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“We’re going to try to continue to improve,” says Jon Warren, 50, chairman of the most successful Fayetteville Dogwood Festival in history. With an estimated record attendance of 200,000 for the three-day festival Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Warren and the festival board of directors have become victims of their own success. “It’s really a huge event,” Warren says. “We were bursting at the seams. I saw lots of smiles and a lot of happy people.” There were, festival officials say, about 18,000 assembled in Festival Plaza Park on Friday as .38 Special rocked the evening. “And there were another 25,000 on the (carnival midway), the promenade and Hay Street who didn’t care about what was going on inside the park,” Warren says. That, he says, is the essence of the festival that “there’s something for everybody.”
