This is the news article from the local Coudersport newspaper announcing the first annual Judy Bolton Day fan get-together in Coudersport PA in 1991. This year, 2014, will mark the 24th annual convening of fans of the mystery series by Margaret Sutton. Judy Bolton fans have met every year since 1991 in early October for a festive fun-filled weekend in the beautiful PA mountains, visiting Judy Bolton sites and the people who live in and around them.
Judy Bolton Day is a Judy Bolton Fans event. Formal visits and events have taken place each year since 1991, sponsored throughout the 1990s by Adelphia Cable Company, which was headquartered in Coudersport, and the Potter County Chamber of Commerce.
Some of the fans who go there now have taken claim to the inception of the event and count the years only since 2000 when they first came. They claim that nothing had been going on there before they first came. The truth is, everything they do from the hotel they stay in to the places they eat dinner to the sites they visit were in effect long before they ever came. These articles are proof of that. Our visits during the 1990s were real. LOL! Yes, we were really there. We even took Margaret Sutton back to the place of her birth, the Dry Brook Hollow house, in 1998, for a late morning brunch.
The first year this group attended there was a Judy Bolton Day parade in town, and a Halloween-themed square dance sponsored by Adelphia like the one in the Judy Bolton book The Haunted Road. I would call these 'formal' events and there just is no reason for the continual claim that nothing was going on before they came there and started things.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment regarding someone taking credit for the October 2010 Judy weekend even though that person wasn't there. I planned the entire event with the aid of Peg Rotello over the phone and was given NO credit for any of my hard work. It was dropped into "my lap" at the last minute. I didn't do it for a mention in a fanzine article. I did the hard work involved for everyone's enjoyment. Lorraine
This year, 2011, Judy Bolton fans had to sit through a speech about Beverly Gray, a different series book character, showing the fanzine editor's desire to change the nature of the event. I was unable to go because of my health, and other original participants stayed away because of the increasing nastiness of the author's family members and those in the Beverly Gray camp. Many people now attend on expense accounts and educational grants focusing on a free vacation, not Judy Bolton. It's my belief that within a couple years the event will morph into a 'girls series book convention' and that Judy Bolton will no longer be the focus. Mike
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