50 years of oompahpah
After half a century of Gemütlichkeit, Oktoberfest is facing many challenges
WATERLOO REGION — In the late 1960s, a group of local business leaders was casting about for ideas for a festival that would attract visitors to Waterloo Region.
The Kitchener Chamber of Commerce had tried a heritage festival that was well received, but it didn’t bring in many tourists. Then came a winter festival, with snow sculptures and dog sled races, but unpredictable weather took the cool out of that idea.
Owen Lackenbauer, along with Darwin Clay of Budd Automotive and Dick Hermansen, were the trio charged with coming up with a workable idea. In 1968, they walked in to the Concordia Club’s Oktoberfest party, to the tent filled with people dressed in lederhosen and dirndls, enjoying beer, schnitzel and oompahpah music, and knew they had found the answer to their quest.
“The light bulb went off,” Lackenbauer recalls. This was a festival that could draw on local tradition and talent, and had authentic roots here. “We said, ‘This is it! It’s got all the bands, and the German clubs, the costumes and the heritage. It’s something that people would have a real good time at. It’s got legs!’”
Organizers scrambled to pull together a fullfledged festival the next year. They had good ideas and marketing experience, but that first
We said, ‘This is it! It’s got all the bands, and the German clubs, the costumes and the heritage. It’s something that people would have a real good time at. It’s got legs!’ OWEN LACKENBAUER
Oktoberfest was launched on a wing and a prayer, and a budget of less than $4,000, including $2,500 of Clay’s own money.
They enlisted everyone they could think of to pitch in and help, and asked the German clubs to provide expertise. A pal took a photo of Concordia Club manager Julius Rauchfuss hoisting a giant beer stein, and slapped it on a poster. The poster didn’t include the year as no one was thinking the new festival would become a local institution. Lackenbauer, who had experience promoting the Calgary Stampede, sent a busload of German club members and musicians in full tracht — traditional German costume — to Toronto and Hamilton to drum up interest in the fledgling event.
That first festival ran for five days, ending with an interfaith prayer service featuring Cardinal Paul-Emile Leger, one of the most prominent Catholic officials in the country, “so that people could atone for the sins they’d committed over the past four days,” Lackenbauer joked.
The planning and the work paid off. “We knew that first year,” Lackenbauer recalls. “The crowds came. It was an overwhelming success.”
Surpassing all expectations, 69,000 people came, including about 20,000 from out of town. Hotels were full and traffic backed up onto the 401 on the opening weekend. Festival goers quaffed 260,000 litres of beer and chomped their way through 22,000 kilograms of sausage.
“We were overwhelmed,” Lackenbauer said. “All the souvenirs got sold. They had to make extra runs for beer. We hadn’t anticipated that many people.
“We knew we had a tiger by the tail, that this was a successful event that we could run over and over.”
When the keg is tapped on Friday, the community will mark 50 years since that inaugural event. But the celebration is tinged with an awareness that the festival faces many challenges today, with declining attendance and a shrinking German population.
Organizers had several goals in launching Oktoberfest: to showcase the area’s German heritage, its costumes, music, food and traditions; to create a fun event that would get residents out in the community to enjoy themselves; to provide a chance for people to volunteer and work together on a community project; and create something “that would highlight Kitchener-Waterloo and put it on the map,” as Lackenbauer says.
By most measures, Oktoberfest has met those early goals and has had an enormous community impact.
Today, Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest Inc. has a $2-million budget and employs six people full-time, with another four to five seasonal staff.
Dozens of rival Oktoberfests have cropped up in cities across Canada and the United States, but the Kitchener-Waterloo festival is still widely seen as the second largest Bavarian festival in the world, second only to the original festival in Munich, which runs for 16 days and draws about seven million people.
“Probably 10 years ago, it was the only thing people thought of when you mentioned Kitchener Waterloo,” said Minto Schneider, chief executive of Explore Waterloo Region, though today the area’s universities and the tech corridor have also helped increase the area’s profile, she said.
An estimated 700,000 people take part in 40 events, from the five-kilometre fun run to pancake breakfasts and a classic car show.
It’s still hands down the biggest single event in the region, Schneider said. “Having the largest Oktoberfest outside of Bavaria is a pretty interesting thing,” Schneider said.
Oktoberfest injects an estimated $22.2 million into the local economy. “That’s huge,” said Schneider. The next biggest festival in the region is the Kitchener Blues Festival, which attracts 140,000 people and injects $3.5 million into the local economy.
Oktoberfest is also a major boon for not-for-profit organizations, raising about $1.5 million each year through sales of tickets, food and souvenirs. More than one million pounds of food have been collected over the past 20 years at the Oktoberfest parade for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region.
The festival has attracted a huge array of dignitaries, from prime ministers Trudeau (father and son), premiers, hockey great Bobby Orr and comedian John Candy. The Canadian Forces’ Snowbirds acrobatic aviation team buzzed the parade in 1984.
Over the years, Oktoberfest has offered a huge variety of events, from Onkel Hans look-alike contests, baton twirling competitions, German shepherd dog shows, puppetry exhibitions, an operetta and, in 1976, the creation of the world’s longest continuous sausage, at more than 1.6 kilometres. In 1970, 1,000 people came to the festival from Toronto aboard a train hauled by a steam engine. Regrettably, our Oktoberfest has never introduced the dachshund races that have become a hit at some U.S. Bavarian festivals.
Some events have been there from the beginning. The hugely popular Thanksgiving Day parade, billed as the largest single public event in the region, is one of only three parades televised nationally.
The first parade featured two floats, a drum corps from Brampton and a beer wagon from Formosa Brewery. It was held on a Saturday, which didn’t please merchants unhappy at the disruption to business.
The parade also helped shape national safety rules. In 1976, music from a marching band drowned out the warning bells at a level crossing, leading to a nearmiss with a train. That led to a requirement that bands had to stop playing when they crossed railway tracks.
The Miss Oktoberfest pageant has also been a fixture, though it has evolved. It began with a queen chosen from the four German clubs. It soon grew to a larger affair that attracted contestants from the professional beauty contest circuit, often from Florida, California or Texas, who knew little about Waterloo Region.
After years of protests, the pageant changed its format in 2003. The swimsuit segment was scrapped and contestants had to live within 80 kilometres of Kitchener-Waterloo so Miss Oktoberfest could serve as a yearround ambassador.
Beer has also always been a major feature of the festival, which used to offer a special Oktoberfest beer brewed by Formosa, with the Concordia Club’s Rauchfuss — a.k.a. “Mr. Oktoberfest” — on the label.
The festival got a major publicity boost in its second year, 1970, when national media covered a dispute with the provincial liquor licensing board, The board banned Oktoberfest posters, which featured a woman carrying steins of beer and the line, “Canada’s great beer festival.”
Battles with the liquor board continued. In 1975, the keg tapping was ruled illegal and cancelled. In 1976, the event went ahead, but the board wouldn’t allow anyone to taste the beer in public. After the keg tapping at Speaker’s Corner, people emptied their steins onto the ground. “What a waste,’” groaned one observer.
In the 1970s, the festival was a major deal with big sponsors. Air Canada and Canadian Airlines flew German musicians and dancers to the festival. Some hotels were booked as much as two years in advance. When Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau came in 1972, he and his entourage couldn’t find hotel rooms locally, so had to spend the night in Hamilton.
Today, there is mounting evidence that Oktoberfest is struggling.
Most festhallen report a slight, gradual decline in attendance and revenue. The festival doesn’t have precise figures, since its last study on attendance was in 2013, when it clocked in at 700,000. By comparison, the Calgary Stampede usually attracts 1.2 million, Klondike Days in Edmonton drew 816,250 in 2017, and the Quebec Carnival attracts 450,000 and injects $38 million into the local economy.
The number of festhallen has fallen, from a high of two dozen to just nine this year, including one in London. Only two festhallen are open for the full nine days of Oktoberfest. Last year, Bingemans, a founding member of Oktoberfest, pulled out of the festival but still runs parallel events without paying accreditation fees to Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest Inc.
American tourists have dropped off, thanks to the post-9/ 11 requirement for Americans to have a passport to cross the border, and fears about illnesses such as SARS and bird flu. By 2004, the number of Americans at Oktoberfest had decreased by two-thirds compared to 2000.
The festival faces a number of other challenges, says Margo Jones, president of Kitchener Waterloo Oktoberfest.
The German clubs that are the backbone of Oktoberfest have declining membership. While the festival still benefits from the efforts of about 500 volunteers, fewer are able to put in longer stints, such as on year-long committees. “People want to help out for a single event, like the parade,” Jones said.
Social habits are evolving too, she said. Young people often have a drink or two before going out, arrive at festhallen later and spend less time and money than previous generations, Jones says.
“We’re always going to have to deal with change,” she says. This year, for example, the festival’s beer offerings are expanding to include Erdinger, an authentic German beer. Jones thinks the festival, which has a major sponsorship from Molson Coors, will have to find a way to include craft beers at some point.
Some challenges are minor. In recent years, LRT construction limited access to Oktoberfest headquarters, and badly hurt souvenir sales. Fall reading week means thousands of students leave town during Oktoberfest, though the festival now holds an event for students the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
Oktoberfest is pinning its hopes on a big change this year to a central location, at the sprawling, 17-acre Lot 42 site on Ardelt Avenue. “I think it’s a great move,” said Lackenbauer. “Lot 42 might be a renaissance. It’s a venue that is easily recognized, you can see it from the highway, and it can accommodate 5,000 people.”
A new wristband system at Lot 42 will provide organizers with valuable data about visitors that can help shape future strategies, Jones said
While the area has deep German roots, today only about 23 per cent of the population of Kitchener-Waterloo is of German origin, and fewer than 10,000 understand the German language. The festival will have to figure out how to appeal to people of all backgrounds, Jones said.
“We have to make them feel welcome,” she said. “It’s not just for Germans. Come out and be German for a week.”
There are opportunities to build loyalty and attract customers, for example by tapping into the huge numbers of graduates from University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier, Schneider says.
Jones remains optimistic, given the festival’s long history and large impact. “It’s so much more than just a beer festival,” she said. For many people in the community, Oktoberfest is a way to reconnect with old friends and to celebrate before the chill of winter hits, she said.
“I don’t think it’s at risk,” Jones said. “I think there’s enough people in our community that share that same love of Oktoberfest. They won’t let it slip away.”