JEFF FEST BEGINS TODAY. My awesomely sweet wife brought me a surprise Jeff Fest treat sack today at the office. Josie decorated the sack and Julie filled it with some of my favorite treats. Some of you are wondering what is Jeff Fest? Well Jeff Fest is the month long celebration of my birthday. My birthday is October 30th. Now I am sure you are wondering why I celebrate it for the month? Many years ago when I started working in PR at Harding(1991) there was a writer named Scott Morris. Scott's birthday was November 1st. Some years the office would have the birthday party on my birthday and sometimes they would celebrate on his birthday. Well as I thought about that I realized that I was being robbed of my special day so I created Jeff Fest. I bring my own treats and pass them out and let others help me celebrate Jeff Fest. The treats are sporadic early in the month but I try to have a special treat everyday for the last two weeks. Yes, people look at me like I am weird sometimes but Jeff Fest is about having fun and it is fun when you randomly give people a piece of candy or some treat so they can help me celebrate my birthday.
Several years ago I photographed a retirement dinner for one of Hardings History professors;Joe Segraves. People would get up and tell stories about Dr. Segraves and then at the end he could get up and refute the stories or tell his own stories. Well he was retiring at May Graduation and the Governor, then Mike Huckabee, was going to be the graduation speaker. At the retirement dinner the night before graduation Dr. Seagraves thanked everyone for coming to his small dinner and he invited everyone to come to the main retirement celebration, graduation. He went on to thank the university for inviting Gov. Huckabee to come up and bid him a fond farewell for his retirement and he went on and on about how special he felt that the entire faculty would come dressed up in their academic robes, families of senior Harding students would travel from all parts of the country to be present at his retirement celebration. I loved how he adopted Hardings Spring Graduation as being all about his retirement and not 500 students graduating from college.
Well, back to Jeff Fest.
Hardings Homecoming is usually the last weekend in October so I have adopted it as the culmination of Jeff Fest. It is awesome, the university has a musical that weekend. This year it will be Oklohoma. Alumni come from all over the country to have reunions. On Saturday at the football game they Crown the Jeff Fest Queen. Several years ago one of the PR student writers, Carrie Dutile, was crowned the Jeff Fest Queen. That was a very special year indeed. Now mind you, I let the Alumni Office call it homecoming and all but secretly we all know it is Jeff Fest. For several years the university hired a live Bison to come for Jeff Fest and for those nine years when Homecoming or Jeff Fest was truly in October and not the first weekend in November the football team was undefeated. I tried and tried to get Sports Information to list Jeff Fest in the stats but they wouldn't do it. Now the live Bison doesn't come anymore.
Once again THANK YOU to Julie and Josie for a great beginning to Jeff Fest 2008.
My friend Emily Anne Dumas Thomason sent me this photo of a towboat named Jeff Montgomery she saw in New Orleans. I did a little Google research and found it here.
