By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
One celebration in Great Bend will start an hour later Friday evening. The Great Bend High School volleyball teams will open the evening with scrimmages inside the GBHS gymnasium at 5 p.m. The Panther football team and Great Bend Rec have moved back their event times due to the extreme heat.
"We're going to push the start of the Jamboree from 6 to 7 p.m. just to give us a little bit of a break from the heat," said GBHS Activities Director Matt Westerhaus. "The sun starts to set a little bit and it will cool down."
The Great Bend Rec is celebrating its 75th anniversary in the community. They have partnered with the Panther Booster Club and Eldridge Fencing for several activities at the high school's Memorial Stadium from 6-8 p.m. Agility activities will be offered for kids with prizes at the end. Mike and Ice will be giving out free snow cones, and the Rec is sponsoring a pulled pork dinner. Proceeds from the meal and a raffle will benefit GBHS Athletics. Eldridge Fencing has donated a Traeger Ranger, perfect for tailgating, for the raffle. A Meet the Panthers event is scheduled for 6:30 p.m.
Friday's event is just the start of the Great Bend Rec's celebration. The Fall Activity Guides will begin hitting mailboxes on Sept. 11. Enrichment and Marketing Director Megan Hammeke said it will be a special yearbook-style edition.
"We have been digging and having quite the fun," she said. "We found some photos back from like 1964, the 1980s. They were still on slides. We had to put them in the projector. Luckily, Riggs took a stack of them for me and flipped them in a week."
The Great Bend Chamber of Commerce will host an anniversary ribbon cutting at the Rec on Sept. 14 to coincide with the painting of the auditorium.