The concept for the Aquatennial originated in 1939 out of a desire to advertise Minneapolis as a vacation and business destination through an annual festival to rival Mardi Gras, the Rose Parade and, closer to home, St. Paul’s Winter Carnival. A gaggle of Minneapolis businessmen including WN “Win” Stephens and Tom Hastings witnessed a grand parade in Winnipeg for Britain’s King George VI. and Queen Elizabeth labor dispute and gang violence. With the assistance of experienced Winter Carnival volunteers, they organized a ten-day festival with nearly 200 events in lower than a 12 months.

The name “Aquatennial” was chosen through a contest to focus on the abundance of lakes, rivers, and parks surrounding Minneapolis. Sail and power boat races were to be held on Lake Calhoun (Bde Maka Ska) and on the primary day of the festival a 450-mile canoe derby would arrive on the Mississippi River from Bemidji. An enormous air show and a non-denominational sermon at Powderhorn Park the subsequent day would each draw greater than 100,000. Nonetheless, the parades were the primary attraction. With the support of business sponsors, Aquatennial pin sales and 1000’s of volunteers, the inaugural Grande Day parade featured eighty-six ornate floats, 15,000 marchers and 50 bands, and attracted greater than 200,000 people. More later within the week took part within the nightly torchlight parade. Attendance would proceed to extend within the years to come back: 750,000 would see the 1962 torchlight parade.

Alongside the parades, the Queen of the Lakes Contest has been a mainstay of the Aquatennial since 1940, attracting participants from local pageants from across the state. A jury selects the subsequent 12 months’s Queen and Princesses based on personality, rhetoric and professionalism. After the pageant winners are crowned, they function ambassadors for Minneapolis in parades across the country, covering more miles than the winners of any pageant within the country aside from Miss America. The competition has modified loads since its inception; While queens haven’t got the identical high-flying international travel and free cars as they did within the Nineteen Sixties, they do get educational grants. By the mid-Nineteen Sixties, newspapers stopped listing the queens’ ages, weights, measurements, and residential addresses.

The Aqua Follies, a highly choreographed aquatic revue show, was launched to great fanfare in 1941 and provided the festival with significant revenue for years. A everlasting pool, diving towers and a stage were built at Wirthersee to accommodate several shows for six,000 spectators at the identical time. Twenty-four women often called Aqua Dears practiced routines within the University of Minnesota pool for months. For a few years all of them needed to be exactly five feet and 4 inches tall and weigh 125 kilos. After the audience was warmed up by stunt divers and comics, skilled dancers and the Aqua Dears performed a number with lavish sets and costumes flown in from Broadway and Hollywood.

Several programs were added over the subsequent half century to appeal to younger audiences. The Nineteen Sixty Seven Festival featured a live show called “The Happening” featuring Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield and the Electric Prunes. At an event sponsored by the American Dairy Association, participants raced across Lake Calhoun in homemade boats constructed from milk cartons. The eccentric event was a daily feature of the Aquatennial from 1971 to 2015 and was revived by a separate non-profit organization in 2017. Within the late ’80s, an event called Aqua Jam drew lots of of skateboarders vying for prizes and festival sponsorship.

By the turn of the millennium, the Minneapolis Aquatennial Association was on the point of bankruptcy as corporate sponsors, individual contributors, and competition fees couldn’t sustain with program costs. In 2002, the organization was taken over by the Minneapolis Downtown Council (DTC), a business association that already includes most of the firms which have sponsored the festival for years. Concurrently, the Aquatennial Ambassador Organization (AAO) was formed to run the Queen of the Lakes program and maintain ties with festivals statewide and nationally. While the festival’s length and scope have been reduced lately to accommodate busier summer schedules and a greater deal with downtown Minneapolis, the Aquatennial continues to advertise the “City of Lakes” with free shows, parades, competitions, pomp and fireworks.

For more information on this topic see the unique entry on MNopedia.