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June 23, 2017
INfortwayne.com
Arcola gears up for days of roar By Garth Snow gsnow@kpcmedia.com
With each passing year, Arcola adds just a bit more to the three-day truck and tractor pull that it has celebrated for more than six decades. The food concessions grow a little bolder. The competition categories expand. The thunder that pierces the clouds of clay dust increases demand for better earplugs. The Arcola Volunteer Fire Department takes in a little more money for equipment. Weather-permitting, the tiny Allen County village will celebrate that growth once again, July 6-8. Generations that have volunteered their energy for the pull will remember those who set it in motion, those who created the park where the diesel smoke now rises, and those who steered the tractors that pulled the immense weights back to the starting line. This year,
By Megan Knowles mknowles@kpcmedia.com
FILE PHOTO BY JANE SNOW
Exhaust hangs over the pull strip as a tractor challenges the clay at Branning Park in Arcola.
yet another name joins the list of those remembered. John Brandon died March 16 at age 76. “My dad was the first fire chief out there,” Brandon said in a 2014
interview. That was 1954, when John C. “Cliff” Brandom Sr. headed the Arcola Fire Department and the first Arcola pull was part of the now-vanished Arcola
All-star cast to stage ‘The Addams Family’ By Steve Penhollow For the Dupont Valley News
Cast members take on character and costume during a rehearsal for “The Addams Family” at Canterbury High School. The Fort Wayne Summer Music Theatre cast includes (from left): Atticus Bennett, Homestead High School senior, as Gomez Addams; Janae Jeran, 2017 Carroll High School graduate, as Wednesday Addams; and Kalee McCullar, 2016 Snider High School graduate, as Morticia Addams.
INfortwayne Publications
See CAST, Page A15
PHOTO BY GARTH SNOW
3306 Independence Drive, Fort Wayne, IN 46808
When fine arts teacher Kirby Volz left North Side High School in 2012 for a job in Indianapolis, he made an unusual decision. He decided not to give up the Fort Wayne summer theater program he helped launch in 1998. Several times a year, Volz returns to the Summit City to keep the Fort Wayne Summer Music Theatre up and running. And he spends every summer here. The group is open to middle-school-age and high-school-age kids who live in northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio. It is also open to area college students in the middle of their
Phyllo and friendship produce Greek treats
Days celebration. For decades, Brandon and his friends from the Antique Power Club of the Mizpah Shrine See ROAR, Page A13
While Greek Festival kicked off June 22 for most of Fort Wayne, for the women of Philoptochos at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church preparations began in April. The group makes hundreds of cookies and pastries for the four-day festival, including almost 500 trays of baklava and more than 200 pans of spanakopita, Philoptochos President Deanna Gountras said. And all those baked goods take a lot of time to prepare. “For each one of our cookies we have a separate day,” Gountras said. “Every week we’re doing something. … We take care of the spinach and cheese [spanakopita] then we do the baklava then we start working on our cookies a little closer to the festival.” All the baklava
GREEK FESTIVAL
Headwaters Park, downtown Fort Wayne. Today and Saturday: 11 a.m.-11 p.m. No charge from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. $5 4 p.m.-10 p.m. for those 16 and older. Sunday: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Free all day. For details: fortwaynegreekfestival.org. alone takes four days to prepare, with the assembly being done in the spring. The layered pastries are then frozen before being baked before the festival. Gountras said Greeks’ most famous pastry isn’t hard to make but can be time consuming. Everything goes better with a group of friends, however. “It’s fun, we just all get together and we sit around the tables and everybody has their own pan and their own set See GREEK, Page A16