BY STEVE DUNKELBERGER for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 8/21/2026
Lakewood turned 30 this year, which feels impossible until you’re standing in the middle of Fort Steilacoom Park during SummerFEST, watching a tethered hot-air balloon rise 100 feet into the air while a kid asks his mom if that’s “tall enough to see Canada.”
That’s when it hits you: Lakewood is 30, and I am old. Walter Neary and I were running the Lakewood Journal back in those days. We had cameras with film. We had an official AOL email account: Journ@aol.com, get it? It was a simpler time, and it was frankly an honor to watch the city get birthed.
No other city would mark a milestone birthday with fire dancers, a circus, and a car show that smells like chrome, sunscreen, smoked meat, and Bengay. SummerFEST has always been Lakewood’s annual reminder that the city is more interesting than its long-outlived “Little Town of Meth-la-hem” reputation suggests, but this year, it felt like Lakewood was just showing off, politely, because this is still Lakewood.
Every single patch of Fort Steilacoom Park’s 300 acres was doing its part. If it wasn’t used for food trucks that were so diverse you would think you needed a passport to experience them, the land was used for classic-car parking, face painters, informational booths, displays, games, toys, vendor booths or attendee parking.
Music drifted from the stages in genres that refused to match, and families zigzagged between booths with ice cream in hand as if the laws of physics didn’t apply to dripping milk products from the Messiah himself. The car show, classic, custom, and lovingly loud, was the most Lakewood thing imaginable. You haven’t lived here long enough until you’ve watched someone explain the emotional significance of a 1968 Camaro to a stranger who only asked where the kettle corn was.
For a city turning 30, Lakewood didn’t bother with pomp. Much. It has elected officials, after all. But at least they learned the lesson that less is more. Obviously from its official ceremony last February, when a gaggle of us old guard folks received our official Lakewood challenge coins. IYKYK, LOL. (That’s me being pithy and a bit snarky, BTW.)
If you stayed long enough, you saw the real Lakewood: families who’ve been coming to SummerFEST since the city was barely old enough to vote; newcomers who wandered in expecting a small neighborhood event and instead found a full-scale cultural circus; teenagers pretending they were too cool to enjoy anything and then absolutely losing it over the balloon animals.
Lakewood at 30 is still figuring itself out, but SummerFEST makes one thing clear: the city knows how to gather people. It has come a long way from its start in two lanes of the parking lot of what is now the Lakewood Towne Center. And even then there was enough space to go full-on Julie Andrews, singing “The Hills are Alive,” without bumping into another person.
Walking out of the park at dusk, with the last notes of live music fading and the balloon grounded for the night, I felt that it was both a lifetime ago when I was fighting for cityhood and just yesterday.
I just spent 17 minutes writing this, so I hope you enjoyed it. I now have to soak my feet.
