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APPLE FESTIVAL: Grand marshal set up, kept up, cleaned up for 31 years

'Big John' Rhinehart is the 2015 King Apple Parade grand marshal.

By Emily Stanley, Published: September 3, 2015

For 31 years, "Big John" John Rhinehart “always took care of whatever was the city’s business to make the Apple Festival happen,” including sanitation, water, and electricity.

It's a big job, and has only gotten bigger over the years as the Apple Festival expanded from a small affair covering three blocks to a huge party expanding across the whole of Main Street.
“We had to grow with it,” Rhinehart says. At the festival’s inception, he needed three employees with rolling cans one garbage truck to manage the Public Works job. By 2014, his last festival before retirement, he needed four garbage trucks and 25 employees to manage the sanitation. For his three decades of work — and to pay tribute to the entire city crew that does the work each year — the Apple Festival named Rhinehart grand marshal of the 2015 King Apple Parade.
“When the city got in to the Apple Festival in 1983, and that was my first year doing it, three of us could take care of the whole nine yards, because there was no food court, it only went from Sixth Avenue to Second Avenue," he says. "But then it kept growing.”
Despite the extreme changes he’s seen over the years, Rhinehart insists the Apple Festival retains its original character. “It lets the city people and the farm people really get to meet together in a good location with a great atmosphere.”
“The main job is taking care of the sanitation end, making sure all of the garbage is gone,” which is a task that requires nearly constant effort. “We put out a lot of extra containers, keep them filled with plastic bags, we send a crew through and they check those bags, and when they’re getting full they take them out, tie them up, set them down, and then they put a new liner in so they can fill them up again. And then a tractor usually goes through with a large box and he picks all the bags up and takes them to the garbage truck.” The end of Main Street with the food court gets the messiest. They also sweep the streets each night.
An enormous amount of behind the scenes work goes into maintaining the Apple Festival’s pristine façade. “People when they go, they don’t wanna see a garbage truck, they wanna see the beauties of it.”
“I enjoy the people, I enjoy the work, but it’s a lot of hours. It’s from seven in the morning usually until eleven o’clock at night,” Rhinehart says. Undoubtedly, it is “the biggest weekend of the year” for the city and its stewards.
Just as the festival has grown over the years, so has Rhinehart’s long and prosperous career. He got his start in Hendersonville as a garbage truck driver, and then worked his way up to become the supervisor of grounds maintenance, which included overlooking thirteen parks, city buildings, and the cemetery.
Rhinehart retired in November, and this is the first time he will enjoy the Apple Festival in a lower stress role. “It’ll be different,” he concedes, but he doesn’t know that it will be better. His spirit remains with his fellow public works crewmen.
“When I was talked to three or four months ago about doing this, being the Grand Marshal, I said ‘Okay, that’s fine, and I appreciate the honor, but you can’t leave the City Public Works out," he says. "Because I couldn’t have done none of it if I hadn’t had the rest. And that means you’ve got to have building maintenance people, you’ve got to have street department people, you’ve got to have other sanitation people, and you’ve got to have electricians and the plumbers.”