Lemonade peddlers line Front Street

While lemonade – organic, strawberry, cherry, pink and blue – was definitely for sale Saturday, it was far from the only thing eager Wrangell children were selling at stands on the borough's main street. Other items sold ranged from handmade lumpia to horchata, cupcakes, Wrangell garnets, cookies, popcorn and cotton candy. Enough lemonade and food was available for sale to please the palate or overwhelm the stomach of the unwary consumer.

In addition to selling items beyond lemonade, would-be child tycoons and their enthusiastic parents employed a range of sophisticated marketing strategies to distinguish their stands from others a few blocks down. A particularly cunning example was William Massin's "Prince William's Royal Lemonade," a stand strategically positioned to coincide thematically with nearby Fourth of July Queen food booths.

William, a first-grade student, relocated to the central area after failing to meet sales forecasts the previous year.

"Last year we did tee ball and it didn't go very well, so this year we did the street," he said.

Business this year was good, William said. He was raising money both for his college fund and for the parents of a local infant facing a heart transplant.

Charity played a big role in a lot of the stands, and many proprietors said they had taken advantage of a borough-managed and First-Bank-funded program to provide start-up loans for materials.

Setups ranged from bare-bones tables with a printed or hand-painted sign to more elaborate setups, like Clara Waddington's brightly colored "Easy-Peasy Lemon Squeezy" stand in front of the Stikine Inn.

"My dad did most of it," Clara said. "My mom did all of this." She pointed at the cupcakes and juices available for sale.

All of the sale revenues were for Liam Blake, an infant recovering from a heart transplant, while a separate cup was for tips.

"That's for me," she said.

While being interviewed, a customer came up and ordered two glasses of lemonade and two cupcakes, creating an applied math problem.

"That's two dollars and that's four dollars," she said.

"What's four plus two?" asked mom Cyni Waddington, prompting Clara to do some math on her fingers.

In the end, the customer paid with a ten-dollar bill, telling Clara to keep the change, and the answer to the math problem was immaterial. Business was steady, Clara said.

"A lot of people come here," she said.

Renée and Jack Roberts sold organic lemonade and homemade caramel corn outside Ottesen's hardware store, a location chosen to maximize foot traffic and guard against precipitation, which has been a guest at three consecutive lemonade days.

"We have a roof over us, and lots of people come here," Renée said.

Eighth grader Caity Galla and seventh-grader Tasha Massin drew inspiration for their stand – "Aloha! Hawaiian Drinks" – from Caity's recent trip to Hawaii. In addition to a variety of blended fruit juices, they sold Rice Krispy squares and carved wooden orcas outside Jerry's Arcade, owned by Tasha's uncle.

Over the years, Tasha's father has sold wood carvings. Lemonade Day offered a chance to get them back on the stands.

"My dad started doing wood carvings a long time ago and we just came back to it," she said.

For sixth grader Jade Balansag and fifth grader Samantha Acuña, who did some heavy business at the "JSLS Lemonade Stand" outside Sentry Market, lemonade was a distant second to handmade lumpia. They sold out of the regular pork lumpia by about 1 p.m., leaving the less-popular (but not less delicious) Spam-and-cheese variety as well as fried rice, chocolate chip cookies, guava juice, and, of course, lemonade.

"It's fun and I guess it's good to practice business," Jade said. "It's good to practice having your own business and stuff."

The grocery store was an ideal location for business, though JSLS was more likely to draw a purchase on the second look, according to Jade.

"Yeah, because people go in and then afterwards they come out and get some of our stuff," she said. "At first it was a disappointment when I saw them just look at our stand and go in, but they come back out and buy stuff from us."

"One, my mom told me that we should be here. Two, we have cover, and a lot of people come into the grocery store, especially since it's Saturday," Jade added.

Like many other participants, they took advantage of the loan program. Ten percent of their almost $300 in sales is going to the Peter Rooney Fund, an anti-leukemia organization set up to honor the memory of Peter Rooney, 9, who succumbed to the blood disease a day shy of his tenth birthday in 1995. An additional $25 will go to repay half of the original $50-loan, according to the terms of the program.

While leukemia mixed with lemonade might be something of a downer, it also created the opportunity for a unique symmetry, Jade said.

"Our first customer was Peter Rooney's mom," she said.