TIPTON — It took only a matter of minutes before a line formed Thursday in the large tent south of Tipton City Hall.

The Tipton County Pork Festival’s serving tent opened at 11 a.m., and by 11:30 a.m., hundreds were perusing the stands and vendors surrounding the courthouse.

The first day of the three-day festival is usually the slowest, attracting mostly Tipton area residents, organizers said, but it was the calm before the weekend’s “organized chaos.”

Festival general manager Dave Colbert said he expected attendance could reach as high as 60,000, increasing the city’s population 10 fold for the weekend.

Behind him, lunchtime diners were waiting for servers to scoop over 1/2-inch-cut chops, pulled pork and hot dogs, accompanied by dollops of baked beans, potato salad, coleslaw or apple sauce.

Over in the kitchen area, cook Ray Tharp was overseeing the preparation of the first few hundred of what will be tens of thousands of pork chops festival volunteers will serve.

Tharp, a 14-year festival veteran, said he and the other cooks began preparing the food about 9 a.m. to be ready for the lunch crowd two hours later.

Today and Saturday, the cooks will have to come in another hour earlier to begin 12-hour days in the kitchen.

“We’re real glad when Saturday night gets here,” he said.

The festival’s growth during its 41 years has forced the cooks to move from using charcoal grills to large cookers that can prepare a few hundred chops at once.

As the pork chop cooks worked through the lunch rush, festival staff in an adjoining kitchen tent had the pulled pork, hot dogs and sides on standby to send out to the serving tent when it needed refills.

“The whole thing is a cast of thousands,” said Brian Canary, who was running the food tents with fellow chair people George Pedigo and Kathy Heaton Benjamin.

Taking the reins of a festival that will draw in crowds of thousands from around Indiana and the Midwest has been no small task because of a big vacancy, said Colbert, who is in his first year as general manager.

Mention Randy Byal’s name and it will strike a somber chord among most of the festival’s staff.

Byal died in January at age 62, after spending 35 years volunteering as an organizer.

While reporting on the event for the Tipton County Tribune in 1973, festival organizers recruited him to help out. He spent the next 3 1/2 decades working odd jobs for the event, climbing his way up to the general manager position.

Colbert and wife, Tina, said they’ve spent their duration as volunteers working odd jobs around the festival like Byal, serving as right-hand men for him.

“I was the treasurer and [worked] concessions for six or eight years. I’d become the gopher,” Dave Colbert said. “I’d kind of taken the role of helping Randy ... but I didn’t realize how much he actually did.”

Byal left big shoes to fill, Tina Colbert said.

“We were a little nervous with not having him with us and we miss him,” she said.

Despite Byal’s absence, Dave Colbert said, the Pork Festival came together smoothly and the organizers are hoping the momentum and Thursday’s nice weather carries through the weekend.

Along with recruiting the hundreds of volunteers needed for the event, a six-figure investment was also necessary.

Colbert said the festival usually costs upward of $150,000, much of which is covered by sponsors.

If there is profit, he said, it is marginal.

“I see this as one of the community’s largest philanthropic projects,” he said. “We have organizations like the Lion’s Club, the Elks [Lodge]. This is their big fundraiser for a lot of them. If they did not have this ... our purpose is to give them an avenue to make money.”

Tina Colbert said any profit the Pork Festival makes will go toward scholarships for students Tipton and Tri-Central high schools. Last year, the festival award $1,000 in scholarship money she said.

• Daniel Human is a Kokomo Tribune staff writer. He can be reached at (765) 454-8570 or at daniel.human@kokomotribune.com.



Schedule of events:

Friday

• 5 a.m. - All-you-can-eat breakfast begins

• 6:30 a.m. - WWKI Morning Show Live

• 4 to 5:15 p.m. - 9/11 ceremony

• 5:45 p.m. - Jester King’s show

• 7:15 p.m. - BIGG Country show

• 9 p.m. - WWKI’s Joey & Rory show

Saturday

• 6 a.m. - All-you-can-eat breakfast begins

• 8 a.m. - Kids breakfast begins

• 9 a.m. - Porker Run program at Tipton Hospital

• 10 a.m. - Porky’s Car Show at Tipton Park begins

• 10 a.m. - Children’s make-and-take art projects

• 11 a.m. - Strength and Honor martial arts presentation at Courthouse Lawn

• 2 p.m. - Grand parade though downtown Tipton

• 5:45 p.m. - Post Script show

• 7:15 p.m. - Good Karma show

• 9 p.m. - Amanda Overmyer show