In fact, so many activities are planned for Saturday, some were left off the already printed schedules due to last minute signups for participation.
Festival Coordinator Jacque Pregont, during her appearance on this week's Amelia Fest Wednesday with the 93.7 FM Morning Petting Zoo, said the addition of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in 2023 has allowed for such scheduling. "I feel like we're really even more coming into our own because I've had people calling and saying, we have this. Can we can we come and be a part of the festival? Before we had the museum, I wouldn't have anywhere to put them. We're pretty much full downtown.
We fill everything all the way out to Memorial Hall, down Commercial Street. We don't wanna put too much on the riverfront because we have to have room for people. We have the museum, and we have outside space there. And that's two great days for us out at the museum, very busy days. And so to have more for people to see and do out there is fabulous.
There's a corporation that has been set up a not for profit in Wichita called the Bleckley Foundation. And Bleckley was in the Air Force, I believe. He flew a plane. His fiancee, when he left for war, had been a roommate of Amelia Earhart's. So that's kind of the tie in.
He did not come home from the war. But they formed this not for profit, and they're refurbishing the plane like he would have flown and trying to honor him. He's — I think he's the only soldier that received high honors from Wichita, and so they're making this big deal out of it, which it sounds really cool. Yeah. And they've put together a little pull-down trailer thing with all this exhibit and all that, and they wanna come and I said absolutely — it's so cool because we're all about Amelia but we're also all about flight — and then the girl who is in Tulsa is the Air Force education director for our region of the country. And she said, I came up and did girls in aviation day at your museum and just had a blast.
Can I come to the festival? And I said, sure. Come on. So she'll have fun stuff for the kids to do too, just like the Bleckleys will as well. They have a lot of interactive things — they'll have things for kids to do.
That's just added to what we've got at the museum, which I think is so exciting. We're getting more and more reasons for people to be here."
For the full lineup of festival events, you can go here.
