Excerpt from an interview about the beginnings of Festival of the Lake in 1982. Interview conducted by Mills College student Claudia Rivas. Part of an oral history series on Lake Merritt, sponsored by the Oakland Living History Program at Mills College. The complete interview is available at the Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room. For more information on the Oakland Living History Program, contact olhpinfo@mills.edu. ©2002.

Claudia: When did you hear about the idea of creating the Festival of the Lake?

Susanne: I guess the Festival started in ’82. I was working as a volunteer in downtown Oakland, for something called the Sculpture Conference. It came out of Washington DC, and I took on the task of finding locations for sculpture to go up for this very big international conference. I had been an artist for many years, and I worked with artists. So, we found sixty or eighty sites for sculptures. We had a very successful sculpture program. I realized how much I liked working with artists and having a project to make the town better.
The place that I was volunteering was called ProArts in downtown Oakland. It turned out that the people who were trying to start Center Stage, which was the first idea of having an annual arts festival in Oakland, had their offices in ProArts. So I met the people who were involved with planning Center Stage, while I was acting as a volunteer for the Sculpture Conference.
They told me they were looking for someone, but that it was a state position. You had to be interviewed by a board of directors for the State of California because the Festival started out as a State Fair. There was money for it. It was a garden show for fifty years until the nature of the community changed. The Garden Show closed, but the money kept sitting in a bank account not being used. The people putting on Oakland Center Stage decided that it was a great opportunity to take that $125,000, and have it be the opening event for their month long festival.

I was interviewed by the Board of Directors appointed by the Governor and succeeded in being hired for the job. Then I had five months to plan this opening event for Oakland Center Stage, which I named Festival at the Lake.