Yetis, penguin fears and the poop patrol

After writing three feature stories this week about the Whitefish Winter Carnival in honor of the event's 50th anniversary (one is on C1 in today's paper; see Monday's paper for the other two), I found myself thinking back on my own carnival memories.

And I realized that like most other Whitefish residents, the carnival figures heavily into my own recollections of the resort town.

My youngest daughter, Deanna, was just 4 and painfully shy when we took our place on Second Street to watch our first-ever Winter Carnival parade. We didn't know what to think when we saw the Yetis, those fierce-looking abominable snowmen.

Before I knew it, a Yeti swooped in and grabbed Deanna, who by then already had firmly established a death grip on my thigh. She was wide-eyed and motionless, too scared to even cry, as the masked man waltzed her around before depositing her back to me.

The Yetis seemed to favor the quiet children. My older daughter, Heather, the extroverted adventure-seeker who I'm sure goaded the Yetis in her younger years ("Pick me, pick me…") never caught their attention.

She recently confided, though, that she's still terrified of the costumed penguins that make the rounds during the parade. Heather suffers from what she describes as "poultry-phobia." She's scared to death of chickens and other barnyard fowl. Apparently penguins are close enough to chickens in her mind.

Then there was the year in the early 1990s when the temperature was well below zero for the parade and other Saturday activities, including a children's event they'd planned outside Central School. As I recall, the object was to find coins in a pile of snow and straw.

My kids, one of their friends and possibly one or two other youngsters were the only ones who braved the frigid weather to dig through the snow. After searching relentlessly, sometimes without their cumbersome mittens, they pooled their spoils and realized they'd dug out nearly $10 in change.

They were rich and we avoided full-blown frostbite, so that carnival was a success.

Both of my daughters took part in the parade for various reasons - Girl Scouts, pep band, etc. One year, Deanna and a friend signed up to be the "pooper scoopers," in hindsight a rather humiliating task that involved dressing up like clowns and shoveling up steaming horse manure along the parade route. They got paid $50, I think. I recall having to help them shovel the droppings into plastic bags and deposit the bags into a city garbage can.

Ahhh, the memories.

Parade day is always an opportune time to hawk goods for some fundraiser or another, and I'll bet most of us who raised kids in Whitefish took a turn at some point staffing a table full of cookies or raffle tickets. I'm not sure the financial results always matched the effort.

Sometime in the mid-1990s I was among the mothers who set up a chili stand to help our eighth-graders raise money to go to Spain. When the electrical outlet failed after plugging in too many roaster ovens, we had gallons of lukewarm chili that wasn't selling. As a last-ditch effort, I carried a vat of chili through the crowd to the Buffalo Cafe, where owner Charlie Maetzold graciously let me heat up the chili. We were back in business.

I'm not as involved in the carnival these days, but I still enjoy taking in the parade. There's a certain camaraderie in standing elbow to elbow with people, many of them your friends and neighbors, out in the cold, waiting for the floats and marching bands.

Congratulations, Whitefish, for 50 years of entertaining us and making the gray winters a little more enjoyable. The carnival culminates next weekend, Feb. 7-8, and there will be plenty of "extras' in the parade, I'm told, to celebrate the golden anniversary. We'll see you there.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com