EVERETT — There’s a secret to running a good sausage festival.
For three decades, Frauna Hogland has been in on the secret.
Each October, Hogland and the families of Immaculate Conception-Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Everett help orchestrate reunions for Catholic families — and the community — at the Everett Sausage Fest.
The three-day festival started noon Friday. It’s scheduled to run from noon to midnight today and from noon to 7 p.m. Sunday.
The reunions take place on rides such as the Zipper, rocking to bands like N’Sane or the New Blues Brothers, or dining on a salmon barbecue or the namesake of the fest, bratwurst and sauerkraut.
It’s all for a good cause: to support Catholic education.
The three-day event — one of Everett’s longest standing traditions — attracts an estimated 25,000 people and raises roughly $60,000 a year to help lower tuition costs for students at Immaculate Conception School, said Hogland, event treasurer.
That translates to a tuition savings of roughly $185 per student at the K-8 school, said interim principal Harry Purpur.
Hogland was part of the team that helped launch the festival back when her children attended the school.
The festival has come a long way since 1977, when it generated $14,000 in profit and helped to keep the school’s doors open.
“We started it because we were short on money,” said Hogland. “We decided we needed a fund-raiser so we visited a sausage festival in Vancouver, Wash., and we came back and decided to start our own.”
On Thursday, Hogland and Ceci Fisher, event chairwoman, were working in the festival’s headquarters, a small office with a window overlooking the evolving midway.
Fisher has been helping with the festival for nearly 24 years, she said. Her husband John, who attended Immaculate as a child, helps too.
Setting up and running the festival each year is a gargantuan effort. The effort is led by an eight-member board of directors who meet monthly year-round, assisted by more than 40 volunteers, plus parents of children who attend Immaculate Conception. Parents supervise booths and take turns working shifts at them.
Over six days volunteers transform a half-city block off Everett Avenue and Cedar Street into a jam-packed festival featuring a midway with rides and games, a variety of fair food and vendor booths, more than 30 arts-and-crafts booths and stages and tents ready for an array of bands and talent and a beer garden. There’s even a farmers market.
When the community arrives to gorge on strawberry shortcake, elephant ears, corn on the cob and cotton candy they’ll be a part of the tradition.
So will J.P. Patches, The Penguins, the New Blues Brothers and the salmon barbecue, said Craig Cooke, president of Pacific Rim Talent, who added these are annual traditions at the event.
For $25, kids can buy a bracelet that gives them access to all the rides all day long.
Identical twins Jon and Chris Shaffer, 7, who were helping their dad set up the elephant ear booth Thursday, said they like the Moonraker ride best.
“Because it flips and it’s fast,” said Chris.
For their older brother, Andrew, 14, Friday is his favorite day. That’s when he and other students at Immaculate Conception get out of school at noon and he gets to walk down to the festival to “chill” with friends, he said.
Leanne Jacobson, one of the leaders of the Bavarian dinner team, is part of the effort behind the food preparations. On Thursday, she was helping to prepare food for an anticipated 1,500 people.
The meal includes sauerkraut, made from an old German recipe handed down from Sophie Schmidts, whose children attended Immaculate.
Gwendolyn Duffy, whose son, Bennett, 9, attends Immaculate, helps run the strawberry shortcake booth.
“We made the biscuits ourselves, on site in the kitchen,” she said. “A team of four people helped. We have it down to a science.”
“This is like our homecoming, like a reunion,” said Mary Fisher, a leader of the elephant ear booth, who added that the secret to good elephant ears is the dough.
And the secret to the festival? It’s the sweet reunions between family and friends that happen year after year.
Reporter Leita Hermanson-Crossfield: 425-339-3449 or lcrossfield@heraldnet.com.
Have a brat
Everett Sausage Fest, 2619 Cedar St., Everett.
Noon to midnight today. Sunday until 7 p.m.
www.everettsausagefest.org.
Free shuttle buses run from South Lot B at Everett Station every 30 minutes.
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