By Jeff Weinstein
Seems like yesterday that I was drafting my Top 5 for last year’s Uncle Fletch. Time does fly by way too fast. Uncle Fletch 2015 is in the books and here are my top 5 thoughts.
1. Without people like Michael Hannigan and Garrett Hope there is no way in the world that we could pull off such an amazing event. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You guys hear me dream up an idea and run with it until we reach the finish line. I love you both very much.
2. How do we measure the success of Year 2 of the festival? Our goal for Year 1 was to have 1,000 people attend, 20 cook teams compete and ask ourselves afterwards was it fun. We really didn’t have any goals for Year 2 other than for members of our community to have a good time celebrating Athens. The police estimated the crowd at somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. To those of you that attended, thank you very much. We had 30 cook teams sign up and over 20 vendors. Every vendor that I chatted with told me to go ahead and sign them up for next year. The photos of our neighbors with huge smiles tells me all we need to know – goals achieved.
3. Athenians are happy with the tag “Home of the Hamburger.” People love hamburgers. It’s as American as baseball and apple pie. No offense to hot dog lovers, but I would much rather eat a burger than a hot dog. We have something in the hamburger tag that we can build upon and utilize to help our community. Let’s continue to roll with it.
4. Hamburgers by the numbers — I don’t have the official count, but we had three vendors that were allowed to sell hamburgers. The guestimate from each was that they served approximately 350 to 400 hamburgers each. That’s pretty awesome since two of the three were raising money for charitable causes. Charity works event and sells hamburgers and makes money so charity can continue to help others. That’s a win-win.
5. My special thanks to McDonalds, Whataburger, Extreme Engineering, Henderson County, the Weinstein Team, Virtual Communications, Athens Screen Printing, Dr. Fran, the City of Athens, Athens Police and Fire Department Henderson County Now, our friends with food vending trucks from Dallas, KCKL, First State Bank and our wonderful volunteers who helped from sun-up until final clean-up. Without your support, financial and actual hands on involvement, Uncle Fletch would not be possible.
We’re all on board for Uncle Fletch 2016, so get your recipes together to make a run at the title of Best Hamburger in the World. Until then, Uncle Fletch says thank you Athens and Henderson County for your love of Athens and the hamburger.