Nixa will host its 67th SuckerDays this weekend.
A lot has changed since Nixa began hosting the event nearly seven decades ago. What began as a fish fry and party on Main Street has become a festival attended by more than 11,000 people each year.
And if you get there early enough on Saturday, you might still get to try sucker fish.
"We have a small band of volunteers who go out and grab suckers for us every year," said Whitney Guison, president and CEO of the Nixa Chamber of Commerce. "They've been working on that for the last month or so. They grab them and freeze them for us."
She said, because of the large number of visitors, those who are lucky enough to get there in time, get a sample of fried sucker fish. According to Guison, they’ll start serving them at noon on Saturday.
"There's a line that will form. It happens right next to the beer garden," she said, "and those samples go until they're gone, and they go pretty quick. We have a lot of people who line up every year to try these fried sucker fish."
The two-day event on Nixa’s Main Street will be held Friday evening and all day Saturday. There will be live music, carnival rides, food trucks, a beer garden, the SuckerDays parade, arts, crafts, vendors and more.
Guison said her city sees an economic benefit from SuckerDays, but the most important thing about the festival is that it keeps the fast-growing community feeling like a small town.
"Nixa is growing, yes. And the festival is growing, yes. And it's getting bigger," she said. "But when you have things like this that are unique to your town, it's, I think, just important to try and keep it alive and keep that culture going so that...upcoming generations, they have the same memories of eating suckerfish that their parents had."
She said she plans to be part of a roundtable this week that will include people who were involved with the festival years ago, so they get a better idea of the event's history.
