Hundreds Get Wet and Wild at Popular Rochester Hills Museum Event

The purpose of the event this town calls "Wet and Wild Wednesdays"  is clean family fun, said Pat McKay.  

The director of the said any educational lessons the hundreds of children take from the experience would be "icing on the cake."

McKay guessed between 800 and 1,200 people attended Wednesday's event. The crowd was nearly all parents with children under age 10.

The main attractions were a show by family entertainer Joel Tacey, wading in the creeks of the Stony Creek*, two makeshift water slides and a giant shower powered by a Rochester Hills fire truck.

Krista Dowd of Lake Orion sat in the shade with her two children, 5-year-old Marissa and 10-year-old Conor, who collected buckets full of crayfish from the nearby creek.

Krista grew up in the Rochester area and said she loves coming out to the weekly Wednesday event for the cheap ($2) admission and the water slides.

"See," Conor Dowd said, holding a bucket of murkey water with finger-length crayfish. "They're huge!"

Dowd caught his crayfish by stranding on rocks in the water and scooping the creatures into a net. Nearby, representatives from the Clinton River Watershed Council set up information booths to teach children about the river environment.

"We show [children] bugs we find here and teach them how to keep the river clean," said watershed council field assistant Jason Davis. 

Wednesday's event was the first of four Wet and Wild Wednesdays in July. All proceeds from the $2 admission fee go toward funding the museum, McKay said. 

With neighboring Troy no longer funding its Historical Village, McKay said he is glad he has the support of numerous volunteers and sponsorships from businesses to keep educational and entertainment-oriented programs in Rochester.

"Some people here just see the value of contributing to the community," he said of local residents. "We are not afraid to pay to put on great family entertainment."

* An earlier version of the story indicated the water that borders the museum was the Clinton River. It is actually the west branch of the Stony Creek, which is a tributary of the river.