Tontitown Grape Festival

I don’t love the Grape Festival in the sense that it has the best rides, or the best food, or is the cleanest or safest, etc. I love it in the sense that it is a part of NWA and it represents a diverse and important part of our region’s past.
As a kid I remember seeing a lot more grape vineyards around Tontitown and Elm Springs than you’ll find today. In reality there are only a fraction of the number today. The old Welch’s Grape plant in Springdale is no longer open and that alone tells you there aren’t anywhere near the number of Concord grapes coming out of the region as there once was.
The Tontitown Grape Festival is as much a rite of passage as it is anything. Fall means The Washington County Fair and the Grape Festival just like Summer means the Rodeo of the Ozarks and the Rodeo of the Ozarks Parade. It’s a part of who we are and I love it for that if nothing else. It’s like the annual pancake breakfast at the fire station. It isn’t because it’s the best, it’s because it’s tradition and it brings us all closer together.
At this point in my life I still love the spaghetti dinners. I still don’t understand why Queen Concordia wins for selling tickets (I don’t really know how she wins) but I love that she isn’t always the prettiest girl at the festival and that she’s usually from Tontitown. I don’t love the rides now like I did as a kid, but I love that they look questionable and that parents still worry about the safety of them today like they did 50 years ago. Like I said, it’s a rite of passage, and as Freddy Cannon sang in the song «Palisades Park», «you’ll never know how great a kiss can feel when you’re stopped at the top of the Ferris Wheel…»

As a kid, I thought the Grape Festival was the greatest thing ever. I looked forward to it all summer long. I loved everything about it: the spaghetti, the grape ice cream, the book fair, the cheesy games, and most especially the rides. It’s really hard to thumb your nose at any kind of carnival when you’re little.
As an adult, I have been back twice and hated it both times. You’d think I wouldn’t have gone back the second time, but several years had elapsed and I went purely out of nostalgia. Bad idea.
The food: The spaghetti dinners are what make the Grape Festival famous. (You’d think it’d be the grapes, but no.) Everything is homemade, from the pasta to the sauce. But, as an adult vegetarian, I didn’t get to enjoy either. They don’t offer meatless spaghetti sauce; you can’t even just get plain pasta, because apparently they mix together the spaghetti and sauce in batches. So when I went I was stuck with salad and rolls. Admittedly, I am in love with both, so I wasn’t that unhappy. I would’ve liked some pasta though. Don’t bother getting the iced tea; it has no tea flavor. It tastes like water. They still offer buckets of grapes after your meal, and they’re pretty good, but have way too many seeds.
The rides: I have not gone on any rides here as an adult. They look too grimy; who knows when they were last hosed off. Possibly unstable too. And they are run by the greasiest, scariest carnies you’ll ever see.
The games: A huge waste of money to begin with. They have also made getting the prizes easier, and at first you think «Hey! It wasn’t so hard to pop those balloons after all, and I won this huge stuffed animal!» But don’t be fooled. It’s all psychological. The fact that you won will trick you into spending more money, until you go home and you realize that you spent $ 100 on 5 cheaply made stuffed animals. And the stuffed animals are dirty, as in smeared with actual dirt (and who knows what else). The carnies running the games are even worse than those running the rides. At one balloon pop, the carny asked me how old I was and leered at me. I should have left then, but sometimes in awkward social situations I freeze like a deer in a headlight. The same carny literally conned us (I’ve only seen conning like this in the movies) into spending about $ 40 at his booth before we were brave enough to escape. He was a fast talker and kept giving us «free darts,» then let us throw those «free darts,» and then belatedly informed us that if we missed a balloon with one of those darts we’d have to pay him $ 10, and so on. It was a humiliating experience for people like me without a spine. Don’t ask why I played games in the first place; it’s the nostalgia thing again.
The book fair: I haven’t had a chance to go to this recently, but I’m pretty sure they’re trying to get rid of the same stale, musty books that were there when I was a kid.
The only thing that’s still good about the grape festival is the grape ice cream. I know it’s just soft serve flavored with grape juice, but darn if it isn’t delicious.