Chamber’s children’s tie dye event exceeded all expectations

In January we began planning our “it’s a birthday party all year long” events. We wanted to pick an event or activity in the summer we could do with the kids, and the ladies in our office convinced me tie dying would be “The Thing”.     Well, I wasn’t entirely convinced, but they seem to really nail it on the head for things people like, so we wrote up our description, put it on the Web sites, and ordered 75 white T-shirts. Seventy five because the women were sure it was going to be a big hit, and I figured, well if we ended up with 30 or 40 T-shirts left over, we could think of something to do with them eventually right? August was forever away: there’d be lots of time to work it out. By the end of last Tuesday we’d had a hundred calls in two days, besides the folks who had the four months before: we were up to a 150 children, along with a few assorted calls from folks with other things: could they bring them down and dye them too? Sure!
On Wednesday the 5th, we started the day thinking we were still ahead of it: we got more T-shirts from Quik Print, and more dye. But by Wednesday evening, I’d be lying to tell you, we weren’t afraid. We were. Peace, love, and how many children do you really think will be here? An aside: three weeks before we’d hoped the Aroostook Republican could be cajoled into joining us with their Customer Appreciation Day in the downtown with us, and Whehua, they’d said yes!
Thursday, the weather held out, and it didn’t rain! And we ended up with well over 400 children doing T-shirts! Four hundred, whew! We made a few more emergency runs to Quik Print, we hauled up all our T-shirts from Arts & Crafts Fair, and we really need to thank: AMHC, FA Peabody, Keiffers for the water (we thank you, the CUD thanks you), our landlord Mr. Kirk St Peter, the Caribou Post Office, Napolis, all the restaurants and grocery stores in town for buckets, bags, Cary for gloves, the good folks at VMS, all our neighbors for putting up with the chaos, before the event, and during! Most especially thank you Joe Bouchard, who stopped in, saw us drowning in children, and stayed to help!
Finally, last but not least, thank you to our very good friends at the Aroostook Republican/ PrintWorks, we hope it worked out well for you, the hot dogs were good, and we hope you got a few good pictures, because we ended up not having a chance to get any!
I hope I’m not missing anyone, and I especially want to thank the Chamber Ladies, and everyone who came by to tie dye with us. You just never know with these things, and we ended up feeling as if we invited everyone to our house, and then had such a big turnout we didn’t really get a chance to visit with all of you. So, we hope you had a good time, we hope your T-shirt turned out well, and we’re sorry we didn’t get to spend more time with you! Many thank-yous to everyone again, wouldn’t it be good to have big crowds in the downtown every day?
Finally, we’ll see you at Presque Isle on Saturday, where we plan to spread some peace, love, confetti and “Happy Birthdays” to our brothers and sisters on their shared 150th Birthday!
Wendy Landes, MPA, is the executive director of the Caribou Chamber of Commerce & Industry. She can be reached in person at 24 Sweden Street, Suite 101; by telephone at 498-6156 or via e-mail at wlandes@cariboumaine.net.