Lou’s View: FLAMING FOLIAGE FACTS
By Lou Bernard
The Flaming Foliage Festival has been around since 1949, but this is the first time I’ve ever really dedicated a column to it. But this year, in mid-October, I’m taking a little break from the ghosts to write about it, mostly because I’m competing here with my friend Chris Miller.
Chris is doing a story on the Flaming Foliage Festival and its traditions; if you page around a little in this edition, you’ll find it. He suggested that I write a column on it, as well, and I decided to do a little digging and find some interesting trivia that Chris didn’t have, which will teach him to suggest more work for me. None of this may be anything new to the people of Renovo, who may have known all this for years. But at least I’m funny.
Flaming Foliage was created by two men. One of them was Carl Bergdahl, an employee of the Department of Forest and Waters. There’s an award named after him, but as I haven’t won one, I never bothered learning too much about it. The name “Flaming Foliage” came from the Record itself, created by Record publisher Jack Smyth. Bergdahl mentioned, in a conversation, the flaming colors of autumn, and Smyth immediately came up with the idea. The first one was held in 1949, and Smyth was the chairperson. After that, Bergdahl took over as chairperson until 1954.
These days, Flaming Foliage is rightfully associated with Renovo, but it didn’t start out that way. It began as a three-community event involving Lock Haven and Emporium, as well, but the other two communities pulled out in the 1950s, and the event became an annual Renovo tradition.
The guest speaker at the first ceremony was Governor James Duff. The first Flaming Foliage Queen grew up to be an actress—Sherrill Hiller of Jersey Shore was the first winner, and later returned to be a regular judge for thirty years. She grew up to act in commercials, industrial films, and the awesomely-titled low budget movie “Viral Assassins.”
Later, having married and changed her last name to Rittenmeyer, she was interviewed for one of the festival booklets. She described being named queen during the halftime of a Lock Haven football game, and later being crowned by the governor on top of Hyner View. (This was, incidentally, also when the governor officially opened the road to Hyner View, presumably because he had to drive up there.) Sherrill’s advice to the contestants was “Just be yourself and everything else will fall into place,” which sounds kind of like something she just made up for the booklet, but it’s still not bad advice.
Oddly, there was no first runner-up in 1950, 1957, and 1985 for some reason, but somehow there was a second runner-up each of those years. In 1957, the second runner-up was a tie between Bellefonte’s Christine Manchester and Cameron County’s Heather Streich. In 1965, they added Miss Congeniality, and in 1980, they added Miss Photogenic. (1966 had the addition of “Mister Congeniality” for some reason.)
In 1958, the Flaming Foliage Committee ruled that there would be no further Miss Renovo entries, presumably because it gave them an unfair home field advantage. Girls from Renovo were relegated to the position of “Hostess.”
In the spirit of discovering facts that Chris wasn’t writing about, I even broke down and did math, far from my favorite activity. In the years that Flaming Foliage has been held, 1956 had the least contestants, eighteen of them. The most contestants were in 1988, with thirty-nine entries. And the average number of contestants for Flaming Foliage Queen is 29.5, which is sort of a neat trick.
Hopefully, you’ve learned something from this column, and more importantly, hopefully I dug up some facts that Chris didn’t find. I’ll try not to gloat too hard about it. Maybe I need to run for Mister Congeniality….I’m told if I just be myself, everything will fill into place, though that has not always been my experience.
