By Pyc Fitness
©2004-2008
Dire predictions of a young couch-potato generation took a holiday Saturday, the busiest day of New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming festival.
Organized events like the baby crawl, the Big Wheel race and the tractor pull stretched out small legs, as did walking the many blocks between the bustling booths.
New was a “little miss” pageant in the late morning, when the costume contest and car show also were drawing crowds and the day-long music stages were warming up.
The weather was unbeatably comfortable, which helped push crowds to another record level, festival president Ray Cunningham said.
“We haven’t got any estimate, we just know that it’s more,” Cunningham said. “The areas have just been full of people.”
Approximating crowd size with any specificity is virtually impossible at an event people enter from numerous points. Last year, organizers guessed that 500,000 attended Harvest Homecoming, amid lower temperatures and frequent, strong wind.
New Albany High School band musicians were enlisted to collect garbage and clean the closed-off streets in lieu of municipal service that Cunningham said has been discontinued.
The crawlers
Between babies and glory lay six feet of gymnastic mat.
Baby-crawl organizer Cris McDowell lined up infants side by side, entering six to eight in each of the three age-based heats. One parent or guardian held each baby at the start and another dangled a tantalizing object — a toy, a sweet, a cellular phone — at the finish.
Before the races began, McDowell recalled seeing contestants in past years “literally fall asleep, and sometimes they’ll rush to the finish and stop right before they get there.”
This year was no different. Eight-month-old Ray’von Farley scooted off the line in the first race, as did another baby, but his competitor pulled up inches short of the finish as Ray’von powered through it.
Mom Courteney Scott had drawn Ray’von with a SpongeBob SquarePants ball.
“He’s all over the place” crawling at home, Scott said. “I think he’s going to be walking pretty soon.”
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