TRAVERSE CITY - The National Cherry Festival’s first century is getting the documentary treatment, and the filmmaker behind it has been building the story for 12 years.
Cat Muncey said the idea took root when her team first began doing marketing work for the festival.
“Back when we first started working with them, I said, hey, you’re going to turn 100 in a few years. We got to do a documentary about your history,” Muncey said. “It seemed like an important piece of work to do for them.”
The film is part of the slate of special programming marking the festival’s 100th year.
Muncey said the finished product “isn’t like a typical History Channel documentary where it’s like, in 1925 this happened, 1926 that happened.” Instead, big historical moments are interspersed with the stories of farmers, festival organizers, volunteers and cherry industry leaders.
“It’s really paralleling the lives of all of these different people and showing how much common ground they really have,” she said.
Some of those stories came straight from the archives.
“We uncovered a lot of things sifting through documents in that Cherry Festival basement,” Muncey said.
Among them: “There’s a huge history of cherry queens giving pies to presidents.” The visits to Presidents Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge are well known, Muncey said, but fewer people know about Cindy Weber, the 1987 National Cherry Queen, who went to meet President Reagan. He was tied up meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, so she met with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush instead, and the two kept in touch afterward.
“She sent him a thank you letter, and he wrote her back,” Muncey said. “There’s darling little things like that that have happened.”
Then there’s the pie eating contest. “Everyone knows it to be eating one slice,” Muncey said. “But when it started in the ’60s, you had to eat the whole pie. It wasn’t until the ’80s that they moved it to one slice.”
For all the quirky history, Muncey said the film doesn’t shy away from hard years, “a lot of highs and a lot of lows,” including crop losses, uncertainty over who will take over family farms, and the years the festival shut down entirely, during World War II and again in 2020.
“There’s a lot of laughable moments in this. It’s very comedic, but then also really moving,” she said. “You see the losses that farmers go through and the real trials and tribulations that they and the festival go through.”
The documentary also traces how cherries earned their reputation as a health food, one Muncey said helps with recovery, inflammation, joint pain and sleep. She credits Ray Pleva, a butcher in Cedar, who began blending cherries into burgers and sausage and noticed the cherry-blended meat stayed shelf-stable about twice as long. He took his findings to Michigan State University and pushed researchers to study the fruit.
“He’s the one that got them to start dissecting the cherry and finding out they have all these antioxidant benefits,” Muncey said, calling Pleva the man who “really got the focus on cherries as being the thing that’s really, really good for athletes.”
With cherry flavors trending nationally, Muncey said the celebration should always come back to the growers.
“It’s fun that cherries are having a moment,” she said. “But I think we really have to give a lot of the credit to the farmers. They plant these trees and they don’t make any money for seven years. You can’t start harvesting a cherry tree for seven years.”
Muncey, a Detroit native who has lived in the area for 14 years, said her favorite festival memories come from the kids events, including the diaper derby, toddler trot and kids pet show.
After 12 years immersed in cherry history, Muncey said the project changed her own habits.
“Making this documentary, I learned so much about cherries. I now eat them every single day,” she said. “And I would encourage everyone else to eat them every day.”