What a great local tradition

I've got friends in the north near Kirkland Lake, Ontario and they do a similar annual fundraiser with a Volkswagon Beetle - they've been doing it for years with the same car. I think it's for fundraising for their local fire department.
Kenogami & District Volunteer Fire Brigade - Herbie Car Fundraiser
The car is cleaned up and cleared for environmental pollutants and then fished out every spring and repeated again the next winter. I always thought it was funny seeing that old yellow car on the ice.

My parents lived in a small town called Yellowknife in Canada many years ago, before there was a highway there. Float planes would land on Great Slave Lake until it froze over, then skid planes. In the spring when the ice got thin, there was a pool collected by the first pilot who landed a float plane. They would come in and gently skim the ice to break it up before settling onto the water. Just occurred to me as I typed this, I never asked what happened if somebody tried it too soon and the ice wouldn't break. Unfortunately it's too late to ask now, my parents are both gone.
- You remember their old phone number?
  
  Not their last one but I remember the phone # we had when I was in high school and an earlier one, why?

I love little local things like this. Punxsatawney's Groundhog Day celebration is probably the most well-known, but anything where local people were just like "heh, that'd be fun, let's try it" is so cool to me.

That's neat! We just have a sign on the river, and people guess when the ice will start moving. More precisely, when the sign will pass under the bridge. A dummy would definitely be more fun, but some teenagers would probably steal or break it... or someone would mistake it for someone drowning in the spring as it travels towards the sea. Maybe it's better to just stick to the sign.
- If I knew about a sign in the river as a teenager, I wouldn’t destroy it, but moving it upriver so it took longer to go under the bridge might have been fun.

Small town in Minnesota did this with an old rusted up truck. It was attached to a giant cable and they winched it out of the lake after it fell through.

Wait... If they give half the proceeds to the historical society, then the people who won are only getting their original money back. There are no winnings.
- 10 people buy tickets for $1 each. The total is $10. Winner gets $5, and the historical society gets $5.
- I'm so sorry for you. ☹️ Your math teachers tried, I'm sure...