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This story appears in the May 27-June 2 edition of The Centre County Gazette
PHILIPSBURG Pat Romano, owner of the We Are Inn in Philipsburg, has a message for the public: “We are … back!”
Romano sought and was granted permission by the Philipsburg Borough Council to have a fireworks display on July 10. Fireworks are a beloved tradition of Philipsburg’s annual Heritage Days, which was canceled this year because of COVID concerns.
The Heritage Days committee must begin planning the festival months in advance and canceled when mandates and restrictions were still uncertain.
“Once the Heritage Days committee announced they were canceling, we sat back and thought, ‘We gotta do something,’” Romano said.
For the 10th consecutive year, the Centre County community came through with another record-setting effort in support of local nonprofits.
Centre Gives, Centre Foundation’s annual 36-hour online giving event, raised $2,238,995 through 16,624 more than 190 nonprofit organizations between 9 a.m. Tuesday and 9 a.m. Wednesday.
The total eclipses the $2,179,143 raised last year. A record total has been set each year since Centre Gives’ inception in 2012 and during that time the event has raised more than $12.5 million for nonprofits working in the areas of arts, animals, education, environment, health and social services and more.
“We couldn’t imagine any better way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Centre Gives than by continuing our streak and breaking all previous records,” Centre Foundation executive director Molly Kunkel said in a statement. “The organizations who benefit from Centre Gives have had a long and difficult year, dealing with continued pandemic-related
The dining room of Poppy & Co. Café in downtown Philipsburg feels like the set of a TV show: restaurant owner Jenny Horton greets her regulars by name, often with a wink, some friendly teasing, and a hug.
“It’s definitely family-oriented,” Horton says. “We yell at our customers – I think they like that. We give them a hard time, ask them where they’ve been if they haven’t been here for a while. We know everybody by heart. We have everybody’s phone number, just in case they’re not here for a couple of days; we worry about them. We call, we check on them, we take them dinners, we even take them to their doctor’s appointments. I mean, we go a little bit above and beyond for our customers, but they have our back as much as we have theirs.”
COVID-19 dealt a “devastating blow” to Centre County’s tourism and hospitality industry in 2020, with hotels seeing a nearly $50 million drop in revenue from a year earlier and the resulting local hotel occupancy tax falling by $2.7 million, Happy Valley Adventure Bureau President and CEO Fritz Smith said.
But Smith and others are hopeful that they are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel and that optimism was on display Thursday as the Adventure Bureau awarded the second round of 2020 tourism grants to six events and projects planned for 2021.
“It was great to see the Palmer Museum of Art opening yesterday,” Smith said. “It’s great to see the students returning to campus. It’s great that we’ve held a couple of basketball tournaments over the last couple of weeks and that has helped elevate the hotel occupancy in the area. We were almost halfway full in our hotels this past weekend. After a very dismal December and January, it’s great to see some progress in