Who's Who-sday | Jacki Seale's lifelong connection to Washington State Apple Blossom Festival continues as Applarian chancellor

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2026 Applarian Chancellor Jacki Seale poses for a portrait outside the Washington State Apple Blossom Festival office Friday, April 10, in Wenatchee.

There is a particular kind of loyalty in Wenatchee, the kind that does not announce itself so much as repeat, year after year, in parades and pageantry, in the slow circling of a float, in the memory of a clarinet line carried on spring air.

Jacki Seale has lived inside that rhythm most of her life.

She was born at Deaconess Hospital, the youngest of three - "I'm the baby," she says, a fact that still seems to carry a kind of quiet identity. Her father welded at Alcoa, hands to metal, while her mother kept the home until later taking a job in a bakery. It was, by her telling, a steady, working-class Wenatchee childhood, rooted in family and routine, and always tethered to the Washington State Apple Blossom Festival.

"My first memory," she says, "I have a picture of my mom from 1925… that's kind of special."

The festival was never just an event. It was inheritance.

As a child, she dressed up for grade school parades, stepping into themes and costumes with the earnest seriousness of a small-town spring. Later came music: clarinet, first in elementary band, then through Eastmont. "I was hooked," she says. "The pride you felt when you walked in there… it's just amazing. Still that way."

She never chased the crown. "No," she says plainly. "I was music. That's all I had in my hand."

Instead, she built a life in quieter, steadier ways - 40 years as a dental assistant, chairside, working for two doctors, her career defined not by spectacle but by consistency.

There were departures, too. In 1983, at her brother's urging, she left the valley for California - San Jose, sunlight, possibility, the vague sense that one ought to leave home at least once. It was there, in a laundromat, that she met her husband.

"I was not interested," she says. Her sister-in-law insisted otherwise: "Give him a chance."

She did.

Their first date was a group outing - dinner, dancing, coworkers from the IRS. What she noticed was not charm, exactly, but attentiveness. "If there was a single girl, he made sure she was not getting harassed," she says. "He just had that Southern… gentleman." She pauses, then adds, "And he still has it."

They married, moved to Texas for his job, and lived there for nearly a decade. Children never came - "we thought about adopting, but we just never did" - but the absence softened into something else: nieces and nephews who became, as she puts it, "my kids," she says.

In 1993, they came back to Wenatchee. Her husband, she says, "fell in love with it the first time he came up here." Some places call you back like that. Some never really let you go.

It was family, again, that drew her deeper into the Apple Blossom orbit. A sister, a brother-in-law, a long thread of involvement that eventually led to the Applarians, the volunteer corps that animates the festival behind the scenes. "It is like a family to me," she says. "If anything happens, somebody's there."

Nineteen years ago, she joined.

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Apple Blossom Director General Kathy Campbell, left, and Applarian Chancellor Jacki Seale, right, wave to the crowd during The Shortest Parade in the World March 14 in Wenatchee.

Now, as Applarian chancellor, she sits at the center of that network, not as a figurehead but as a coordinator of continuity. The role is layered: second vice chancellor organizes socials, first vice oversees logistics, and the chancellor leads meetings, budgets, travel and the careful choreography of hosting other festivals. "Wherever the float goes, we go," she says.

It is work that is equal parts administration and devotion.

She speaks often of family, not just her own but the constructed kind. The Applarians have made it literal this year, choosing "family" as their theme. "We just feel like one big family," she says. It is not metaphor so much as an operating principle.

That sense extends outward, too, to the network of festivals across the Northwest: Spokane, Marysville, Portland and Leavenworth. Eight in total. Each spring, they visit one another, exchange traditions and build relationships that feel both ceremonial and deeply personal. "You make friends with all these different festivals," she says. "And then… it's just fun."

There are moments she looks forward to: the trip to the Portland Rose Festival, where she will be formally knighted alongside her counterpart. "They make it a huge deal," she says, a hint of delight in her voice. It is, perhaps, the closest the role comes to pageantry for its own sake.

But mostly, she prefers the grounded parts: the convention center gatherings, the shared meals, the steady presence of volunteers who return each year. "My favorite thing," she says, "is what we do down in the convention center… we get to party down there."

Even there, though, the work is relational, hosting out-of-town guests, welcoming royalty, building the quiet, durable connections that keep a festival alive across generations.

That, she knows, is the challenge.

"It is kind of an older crowd," she admits. Recruitment matters. Younger members trickle in, often parents of royalty, drawn in after watching their daughters participate. The hope is that they stay, that they see what she sees: not just an event but a structure for belonging.

Outside of festival life, her world narrows again to the personal. Evenings with her husband on the patio, "a glass of wine, a little fire." A cat named Maxine, a tortoiseshell with what Seale describes as a mischievous streak. "She thinks she's a dog sometimes," she says.

There is Celebration Lutheran Church, where she "wear(s) a lot of hats," though less so during festival season. There is the idea of fishing, recently equipped for but not yet fully realized. "Have we used it yet?" she says, laughing. Not quite.

And there is, always, the return to the festival.

She moves through it now not as the child in costume or the musician in step but as a steward, someone responsible for carrying forward a tradition that predates her and will outlast her.

Next year, she notes, she'll be a "has-been," the affectionate term for former leaders who remain part of the fold. Even that sounds less like an ending than a shift in role, another way of staying.

Because in Wenatchee, the pattern holds. The floats circle. The bands play. The families, by blood or by choice, gather again.

And somewhere in it, Jacki Seale is still there, moving with the rhythm she first learned as a child: steady, familiar and, in its own quiet way, enduring.

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This story was originally published April 14, 2026 at 8:38 PM.