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New festival aimed at local veterans
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
The events-marketing guru who brought ChazzFest to Daniel Island is going down the nonprofit path this November to launch the first annual National Veterans Day Celebration, a four-day festival that aims to inspire and entertain with a spread of events across the tri-county area.
The event and its nonprofit National Veterans Day Foundation has been recognized by the National Veterans Day Committee, which has certified Charleston as one of a dozen 2007 Veterans Day Regional Sites in the country. To achieve that status, the event must serve as a model for other communities to follow in planning Veterans Day observances.
Founder Rick Jones, president of Johns Island-based FishBait Marketing LLC, is sure the event will catapult to success and capture the national media’s attention, in spite of the fact that many cities and towns across the nation already have annual Veterans Day celebrations.
“We’re the only one with ‘national’ in our name,” Jones said. “Our goal long-term is to become the place for veterans throughout the country to come to each Veterans Day.”
Jones expects the first event, which runs Nov. 8–11, to attract as many as 30,000 people.
The celebration will include golf tournaments and football games, concerts and fireworks, a memorial service and a Freedom Walk on the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. There will be themed military reunion dinners and a USO-style show as well as an annual Veterans Day parade. Many events will be free and most ticketed events will be reasonably priced between $5 and $20.
“We’ve got wonderful venues for our reunion dinners,” Jones said. “On the Yorktown, it’s going to be like you’re on the Yorktown in 1944 in the Pacific.”
Tracey Erwin, executive director of the National Veterans Day Celebration Foundation, said sponsors are encouraged to support the celebration because they help make ticket prices more affordable.
“When ticket prices become unaffordable you don’t get the participation, and we want people to come out and celebrate,” she said.
Erwin said the celebration will be a way for civilians to connect with those in the military.
“Our vision was to help bridge that gap so that all civilians feel comfortable in saying thank you to our military,” Erwin said. “After Sept. 11 (2001) we were all looking for safety and who would take care of us, and the military was there. There are so many of us on the outside who would like to say thank you, but they don’t have the occasion.”
The National Veterans Day Celebration Foundation will donate 100% of its profits to five charities: The American Red Cross Lowcountry Chapter, the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation, the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund, The Good Neighbor Center, which helps provide housing for homeless veterans in the area, and the The Fisher House program, which provides housing on military bases and at Veterans Administration medical centers so that family members can be near ill or injured loved ones.
Businesses are encouraged to donate at least $100 to the event and will receive a window decal that signals their support. Individuals can support the event with as little as $10 and will receive a commemorative bumper sticker.
Jones said one of the challenges of launching the event late in the year is that businesses have already set their budgets.
“We depend on corporate sponsorships largely and we were not in people’s budgets, so they have had to find the money,” Jones said. “We’ve had a number of sponsorships start up, but we need to get more in the boat. That is a challenge, but we have a saying in our office, ‘If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.’ ”
Jones had originally planned to launch the National Veterans Day Celebration in 2008, but decided to step up the event because of the spotlight that will shine on South Carolina during the upcoming presidential primaries. On Sunday, Nov. 11, the National Veterans Day
Celebration plans an old-fashioned political stump at Riverfront Park on the old Charleston Naval Base.
“We’re going to give each presidential candidate that’s in town the opportunity to speak for 20 minutes,” Jones said. “We think it’s going to be difficult to win a primary in either party in this state if you’re soft on military affairs. I think this is a great platform for those candidates to state how they feel about the military.”
The idea that Charleston would become the center of a national celebration honoring veterans was born in Santi’s Mexican restaurant on upper Meeting Street, where Jones and other area event marketers gather weekly for a lunchtime brainstorming session.
The topic of conversation one day revolved around how Savannah got to “own” St. Patrick’s Day and how New Orleans got to “own” Mardis Gras. The group wondered if there was a holiday that Charleston could own.
“We went through the whole calendar year and when we got to Veterans Day, it was like the ‘duh’ moment,” Jones said. “We’ve got such a rich military history in Charleston. We’ve got amazing weather in November and we’ve still got an active military infrastructure in Charleston. The number-one industry is tourism and the number-two industry is the military. This is the intersection of number one and number two.”
Perrin Lawson, deputy director of the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, thinks the National Veterans Day Celebration has a lot of potential.
“This is something unique and different and it’s coming in November, which is certainly not in competition with a lot of other events, which seem to be bundled in the spring months,” Lawson said.
Some of the area’s largest events, such as the National Wildlife Exposition, have grown to enormous proportions after starting out small, Lawson said. The Wildlife Expo annually attracts 43,000 with an economic impact of $67 million.
With the launch of the National Veterans Day Celebration, Jones hopes to raise significant dollars for the event’s five charities. He also hopes to fill up a lot of hotel rooms and restaurants during Charleston’s shoulder season, but mainly he hopes to rev up gratitude for the nation’s military.
“I think we’re at a critical point in our country where we have to stand up and recognize our vets, regardless of how you feel about the (Iraq) war,” Jones said. “I think all of us feel strongly that we’re going to back our troops. This is a chance to back the current troops and a chance to thank those who did it before them. Year one success for us would be really putting the meaning back into the Veterans Day holiday. Freedom has never been free.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
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