Next year’s Song of Hiawatha is the finale for pageant

By Duane Winn
“The Song of Hiawatha Pageant,” a staple of summers in Pipestone for decades, will take its final curtain call next year with the distinct unlikelihood of an encore.
Hiawatha Club members voted 28-7 Monday evening to discontinue the once-popular pageant after its 2008 run. Next year will mark the 60th continuous soon-to-be final year that the pageant will be performed in Pipestone.
The play, which is staged outdoors about a half-mile from the famous Pipestone quarries, fell victim to changing tastes, just as the works of its author, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, have fallen out of favor with teachers and scholars.
“Basically, what it boiled down to is that we’ve been losing money at it for umpteen years,” said Hiawatha Club member Don Harstad. “Attendance is going down and interest is down.”
Greg Carrow emphasized that the Hiawatha Club isn’t disbanding. The festival is being discontinued so it won’t continue to be a drain on the club’s resources.
“The big plan is to get through the 60th year and have a big final year. We have plenty of time, we have money in reserve so we have plenty of time to figure out what we want to do,” he said.
There was a consensus among members after Monday’s vote that the entertainment scene has changed drastically since the inception of the pageant in 1949, Carrow said.
“Members remarked that times have changed, family entertainment has changed, wholesome entertainment isn’t the big thing any more,” said Carrow.
Hiawatha Club member Bill Sorensen said that when the pageant was in its heyday, entertainment options were more limited.
“Traveling is so much easier now than it was 60 years ago,” said Sorensen.
“And cheaper,” said Jan Van Roekel.
“You can get in the car and drive 100 miles. You don’t think anything about it,” Sorensen continued.
Harstad even ventured his opinion that the public’s consciousness of the West Nile Virus played a role in the pageant’s demise.
“One of the biggest questions people ask when they come to the pageant is, “Has the area been sprayed (for mosquitoes)?’ “
Once upon a time, such issues were immaterial.
The pageant was the brainchild of the Exchange Club, whose members in 1949 fastened on the idea of a yearly performance of Longfellow’s poem as a civic program. The Exchange Club later renamed itself the Hiawatha Club and claimed sole sponsorship of the event which once attracted scores of buses and thousands of visitors to Pipestone. Its popularity grew to the point where it was named one of the top 100 attractions in the country by the American Bus Association. The pageant, for 10 consecutive years, was recognized as one of the top 25 festivals the state of Minnesota offered.
Sorensen, a Hiawatha Club member for nearly 40 years, since volunteers at one time set up 5,000 chairs for the nightly performances.
“I’m sure we had 4,000 people there on a night’s performance,” he said.
The demise of the pageant means much than the loss of dollars the pageant pumped into the local economy. The pageant also brought residents together, united in a single civic purpose, and it provided a unique identity for the city. For many members, the festival also represented precious childhood and family memories.
“I can remember going to the pageant as a kid, sitting on blankets because the chairs were full,” said Van Roekel.”
Several members took on roles in the pageant, as did their kids and relatives after them.
With the hustle and bustle of modern life, it grew harder and harder to attract members to the fold.
Carrow said that prospective members were turned off when they discovered the huge investment in time the pageant requires, which included three weekends during the summer and several weeknights.
“Right away, we’d lose them,” he said.
The first sign of the dwindling popularity of the pageant, though, might have cropped up years ago in classrooms across the country.
“Longfellow used to be read in school all the time.” said Myers. “Years ago we sold booklets and people knew the first 20 words or so. I think they quit doing that in the 1970s. Now there are people who don’t even know who Longfellow or Hiawatha were,” said Mick Myers.
Myers said that the people who still know Longfellow and his most famous literary creation will feel the absence of the pageant.
“It wasn’t because we didn’t put on a good show,” said Myers. “We still get people that call back, write back, and comment on good show.”