SUNNY SAUNDERS WAS BORN AND RAISED HERE. She lived on Rocky Point as a kid and went to school at Star Of The Sea and Crownhill Elementary. She graduated from Bremerton High in 1993. Her family is a fourth generation Bremerton family of, as she says, “true Bremerton natives.”
They didn’t come here with any ties to the Navy, they just came to Bremerton.
Sunny said she moved to California for three years of her life at one point, but came back because she feels like this is one of the most beautiful places in the country. She loves being by the water. She loves the weather. Loves the rain. And she’s been here ever since.
She has been running community festivals in this town for nearly two decades.
Her company, Sunny Jack Entertainment, is the organizer of the annual Bremerton Bridge Blast. I caught up with her one day—a few days before this year’s sixth annual festival and fireworks show—during that sweet spot of the morning where she was up, but her phone wasn’t blowing up yet.
She says it all started about 20 years ago when she married into Gordon Sound, a production company in Silverdale. She belonged to a Soroptomist Club back in those days, that asked her to organize their garden show, and her career in large event manager grew from there. She volunteered for Silverdale’s annual Whaling Days event and became the entertainment director for more than ten years. She also managed of the Kitsap County Fair for seven.
Currently, in addition to organizing the Bridge Blast, she has also contracted as event manager for the Blackberry Festival for the past three years, runs the Kitsap Wedding Expo in February each year and started a new local food-focused festival which began as the ‘Kitsap Food Truck Fest’ at the Fairgrounds in 2021 and is now being rebranded as a free entry festival called ‘Taste Of Kitsap,’ relocated to the Bremerton Boardwalk.
“So it’s just kind of been a progression over the past 20 years,” Sunny looks back on it.
During the last year that she worked as manager for the fair, she said one of her co-managers, Jonathan Miller, formerly of Boomtown Productions now with Halo Fireworks, came to her with a crazy idea. He wanted to do a fireworks show off the Manette Bridge. Sunny said she loved the idea. And that first year, in 2017, they put together the event in about three months organizing time.
And, well, it blew up.
In a good way.
The community loved it. And it’s grown each year.
“And I am now the sole producer of that event,” Sunny said. “I think there’s a misnomer out there that it is a city event. The city provides an enormous amount of resources and I couldn’t do it without the city, but it is my event.”
The city shuts down traffic on the bridge, the downtown boardwalk is filled with festival vendors and live entertainment all day. Evergreen Park hosts additional vendors and another stage of entertainment. All culminating with fireworks off the bridge, visible from multiple Bremerton neighborhoods. It feels like the whole city comes out for it. There’s backyard parties scattered throughout the bridge facing neighborhoods. Waterfront public spaces across town are filled with onlookers. The fireworks are ginormous.
Sunny books the vendors and entertainment for the events. Over the course of her career, she’s dealt with thousands of vendors. This year alone, she said, she’s working with nearly 400 for the events she produces locally. During the wintertime, she works a talent agent that travels around to conventions and sells entertainment to county fairs and other organizations. Last year, she booked Joel Gibson Jr. on a county fair circuit with appearances throughout Oregon and Washington.
“Everything from a world class magician to a Guinness Book of World Records’ holding juggler,” she lists the type of entertainment she represents when not running festivals.
I wonder aloud if she saw herself going into this line of work when she was younger.
Or if she ever went to the festivals around Kitsap as a kid that may have provided a spark. Back when she was a teenager, the Fairgrounds hosted massive music festivals like Lollapalooza and Endfest.
Sunny said she didn’t really go to many festivals when she was younger because the family rarely had enough money. She remembers going to the Fair a few times as a kid but usually when she was invited by other families. As for her career, she always knew that she wanted to go into something relating to business, she holds a degree in organizational leadership, but the festival stuff just kind of fell into place, she said.
Now that she’s running her own company, she likes to think about what kind of festival she would like to attend and then try to make that happen. Like the upcoming Taste Of Kitsap, Aug. 4-5 on the downtown Bremerton Boardwalk. It’s is a free entry event celebrating local street food, featuring 20 different food vendors, each offering $7 or less small plates. And the live music stage will feature Ladies Who Rock, comprised mostly of local acts either female performers or female fronted bands.
Now that we’ve covered all the stuff that she does in this town, one question still remains in my mind. Let’s meet the lady behind the Bridge Blast. Tell me about the name Sunny Jack, I ask.
“It’s my name,” she says. “Well, my first name and middle name. Sunny Jack Saunders.” // BILL MAN
Check out the Taste Of Kitsap Festival Aug. 4-5 on the Bremerton Boardwalk. More at tasteofkitsap.com. And find more on Sunny at sunnyjackevents.com
