It was six years ago when Drew and Kelly Donaldson found themselves driving past Kutztown.
The couple were looking to move from their home on Long Island, N.Y., to the Lebanon County area, where Drew Donaldson grew up. On that particular day, they were headed to see a house in Richland, one they would end up buying a couple of months later.
Their route took them past Kutztown, which just happened to be hosting the annual Kutztown Folk Festival at the time.
“I remember I said, ‘Man, if we move out here this is the kind of stuff we could do,'” Drew Donaldson recalled.
On Saturday, they were doing it.
The couple watched with smiles as their “animal crazy” nearly 2-year-old daughter, Molly, cautiously pet a pot-bellied pig napping in a small wagon. They playfully bickered about food, with Kelly Donaldson suggesting they pick up one of her favorites, a waffle ice cream sandwich, moments after they arrived.
“It’s too early for that, I need some pierogies first,” her husband said. “I have to build some tolerance up first.”
It was exactly the kind of summer day the couple had pictured back in 2018. It was exactly the kind of life they wanted to be living.
“Coming here, getting ice cream at the Jigger Shop in Mount Gretna, the Lebanon Fair, movie nights in Richland — it’s the perfect summer,” Drew Donaldson said.
The Donaldsons weren’t the only ones getting a taste of the perfect summer on Saturday. Thousands came out to the Kutztown Fairgrounds to celebrate the opening day of the 2024 Kutztown Folk Festival.
The festival, which began in 1950 and is the oldest continuously operated folklife festival in America, this year featured over 200 vendors selling crafts, artwork and food. The nine-day event, which runs through July 7, also features dozens of daily performances and demonstrations.
“It’s coming back after COVID,” Craig Koller, interim fair director said. “We have a very full fairground this year.”
This year’s edition is the first with Koller at the helm. But it is by no means his first experience at the fair.
Like many of the vendors, artisans and performers, his connection to the festival runs deep and long. He remembers spending time there with his grandfather and cousins as a child, and he remembers getting a chance to work there.
“Everybody around here got their first jobs at the festival,” he said.
For Koller, that first job was acting in a musical. While he didn’t have any lines in “We Remain Unchanged,” he did sing as part of the chorus.
“I thought I was so special because I was a professional actor,” he said, recalling that he was paid $15 for his efforts.
Through his teen years and into his early 20s, Koller continued to work at the festival. He sold sarsaparilla, he helped keep the books for vendors.
And for the past 20 years he has emceed the quilt sales.
Suffice it to say, Koller knows his way around the festival. And he loves every corner of it and every person who helps make it happen.
“This is what the festival is, these people,” he said. “The feeling you get just being around these people is amazing.”
One of those people is Tammy Zettlemoyer.
The Hamburg native has been selling her red clay pottery at the festival since 2004. But, like so many others, her history with the event goes back further than that.
When she was a kid she worked at the Zion’s Church stand alongside her mother, while her grandmother and great-grandmother were busy in the kitchen cooking the food they sold.
So when she started her pottery business in 2003, she knew she had to make an appearance at the festival. It was one of the first events in which she took part, and today it is the only event in Pennsylvania she does.
“It’s my hometown,” she said, explaining that she travels nationally to sell her wares. “It’s the best event of the year.”
The Kutztown Folk Festival is open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information or to purchase tickets visit kutztownfestival.com.
Molly Donaldson, 2, looks to her mom and dad Kelly and Drew Donaldson of Richland as she looks at a pot-bellied pig on Saturday at the Kutztown Folk Festival. (BILL UHRICH – READING EAGLE)Tammy Zettlemoyer handles a purchase at her Zettlemoyer Redware display on Saturday at the Kutztown Folk Festival. (BILL UHRICH – READING EAGLE)
