Rondo Days

This weekend is Rondo Days. This marks the 25^th anniversary of what has become one of the city’s principal festivals.

Rondo Day[s] always hits a special point on my cranium. I never lived there and never saw the street. It was taken out in the late 1950s and I did not get here until the mid 1960s. But I grew up on top of a hill in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where about ten years later the Iowa Highway Commission decided to build what became known as I-380. Like when Minnesota chose Rondo, Iowa chose our place because it provided for a nice, straight road without displacing any people of influence. It has been suggested that where freeways are straight, that they went through poor/working class neighborhoods. I think there is some truth to that.

As far as I know nobody has ever attempted to do any kind of festival for our neighborhood in Iowa. Maybe we didn’t have the organizers. Maybe too many have left the area. Maybe the lack of a central, defining ethnicity which felt displaced have never inspired anybody to try. [There were a lot of people of Czech and Slovak ancestry in the corridor, but there were a lot more elsewhere in the city.]

But I do wish the Rondo folks well every year and trust that everybody involved will have a good and happy festival. I envy their commitment.