Down memory lane with Laurel Fest queens

WINSTED — This year’s Winsted Laurel Festival is scheduled for June 10. In addition to the other festivities, past queens are being invited back to take part in the parade and have a seat of honor on the bandstand when the 2018 queen is crowned.

The Laurel Festival was started in 1934 and named for the state flower, the mountain laurel, which grows in abundance around Winsted. The first Laurel Queen was crowned that year, in what was, in those days, a beauty pageant; the competition has since become a scholarship competition.

Festival Commission member Lara Green Kazlauskas has been tracking down past queens and asking them to share photos and memories. The Lakeville Journal will present some of them in the weeks leading up to the 2018 festival.

“So far we’ve been able to locate 14 girls,” Kazlauskas said.  

The earliest-crowned queen that she has found so far is Jessie Harding, the 1959 Laurel Queen.

A more recent Laurel Queen is Donna Soucy, who was crowned in 1983 and shared some newsy updates and old photos. Her sponsor for the competition was Winsted Memorial Hospital.

“I worked in the dietary department from 11th grade into my first couple of years of college,” Soucy said in her note.  The  hospital also won Best Float that year; showing a sense of humor, the hospital staff chose a M*A*S*H theme and wore Korean-war era style military wear.

Soucy knew that she wanted to work in the health care industry but also knew that, “I was too queasy to go to med school. A nurse convinced me to shadow the pharmacists at the hospital and that was it! I loved what they did and immediately transferred to the University of Connecticut and majored in pharmacy.”

Soucy now lives in Maryland and is a global medical information leader at AstraZeneca. She credits her career path to “the wonderful people at WMH, who truly helped shape my future.”

Look for more Laurel Festival queens in future issues of The Lakeville Journal.