Elect Laura

Dozens of Laura’s volunteers help keep the Taste clean for our community

From Thursday night to Sunday night Park Ridge was the focal point for fun-filled family oriented festivities and showed visitors what a great community we have. From band stages over by Touhy Avenue to Kids’ festivities in front of City Hall. Park Ridge, the superb Taste Committee, sponsors, participants and volunteers all showed over 100,000 people an action-packed, delicious, festive weekend.

Of course the main event was as always the great food and this year featured the widest array of edibles ever, along with beer, wine and margaritas for the first time. To keep up with all this fantastic food, Committee to Elect Laura Morask donated over thirty volunteers for cleanup detail. Clad in Laura’s bright yellow and blue “Elect Laura” T-shirts, they roamed far and wide making sure that our Taste of Park Ridge sparkled.

In fact, the t-shirts were such a big hit that many taste-goers wanted to buy one. One visitor, the National Marketing Director for Barbeque Fests across the country stopped Laura to comment on how impressed he was at the great job the Elect Laura team was doing keeping in the grounds clean.

Not even a series of storms Thursday afternoon deterred fans from attending as fest activities kicked off Thursday evening. We were forced to shut down after the second enormous storm loomed large on the horizon and organizers wisely chose to close the festival around 8PM for safety reasons. But even the closing was done in the professional style for which the Park Ridge Taste has become synomous-because of the excellent organization of the Taste Board, headed by Bob Dudyz. And of course Team Laura’s volunteers were right there helping make sure despite wind gusts of over 60 MPH that umbrellas and other equipment was quickly folded up and people were safely escorted out.

But, as a gorgeous day dawned on Friday, the Taste roared back to rousing success. Friday featured Senior Day with celebrity bingo sponsored by Maine Township and featuring Mike North and a host of local Who’s-who. Huge crowds swarmed to the festival Friday evening to eat, drink , socialize and hear great music. Even with the challenge of virtually wall-wall people at around 8PM Friday, Laura’s volunteers kept up with the crowd.

Saturday featured Canopies on Courtland, an expo featuring local businesses, organizations and candidates. The Canopies was such a popoular event that crowds started descending even before booths were finished setting up. Laura’s booth was definitely one of the brightest spots under the canopy and judging by the non-stop traffic, one of the most popular. Team Laura featured free lollipops which were a huge hit, particularly with the kids after the kids parade. Even better, as the day grew hotter and the sun beat down on thirsty patrons, Laura was the only booth giving away mini-spray bottles along with bottled water.

Laura’s Team was there for the final night’s jam-packed schedule and crowds as well and once again received many kudos from locals for all their hard work and dedication.

We want to thank everyone who participated as a volunteer for us at this event. Your sweat (literally) truly helped not only our campaign, but the entire town to pull off this huge success!