By the late 1990s, Rick Bryant had been selling insurance on South Allen Street for nearly half his life.
Then it hit him: “I hated selling insurance.”
He had followed his larger-than-life father into the field after finishing a bachelor’s in architectural history at the University of Virginia. Joining the family business felt worth a shot. But nearly two decades later, “I was a square peg in a round hole”—a temperamental mismatch for the world of liability coverage and deductibles.
So Bryant sold the State College agency, plunging into the uncertain while just barely into his 40s. He had nothing lined up.
“When I was 41, I wasn’t going to get a Corvette. I certainly wasn’t going to date a younger woman,” recalls Bryant, pausing over his ginger ale on a recent Saturday at Chumley’s. “Selling the agency seemed like the thing to do.”
The move proved fateful: Less than a year after the business sold in 1998, a full-time job opened at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. Bryant had volunteered with the festival for years, at first on the trash crew.
Named the visual arts director in 1999 and executive director in 2005, he became the public face of the summertime festival and its year-end sister event, First Night State College. His pending retirement from the top job, announced this fall, will cap a tenure of relationship-building, attention to detail and steady innovations that have delighted generations, friends and supporters say.
“I think what Rick saw in the festival was that opportunity to take it to the next level,” says Meg Wheeler, a longtime confidante and former festival volunteer. Bryant believed he could leverage his longstanding relationships in the community to the festival’s benefit—and “I think he was right,” she says.
Raised in the Centre Region, Bryant, now 65, poured himself into recruiting board members and deepening bonds with artists, volunteers and other festival coworkers. Those ties came in handy during his first year as boss, when a tow truck backed up and broke his left ankle while he was clearing parked cars.
He tried to time ankle surgery so he could make the festival in person. Still, recovery sidelined him for most of that event, forcing him to work remotely.
“Rick micromanaged over the phone quite well,” festival volunteer Phil Spangler says, laughing.
Bryant felt well enough to call and chide a WTAJ-TV producer for the station’s use of “fest” to identify the event on the air. For the son of a grammarian—his mother insisted on proper language—the abbreviation agitates.
“People get to pick what their name is. And that’s not our name,” Bryant says, reprising a favorite catchphrase: “It’s Richard. Don’t call me Dick.”
That ready mix of wit, precision and propriety weaves through his leadership. Known for graceful thank-you notes and lively blog posts, he is an often-unidentified writer behind the festival website, program guide and other materials.
His grant writing helped diversify the nonprofit organization’s funding, says festival supporter Susan Sanders, who is married to Phil Spangler. (The close friends took Bryant in after his ankle accident.)
“Nobody is going to see him writing grants, but he reached out to different places for help that keeps the festival alive,” Sanders says.
An estimated 125,000-or-so people attend the State College festival over five days in July, a town-and-campus celebration that incorporates a sidewalk sale, live performances and a slew of other creative attractions. Making those offerings appeal to a wide range of tastes marks another of Bryant’s consistent priorities.
“That keeps the festival popular, but he isn’t afraid to push the envelope a little bit and expose festival-goers to something a little more cutting-edge,” Sanders says. “I think that’s been a huge contribution.”
Not that he can’t whiff. One year, the festival booked the Povertyneck Hillbillies, a Pittsburgh-area country band. Organizers alerted the State College police to plan for more people than usual at Memorial Field.
Bryant, a country fan, wanted and expected a crowd.
But “people did not come out of the woodwork wearing their cowboy hats, driving their F-150s to come to the festival,” he says. “We don’t do that so much anymore. We sure gave it the good old college try.”
The experiment jibed with his vision “to reemphasize the goal of the audience in the festival,” he explains. “It belongs to everybody.”
Food helps. An ice-cream giveaway last summer burned through its first six gallons in just 20 minutes, Bryant says. And a new food-truck court behind Memorial Field—including one truck “the size of an aircraft carrier”—turned into a draw, too. That was his idea.
“Food trucks are sexy, you know?” Bryant says.
Beyond the one-liners—and he does crack himself up—his quiet kindness, generosity and lack of ego might be less visible, friends confide. As Sanders puts it: “He may be the festival’s face, but not in a way that detracts from the show itself.”
“He would never tell somebody to do something and not do it first himself,” Spangler says. Two generations of the Spangler-Sanders family have volunteered alongside Bryant to help set up the festival and First Night, carting equipment, props and other essentials from a storage unit in Ferguson Township.
“The logistics of it are mind-blowing. He’s one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met,” Wheeler says. Bryant’s focus on detail lets visitors “walk through the festival and think it all happens magically. The effort is not necessarily evident. That’s the point—so people can be there in the experience.”
In his own telling, Bryant’s festival vision was “about more, more, more.” Unlike insurance, the festival “is an experience; it’s a feeling.” His work filled a personal void, moving him to seek the best artists, foster a broader audience and cultivate joy.
Pressed on his success rate, he is self-effacing. “You never really think it’s enough,” he says.
So why retire? He sees a window to afford himself some time. He’s already lived longer than his father and one of his siblings did. As he watches health problems crop up among his peers, “I want to do something with my life other than go to work—and now’s the time to do it.”
As of this writing, the festival was looking for his successor. Bryant plans to step down by late January and remain in State College, although he wants to travel more.
At Chumley’s, he described his loyalty to the community as “to the people more than any institution.”
“It’s the people that make the difference,” he says. They are his family—people like Spangler and Sanders, his church pastor and Ellen Braun, the longtime Chumley’s manager.
He turns to her. Would she agree: He’s not very good at love, but pretty good at friendship?
“Rick,” Braun tells him, “you’re one of the best friends I’ve ever known.” T&G
Adam Smeltz is a reporter in Pittsburgh. A former volunteer for the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, he has traded off-color jokes with Rick Bryant for more years than he can count. This story appears in the December 2022 issue of Town&Gown.
