Walking toward the antique and classic car show Monday at Cullman County’s Sweet Tater Festival, crowds instinctively were drawn to Sonny Norris’ eye-catching 1934 Plymouth — and not just for the lovingly restored vehicle’s rusty, event-appropriate sweet potato-orange paint job.

Perched diagonally askew atop a shallow drainage ditch at Smith lake Park, the Cullman native’s prize Plymouth — with Sonny’s wife, Brenda swearing she wasn’t the one behind the wheel — had managed to get itself stuck, front wheels over the edge, in a pose that almost looked like an intentional visual ploy; a bit of free advertising to entice curious car enthusiasts.

“A man driver — that’s what you get!” laughed Brenda as onlookers massed around the scene. “My name is Brenda Norris — and by gosh, I was not driving!”

Though they’ve owned the car for 58 years, Sonny and Brenda stayed in good humor as event staff busied themselves devising a way to get a tow truck through Monday’s thick early festival traffic. No one was hurt, the car looked to have only minor damage, if any, and it definitely made the Norrises — entering the vehicle for the first time ever at the Sweet Tater car show — a memory that’ll probably endure as long as the car.

“I don’t think it’s gonna be messed up too bad … but it was a lick!” joked Sonny, who said he’d only recently gotten his Plymouth back on the road after the area’s 2011 tornado damaged it at the couple’s Lake George home. “I did come in with a grand entrance. But I did find out one thing: It’s not a Dukes of Hazzard car!”

Monday’s momentary car kerfuffle was one of the only snags over the course of the two-day event, the 28th Labor Day weekend installment of a ‘tater-themed annual celebration that commemorates one of Cullman County’s go-to agricultural foods. “It’s all gone great on both days,” said Cullman County parks director Kenneth Cornelius, eyeing the angle on the Norris’ stranded Plymouth. “This is about the biggest thing that’s happened so far.”

Though the forecast promised rain on Sunday, the skies cooperated all weekend long, and ticket takers greeting guests at the park’s entrance said Sweet Tater fest attendance appeared robust on both days.

The festival’s offbeat, quirky branding all but assures there’ll always be inquisitive first-time attendees; folks who show up to see what all the orange fuss is about. But for Fultondale’s Jeannie Hogeland and other longtime guests, the festival has become an almost-compulsory family tradition.

“We used to come and camp here with the grandkids” in the festival’s earlier years at the park, said Hogeland, fresh from buying a sweet sack of ‘taters from Cullman’s Kress Farms vendor booth. “Now, the grandkids are 20 and 21. It’s good to come out and support events like this. If he’s not making money — if our local people who do these events aren’t making money — then we won’t have a sweet potato festival!”