He’s the co-founder of Boom Days, an event that celebrates the annual removal of the ice boom from Lake Erie around about this time every year. Because that’s an imprecise date on any given year—it’s April 13-15 this year—the festival can be a little hard to plan. But when it gets here, it’s time to celebrate the passage of another winter and welcome spring.

Artvoice recently asked Smith how Boom Days came about and what festival-go-ers can expect from this year’s event.

AV: How did you get involved with Boom Days?

Rick Smith: I came up with the idea for Boom Days while running over the Skyway every day to work and looking out on winter, watching the boom hold back the ice. Clint Brown said, “We should have a festival to celebrate this thing’s removal.” So we started Boom Days not only to thank winter for being so strong—because that’s what makes Buffalonians so cool—but also we wanted to welcome spring. We wanted to get a festival going that was uniquely ours, with our geography and our culture, which is created by our strong winters. We’ve got a lot of great artists and songwriters—and a great lot of things on the cultural side.

AV: Why should people come out to Boom Days?

RS: Everyone should come out to Boom Days because it’s a great celebration. We’ve got great fireworks, great music. Just Buffalo Literary Center runs a poetry slam. This year we’ve gone to a passport thing where we go from lake [Erie] to lake [Ontario], starting at Charlie O’Brien’s and we go all the way to Old Fort Niagara. So there’s a lot of spots to stop by. It’s a blast. It’s beer, poetry and music. Lots of fun for the whole family.

AV: What would you like to see happen to the waterfront?

RS: Ideally for the waterfront to really work it has to be like Chippewa or Allentown. It works one [thing] at a time. Ideally it would become accessible. And to be accessible there are several things on the docket, but I think the best thing is to build back the bridge to the Outer Harbor. Then hopefully it’ll go—once you give people access. And that’s one of the things Boom Days is all about: reminding people that we live in a great waterfront town.

AV: How many people do you expect to attend?

RS: We usually get four to five hundred people. This year we’ve got 97 Rock as a sponsor and we’ve got a lot more advertising, so we’re hoping to get about a thousand passports out there and having everybody going and stamping their passport at all of our port locations.

AV: Where would you like to see Boom Days in the next five years?

RS: I would hope it would be a regional holiday where everybody gets the first Friday of every April off, celebrated on both sides of the border and throughout the region. And have everybody shake off a little bit of winter and thank spring for comin’ around.

You can learn more about Boom Days by visiting www.BoomDays.com. Passports can be obtained at Wegman’s or any of the port locations or the “main anchors”—the CPO Club, LaSalle Yacht Club or Youngstown Yacht Club.