The Garden City Telegram
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Saying farewell
Published 8/20/2008 in News
By EMILY BEHLMANN
ebehlmann@gctelegram.com
Like a tumbleweed, he blew in from another town.
That’s how Dennis Mesa, a former city commissioner, described Dave Sweley at a reception Sunday for Sweley, who is retiring to Salina this year after serving as president of the Tumbleweed Festival board for 17 years.
It was 1989 when Sweley blew in to Garden City to be a pastor at Presbyterian Church.
At the time, Garden City didn’t have a Tumbleweed Festival, a now annual event that this weekend will include two days’ worth of entertainment for children and adults at Lee Richardson Zoo.
But Sweley’s hometown of Salina had something like it with the Smoky Hill River Festival, founded in 1976. Gordon, Neb., where Sweley first moved after attending seminary school, also had something similar with the Willow Tree Festival. Sweley had been involved in both.
Garden City needed one, too, he thought, when he moved to town with his wife, Cheryl, and their children, Stephanie and Sean.
“This town, it’s so diverse it needs some kind of thing that holds this community together — something that gives us an opportunity to feel good about ourselves and about our community,” he said.
He met Lon Wartman, who at the time was president of the Southwest Arts and Humanities Council, and “I talked him into it,” Sweley said. “We decided we’d try to do something. We got in over our heads.”
The Garden City Jaycees, with funding from the Finnup Foundation, had built a gazebo for the outdoor music festival, but the first event wasn’t quite as big as Sweley had planned. The planners were short on funds and nervous about the outcome. They brought in three acts and called the Saturday afternoon event a “sampler.”
Then came Tumbleweed, a bigger and better event a year later. It included food booths and lasted a full day, and Sweley said it was so successful that the board decided to go for a two-day event the next year.
“Every year we added something,” he said. Before long, the Tumbleweed Festival included two days, multiple stages, and activities and performances specifically for children.
Tumbleweed Vice Chairman Willis Pracht said that as the festival has grown over the years, he, Sweley and other board members might have occasionally disagreed about how to get something done, but never about why they were doing it.
“This is an opportunity to bring something to Garden City that the community should be pretty proud of,” Pracht said.
Tumbleweed has become “an ongoing function of this community,” Sweley said.
“The thing that makes this so valuable is it’s become a Garden City happening, and it’s taken a while for us to get to that point,” Sweley said.
Now in its 17th year, the Tumbleweed Festival has become an event area residents use as the main attraction of their family reunions or company picnics, he said.
It’s something the city of Garden City appreciates, according to City Manager Matt Allen. He presented Sweley with a “key to the city” at Sunday’s reception.
“This is not just for your service, but also for this jewel that you’ve given us,” Allen said.
Sweley said Garden City has been home to him and his wife — Stephanie has moved to Colorado and Sean to Washington state — for 19 years, 18 of which were spent as a Presbyterian Church pastor.
Besides the church and the festival, he has become involved in other facets of the community, including Spirit of the Plains CASA, the United Way and Habitat for Humanity.
“He’s caring, compassionate, involved,” said friend Judy Crymble, whose husband, Bill, is on the Tumbleweed board. “He doesn’t know the word ‘no.’”
Bill Crymble, a sculptor and potter, showed the Tumbleweed board’s appreciation toward Sweley by presenting him on Sunday with a sculpture he said was “a little bit Kansas and a little bit all over.” It included a tumbleweed made from barbed wire — the rejects of Sweley’s barbed wire collection, the newest of which is from 1865, Crymble said.
Sweley’s collection hobby expands beyond barbed wire. He also collects red Fiestaware dishes, milk bottles, carved monk statues and Communion ware.
The collections and the Sweleys’ other belongings are in the process of being moved to Salina, where Sweley said he plans to retire from the hard work of Tumbleweed fundraising and planning.
He said that at first, he thought it would be hard to leave the Tumbleweed Festival, but that he now realizes he has nothing to worry about.
“I have trust in this board,” he said. “They love this festival as much as I do.”
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