April was a month filled with community events and massive fundraisers as well as its fair share of peculiarities.
Students at Plant City High School brought a cult favorite to life when Troupe 1449 performed Little Shop of Horrors. Little did they know that performance would launch them to further glory as they continued to collect accolade after accolade for their high-quality performances.
Keel Farms drew massive crowds to Keel & Curley Winery for the 12th annual Tampa Bay Blueberry Festival. Families were scattered among the blueberry trees picking buckets of the fresh fruit to take home for their sweet treats. The Plant City Noon Rotary Club hosted its annual Wild Game Cookout fundraiser, which featured mouthwatering food and a massive raffle of outdoor equipment and guns.
For the second year, Praise in the Park was one of the highlights of the month. The relatively new event acts as a day of nonstop worship in downtown Plant City. This year the group partnered with On Common Ground and pulled more than double the crowd than the year before. The annual Railfest was also a massive hit and the community was in for quite a surprise when during the festivities the Robert W. Willaford Railroad Museum announced it was officially opening “The Tower” to the public, which had acted as a glorified storage shed for the museum for years.
Easter is always one of the busiest weekends of the year in Plant City and the Recreation and Parks Department once again went above and beyond in hosting a fun family event the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Nearly 1,000 children and their parents came to Otis M. Andrews Sports Complex for the annual Easter Egg Hunt.
One of the more bizarre happenings of the month was when Walter Doyle rolled into town on his mobility cart. The disabled veteran drove the cart — which only goes approximately 10 miles per hour — from Tampa to Daytona Beach and Plant City Police Department gave him an escort through town.