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GOSF gets started Friday
Festival a recipe for fun from outset
SeafoodFestival Logo 2014

Seafood. Rides. Arts and crafts. More seafood. Fun things for kids to do. Fun things for adults to do. Music performances by nationally known recording artists, along with regional – and local – favorites.

All are on tap in Richmond Hill beginning Friday when the 16th annual Great Ogeechee Seafood Festival presented by Southern Eagle Distributing gets under way at J.F. Gregory Park.

But what organizers say is the largest event of its kind and one which annually brings an estimated 30,000 people to Richmond Hill over “Seafood Fest” weekend, didn’t just happen overnight. What was once a local festival which drew a few hundred people to the Fisherman’s Co-Op in the late 80s was resurrected in 1998 when then-Mayor Richard Davis asked the Richmond Hill Bryan County Chamber of Commerce to bring the festival back and hold it at J.F. Gregory.

They did.

 “We had approximately 8,000 people attend that first festival 16 years ago, and everybody, even the volunteers, paid $1 to get in,” said Proctor said. “That’s how we got a count of how many people were there. Back then we didn’t have arts and crafts or the carnival, we just had the pavilion with a few chamber businesses displaying their wares and seafood, and some local bands performed just on Saturday night, and that was it.”

It didn’t take long for organizers to realize they had a winner. The Seafood Fest’s mix of family friendly entertainment, local and regional vendors and plenty of good food was a sure recipe for success.

 “We knew after that first year that it was going to be a hit,” Proctor said. “We knew the community would support it, even with very little advertising. There was just something about it that made us know we wanted to continue it.”

This year’s headline act is Grammy winner Blues Traveler, and a number of other national, regional and local favorites are scheduled to perform over the weekend, including Jake Miller, the Swingin' Medallions

For more information on the entertainment, check out www.goseafoodfeatival.com.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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