The stars are aligning for a bang-up Bronson Day celebration Saturday.
The weather forecast is for sunny skies and mid-80 temperatures, and the Bronson Ruritan Club has scheduled what President Dave Mathewson thinks is the most inclusive and varied event in its 44th year. Virtually all of the club’s 22 members — 10 percent of Bronson’s 223 residents — will be busy from shortly after daybreak until well after dark.
A couple of highlights:
— The parade will start at 11 a.m., with Joyce and David Wilkins as grand marshals. A float will carry veterans, and the procession also will have music, tractors, cars, motorcycles and bikes.
— Horseshoe pitching — Mathewson’s baby — will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with cash and Kansas State Horseshoe Pitching badges as prizes.
The sport is an integral part of Bronson’s history. The first ever world pitching championships were in Bronson, with Blue Mound’s Frank Jackson winning his first of 13 titles in the 1909 gathering.
Humboldt’s Neil Hartwig, 91, and a lifetime participant in the sport, is also expected to send shoes flying on Saturday.
Other activities include turtle races, a tractor pull and cake walks, with the Jason Kenny Band playing a two-hour set starting at 8 p.m. at Bronson Pourhouse, formerly the Chicken Shack.
MATHEWSON is most proud of Bronson’s six new horsehoe courts that opened in April 2015.
A resident of Gas today, Mathewson, 78, was born in Plymouth, N.Y. His interest in pitching came from his dad, a steelworker, who reached for his pitching shoes almost the minute he got home from work each evening. Mathewson today is regarded as a historian of the sport, and particularly of it origins in Kansas and Jackson’s run of success.
“I joined the Air Force at 17, because I was tired of people telling me what to do,” without concession to the irony.
He moved through the ranks and was a first sergeant when his tour in Vietnam neared its end. He organized a “beat the first sergeant” horseshoe pitching match, with losers obligated to forfeit beer rations. “I had 17 cases piled up when I left,” he said.
He met and married wife Beth in Alaska 39 years ago. They have lived in Gas since 1984.
