sharlie representations in the festival were significant things (Fiske 1993, 206). And so it was that a carnivalesque lake monster was paraded down the street and constructed in snow and ice every year as a central Mardi Gras symbol during Winter Carnival. Parades frequently display the most powerful

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object in the community by carrying it through the streets. Roger Abrahams writes that on such occasions, the goal is “to enliven it, perhaps even bring it back to life” (1987, 180). The community’s oldest denizen—the one that generated laughter—was sighted/cited every year to renew the social body. Ambivalent and carnivalesque, community member and international celebrity, Sharlie was indeed brought to life annually by some twenty-odd schoolchildren, undulating through the streets as visible proof of McCall’s persisting mystery. Incorporating her into Winter Carnival associated her with community and the greater social body, which, as McCall’s oldest resident and its most famous member, is where she probably should be.

Conclusion

Winter carnivals historically have been, and continue to be, com-

mon across the Northern Hemisphere. They are important to areas that have developed a winter-oriented culture, but, relative to the frequency of their occurrence, they are neglected in cultural scholarship. The study of McCall’s Winter Carnival contributes to a better understanding of northern and mountainous snow cultures, where a cyclical seasonally-based identity is perhaps a more salient feature than ethnic or regional factors. Such a study also contributes to the existing body of festival scholarship by providing an examination of an underrepresented festival type. Festivals have long been associated with community, but both festivals and community are complex, and the relationships that link them are even more so. Community is not limited to a single idea or proposition, or even to the realm of ideas and propositions. Community is an idea that, when enacted, both reinforces and contradicts presumptions about what it is supposed to be. When people attempted to ratify community through Winter Carnival by putting abstract ideas into motion, the result was a reinforcement of positive ideas about community and the generation of disagreement about Winter Carnival. This disagreement is an important aspect of community-making and should not be overlooked. Studying the multilayered, sometimes-conflicted dimensions of community leads to an expanded understanding of not only a set of ideas but also of a multidimensional phenomenon that is at once emotional, social, ideological, geographical, and imaginary. Dorothy Noyes points to the importance of outlining specific sets of techniques for community making (2003a:29; see, for example, Horton 2001; Shoupe 2001), so I conclude in part by outlining some of them as they emerged in my research. Elements of playfulness and the imagination permeated Winter Carnival. The importance of the imagination in constructing community has been acknowledged since Benedict Anderson ([1983] 1991) illustrated the way an abstract idea like “the nation” could be created through participation in mass media, such as reading the newspaper. 223

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The notion of community as imagined is commonly accepted today by scholars, but one unfortunate result of Anderson’s work is that imagination in the context of community acquired a somewhat negative connotation, suggesting something like ideology. Other connotations of the imagination, such as playfulness and creativity, are important, too. In Winter Carnival, the imagination as a creative, playful force played a large role in creating community at many levels, particularly in constructing complementary poles of identity. Like folktales in which character types represent opposed propositions (Olrik 1965), Winter Carnival split community identity into two halves, allowing the creative construction of associations that were not necessarily real, and in doing so, generated new meanings and intimated possibilities of change. The open, expansive dimension of community identity, for example, was imagined in terms that were national, mythological, and global, and such references were frequently (though not always) humorous and ironic. References to frontier mythology, national spectacle, and Europeanness were apparent in snow sculptures, ski styles, Monte Carlo Night, the Idaho State Snow-Sculpting Championship, the original 1924 Winter Carnival, the main Mardi Gras Parade, and Sharlie. The mass media, consumerism, and a large audience were important in this endeavor. A sense of playfulness and the imagination were also important in constructing more local dimensions of community identity. Children particularly (and dogs to a lesser degree) signified local community in important ways. Artists in the local snow-sculpture competition constructed pieces to appeal to children by referencing their literature and popular culture; organizers modified Mardi Gras to appeal to and feature children in a separate parade; and they devised a distinct Junior Winter Carnival to make a counterstatement to modernity in the 1920s. Sharlie, too, is associated with children. Children easily represent community because the ideas associated with children are similar to the ideas associated with community. They represent presumed shared values, they symbolize an entity beyond the self, they are seemingly autochthonic, and they suggest the future. Community-making techniques entailed not only representing but also mediating between the outward- and inward-facing aspects of collective identity. Jay Mechling (1989, 1997, 123) has suggested that folklore often functions as a Janus-faced mediating structure between abstract processes and everyday realities while Creed (2004) points to mumming as a midlevel symbolic resource existing somewhere between the family and the nation. People used Winter Carnival to mediate between these opposed, but

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complementary, dimensions. When one dimension became too prominent, residents attempted to bring it back in the other direction. Tourists participated less in Winter Carnival events that were local—the ones oriented toward children and families—such as the Little Ski Hill dinner, church pancake breakfasts, and the Children’s Neon Light Parade. In these cases, an outside audience was less important. Too much limitation, however, is unhealthy, and without new people, new ideas, and new economic strategies, a community will not thrive. When the festival—whose primary purpose was the economic well-being of the community—grew too small and did not attract enough of an audience, local people devised strategies for widening its appeal: more people, more money, more sponsors and marketing, more color were considered good for Winter Carnival and hence for the community. Proper balance between inward and outward dimensions is ideal, which is why Sharlie, a figure that mediated between insiders and outsiders and was both serious and playful, was important and appropriate for Winter Carnival. As a Janus-faced, midlevel structure, Winter Carnival was oriented both inwardly and outwardly, situated on a conceptual, theoretical, and performative borderland between the global and the local. Another community-making technique was producing heightened emotion. Winter Carnival generated positive feelings, and these emotions were interpreted as a sense of community. These “warm fuzzy” feelings included a sense of accomplishment, gratification, togetherness, sociability, and connection to friends and family, both past and present. Without emotional attachments and some kind of personal investment, traditions such as Winter Carnival have little meaning: the self must be satisfied (Hymes 1975b; Dolby 1989). These warm feelings of bonding are sometimes associated with Victor Turner’s communitas, a socially undifferentiated state of togetherness (1969). What has been less well documented, however, is that people partially achieve community through other kinds of experiences and feelings, going “beyond communitas” (Roth 2005). Winter Carnival produced a wide range of emotions, all of which were important. People worked hard, sacrificed free time and labor, sweated together, stressed out, and complained; they grumbled good-naturedly about the enormous amount of work it required, or they did not volunteer or participate and simply complained about Winter Carnival and tourists. These less positive feelings were a direct result of community in action, but they don’t square with commonly held assumptions about what community is supposed to be. They are important and should be attended to.

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Community also entailed social and economic relationships that were bound up with a sense of moral commitment to others. Winter Carnival activated networks of obligation, neighborliness, and reciprocity in the name of a larger good. It was a motivating force for enacting (or revitalizing) morality. This morality was based on economic exchange. This meant that many people participated in Winter Carnival out of a sincere sense of duty to others and the desire to work toward a greater whole. Other people, however, participated because they felt socially pressured by a morally inflected, economic community goal. Furthermore, an individual’s sense of moral duty and obligation was challenged if he or she perceived that other people were not doing their fair share, so putting moral commitment into practice in the name of community occasionally led to feelings of injury, unfairness, or being overburdened or taken advantage of. The pressure that stemmed from the idea of communal good and the potential for resulting damage to social relationships are also part of putting community into action and must be considered. Finally, the enactment of community entailed its assessment. Winter Carnival generated a lot of talk, bringing the idea of community to the fore as a topic for discussion. People talked about whether Winter Carnival was good for the community, what that good might be, whether it should be abandoned, how much people liked or disliked it, whether it was successful in any given year, and what could be done to improve it. These debates and assessments were a kind of oral criticism about the nature of community (Dundes 1966) that then fed back into and refined future Winter Carnivals (Wenger 1998). This suggests that Winter Carnival was more about the future than the past (Mould 2003). This makes sense metaphorically as well because, like Mardi Gras, Winter Carnival was oriented toward spring, rebirth, and economic survival (Mire 1993). This analysis indicates that the idea of community is one thing, and its enactment is another. When ideas are put into action, differences arise, which can cause conflict and debate over what community is and should be. This discussion is part of the picture, complicating the notion that community entails complete, uncomplicated harmony, consensus, or homogeneity, at least in its implementation. Community is an abstraction that became real through the organization, production, and performance of Winter Carnival and was a multidimensional, multilayered phenomenon. Ideas were given dramatic form and put into action by engaging with neighbors and strangers and working out issues about organizing and managing resources, real

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and symbolic. People wrangled with ideas of citizenship and belonging; the proper relationship between the individual and a greater whole; presumptions of shared values, morality, and identity; and economic ramifications of tourism and commodification. They proposed various strategies for situating their relationship to the rest of the world, they thought about the limits of community, and they made, and remade, history (Guss 2000). Ideas were put into practice, which is why Winter Carnival, like other forms of folklore, can be described as social process, as action (McDowell 2000). If people sometimes were ambivalent about Winter Carnival, it was because the festival made core issues real for a limited period of time and within a framework of play that suggested that what was going on did not necessarily count. The relation of Winter Carnival to changing economic formations in McCall is not unique. The decline of industrial paternalism and the rise of recreational tourism reflects the situation of many places in the New West, but David Wrobel importantly points out that “tourism, though it may speed up the rate of change, does not create the process of change” (2001, 6). It is important to note that the West has long been a region shaped by tourism; what is perhaps unique, as Lawrence Culver points out, is that it is the first part of the country to experiment with tourism as an alternative economy on a widespread scale.1 As the rate of tourism has accelerated, people across the Intermountain West have had to negotiate a changing relationship to place, identity, and community. Early Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for example, was a snowbound, isolated community that depended on skiing for its life. The primary economies were ranching and agriculture with some mining, which were supplemented by a short summer tourist season similar to McCall’s. Steamboat Springs started a Winter Carnival in 1914 that featured skiing and was organized by the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club. A Texas-based aerospace company called LTV (Ling-Temco-Vought) bought the local ski area in 1969 (Rothman 1998). The company poured resources into the area, transforming it into a resort that catered to a wealthy clientele. The effects over the next decade included changes in demographics, rising real-estate prices, subdivision of ranches, conflicts over zoning, a decline in agriculture and ranching, increased tax liabilities, and few permanent jobs with benefits, all changes that people in Valley County have faced as well. Growth and development have also affected Bend, Oregon, more recently. Located on the Deschutes River, Bend was historically a timber 1

Lawrence Culver, e-mail communication with the author, June 24, 2008.

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town where drinking, gambling and prostitution flourished.2 An influx of Scandinavian immigrants from the Great Lakes and Europe led to the development of skiing and mountaineering clubs in the Cascade Mountains, and by 1957, Bachelor Butte had been turned into a ski area, setting the stage for Bend to become a recreation destination. The timber industry began to decline at about the same time. Bend’s population grew from fifteen thousand in the mid-1970s to fifty thousand by 2000, and between 1995 and 2007 its population increased 264 percent.3 Median home prices in the Bend metropolitan area increased more than 80 percent between 2001 and 2005. In 2005 17.3 percent of all jobs were in construction and real estate, 70 percent more than the proportion of these jobs in both the Oregon and national economies. In June 2007, Money magazine named Bend the most overpriced housing market in the United States.4 New West examples are not limited to ski towns. Kathryn Hovey (2005) documents the complex social, economic, and cultural relationships that pervade the tiny town of Madrid, New Mexico. Counterculture resettlers began living in the defunct mining town in the 1970s as a way of resisting modernity, recreating the myth of the West as a place where people could escape society by returning to nature. As Madrid became commodified through tourism, its responses to growth, development, and the tourist industry called questions of community to the fore. Other places that have been transformed by tourism include the making and remaking (and reremaking) of Santa Fe, an early and well studied example (C. Wilson 1997); the makeover of Moab, Utah, from a uranium town to mountain-bike paradise (Amundson 2003); and the marketing of Jackson Hole as the surviving bastion of the Wild West (Culver 2003), among many others. David Wrobel notes that “we need to move beyond the ‘visited as victims’ model in studying the ‘toured upon’” (2001, 21) and he specifically points to a “lack of empathy” and a tradition of “fleecing” tourists by scholars. In his view, scholars have too easily dismissed tourism and tourists as superficial, exploitative, inauthentic, and even soulless. Tourism is characterized as bad because large-scale developers who represent global capital 2

Information available at http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/narratives/ subtopic.cfm?subtopic_ID=409.

3

Information available at http://www.edforco.org/COFacts/population/population. html.

4

Information on housing and construction taken from Wikipedia available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_Oregon.

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come in, push local people around, change their value system, and transform places in significant ways. Local people resist or acquiesce, but the change is not usually understood as theirs; they are constructed as smalltown victims, dupes, or sellouts, rather than conscious, creative agents and active participants in their own economies, monetary or symbolic. Scholars such as Wrobel and Patrick Long (2001) seek to examine tourists and tourism from a more balanced perspective and so have been less condemning (see especially the essays by Limerick, Anaya, and Long), but they still tend to perceive accelerated change from the top down. Ethnographically examining expressive culture such as Winter Carnival answers Wrobel’s call to move beyond a “visited as victims” approach because it offers insight into change from the standpoint of the community experiencing it, a view from the ground up (Dolby 1996). The study of McCall’s Winter Carnival suggests that local people have actively and consciously participated in processes of socioeconomic transformation. They seek to bring change about, and they use Winter Carnival to do it. Closely examining the symbolic resources of places like Bend and Steamboat Springs may offer insight into the way other people experiencing change construct community in the midst of changing economic formations. It would be interesting, for example, to see how people have used expressive culture to create community in times of economic crisis, such as the global recession of the past two years, when tourists and their dollars have been noticeably fewer. To be more specific, it is not mere chance that Winter Carnival appeared during two periods of rapid socioeconomic transformation. When the first Winter Carnival took place in 1924, Valley County was experiencing a surge of industrial modernity and mass culture. The railway had been completed, democratizing travel, and as an agent of change Winter Carnival helped integrate this isolated area into the nation through sports and leisure (Steiner 1933). That Winter Carnival eventually split into two parts, a nationally-oriented one in McCall and a locally-oriented one in Cascade, makes perfect sense given the fully modernist narrative in which it was originally situated. The 1960s set the second stage for a postmodern Winter Carnival. The festival’s revival occurred directly in the midst of a second historical transformation as economic contours began to shift and McCall significantly reshaped its identity from logging town to destination resort. Brundage Mountain Resort opened in 1961; Boise Cascade, a multi-national corporation, purchased the locally owned timber mill in 1964; Winter Carnival was

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revived in 1965. Residents began to promote winter tourism in addition to the traditional summer season; the revival of the Winter Carnival ensured that visitors would come year-round. The strategy was successful, leading to expansion and real-estate development; rapid additions to the village began in earnest in 1971. Change raises important questions about community and identity, but these issues get worked out differently in different places. McCall represents but one approach. Winter Carnival is a mechanism for exploring and enacting ideas about community, and it also is a way of engaging with socioeconomic transformation. These two realms are not separate. Scholars tend to dismiss innocuous cultural expressions such as chamber of commerce festivals because they too easily appear only boosteristic. In overlooking these events, however, scholars risk disempowering local people, producing narratives that situate them as victims of big business rather than active agents who consciously think, talk, experiment with, and bring about social change. In McCall concepts of community, which include economic relationships, moral questions, ideas about citizenship and belonging, historical processes, and collective identity, play out over and over again, not only in city hall but also and more prominently in a frozen, festive sphere. *** Sharlie was sighted again recently after a seven-year hiatus on 3 August 2009 by a man named Don Fenstermaker of Phoenix, Arizona. The following op-ed piece appeared in the same issue of the Star-News as the article describing Fenstermaker’s sighting. The piece welcomed Sharlie back, stating that people knew she had returned specifically for them and they were glad about it. The piece also related her sighting directly to the economic well-being of the community and a sign of a return to a less-heady, morebalanced tourist economy. Welcome Back, Sharlie, We’ve Missed You Just when the level of despair for area residents has reached a new low over home foreclosures, a decline in construction jobs and uncertainty over health care, along comes someone—or something—to pull us out of our doldrums—Sharlie! Last week’s sighting of Payette Lakes’ legendary serpent was a welcome relief in what has been a sea of gloom. Sharlie is McCall’s most famous resident, and its oldest, if you believe sightings that go back to the mid 1940s. She (yes, we believe

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it is a female) appears to otherwise unwary visitors and residents alike just when the populace needs a boost. If you don’t believe that, think about the last time Sharlie made an appearance—the summer of 2002. That was the last year that McCall was experiencing a “normal” economy that was dependent on visitors. That was the year Tamarack Resort began construction on its four-season wonderland on the west side of Lake Cascade. For the next five years, the frenzy over Tamarack and the associated housing boom would lead to a windfall of prosperity in the area. Everyone was making money in those years, so Sharlie was not needed to cheer anyone up. But once the boom went bust in recent years, the area returned to a 2002 economy, but with a heavy hangover from the growth years. Somehow, Sharlie knew a malaise had descended upon us, so she reared her humps to provide a needed distraction. . . . Star-News 13 August 2009

Appendix Winter Carnival Event Schedule, 2011 Friday, January 28 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures

Star-News map

8:00 a.m.

Local Snow Sculpture Judging Begins

Star-News map

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

Noon

Sculpture Awards Placed

Star-News map

Noon–5:30 p.m.

Craft Faire and Chocolate

Hunt Lodge/Holiday Inn

2:00 p.m.

Children’s Mini-Carnival

Alpine Village

3:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.

Face Painting by Lauri

behind Steamer’s Steak & Seafood

5:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.

Vendor & Food Court

Lake Street/Alpine Village

5:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.

Beer Garden

Depot Park

5:00 p.m.–9:30 p.m.

Main Stage Music

Depot Park

5:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.

Children’s Torchlight Parade

Community Congregational Church

6:30 p.m.

Opening Ceremonies/ Presentations

Main Stage

7:00 p.m.

Fireworks over the Lake

Legacy Park

7:00 p.m.–9:15 p.m.

The Gathering Place Warming Center

McCall Church of the Nazarene

7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.

Comedy Night

Northfork Lodge

7:10 p.m.

Idaho v. BSU Hockey Game

Manchester Ice & Event Centre

7:30 p.m.

“Murder for Rent”

Alpine Playhouse

8:00 p.m.

Live Music/Soul Serene

Salmon River Brewery

8:00 p.m.–Midnight

Optimist Teen Dance

McCall Donnelly High School

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Saturday, January 29 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures

Star-News map

8:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m.

Pancake Breakfast

McCall Senior Center

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Craft Faire and Chocolate

Hunt Lodge/Holiday Inn

10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.

Vendor & Food Court

Lake Street/Alpine Village

10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.

Beer Garden

Depot Park

3:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.

Face Painting by Lauri

behind Steamer’s Steak & Seafood

11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

11th Annual Snowshoe Golf

McCall Golf Course

10:30 a.m.–Noon

Mardi Gras Parade Line-up

Forest Service Park & Mission Streets

Noon–1:30 p.m.

Mardi Gras Parade

First St. to E. Lake St. Turns South on Hwy 55, ends on Stibnite

Noon

Children’s Mini-Carnival

Alpine Village

1:00 p.m.–2:30 p.m.

Bear Creek Wine Tasting

Bear Creek Lodge

2:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m.

Live Music/B-4 Zero

Woody’s

2:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

Polar Plunge Fundraiser

Alpine Village

2:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.

Flash Point Snowbike Race

McCall Golf Course

2:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m.

Music Main Stage

Main Stage/Depot Park

6:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.

Snowdown Wine Tasting and Art Auction

McCall Golf Course

7:10 p.m.

Idaho v. BSU Hockey Game

Manchester Ice & Event Centre

7:30 p.m.

“Murder for Rent”

Alpine Playhouse

8:00 p.m.

Live Music/Dead Winter Carpenters

Salmon River Brewery

8:00 p.m.–Midnight

Optimist Teen Dance

McCall Donnelly High School

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Sunday, January 30 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures

Star-News map

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

Craft Faire and Chocolate

Hunt Lodge/Holiday

10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Vendor & Food Court

Depot Park

3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.

Face Painting by Lauri

behind Steamer’s Steak & Seafood

11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

11th Annual Snowshoe Golf

McCall Golf Course

11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Beer Garden

Depot Park

11:30–1:30 p.m.

Zamzow’s Monster Dog Pull

Depot Park

Noon

Children’s Mini-Carnival

Alpine Village

5:00 p.m.

Live Music by Glenn Kelly/Cornhole Tournament

Wraptor

7:30 p.m.

“Murder for Rent”

Alpine Playhouse

Monday, January 31 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures

Star-News map

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

3:00 p.m.

Children’s Mini-Carnival

Alpine Village

Tuesday, February 01 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures

Various

9:00 a.m.

Idaho State Snow Scupting Championships Begin

E. Lake St/Depot Park

Appendix

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9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

5:30 p.m.

Public Dinner

McCall Senior Center

TBD

Dunham Wine Dinner

Rupert’s at Hotel McCall

7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.

Bingo! Bingo!

Foresters

Wednesday, February 02 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures View Idaho State Sculptures Being Built McCall Boat Works Open House 11th Annual Snowshoe Golf Lunch and Bake Sale Grand Bingo Cinder Wine Dinner “Murder for Rent”

Various

All Day 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. 11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Noon 5:30 p.m.–10:00 p.m. TBD 7:30 p.m.

E. Lake St./Depot Park McCall Boat Works McCall Golf Course McCall Senior Center Northfork Lodge Rupert’s at Hotel McCall Alpine Playhouse

Thursday, February 03 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Idaho State Sculptures Being Built McCall Boat Works Open House 11th Annual Snowshoe Golf Snowshoe Golf–Yacht Club Challenge Children’s Mini-Carnival McCall–Donnelly Education Foundation Chocolate & Spirits Tasting Public Dinner

E. Lake St./Depot Park

9:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. 1:00 p.m. 3:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.

5:30 p.m.

McCall Boat Works McCall Golf Course McCall Golf Course Alpine Village Shore Lodge

McCall Senior Center

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7:00 p.m. 7:30 p.m.

Beard, Hairy & Sexy Leg Contest “Murder for Rent”

Yacht Club Alpine Playhouse

Friday, February 04 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures

Various

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

10:00 a.m.

Idaho State Snow Sculpture Championships Judging Begins

East Lake Street/Depot Park

11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

11th Annual Snowshoe Golf

McCall Golf Course

11:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.

Vendor & Food Court

Lake Street/Alpine Village

11:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.

Beer Garden

Depot Park

3:00 p.m.

Children’s Mini-Carnival

Alpine Village

5:30 p.m.–10:00 p.m.

Monte Carlo Casino Night

Northfork Lodge

6:00 p.m.–9:30 p.m.

Music Main Stage

Depot Park

6:00 p.m.

Talvi Festivaali–McCall Folklore Society

McCall Golf Course

7:00 p.m.–9:15p.m.

The Gathering Place Warming Center

McCall Church of the Nazarene

7:30 p.m.

“Murder for Rent”

Alpine Playhouse

8:00 p.m.–Midnight

Optimist Teen Dance

McCall Donnelly High School

8:00 p.m.

Live Music/Holden Young Trio

Salmon River Brewery

Saturday, February 05 Time

Event

Location

All Day

View Local Snow Sculptures

Various

All Day

View Idaho State Sculptures

E. Lake Street

Appendix

237

9:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

McCall Area Snowmobiler’s Fun Run

Bear Creek Lodge

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.

Vendor & Food Court

Lake Street/Alpine Village

10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.

Beer Garden

Depot Park

10:00 a.m.–Noon

Snowman Building Competition

McCall Baptist Church

11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

11th Annual Snowshoe Golf

McCall Golf Course

Noon

Children’s Mini-Carnival

Alpine Village

1:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

Music on the Main Stage

Depot Park

3:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.

Family Bingo Fun

McCall Golf Course

6:00 p.m.–6:30 p.m.

Closing Ceremonies

Depot Park

6:30 p.m.

Fireworks over the Lake

Legacy Park

6:30 p.m.

Showing of “Momentum”

Wraptor

7:30 p.m.

“Murder for Rent”

Alpine Playhouse

8:00 p.m.

Live Music/Jonathan Warren & the Billygoats

Salmon River Brewery

8:00 p.m.–Midnight

Optimist Teen Dance

McCall Donnelly High School

Sunday, February 06 Time

Event

Location

9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

McCall Boat Works Open House

McCall Boat Works

10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.

Vendor & Food Court

Lake Street/Alpine Village

10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.

Beer Garden

Depot Park

11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

11th Annual Snowshoe Golf

McCall Golf Course

Noon

Children’s Mini-Carnival

Alpine Village

5:00 p.m.

Live Music/B-4 Zero

Wraptor

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Index

A Abrahams, Roger, 6, 33, 37, 164, 221–22 alcohol: illegal consumption of, 181­–84; and Sharlie, 192, 203, 210, 214, 216, 216, 220 Alta ski resort, Utah, 152, 175 amateurism, 33, 68, 101–3, 105–6, 164, 172–73. See also professionalism ambivalence, x, 7, 24, 30, 36–40, 45–46, 136, 192, 199, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 219–21, 227 Anchorage, Alaska, 185 Anderson, Benedict, 223–24 Anderson, Cindy, 206, 210 Anderson, Sue, 85, 86 Ashton, Idaho, 168–69, 172–73 Aspen, Colorado, 13–14, 141, 174, 179 assemblage, 81, 141 audience, 33, 221, 224–25; early winter carnivals, 167–68, 176; legends, 200, 209–10; parades, 36, 114–17, 119, 122, 125–26, 130, 137, 149–50, 154–55, 157, 160–63; pranks and tall tales, 210–13; snow sculptures, 35, 68–69, 82, 98, 105­­–6, 108, 113. See also parades

Boise State University, 105, 123, 130, 133 Breckenridge, Colorado, 141, 152 British Columbia, Canada, 171 Bronner, Simon, 37 Brown, Carl, 20, 175 Brown, Frank, 176n24 Brown, Jayne, 152 Brown, Warren, 82, 168, 170, 172, 175, 189 Brown family, 8, 20, 21n23, 22, 82–83, 177 Brown Tie and Lumber Company, 175 Brundage Mountain, 22, 141, 151, 178, 179, 229 Brussels, 195 Buffalo Horn, Chief, 18 Burlington, Vermont, 139, 165 Burnside, Tom, 183 businesses: folklore of, 182, 182n33; participating in Winter Carnival, 44, 120, 124, 127, 145–46, 163, 168, 172; role in community life, 41, 58, 96; snow sculptures, 2, 83–85, 96–101, 104–7, 107; Winter Carnival as benefiting, 6, 22, 31, 35, 40, 42, 46–51, 59, 62, 66, 97. See also chamber of commerce

B Bachelor Butte ski area, Oregon, 228 Bakhtin, Mikhail, x, 115, 219 Banff, Canada, 166 Bauman, Richard, 28, 32, 115, 149, 199, 209 bead, bra, and panty trees, 141, 142n19 Bend, Oregon, 227–29 Bennett, Mark, 85, 86–88, 90, 97, 101, 118, 153, 207 Benson, Mary, 135–37, 153–54 Billings, Bird, 183 Binning, Barry, 211 Boatright, Mody, 212 Boespflug, Jean-Pierre, 23, 180 Boise, Idaho, 3, 4, 7, 13, 13n8, 21, 51, 62, 96, 108, 215 Boise Cascade Corporation, 8, 22, 23, 229. See also logging and timber

C cabin fever, 5, 67–68 Callender, Signe, 20 capital and capitalism, 13–14, 26–27, 48, 105, 115, 213, 221, 228 Carey, David, 160 carnival: See Mardi Gras, Winter Carnival carnivalesque, ix–x, 36, 115–16, 145–46, 146n26, 149, 192–93, 199, 213, 219–22. See also festivals, Mardi Gras, Sharlie Cascade, Idaho, 17, 22–23, 36, 108, 164–65, 168–69, 172–75, 180, 184, 229 Cascade News, 168, 174 Cashman, Ray, 148, 188 celebrity and celebrities, 23–24, 174, 179, 187, 213, 218, 220, 222. See also movies Challenger shuttle, 78–79, 79

251

252

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chamber of commerce: boosterism, x, 6–7, 22, 156, 230; documenting Winter Carnival 69; relationship to Sharlie, 191, 198, 218; relationship to Winter Carnival, 30, 40–48, 55, 120, 178, 181; snow sculptures, 1, 73, 83–84, 103, 105. See also businesses Chamonix, France, 174 Chief Joseph, 18, 75 children and childhood: local identity, 33, 170, 224–25; parades, 36, 44, 114–15, 117, 122, 125–26, 128–30, 144, 150–64, 158–60, 197–98; skiing, 171, 171, 175–76, 188–89; snow sculptures, 71–72, 75, 81, 84, 98, 102, 135, 195–96; Winter Carnival, 36, 52, 63, 69, 70, 86, 140, 172–73, 199. See also parades Chitwood, Martha, 8, 9, 10, 182 citizenship, 7, 35, 68, 82, 98, 107, 113, 227, 230 class, 11–13, 16, 25–27, 29, 41, 48–50, 60, 66, 98, 144–45, 176, 179 clowns and clowning, 134–37, 221 Coleman, Annie, 167, 176 Colorado Springs, Colorado, 172 Columbia River, 14 commemoration, ix, 80, 81, 134, 148, 165, 186–90. See also history communitas, x, 225 community: and emotions, 30–31, 34, 58, 64–65, 68, 93, 95, 112, 117, 136, 149, 225; change, 6, 13–14, 27, 32, 36, 129, 228–30; community good, 27–31, 34–35, 37, 40, 46–50, 52, 54, 57, 63, 66–67, 226; community making techniques, 36, 223–26; community spirit and community building, 47, 53, 57–58, 63, 95, 99–101; conflict, 12, 30–31, 34, 38, 40, 54, 62–64, 68, 99–100, 223, 226; disciplining functions, 39, 56; economic relationships, 37, 47–50, 52, 66, 124, 225–27, 230; enactment, x, 29–30, 36, 54, 57–58, 64, 66, 67, 104, 136, 222–23, 225­–27; festivals, 27–28, 38, 64, 223; geography, 28–29, 48, 223; ideas about, 28–29, 31, 33–34, 37, 39–41, 48, 52, 67, 188, 223, 226; identity, 31–33, 36, 48, 69, 113, 115, 124, 156, 165–167, 170, 172–73, 176–77, 186, 188–89, 191, 194, 200, 218, 221, 224; imagination, 37, 50–51, 66, 221, 223–24; limits, 62–63; in McCall, 28–29, 31, 50, 136, 98, 194, 230; as obligation, 50–51, 52, 54, 56, 96; participation, 39, 46, 64–65, 98, 99n21, 112, 136–37; as rhetorical device,

39, 48, 52, 63, 66; self and, 35, 38–39, 49, 52, 62, 67; values, 30, 33, 51–52, 62–63, 67, 100, 226; voluntary associations, 38–39, 41, 46, 49; winter carnivals, x, 6, 7, 167, 188–89, 225, 230. See also identity, McCall, volunteering, Winter Carnival Connerton, Paul, 188–89 Copper Mountain ski resort, Colorado, 152 Creed, Gerald, 29, 31, 224 Culver, Lawrence, 227 Cummins, Charlie, 183

D Dartmouth, 82–83, 139, 146, 166 Davidson, Roger (Rod), 184–85 Davis, Phil, 6n5 Davis, Susan, 114–16, 144, 146, 149 Dégh, Linda, 199–200 Denver ski club, 171 DeQuille, Dan, 212 Dever, Sam, 20 Diggs, Fred, 183 Dingle, Mike, 212–13 dog racing and sled dogs, 22, 165, 167n2, 168–73, 169, 175, 178, 184, 188–89 dogs, 3, 33, 44–45, 126, 144, 159, 165, 189, 209, 224 Donnelly, Idaho, 17, 23, 173n18 Dorson, Richard, M., 206, 210 Drake, Fred, 53, 55–56, 60, 63 Durkheim, Émile, 7, 31, 33

E Eberle, Glen, 176n24 economic change and development, 12–13, 16, 22–28, 25, 47, 55n25, 59, 117, 148–49, 156, 180n31, 187, 221, 225, 227–30. See also resorts and resort development, Winter Carnival economy, 3, 5–6, 18, 21, 23, 49, 65, 166 Eld, Frank, 142, 144 Elk City, Idaho, 18 Ellicottville ski resort, New York, 141 Emmett, Idaho, 108 Engen, Alf, 175 Engen, Corey, 175, 175n21, 179 Engen, Dave, 176n24 ethnography, ix–x, 6–8, 11, 36, 229 Equals, Nathelle, 3, 8, 9 Eunice, Louisiana, 162

Index

F Farber, Carole, 46 Farmer, Jared, 207 Fenstermaker, Don, 230 festivals, ix–x; as history, 7–12; begging, 56; bounded events, 10; bureaucracy, 154, 156; burnout, 60, 63; community festivals, 27–28, 37, 40, 58, 73, 128; cultural performances, 10–11, 30, 32–33, 39; energy, 33, 35–36, 114, 117, 150, 156–57, 161–62, 172; festivity and festive behavior, 84–85, 95, 150–51; harvest festivals, 6; play, 30, 220–21; preparations and rehearsals, 84, 95; ritual, ix–x; tourism, 10, 22, 39, 117, 221, 230. See also carnivalesque, Winter Carnival Finns, 10, 19–20, 138–39, 166–67 fireworks, 44, 58, 61, 161–62 Florence, Idaho, 18 folklore, ix, 6–7, 33, 71, 74–75, 141, 182, 182n32, 191, 199, 204–7, 213, 219, 221, 224, 227 folktales, 71n2, 224 Forest Service, 7, 18, 20, 47; in local snow sculpture competition, 56, 77, 81, 81, 104, 208, 208; in parade, 130, 131, 137, 145; and skiing, 174–75 Fourth of July, 3, 58, 67, 146–47, 162 Frederick, Jodi and Jerry, 157 Freeman, Idaho State Senator Frank, 215 frontier behavior and humor, 212, 216; ideologies, 33, 74, 207; marketing, 144; mythologization, 13, 73–78, 76–77, 186–87, 192, 206–7, 208, 217, 224, 228; theories, 12, 19, 19n19

G gambling, 21, 181–82, 184–87, 228; casinos, 74, 187; dog races, 184; Shore Lodge, 185; skiing, 166; Winter Carnival, 35, 45, 181, 186–87. See also Monte Carlo Night Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, 174 Gaston, Smoky, 169­–70 Geelan, Thula, 169–70 Gilman, Lisa, 66 Glassie, Henry, 9 Gonzalez, Morgan, 55, 64–65 Gotham, Kevin Fox, 148 Grote, Tom, 37, 41, 45–46, 51, 54, 59, 65, 67, 105, 120, 216, 218 grotesque realism, 219 Gutowski, John, 73, 206

253

H Hamerick, Sam, 183 Handelman, Don, 10, 136 Hannagan, Steve, 174 Harriman, Averell, 174 Hicks, John, 43, 51–53, 56 Hicks, Shirley, 43, 45, 53, 119, 124 Hill, Eino, 183–84 Hines, Ron and Pauline, 85, 86 history: constructions of, 7–10; making history, 164–65, 169, 172, 227; oral history, 75, 182. See also commemoration Hoff, Grace, 215 Hoff, Theodore, 20 Horton, Laurel, 34 Hot Sulphur Springs, Colorado, 166 Hovdey, Patty (Boydstun), 176–77, 176n24, 189; and Dean, 48–49, 104 Hovey, Kathryn, 228 Hurd, Dr., 183–84

I ice break-up contest, 185–86 ice castles and ice palaces, 1, 72–73, 74, 83, 140, 151 Idaho, University of, 81, 105, 178 Idaho Primitive Area, 16 Idaho State Snow Sculpting Championship, 3, 43, 45, 59, 68–69, 107–13, 109­–111, 117, 224. See also snow sculptures Idaho Territory, 18, 166–67 identity: local, 3, 5–7, 14, 22, 31–34, 36, 69–82, 112–13, 115, 150, 163–66, 170, 172–73, 176, 187–89, 193–94, 216, 221, 224–25, 229; national and global, 27, 32–33, 73–74, 78–81, 112–13, 117, 124, 141, 150, 163–64, 167, 169, 172, 187, 191, 206–8, 213, 229. See also community, Winter Carnival Indian Valley, Idaho, 108

J Jackson and Jackson Hole ski resort, Wyoming, 13–14, 13n8, 74, 141, 168, 187, 228 Johnson, Kathy, 206, 210 Johnson, Lloyd, 171 jokes and pranks, 135, 180, 192, 209–10, 212–13, 220 Jones, Arthur C., MD, 215 Jordan, Grace, 201n11, 206 Jordan, Idaho Governor Len, 215

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Jordan-Smith, Paul, 34 Joseph, Miranda, 37, 39, 48, 56 Junior Winter Carnival, 36, 164, 172–75, 224

K Kangas, Jan, 55 Kellogg, Idaho, 179 Kent, Tud, 169 Keystone ski resort, Colorado, 142 Kimball, Earl, 169, 173 Kinser, Samuel, 115–16, 145–46, 146n26 KMCL, 185 Krahn, Dan, 49, 85–86, 85, 87, 92, 93, 102, 117, 153, 195, 201–2 Krahn, Gaylord, 85, 85–86 Krahn, Marilyn, 85–87, 85, 91, 92–93, 95, 101–2, 143, 153, 191, 194, 201, 219, 220 Krahn, Nancy, 46, 60, 85–88, 85, 89, 90, 92, 94–97, 94, 102, 142, 153 Kraumer, Michael, 25–26

L Lake Placid, New York, 165, 174 lake monster folklore, 200–2, 204–7, 221. See also Sharlie Lake Tahoe, California, 174 landscape: and folklore, 7, 211–12; and leisure, 6, 13, 167; and myth, 74, 201, 204–8, 220 Laskiainen, 138–39, 142 laughter and humor, 36, 80, 116, 127, 134, 136–37, 146, 192, 199, 209–10, 211, 212–13, 216, 219–22, 224. See also parody and irony, play Lavenda, Robert, 40, 48, 58, 156 Lawrence, Denise, 137 Leadville, Colorado, 166 legend, 14n10, 36, 70–71, 81, 191, 193, 199, 201, 203–4, 206, 208, 212–14, 217, 219, 230. See also memorate, Sharlie Lemberes, Dalene, 134–37 Lewis and Clark, 17, 75 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 12 Little Ski Hill, 173n18, 175–77, 178, 188– 89, 225 logging and timber, 6, 10, 16, 21–22, 24, 27, 38, 75, 77–78, 77–78, 144, 179, 189, 227– 29. See also Boise Cascade Corporation Long, Patrick, 299 Long Valley, Idaho, 14, 18, 18n17, 18n18, 19, 21, 184 Luling, Texas, 32, 149–50

Lyons, Rob, 38, 52, 54–56, 61–63, 99n21, 196–97, 203, 212, 218

M Madrid, New Mexico, 228 Magliocco, Sabina, 32, 55n25 Manchester, Doug, 22–23, 100–101 Manning, Frank E., 30, 186 Mardi Gras: beads, 116, 120–22, 121–23, 131, 142–43, 143, 158, 159; Cajun Country, 115, 127, 138n14, 148, 156, 162; economic relations, 36, 117, 137, 146–49, 163, 224; patriotism, 126–27, 146–47; seasonal and religious celebration, 115–16, 133, 138–39, 142, 146, 162, 226; signaling festivity, 116, 133–134, 143, 148; social criticism, 145­–46, 149; style, 33, 36, 114– 17, 120, 124, 130, 133, 137–38, 142–44, 147–149, 151, 157–59, 162. See also carnivalesque, parades, skiing, Winter Carnival Marin, Louis, 118 Marrow, Don 139, 151 May, Roy, 182, 215 McAuliffe, Christa, 78 McCall: as setting for Winter Carnival, 1–2; author’s relationship to, 6–7, 11; characteristics of, 3–6, 4, 12; history, demographics, and economics, 7–10, 12, 14, 16–18, 20–27, 77­­–78, 100, 116, 181­–85, 189, 196–97, 227, 229–230; image, 34, 38, 50–51, 59, 65, 69, 113, 149–50, 175, 179, 187, 204, 216, 218. See also community, skiing McCall, Jim, 185–86 McCall, Tom, 20, 21 McCallum, Boone, 214 McMahon, Felicia, 116 Meadows Valley, 18–21 Mechling, Jay, 224 memorate, 191, 200–202, 204, 213. See also legend, Sharlie Meurger, Michel, 201, 204–5 Miller, Mack, 176n24, 177, 189 mining, 14, 18–21, 75, 77, 166, 179, 227–28 Minneapolis, Minnesota, 165. See also St. Paul Miranda, Carmen, 132 Moab, Utah, 228 Mobile, Alabama, 115 Monarch Mountain ski resort, Colorado, 152 money, beliefs about, 49. See also community Monte Carlo, Monaco, 186–87 Monte Carlo Night, 44, 164, 181, 181, 186– 87, 204, 224. See also gambling

Index Montreal, Canada, 27, 73, 83, 139, 151, 165, 167 Morgan, Barbara, 78, 79 Morris, Karen, 68, 85, 86, 90, 96, 101, 102, 106, 142, 191–92, 206 Mt. Hood, Oregon, 168 Mt. Rainier ski club, 171 movies: allusions to, 187, 216; made in McCall, 8, 168; shown during Winter Carnival, 179. See also celebrity and celebrities Münchhausen, Baron von, 215 muscular Christianity, 165

N Nampa, Idaho, 169 national forest, 14n11, 15, 20, 20n22; Payette, 14, 16, 16n12, 20, 20n22 National Ski Association, 165, 171 Native Americans, 14n10, 17–18, 19n19, 75, 76, 167, 207 Nelson, Lyle, 176n24, 177, 189 New Meadows, Idaho, 7, 20 New Orleans, 115–16, 141–42, 146, 148, 156n35 New West, 6, 12–14, 16, 36, 227, 228. See also resorts and resort development Noyes, Dorothy, 32, 67, 223

O Obama, Barack, 127, 147 Ogden, Utah, 168 Olympics, 80, 174, 179; local champions, 80, 175–77, 176n24, 179, 188; snow sculptures, 80, 80, 112–13; torchlight parades, 152. See also skiing opening ceremonies, 35, 44, 74, 84, 114, 128, 150–55, 157, 159–61 Orofino, Idaho, 18 Osborn family, 19 Owen-Diesel, Alison, 176n24

P parades: ix, 143, 145, 147, 158–60; commodification, 147–50; communication, 32, 36, 114–17, 221–22; history of Children’s Parade, 115, 151–54, 160–61; history of Mardi Gras Parade, 115, 133–38, 134–35; Mardi Gras Parade entries, 124, 126–33; organization, 122–24, 155, 157; parade aesthetics, 124, 134, 144, 155; parade routes, 118, 118n2, 119, 122, 149, 150, 159; social

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control, 144–46, 146n27; socializing, 65, 117, 118, 120, 136; social relations, 36, 116–117, 124, 147–49, 163; structure, 44, 124, 146, 154–55. See also audience, children and childhood, Mardi Gras, royalty, Sharlie parades, torchlight, 115, 150–54, 151n29, 156–157, 156n35, 159, 161 Paris, Idaho State Representative Ralph L., 215 Parker, Don, 45, 50–51, 54–55, 57, 61–62, 67 parody and irony, 116, 126, 133–34, 137, 224. See also laughter and humor, play patriotism, 80, 81–82, 124, 125, 126–27, 146 Payette, François, 17, 75 Payette Lake: folklore of, 1, 185, 191, 194, 200, 205–6, 210, 213–14, 230; geography and history, 3, 14, 20–21, 70; and winter carnival, 1, 73, 118n2, 169, 170 Payette Lakes area, 3, 12, 14, 18, 20–21, 24, 26, 33, 36–37 Payette Lakes Star, 214 Pearl, Jack, 215 performance, ix, 10, 30, 33, 39, 67, 117, 149, 188, 206, 226 Pitigliano, Italy, 151n29 play, ix, 6, 30, 36, 69, 71, 81, 113, 116–117, 127, 133–34, 136, 164, 166, 192–93, 196, 210–12, 220–21, 223–25, 227. See also laughter and humor, parody and irony popular culture, x, 2, 33, 69, 71, 81, 178, 216, 221, 224 Poulter, Gillian, 167 Preston, Cathy, 141, 142n19 Preston, Peter, 20, 20n22 Printz, Fred, 168 professionalism, 28, 33, 43, 69, 101, 103–6, 108–9, 112–13, 124, 164–65, 168, 171–73, 173n18, 175. See also amateurism Prosterman, Leslie, 98 Putnam, Robert, 39n2, 51

Q Québec, Canada, 27, 73, 139–40, 146, 151; lake monsters, 204

R railroads, 21, 75, 167–68, 174, 182n32, 229 Randolph, Greg, 176n24 resorts and resort development, 3, 6, 8, 13–14, 16, 22–24, 26, 34, 50, 74, 80, 100,

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112–13, 126, 141–42, 148, 151, 165, 172, 174–75, 179–80, 186–87, 218, 227, 229. See also economic change and development, New West, skiing, Tamarack Rhodenbaugh, Edward, 205 ritualesque, ix–x Roberts, Art, 215; Art Roberts Park, 58, 73, 153 Romstadt, Arthur C., 171 Rotary, 86, 117, 120–121, 122, 215 Rothman, Hal, 13–14, 22–24, 167, 176 Round Valley, Idaho, 14 Rowland, Frank, 21n24, 171n12 Roy, Louis-Phillipe, 201 royalty, 139, 140, Boreas, 140; Lord and Lady, 126, 128–29; queens, 32, 73, 128–29, 128, 154; Rex, 140–41. See also parades

S Sager, Jane, 46–47, 49, 59, 63, 65, 107–8, 110­–13 Salmon River, 14, 18 Salmon River, Middle Fork, 14, 18 Salmon River, South Fork, 14, 18 Salmon River Mountains, Idaho, 14 Sandpoint, Idaho, 108 Santa Fe, New Mexico, 228 Santino, Jack, 30, 141 Saubert, Jean, 179 Schott, Barbara, 137–38, 149 Scoles, Bob, 77, 82–83, 99n21, 104, 133, 152–53 Sharlie: 1, 33, 36, 150, 163, 191, 192, 199, 219, 224–25; children, 86, 128, 130, 196, 198–99, 218, 222, 224; consumer culture, 99n21, 216, 218; economy, 230–31; mass media, 213–16, 214, 218, 224; naming of, 214–15; national imaginary, 206–8, 214, 220; parades, 64, 124, 127, 130, 134, 150, 159, 163, 197–98; pranks and jokes, 192, 210–13, 211, 220–21; snow sculptures, 70–71, 72, 86, 90, 91, 105–6, 193–95, 194– 98, 208, 217; stories, 191–93, 199–204, 206, 208–10, 215, 220, 230; tourism, 214, 216, 216, 218, 220–21; Winter Carnival icon, 191, 193, 196–97, 198–99, 218, 221. See also carnivalesque, lake monster folklore, memorate, parades, tall tale, legend Shaw, Johnny, 172 Shore Lodge, 22, 52, 70, 70, 73, 77, 80, 100–101, 184–85 Singer, Milton, 10

skiing: consumerism 36, 164, 174, 178–79, 180; history, 10, 20, 164–71, 166, 171 173–75, , 178; local identity, 3, 129, 153, 176–77, 177, 187–89; Mardi Gras, 124–25, 127, 129–30, 133, 141–42, 151; snow sculptures, 80; in winter Carnivals, 3, 22, 27, 36, 45, 165, 171, 178. See also Mardi Gras, McCall, Olympics, resorts and resort development slush and slush-on method, 88, 89, 90, 96, 103 Smith’s Ferry, Idaho, 14 Smokey Bear, 77, 130, 147, 208, 208 Snake River, 14 Snowbird ski resort, Utah, 141 Snowmass ski resort, Colorado, 142 snow sculptures: as gift, 95–96; history, 69, 82–84; maintenance, 60; outsourcing, 103–6; regulations and judging, 84, 102–3; social relationships, 56­–57, 84–85, 93–97, 99–101, 106, 107; style and aesthetics, 90, 98–99, 103; themes and classification, 69–81; tools and techniques, 2, 86–93, 88–89, 91, 93–94; as Winter Carnival event, 42, 44, 68. See also Idaho State SnowSculpting Championship spontaneous shrines, x, 78, 79 Standish, Gail, 182–83 Star, Idaho, 108 Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 13, 74, 166– 67, 171, 187, 227, 229 St. Moritz, Switzerland, 174–75 St. Paul, Minnesota, 27, 73, 140–41, 146n26, 151. See also Minneapolis Star-News, 25, 120, 155, 180, 180n31, 185, 216, 216, 230–31 Stoeltje, Beverly, 32, 104, 149 Stover, Roy, 168, 170, 183–84 style. See Mardi Gras Sun Valley, 83, 174–75, 178–79 SUNY-Brockport, New York, 142

T tall tales, 191–92, 209–13, 215–16, 220. See also Sharlie Tamarack ski resort, Idaho, 6, 23–24, 26, 50, 179, 180, 180n31, 231. See also resorts and resort development Territorial Enterprise, 212 Thomas, Jeannie, 201, 209, 219 Tobias, Nelle, 8, 9, 21 Toelken, Barre, 211

Index tourism. See New West, resorts and resort development tropicana, 124–26, 130–33, 144, 148 Tucker, Elizabeth, 182 tunnels: underground, 182, 182n32; in lakes, 205–6, 205n18, 209 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 19, 19n19 Tury, Le Isle Hennefer, 215

V Vail, Colorado, 13, 141, 179, 187 Valley County, 3, 5, 10, 14, 16–18, 23–24, 26, 32, 75, 108, 127, 138–39, 166–68, 166, 169, 172–73, 176, 179, 182, 227, 229 Varenne, Hervé, 49 Varian, Judge, 184 volunteering, x, 11, 29, 39–48, 39n2, 52–66, 55n25, 86, 96, 99n21, 120, 133, 136, 153–54, 176, 181, 225. See also community, Winter Carnival von Sydow, Carl W., 199–200

W Wacky Women, 124, 137–38, 146 Ware, Carolyn, 156, 162 Warren, Idaho, 18–19 Wenger, Etienne, 34 “When McCall Went Dry” (ballad), 183–84 Whitaker, Carl, 195 White, Shal, 183–84 Wiegand, Diane, 43, 47, 53, 63, 65, 108, 111–12

257

Wilcomb, Marlee, 85, 86, 90, 101, 210 wilderness area, River of No Return, 14, 16, 16n12 Wilson, Sheriff Robert, 183 Windham, New Hampshire, 141 Winter Carnival: chairing, 38, 40–43, 45, 53, 55–56, 55n25, 60–63, 99n21; community festival, 28; conflict, 30­–31, 34–35, 37–38, 40, 57–59, 62–64, 68, 223, 226; description, 1–3; early Winter Carnival, 21–22, 36, 164, 167–75, 170–71, 224, 229; events, 3, 35, 45, 232–37; expansion, 59–60, 107; family-oriented, 39, 52–53, 57, 66, 71, 83, 83, 86, 104, 120, 142, 159, 161–62, 195, 225; harvest festival, 6; organization, financing, and structure, 40–45; relation to chamber of commerce, x, 6, 40–46, 48; revival, 22, 36, 68, 73, 104, 138, 151, 164, 178, 193, 221, 229–30; themes, 2, 34, 41, 63, 69–71, 86, 103, 109, 133, 196; winter carnivals other than McCall, 27, 73, 139–41, 145­–46, 151, 165–66. See also community, economic change and development, festival, identity, Mardi Gras, volunteering world’s records, 164, 169–70 Worthington, Kit, 125 Wrobel, David, 227–29

Y Yocom, Margaret, 156