A Swiss cheese-eating contest and a new flavor of bratwurst will be among the offerings at this year’s German-American Festival, set for Aug. 24-26 at Oak Shade Grove in Oregon.

The 47th annual event will also feature all the popular contests and favorite Swiss-German foods and drinks of past years, said Jack Renz, marketing/public relations committee chairman for the festival.

“We’re in our 47th year. That’s quite a statement,” Renz said. “For 47 years we have continually produced a quality product, and I think what we really strive to do is offer something different each time. Even though the public looks for their favorite things and relishes what they like, they also know that each year we try to do some new things. We’re very proud of what people get for the money. They get a heck of a bang for their dollar.”

The winner of the new eating contest, set for 7 p.m. Aug. 25, will be the contestant who eats an 8-ounce block of Swiss cheese the fastest, Renz said.

The new brat will be a Swiss cheese and mushroom bratwurst handmade by Tank’s Meats in Elmore.

“It has an absolutely phenomenal taste,” Renz said. “That’s what’s really fun about being part of the German-American Festival. Each year we try to bring something new to the community to try to keep it cutting-edge.”

The festival will be open 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. Aug. 24, with a parade and opening ceremonies set for 8 p.m. The event will continue from 2 p.m. to 1 a.m. Aug. 25 and noon to 11 p.m. Aug. 26.

Daily admission is $7. Advance tickets, available online at germanamericanfestival.net or at various area restaurants and bars, are $6 for one day, $10 for two days or $15 for three days. Children 12 and younger are free when accompanied by an adult. Active military, police, fire and EMS personnel with ID will be admitted free on Aug. 26 and senior citizens with a Golden Buckeye card will be admitted for $1 off admission Aug. 26.  Round-trip shuttle tickets are available for $6 and leave from several Toledo area locations.

The traditional Swiss Steinstossen, or Swiss stone-throwing contest is set for 3 p.m. on both Aug. 25 and 26. Men will throw 138-pound stones while women will throw 75-pound stones.

“That one is the most popular contests, followed by the Masskrugstemmen,” said Festival Chairman Timothy Pecsenye.

In the Masskrugstemmen event, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. on both Aug. 24 and 25, contestants lift a liter of beer with one arm stretched parallel to the floor and hold it as long as they can.

The Hummel Lookalike Contest for children age 2 to 10 will be held 4 p.m. Aug. 26. Prizes are awarded for the most authentic look-a-like with a focus on overall look, costume, props, pose and facial expressions.

There’s also the Brezeln Essen, or soft pretzel-eating contest, set for 9 a.m. Aug. 25 and the German dessert baking contest at 3:30 p.m. Aug. 25.

Each hour, festival organizers come on stage to perform a rendition of the scenes played out by the wooden characters in Munich’s Glockenspiel, or city clock.

“We come out on the hour and do a little performance to salute the hour,” Renz said. “There’s crowd participation. It’s kind of a crowd-pleaser. It’s really becoming something people look forward to watching.”

Bands include Austrian Express from Milwaukee and Phenix from Chicago. Children’s activities include rides, face painting, a clown and more. A German language worship service will be held at 10:30 a.m. Aug. 26. There will also be soccer matches on Aug. 25 and 26.

The festival, a fundraiser for the German and Swiss cultural center in Oregon, along with a variety of scholarship, athletic and philanthropic programs in the Toledo area, is operated by the nonprofit GAF Society and sponsored by the seven German-American and Swiss-American societies in Toledo.

“We’re probably one of the best-known festivals in the area. We’ve been in existence longer than the other ethnic festivals,” Pecsenye said. “People have a fantastic time. They enjoy themselves. You see a lot of happy people, a lot of smiling people with their friends or meeting new friends while exploring German culture, German music, German foods. Just bring a guest and come to the fest!”

For more information, visit germanamericanfestival.net.

Tags: German American Festival, Timothy Pecsenye

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 at 11:38 am and is filed under Festivals, Star.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

sk the average person what draws them to the beloved German-American Festival (GAF) in Oregon year after year, and one of the items mentioned most often — usually accompanied by wry smiles and watering mouths — is the food.

The festival’s organizers have taken pride in their event offering numerous examples of authentic German cuisine for many years. Now, as the 46th annual event is set to take place, beginning Aug. 26 at Oak Shade Grove in Oregon, the folks behind a few of the most popular food items prepare to face an estimated 30,000 happy, hungry customers.

The GAF has been a part of Annamarie (Ann) Kuebbeler’s family experience for years.

“We have been involved with the festival since I was younger,” she said. “My dad was one of the vice chairmen of the festival in the early 1990’s. No matter what age you are there are always places to volunteer at the festival.”

For Kuebbeler, her involvement eventually led to her becoming chairperson behind the production of the festival’s Pommes Frites, a German variety of French Fries.

“My parents volunteered in the Pommes Frites booth for one of their great friends, John Whitt. John decided he wanted to take on other roles in the festival and about six years ago I decided to step forward and become the chairman. I still rely on John’s help,” Kuebbeler said.

Tradition also fuels the participation of Frank Chenetski, whose family has been involved with the GAF since the late 1980s. Now, more than two decades later, the former festival dancer finds himself in charge of another of its most popular food items — the delicious fried meat dish known as schnitzel.

“I was a sous chef at a restaurant Downtown, and my dad and I had just kinda talked about it. I was an exchange student [in Germany], so I’d had real schnitzel. And we just kinda started playing with the recipe,” Chenetski said.

Like most of the items at the festival, the schnitzel is hand-made by a large staff of volunteers, though Chenetski is reticent to divulge all details about what goes into the making of such a popular item.

“The schnitzel is all hand-breaded. It starts with a flour, like a flour dredge, then it goes into an egg wash, and then it goes into a seasoned bread crumbs coating. And we have our top-secret seasoning mix, that we can’t reveal what’s in it,” he said.

Making items fresh is a key to Kuebbeler’s operation, as well.

“Our Pommes Frites are fresh cut with the skins on and cooked while the customers are standing in line. We never leave fries sitting more than a few minutes to ensure freshness,” she said.

Kuebbeler is also in charge of another of the festival’s most recognizable food items.

“Our sauerkraut balls are popular and we guarantee to sell out every year. It is now a game between the various crews as to who can outsell each other per shift. The crews come up with creative ways to keep the fries and balls selling, and makes it quite entertaining,” she added.

Kuebbeler said her crew made more than 3,000 pounds of Pommes Frites at last year’s festival, and more than 500 pounds of sauerkraut balls.

Chenetski said he and his loyal volunteers will prepare more than 1600 schnitzels for this year’s attendees, every last one of them by hand.

“I’ve had a great team of volunteers,” he said. “We treat them well, and they keep coming back. So I’ve kinda had a crew that does my cooking, that actually cooks them and serves them to the customers, and then I have a kitchen crew that — we’re in the back, doing prep, actually breading them.”

The crews just keep making items until they sell out of them — Kuebbeler said last year’s batch of sauerkraut balls were gone on Saturday night, and Chenetski said his team usually runs out of schnitzels on Sunday.

“They have Polka Floyd playing on Sunday,”  Chenetski said of one of the Festival’s most popular musical acts. “That’s always my reward, because we’re usually done with everything in the later afternoon.”

And Kuebbeler — who, as a member of the dancing Toledo Holzhacker Buam Schuhplattler Gruppe, will also perform at the festival — said she hopes the community will get as much out of the event as she and her fellow volunteers do.

“When this great festival was first organized 46 years ago by our families and friends, it was the intention to share our German heritage through our German dress, German food and dance with the community,” she said. “It is my hope that I can share with the community my passion for my heritage.”

For more information, visit www.gafsociety.org/fest.htm.

Email Jeff at PopGoesJeff@gmail.com.

Tags: German American Festival, Jeff McGinnis, Pop Goes the Culture

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2011 at 10:36 am and is filed under Family Fun, Festivals, Pop Goes the Culture, Star.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

More than 30 percent of Toledo-area residents are of German heritage, according to census figures. This may go a long way toward explaining why Tim Pecsenye is so busy this time of year.

As chairman of the German-American Festival, Pecsenye speaks with a great deal of pride and joy about the event he’s put his heart into — though he admitted in an interview that the stress can take its toll in the weeks leading up to it. When asked what he finds most rewarding about working on the Festival, Pecsenye laughed and simply said, “You should probably ask that question during the off-season.”

Pecsenye

One of Northwest Ohio’s oldest and most prized cultural traditions, the German-American Festival’s 2010 edition will be held on Aug. 27-29 in Oregon. This year, the event celebrates its 45th anniversary with its eternal blend of traditional German cuisine, music and atmosphere.

“It’s the largest ethnic celebration in the Toledo area,” Pecsenye said. “So this gives an opportunity to sort of relive their ethnic background, and eat some great food and have a good time with their friends and their neighbors.”

For Pecsenye, his work on the festival is the culmination of a lifetime of involvement in the German-American community in the Toledo area. After working within the community for more than 35 years, Pecsenye took over as festival chairman in 2007.

“My greatest satisfaction is that we raise enough to keep our Swiss-German Cultural Center out in Oregon going, and that we’re able to attract as many people as we are to the festival, and that we are able to make it a great community asset,” he said.

He has reason to be proud of the attendance. Modest figures show the German-American Fest attracts more than 25,000 people to Oregon. Pecsenye predicts that the actual number will easily exceed that. The event requires more than 2,000 volunteers just to keep it running each year.

The festivities will begin Aug. 27, with the symbolic tapping of the first keg, followed by fireworks, a first for the festival. In celebration of the 45th year, “we’re trying to do something a little special, and fireworks are part of that,” Pecsenye said.

Beer will play a large role in the festival, as always, with more than 20 different varieties of imported brew available to choose from, as well as other types of spirits. A new official event even centers around beer: “Masskrugstemmen,” where contestants hold a one-liter stein of brew at arm’s length. (The U.S. record is 13 minutes, 30 seconds.)

“We had tried that competition informally on the midway the last couple of years,” Pecsenye said. “When people come to a festival, they enjoy doing things other than just sitting around dancing and eating and drinking, they enjoy competitions like that.”

Also on tap for attendees will be a number of entertainment acts, including numerous bands that bring their own traditional German flavor to the festivities. Headlining the event on Sunday will be the returning Polka Floyd, an accordion-based Pink Floyd tribute band.

“The entertainment acts that we book lend themselves to their ethnic authenticity,” Pecsenye said, noting that no bands are from Germany this year. “We pick our bands very carefully so that we are ethnically correct.”

The festival’s other activities include Hummel figurine look-alike contests and face-painting for children, a Swiss stone-throwing contest, numerous amusement park rides, dozens of food choices (from pretzels to sauerkraut balls), soccer matches and more.

Diversity in planning is key to the event’s goal of providing something for everybody. Scheduling attractions to appeal to a wide range of people, Pecsenye said, is crucial for an event which faces as many challenges as the German-American Festival.

“We’re a rain-or-shine festival, but we are also weather dependent, and I guess we’re economy dependent, to some greater or lesser extent. Our lifeblood is to have plenty of people coming here.”

The long hours of preparation come to an end in just a few days. But for now, the chairman works hard to give every person who attends the festival something memorable.

“The one thing we insist on is that we provide excellent value for our customers, because everybody has a spot for their dollars. And we work very hard to maintain our position as the best festival in Toledo.

Tags: German American Festival, Jeff McGinnis, Pop Goes the Culture

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Featured, Festivals, Star.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

The German-American Festival Society is throwing its 44th celebration of German and Swiss culture Aug. 28 through 30 at Oak Shade Grove in Oregon.

The event is rich in history. Festival chair Timothy Pecsenye said by 1966, the Toledo area was home to seven different German and Swiss ethnic societies. In an attempt to establish a sense of unity among the organizations, representatives from each group came together to create Toledo’s first German-American Festival. The success of that initial collaborative venture resulted in a more permanent association of the seven original ethnic societies in the form of the German-American Festival Society (GAF).

Pecsenye said the GAF Society continues its mission of promoting its collective ethnic heritage by offering up the entertainment, Germanic fare and extensive beer and wine collection festivalgoers have come to expect over the years.

The festival continues in its tradition of lively musical performances by showcasing five-piece headliner band Die Sandler, straight out of Steinach, Germany, and homegrown Pink Floyd-inspired, accordion-meets-rock ‘n’ roll group, Polka Floyd. Music will continue live on three stages throughout the weekend.

The festival’s commitment to making each year’s festivities better than the last continues this year with several new offerings. Pecsenye said he is excited to announce that the festival is taking on a fresh look this year with the switch to a new amusement ride operator. A first-ever baking contest is slated for Aug. 29.

Through an exclusive deal with the Build-a-Bear company, event mascot Moritz the raccoon and his sweetheart, Mitzi, will be available for purchase at this year’s festival.

Also of interest to children will be the 18th Annual Hummel Look-Alike Contest for children ages 2 to 10. Roughly a dozen pint-sized entrants will don the attire and strike the pose of a figurine of their choosing. Adults will battle it out in the Swiss Steinstossen stone-throwing contest. Men and women will compete to see how far they can toss 138-pound and 75-pound stones.

Pecsenye emphasizes the dedication of those who make the festival possible each year.

“The festival is a labor of love for our volunteers,” he said.

In an attempt to give something back to those helpers, the festival began offering a German language Sunday morning service for members eager to work but wanting to worship. This year’s worship service begins at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday and is open to the public. Anyone attending the worship service will receive free admission to the festival.

The Toledo German-American Festival’s reach extends beyond the northwest corner of Ohio.

“It’s very much a regional festival,” Pecsenye said. Visitors are expected to arrive from Illinois, Indiana and from as far away as Texas.

The 2009 German-American Festival runs 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. Aug. 28; 2 p.m. to 1 a.m. Aug. 29; and noon to 11 p.m. Aug. 30. For more information, visit  www.German AmericanFestival.net or www.GAF Society.org/fest.htm.

Tags: German American Festival

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Arts and Life, Family Fun.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.