The Bowlegs Festival starts this weekend? How did that happen? Seems I just got the Christmas stuff put away. I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone by. Next thing you know we’ll be in our new building and I won’t know it’s fall because I can’t hear the Choctaw Band practicing.

When I was a kid, just after the earth’s mantle cooled, I’d attend the Bowlegs landing and hit up as many of the pre-landing festivities as Mom was willing to drive me to. Things were a lot different back then, to say the least.

See a photo gallery of Billy Bowlegs from the past.

A big draw was the Bowlegs water-ski show that would be held in Cinco Bayou near the bridge. We would line the shoreline, where Scully’s sits now, and watch the daring skiers launch themselves from ramps. That’s it. Ramps.

After the ski show they’d launch fireworks. These were not the elaborate mortars you see at modern fireworks shows. It was a bunch of guys who I always suspected had been drinking beer launching plain-old oversized bottle rockets into the air. We loved it.

They’d have a parade. A beauty queen would ride in the back seat of a Ford Fairlane convertible (hey, my sister Sandie placed third in the Bowlegs beauty contest) and they’d throw candy, which we’d fight over, as if we’d never seen a paper-wrapped piece of taffy.

Landings were the best. We’d gather down at The Spendrift, a restaurant/lounge that sat on Santa Rosa Sound across the street from the present location of Captain D’s in Fort Walton Beach. As the Blackhawk approached from Brook’s Bridge a makeshift “fort” built in the middle of the sound would be dynamited. Then, as the pirates approached, they would hurl bombs into the water which would explode and shower us with saltwater.

These days even water balloons are frowned on, though drunken fights on the fleet speedboats anchored in Santa Rosa Sound routinely make it to YouTube. And I enjoy looking through the arrest mugshots for BUIs the day after Bowlegs.

Bowlegs is bigger now and maybe a lot slicker, but the old Bowlegs fest had something you don’t see very often these days: charm.