Ted Stainbrook is a veteran WaterFire Sharon fire tender. Since the very first event, he’s been on board a boat from dusk until the fires go out, making sure the flames crackle and burn for the revelers on the shores.
Stainbrook, 59, lives in Sharon and works as an orderly at Sharon Regional Health System after “closing three steel mills” in the valley.
A busy fellow active at South Pymatuning Community Church and a regular poker player with a special group of guys at Juniper Village in Sharon, Stainbrook looks at his WaterFire involvement as another way to reach out to the community he loves.
He said he first heard talk of what became WaterFire during brainstorming sessions a few years ago at Penn State. Folks met a few times to talk about what might help improve the quality of life in the Sharon area and things often came back to the Shenango River.
Beautification efforts got underway, but many things seemed like talk and no action to Stainbrook. Then, he heard WaterFire was in the works. Stainbrook went to yet another meeting, where he met organizer Rick and Jen Barborak.
“This could be something worthwhile,” he thought. Stainbrook said he was impressed that people from Providence, RI, where WaterFire began, were supportive of Sharon’s goal and met “some really nice people.”
Even practicing for the WaterFire events has been a lot of fun, Stainbrook said, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing.
“That first night, going down the river seeing that many people in Sharon, it was truly an experience,” Stainbrook said of the 30,000-plus in the audience in summer 2013. And it was particularly exciting to be part of the very first time something so major happened, he said.
Stainbrook said his is not a hard job – “All I have to do is stand there” – and they’ve worked out a system for lighting and stocking the braziers that works well.
And WaterFire works for Sharon. Stainbrook noted the growth in the downtown area in the last couple years, adding that it’s not all because of WaterFire. It’s because people care. They’re cleaning up, opening shops, coming to downtown.
One of the best things about WaterFire, Stainbrook said, is seeing the hundreds of volunteers come together to make it a reality.
