RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA — September 25, 1999
Festival of the Family — 5000+ people coming to Fairmont Park to spend time with family, meet old friends, enjoy a host of entertainment and celebrate the family. Our responsibility included everything outside the main park area: traffic control, visitor information, parking placement (VIP, Entertainer & Vendor), coordination with The Press Enterprise (newspaper) staff, Park Rangers, Riverside fire & police departments, and …. COMMUNICATIONS!!
Although the event didn’t officially start for the public until 11:00, most of us were up at 5:00 a.m. to arrive early for with pre-event preparations: booth setup, placement of parking barricades, testing of radio equipment, and getting those “last minute changes” from our event sponsors. It was an absolutely beautiful day (just look the pictures). It the sky was sunny and clear and it wasn’t “too hot” — which was great … don’t some visitors provide enough “hot tempers” anyway?
Crest 107, still recuperating from surgery, handled Communications booth communications control and visitor information. Crest 3 and 33 took up off-site positions at The Press Enterprise (newspaper) parking lot to provide shuttle bus communications (taking visitors to/from the parking lot and the event). Crest 89 had pre-staged a repeater inside a vehicle at the 4th level parking lot of a local hotel, providing repeater communications between the event, the shuttle bus, and the newspaper parking lot. (Just curious … is that hard work … carrying a radio as you sit on a shuttle bus going back and forth between parking lots???)
It was a “typical” event. VIPs, vendors & entertainers were “supposed” to have received their parking permits before arriving. Yea, right!! Anyway, we quickly adapted and got them parked. As usual, we had those who chose to show up late and then blame us because the parking space they thought was reserved only for them was actually being used by someone else …. but otherwise, it was a good day and fun was had by all.
