Thousands visit annual festivals

Spokane residents Len and Jan Mortlock spent their 33rd anniversary staying at a Coeur d’Alene bed and breakfast and wandering through the public festivities Friday and Saturday.

They’ve celebrated many anniversaries shopping at the city’s Art on the Green, Taste of Coeur d’Alene and the Downtown Street Fair – a trio of celebrations, all of which feature arts, crafts and food.

Saturday, Jan was hoping this wouldn’t be her last. She was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer.

As she bought a deer leather-wrapped vase in a Taste of Coeur d’Alene booth in City Park, she said that she was just trying to enjoy every day. Pat Brown Fetters, a Mesa, Ariz., resident who makes the vases, handed Jan a free flower made entirely of leather and wished her luck.

The women embraced.

“Sometimes you make a connection with people,” Brown Fetters said after the couple wandered away. “God bless her soul.”

Tens of thousands of people, each with their own stories, came to Coeur d’Alene for the three annual celebrations. Many will come again today.

The granddaddy of the three, Art on the Green, is celebrating its 38th year, but its first without Pat Flammia, an event founder who died of cancer several weeks ago at age 83.

“Everybody’s working hard to make it great for Pat,” said Mike Dodge, a volunteer who 30 years ago started attending the celebration.

It’s not just locals who take in the festivities.

Delaware resident Eleanor Koerner sat in a rustic wooden chair outside an Art on the Green booth on Saturday. She has trouble walking, so her daughter, Lynn, asked the artist if she could sit.

Lynn, from Boston, said they traveled from the East Coast for her niece’s wedding reception Friday night in Spokane.

Eleanor said she enjoyed the variety of the booths on the grounds at North Idaho College. But she got especially excited when actor Dennis Franz walked by in shorts and a striped button-up shirt. She recognized him from the television show “NYPD Blue,” on which he played Detective Andy Sipowicz, a hard-boiled character one cannot imagine ever visiting a craft show.

Art on the Green featured about 140 booths pre-approved by a committee.

Two artists, sitting on a blanket stretched on the ground just outside the event, didn’t bother with the committee. Sarah and Henry, who didn’t want their last names used but go by Sunshine and Hippie, said they usually travel to rock shows to sell their fresh-cut flowers, hemp necklaces and other jewelry.

The travelers, who have lived in town for two weeks, acknowledged they didn’t represent the norm on Saturday, sometimes drawing strange looks from passers-by.

“Because I’m selling flowers, some of them were like, ‘Yeah, flower children!’ ” said Henry, a full-bearded man with a small yellow flower behind his left ear.

Others were more comfortable with them.

One woman ran up and said their hemp was exactly what she was looking for. Sunshine, who was wearing a hemp necklace with a dangling iridescent shell, offered to weave a necklace.

The woman and her friends agreed to return in 30 minutes, and Sunshine got started on the complicated weave, using her fingers and a toe to tie down the hemp string.

Meanwhile, at the Downtown Street Fair, Lee Ann McKinney sat on a short stone wall at East Sherman Avenue and South Third Street, eating a sausage dog covered with mustard and sauerkraut. McKinney came from Santa Barbara, Calif., with a golfing club, and is staying with her husband at the Coeur d’Alene Resort.

McKinney likes to golf, but said she’s leaving the game to her husband this trip and is enjoying the sights.

“I don’t necessarily buy anything, but I enjoy looking,” she said.