Sunday, July 5, 2009

Fourth of July

The Heritage Festival, in Fredericksburg Virginia, is an all day gathering of activities, food and crafts that begins with a 5 mile run then a parade and ends in a fireworks display on the Rappahannock River. The Festival began in 1972 by the Rotary Club in Fredericksburg and has grown to over 150 vendors in attendance during the day. There are over 10,000 people that walk through Fredericksburg on that day and view the vendors and displays. We are one of the displays and this year we decided to have American pickups as the theme. We started planning this year’s event during the event last year. We call our part of the event the American Automobile Heritage Invitational. We start inviting people as soon as the current year’s event is over! This year we overbooked a little in anticipation of people having to cancel at the last minute because of sickness or vehicle trouble and we had a couple do just that.. ..But this year we had 16 people that said they would attend but then decided to just not show up! That makes it tough to fill an event and it’s a waste of awards and other support items we purchased that will have to be thrown away.

Anyway the people that did attend had a great time. You can hear some of their comments and hear their neat trucks running on.. .. “youtube.com/user/502SizeMatters”. You can also see how many Chevy guys it takes to fold up one table! Hehehehe The weather was perfect, the spectators were plentiful, and the vendors were in abundance, the event manager, Roberta, knows how to run a show! The Princess and our daughter Michelle tried to wear the numbers off one of our credit cards so I know the vendors were happy. I pretty much stayed at our event to assist our staff and the attendees if needed. We provided Gatorade & water to all the attendees for free. And we presented appreciation awards to all the attendees. Our sponsor, VA Paving, provided the funds to put on a first class event and they picked out one of the trucks that they liked and presented them with a special trophy! It was Larry’s green ’37 Chevy! VA Paving is a great company that contributes back to the communities they work in. If you are in a position to need a first rate paving vendor you may want to consider them. This year we partnered with Susan Caldwell and Skills USA for our awards. We saved a few $’s on the awards by doing that and supported a local High School in the process, a real win/win deal! And we had the support of our car club, Stafford Classics, in the form of Brent, Andrew, Dan and the Princess. Andrew’s friend, Jose`, and Dan’s brother, Byron, were drafted to help too! That will teach Byron to not try to visit his brother and expect a relaxing weekend..grin. One of Brent’s duties was to provide the background music for the event but with the music from Mike’s Harley truck, then Steve’s calliope music from his stake body truck, Brent turned off his music. He couldn’t compete with the “battle of the bands” deal going on between those two! grin Because of our partnership with Skills USA we were able to give our Charity, Wounded Warrior Project, more money this year.. ..In fact we were able to give them a check for $1000. This coupled with the $751 donations that were deposited in the jar near Ray & Terry’s WWP race car brought the total to $1751 for the day! This will go a long way in helping our wounded men & women coming back from the war zone. It matters not what your view on the war is.. ..These men & women answered the call of duty and paid a price none of us would have paid in civilian life to do a “job”. Our military personnel are special.. ..They deserve special treatment.. ..Please consider them when you give.

In an effort to help you better appreciate the pictures we posted, the Princess collected some information on the participants and what truck they brought. Bob and his yellow ’04 Chevy SSR, Claude & Paula and their blue & silver ’88 Chevy, Richard and his red ’60 Chevy, Pete and his green/white ‘72 Chevy, John and his yellow ’05 Dodge Rumble Bee, Stuart and his blue ‘’63 Ford, Skip & Barbara and their red/white ’86 Ford, Tony and his red ‘61 Ford Econoline, Bobby & Nina and their purple ’79 Ford, Bill and his tangelo ’70 Chevy, Steve and his black/green ’30 Ford Stake body, Bill & Julie and their black ’46 Chevy, Jim and his peach ’46 Ford, Don and his red ’51 Ford, Scott and his purple ’32 Ford, Jim & Suzan and their black/green ’31 Ford, John and his black ’23 Ford, Dallas & Carol’s brown ’31 “ALL FORD”, Ford, Larry and his green ’37 Chevy and last but not even close to least is Mike’s Darth Vader Black ’04 Harley Davidson Ford with all the body/chassis/electronic modifications. All these pickups are winners in their own right but together they made the event memorable for thousands of spectators this Fourth of July! Thank you all!

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