HIGH PROFILE: Riverfest Executive Director DeAnna Jo Harless Korte

All her life, Korte had been a shrinking violet. She blossomed when she got involved in putting on Little Rock’s annual kickoff party to summer.

“It’s like summer camp, only with hard labor,” Riverfest Executive Director DeAnna Korte says of the three-day music and fun festival.
“It’s like summer camp, only with hard labor,” Riverfest Executive Director DeAnna Korte says of the three-day music and fun festival.

In mid-April, the view of Little Rock's Riverfront Park from DeAnna Korte's office was like a widescreen daydream -- green, pristine, with just a sprinkling of people taking leisurely lunchtime strolls. The amphitheater, in its dormant state, somehow seemed to amplify the ambient quiet.

photo

“People gravitate to her. I think they always would have, she just didn’t have the opportunity to show that side of herself,” Kelly Hague says of her sister, DeAnna Korte.

Korte, Riverfest's executive director, loves that view. She knows that park like it's her own backyard. During the spring, it practically is.

SELF PORTRAIT

DeAnna Korte

Date and place of birth: Sept. 9, 1963; Oklahoma City

Family: Husband Joey Korte; son Ryan Shannon and daughter-in-law Taryn; son Kyle Shannon; and granddaughter Vivian

My favorite kind of music is all music, but if I have to choose what I most listened to … would be country.

I like to wear heels.

If I were reincarnated, I would be one of my dogs. They have a great life.

My favorite carnival food is funnel cakes.

My harmless vice: shoe shopping

Growing up I wanted to be a mom and a teacher.

I’m most comfortable with people who are down to earth.

Famous person I’d like to meet: Ellen DeGeneres

I hope I never have to live far away from my boys.

One word to sum me up: determined

"Sunday morning, I was pulling out of my driveway and I was looking at my flowerbed, and I was thinking, 'see you in June,'" she says. More and more over the next seven weeks, the office and the park would be her home away from home.

That was six and a half weeks ago. On Friday, the gates will open on the 39th annual Riverfest. Nearly a quarter-million people will fill the park and the surrounding River Market District to eat, drink, play games, enjoy rides and revel to music bellowing from the amphitheater and a second stage by a plethora of artists. The weekend crescendos to Sunday night's eye-popping, ear-pounding fireworks show.

As it has been for the past 12 Riverfests, the park's metamorphosis from urban oasis to Party Central will be Korte's doing -- her and her crew of over 3,000 volunteers.

Korte's gaze turns back into the office. To most people, Riverfest is something that surfaces every year for three days and disappears again. They don't realize that it takes the other 362 days of the year to make the three-day festival happen.

Planning starts the summer before. Then Korte starts lining up vendors and craftspeople while working with a booking agency to sign entertainers. She'll raise funds -- this year's tally was $1.3 million in cash and in-kind donations. She'll work with suppliers, a production company, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department. She'll coordinate with the city's police, fire, waste management and parks and recreation departments. As intended, she'll field the concerns and needs of River Market District businesses and residents.

The pace starts to build in January. By spring, preparations are at full speed. The final 10 days are a flat-out, 24/7 sprint -- setting up the stages and tents and wiring, the portable toilets and the fencing. They'll essentially build a village that is interwoven into an existing city, one that is functional and flows and is simultaneously secure and accessible.

And then she'll pray it doesn't rain.

LIFE PLUS A SEQUEL

Twenty years ago, Korte would have been hesitant to take on any of those tasks, much less all of them.

"If you told me then I'd be sitting in this chair now, I'd have never believed it," she says. There are still times she'll be meeting with a bank president or giving an interview, and she'll think, "Wow, is this really me?"

She's not the person she was when she came to Riverfest 19 years ago, or maybe she was the person she is now and just didn't know it.

People often look back at their lives as a series of chapters. Korte's biography is more of a two-volume set: before Riverfest and since Riverfest.

Volume I opens in Oklahoma City, where the former DeAnna Harless had what she describes as "an Ozzie and Harriet upbringing." Her dad, Manuel "Joe" Harless, worked; her mom, Avis "Lou" Harless, stayed at home. Mom would have Dad's cocktail ready when he hit the door and dinner on the table at 5:15.

"Growing up, I was, and probably still am at heart -- I'm super shy," Korte says. "I had my little group of friends, but I never expanded out and did much because I was terrified of talking in front of people."

Korte's sister, Kelly Hague of Edmond, Okla., says she thinks DeAnna's shyness was really a display of confidence. At school, Korte was a wallflower, Hague says, but within the comfort zone of her church community, she made friends easily.

After high school, Korte ventured off to college but quit to marry her boyfriend. He was Korte's first serious boyfriend.

Korte recalls how her mother tried to talk her out it, tried to impress upon her how much living and growing a person can do between 20 and 30. However, the 19-year-old in the throes of romance would not heed her mother's advice.

The plan was for her to get a job and put her husband through school. Four months after the wedding, Korte was pregnant with her first son, Ryan.

"The first day I took Ryan to day care, he cried," she says. She decided that day she'd have to be a stay-home mom for a while. Some of their friends were having kids, too. Soon, she was taking care of them during the day along with Ryan.

About the time Ryan was old enough to start school, her second son, Kyle, came along.

"It's weird, it isn't what I had planned, and then all of a sudden that became my life for 12 years," Korte says. Not that she's complaining. "I just loved being a mom. I loved being there for them."

In 1993, her then-husband got a new job and moved the family to Little Rock.

"I didn't know a soul, and I'm still super-shy," Korte recalls. "I decided the best way to meet people would be to get involved at my children's school."

At Our Lady of the Holy Souls Catholic Church, she found a new comfort zone. She made friends and joined committees.

"That was the start of something coming out in me that I didn't know," Korte says.

Looking back, she thinks God must have been getting her ready for Volume II.

A PEOPLE PERSON APPEARS

In 1997, Korte was Holy Souls' playground supervisor. One of her friends at the school told her: "You need to get out with adults now. You've been with kids a long time." Then the friend told her about a part-time job assisting Riverfest executive director Van Tilbury.

Korte wasn't sure what to make of Tilbury at first. The interview was "crazy," she says. Two hours? For a part-time job?

"When I left, I said, 'Good grief, all I'm doing is answering phones,'" Korte recalls.

Tilbury says he has always been a strong believer in getting to know the people you work with.

"I knew she was someone I could work with and who could work with others," he says.

The executive director of Riverfest serves at the behest of a board of directors -- 35 well-connected members of the community, Tilbury says. You work with bank presidents and corporate CEOs, the local media, a marketing company and a booking agency. You interact with city leaders, suppliers and vendors. There's a 250-member volunteer committee that works on various aspects of the festival throughout the year.

"Listening to how Van dealt with everyone, he taught me a lot," Korte says. "Whether you were volunteering for us or were the president of a bank, he treated everyone with the same grace."

She'd found a mentor in Tilbury, and another in board member Ann Lewis.

Lewis' first impression of her was that she was "a personable, attractive young woman, but not terribly confident."

Lewis encouraged her to take on more responsibilities. The more she did, the more she realized she could do.

"If you do well in a job, you get confident, don't you?" Lewis says. "She always had it in her to do the job, but she didn't own that part of herself."

She was developing a comfort zone within. Her sister says it was like seeing a butterfly emerge from its cocoon.

"I think just getting out into the workplace and realizing just how much people responded to her in a positive way probably gave her more confidence," Hague says. "People gravitate to her. I think they always would have, she just didn't have the opportunity to show that side of herself."

Korte found she had an affinity for logistics, making all the pieces of the festival come together. In 1999, Tilbury made her director of operations.

Then came the summer of 2001, when it looked like everything was coming apart.

Her mother had been right about marrying young. She had been raised to believe marriage was forever, but at this point, hers was over. She filed for divorce.

Meanwhile, Tilbury had decided that five Riverfests were enough; he was ready to move on in his career. And Lewis, who'd been there when the Junior League of Little Rock started Riverfest in 1978, had decided to retire.

"When you take a turn in your life and things change, I think that's when you find out what's inside of you," Korte says. "I'm just like, my world as I know it, which has pretty much been this steady housewife, mom, part-time working -- everything is about to change in a two-week period."

She went to the board of directors and proposed that they put her on full time. She'd handle operations and be volunteer coordinator, she told them. The workload was demanding. Often, she would pick up Ryan and Kyle from school and take them back to the office while she kept working.

"My boys were literally raised down here," Korte says. "They would do their homework here. As it got closer to the festival, sometimes we would eat dinner here.

"Any other job, I wouldn't have had the ability to do that, so I felt really, really lucky."

Lewis has always suspected Korte was disappointed that the board didn't name her Tilbury's successor straight away. The person they did hire didn't last a year, and then his replacement quit halfway through his second year.

In January 2004, with five months before Riverfest, she went to the board again and convinced them to let her take the helm on an interim basis.

"I really wanted it," Korte says. "I wanted to show them I could do it."

This was her audition, and she gave it everything she had.

"I ended up on an IV during that festival. I was in the security trailer, and the medics were trying to get fluids in me."

She survived, and so did Riverfest. A couple of weeks later, the board officially named her executive director.

ANOTHER YEAR

IN THE BOOKS

Those last 10 days and nights setting up the festival are incredibly stressful and so much fun, Korte says. The high school girl who was too timid to talk to people now looks forward to conducting that 3,000-member volunteer army.

"It's like summer camp, only with hard labor," she says. People from different walks of life form friendships and even the occasional romance blooms.

As a matter of fact, shortly after Riverfest 2002 wrapped up, a couple of friends told her "Don't look now, DeAnna, but one of the guys on the volunteer committee has a crush on you."

She scoffed at first. Then again, that Joey Korte fellow did seem to be making an extra effort to get in her line of sight.

The next time she ran into him, her super-shy self re-emerged, briefly. They took things slowly at first, she says -- for a couple of years, actually -- but they both knew they had something. They married in October 2007.

"Joey's my rock," Korte says. He has actually been affiliated with Riverfest longer than she has. He has watched her throughout her career there. He not only understands what the festival means to her, he also knows the challenges and demands of her job.

Every September, Korte gets together for lunch with Tilbury and Lewis. When that time arrives this year, the race around the calendar toward Riverfest 2017 will be underway. Inevitably, they will ask her: "Well, what do you think? Got another one in you?"

The question is only half facetious. They also understand her commitment to Riverfest, her belief in its value.

Riverfest draws people from around the state and country. It will generate about $33 million for Little Rock's economy over those three days, and its value to the city's image is incalculable.

But it's more than that, Korte says. Every year, people recognize her at the festival and thank her for the great time they're having. For some people, coming to town, staying at a hotel for a long weekend -- this is their big splurge for the year. That's no small thing, providing entertainment to thousands of people.

Next year will be Riverfest's 40th year, and Korte's 20th. She'll be 53 in September.

"I am getting of the age where I start wondering if there's time to do something else," she says. "Even if there is, what would that something be?"

It's a good feeling to get to this stage in life and be able to ask those questions from a position of strength.

"What I've learned from this -- that I wish was inside me when I was 18, 19 -- is there's nothing I can't do."

High Profile on 05/29/2016

Upcoming Events