Sturgis casts shade on MC Week

LACONIA — Normally, the NASWA Resort, the official hotel of Motorcycle Week, would be rocking during the annual rally, but this is no normal year.

Cynthia Makris, whose family owns the business, said that when the event began last weekend, it was “like somebody turned off a switch.”

The hotel had been full prior to the rally.

“We have no tourists, no bikers, we have no one,” she told Gov. Chris Sununu when he stopped by Wednesday evening to cut a birthday cake for the 97th installment of the rally. “We have 50 empty rooms. So everyone was sufficiently scared.”

Sununu said the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota may have contributed to those fears.

That rally, which ended Aug. 16, attracted large numbers of people who were in close proximity to one another and did not wear facial coverings. Now, more than 100 cases of COVID-19 connected to Sturgis have been reported in eight states, including six New Hampshire residents.

“I got to tell you, Sturgis didn’t help,” Sununu told Makris. “It sent the wrong message. The numbers out of Sturgis are really high and they’re going to get higher.”

Sununu, who was wearing a New England Patriots facial covering, walked to the cake-cutting ceremony, pausing briefly below a sign explaining precautions being taken at the resort’s NazBar & Grill bar on the sandy shore of Lake Winnipesaukee:

“All guests: A mask must be worn to and from the restroom. Be seated! No dancing! Per Governor Mandate.”

Makris joked with the governor.

“We were going to put you on a barge,” she said. “We were going to socially distance you. We said, ‘We’ll put him out and then we’ll pull him back in.”

Instead, Sununu, who is up for re-election, spent time visiting with masked guests and employees, at one point shying away from an offered handshake, his hands held high.

Absent from the cake cutting was Charlie St. Clair, executive director of the Laconia Motorcycle Week Association. He went to the Sturgis rally, but stayed in a campground away from the crowded areas. He has taken two COVID-19 tests, which came back negative.

He said Motorcycle Week attendance is down this year.

“But we’ve had a lot of people come up and say they were glad this wasn’t called off,” St. Clair said. “It’s good to have some sense of normalcy even if everything is different. At least they’ve been able to come up to the Lakes Region and ride, see friends and just enjoy themselves. It’s soothing.”

Makris said in an interview Thursday that “the bad press coming out of Sturgis” hurt the Laconia rally. Some of the fear may have been based on a false impression.

“New Hampshire is not Sturgis,” she said. “We have a different governor running our state.”

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said she was eager to greet visitors and businesses from states that have pandemic restrictions. No special limits were placed on indoor crowds and no mask mandates were set in South Dakota.

Sununu, on the other hand, has approved a series of precautions in New Hampshire, including some mask, social distancing and capacity-reduction requirements.

Something many governors are concerned about is the labor market, which has been disrupted in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

The NASWA has 80 openings on its staff. It relies on international worker visa programs that have been closed by a presidential executive order.

“That was devastating,” Makris said. “This is the first year since 1957 when we’ve not been able to open the inside restaurant. That’s because of a lack of employees.

”We’ve had to re-invent ourselves like everybody around the country.”

The menu at the bar and grill was expanded. Chefs and waitstaff were brought in from Florida and went to work after 14-days of quarantine and a COVID-19 test.

Many of the resort’s planned Motorcycle Week events such as the NazKini Bikini Contest and a tattoo contest were canceled.

“It would be hard to keep people seated at the bar stools at tables and socially distanced,” Makris said. “It didn’t feel like the right thing to do this year.”

One thing that did go on as planned was the motorcycle run named for her late father, Peter Makris, who operated the resort along with his wife, Hope, who is now 95 years old and continues to work. The 14th annual ride raised $32,000 for charities in addition to the $435,000 it has raised in previous years.

Sununu said hello to Hope Makris through a window at the family’s house. When he left, he had one of Hope’s banana rum fudge cheesecakes.