From a recliner in his Kewanee home, the Hog Days committee co-chair has kept up on the festival events and has now tallied the final numbers. And they look really great, he said.
“This year is right up there within literally $50 to $100 of the record,” said Larry Flannery. “It was a very, very successful weekend.”
Flannery said it takes about $120,000 to $125,000 each year to put on the festival. That figure includes the cost of insurance and maintaining the Hog Capital building.
“That’s what it takes to have Hog Days in Kewanee,” he said.
That cost is helped along by CDAC Amusements, which provides the committee with $30,000 in presale carnival tickets each year. And passing the hat at entertainment events helps offset that cost, which Flannery said brought in $1,030. Even that amount was within a few dollars of breaking the record.
In total, Hog Days took in $91,350.
In addition, Hog Days set more records. Flannery reported that the flea market, which is held each year at West Park, sold out all of the spaces. He credits his fellow committee member Janie Metscaviz with the market’s success.
“She did an absolutely fantastic job of selling out spaces at the park,” he said.
In past years, pork chops are left from the Hog Days barbeque, but this year, there wasn’t a chop to be found. The committee purchases its pork patties from Save-a-lot and was able to return 30 cases of frozen patties.
“Technically, we sold out,” he said.
Water and chip supplies following the festival were also lower than previous years, although Flannery said the few boxes of leftover chips will go to a good cause. The chips will provide snacks and additions to the committee meals that are served before the monthly meetings.
But it’s not just near record-breaking profits that had the committee cheering the 2024 festival. Flannery said that this year was a “kinder, gentler’ Hog Days, with very few complaints from attendees.
Flannery said the mood of the crowd harkened back to the festival in 2021, the year it returned after the one-year hiatus from the pandemic.
“This one was a mirror image to the 2021 event,” he said.
While Flannery has all of the details on the festival, he couldn’t attend this year. Just days before the festival, Flannery fell off a ladder in his garage and broke a hip. He is homebound until the end of this month, but his healing is coming along nicely, he said.
While he wasn’t there in person, Flannery did take phone calls over the Labor Day weekend from committee members and was kept apprised of the preparations.
His absence from the festival this year has caused him to rethink some of his plans.
“I thought about stepping back,” said Flannery, who has been either chair or co-chair of the committee for many years. “But I said if you do like me running the show, I would like to go one more term.”
His two-year term as co-chair with Mike Komnick is set to expire in November, but Flannery said he isn’t going anywhere. In November, the committee is expected to give him two more years to run the show.
