1,000 Eat up Festivities (And Ice
Cream) at MSC
By Cheryl Ellis
Staff Writer
Moorhead State College knows how to give a party-at least in the minds of
about 1,000 Fargo-Moorhead residents who passed through the MSC campus on
the Fourth of July.
Billed as an old-fashioned celebration of Independence Day, the party
lived up to its promises. During the first four hours of the bash, 1,000
free ice cream cones were devoured along with nearly 50 gallons of ice
cream. Troops were sent out for more.
Lemonade and coffee were free, too, and gallons were consumed non-stop.
Popcorn, carmeled apples and caramel corn all cost a few cents, but with
everything else free, no one seemed to mind.
Of course, all that holiday nourishment was only to keep people going for
all the events. It all started at 11 a.m. with MSC President Roland Dille
presiding at the opening ceremony. After the pledge of allegiance and the
posting of the colors, the fun began in earnest.
There was the children's bicycle parade and the children's costume parade.
One Moorhead woman, dead tired but still bubbling at 4:30, summed it up
for many of the people there.
"The kids just loved the parades, and the games were so much fun. I
even had a worm crawling on my arm here," she said tracing a squiggly
path on her upper arm with mock distaste. "But you know, I think it's
really good for the kids to see their parents having fun."
And fun everyone was having. Tiny toddlers, some of whom were so small
they must have learned to walk the night before just for the occasion,
walked around wide-eyed with wonder. So did an elderly gentleman who said
he had taken out an MSC girl in '09 and he wanted to stop by for another
look at the campus. After asking when various buildings had been
constructed, he looked all around for a moment. "They really squeezed
them in, didn't they?"
But considering there was a consistent crowd of about 600, the campus was
remarkably uncrowded. The Hagen Hall auditorium, which one administrator
said held 300, was packed like a sardine can with 350-400 people watching
movies of Zorro and Laurel and Hardy and even Gene Autry.
"Who's Zorro, lady," a little boy asked after a brief tug on a
nearby shirt.
"He's the one who went 'swish-swish-swish'," she said, tracing a
Z in the air. The little boy shrugged and walked toward the movie anyway.
"I didn't think I was that old," she said, walking away looking
a bit crestfallen.
Surprisingly enough, many of the younger children had apparently never
seen a Laurel and Hardy film either. They laughed even harder than their
parents. And nobody seemed bothered enough by the out-numbered cooling
system to leave.
Then there were the three planetarium shows, with a capacity crowd of 90
at every showing.
And there were the barber shop quartets on the lawn, the games for kids
all ages and the kiddie play area in the school for small tots to give
them some fun and their folks a breather. There were balloon races and egg
rolling, and one little girl ran breathlessly up to her mother to tell her
about the great egg fight she had been in. She must have won-there wasn't
egg on her anywhere.
The picnic came at 5:30, bringing with it perhaps the smallest crowds of
the day. Only about 225 people had made advance reservations.
(The article continues, but the rest of
it was not placed into MSU's archives.)
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