Welcome back. Glad you're here.

Fun Fest ends tomorrow night, which means most of you are running on four hours of sleep and a funnel cake. Before it wraps, I went looking for the oldest event on the schedule and found one that isn't on the schedule at all anymore. It was there the very first day, in 1981, and almost nobody remembers it.

In today's post:

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Everybody in this town has a Fun Fest they think of first. The parade. Crazy 8s. The balloons coming up over Fort Henry Drive at dawn. Ask what came first and you'll get a hundred different answers, all of them confident, most of them wrong.

Here's one nobody guesses.

On Saturday, August 8, 1981, Kingsport held the first Fun Fest Crazy Boat Race. Not the first one eventually. The first one, on the same day the whole festival started. Fun Fest was one day long that year, and a boat race was on it.

The location was the South Fork of the Holston. Registration at ten, races at noon. Heritage Federal Savings and Loan sponsored it and took out a quarter-page ad in the Times-News the day before, and the ad is worth reading closely because it tells you exactly what kind of event this was meant to be. Bring a canoe, a kayak, a raft, or anything that floats. Parking on Long Island, access from the Riverport Garden Center. And a line encouraging people to come be among the first to cross the new swinging bridge.

That's the whole pitch. Come to the river. Bring something. Or don't, and bring a lawn chair.

By 1983 it was in its third year and it had gotten strange in the best way. The Times-News ran a photo of the Jolly Roger, a raft flying a skull and crossbones sail with FUN FEST lettered across the bottom, crewed by a team calling themselves the Paper Pirates. The entry list reads like a small-town who's who. TEC sponsored a boat called Spirit of Fun Fest '83. The Times-News entered one and named it the Titanic. Roger Gilliam built something called the Tube Train. Boy Scout Troop 48 launched Dragging Canoe's Revenge III, which tells you there had been a Revenge I and a Revenge II.

Winners were listed by class, the way you'd list a livestock show. Two-man canoe, Steven Tolbert. One-man canoe, Jerry Collins. Small raft, David Morrison. Medium raft, Bill Cunningham. Large raft, Lisa and Robert Wright.

The next summer it was bigger. Roughly sixty boats came down the Holston in 1984, and Walt Braun's story in the Sunday paper opened by saying it wasn't whether they won or lost, it was how outrageous they could be. There was the Jolly Green Giant, a floating pod rowed by four people. Mark Hansen entered the Aloha, with grass skirts made out of corduroy. The Navy and Marines put a boat in. The Times-News tried again with something long on design and short on speed.

And then there was the trial.

One entry that year was built, in the paper's words, for flotation and vengeful purposes. Mayor Norman Spencer, who the Times-News took to calling Noah, tried to get a hearing from city officials and was refused. Sheriff Mike Gardner issued a summons. Judge Mark Hansen presided. Alderman John Everett served as counsel for the defense. A full mock legal proceeding, staged by the sitting officials of the City of Kingsport, over a homemade raft.

The mayor, the sheriff, a judge and an alderman all agreed to spend a Saturday playing dress-up on a riverbank because it would make people laugh. Fun Fest was three years old. Nobody was too important to get in the water.

The race ran on the Holston for years after that. At some point it stopped, and by the 2010s most people under forty had never heard there had been one.

Then it came back, sort of. In July 2010 there was a Crazy Cardboard Boat Race at Legion Pool, sponsored by Armstrong Construction and St. Dominic School, with six awards and cardboard trophies. The next summer the city promoted the second annual, this time with the Board of Mayor and Aldermen against the school board. Later it moved to the Aquatic Center. In 2018 a TV crew called it the sixth annual, which doesn't square with a 2010 start, and the numbering never quite added up.

Cardboard only. A swimming pool instead of a river. A prize for the best sinking boat.

That one is gone too. Look at this year's schedule and there's no boat race on it in any form.

Two runs, decades apart, both finished. A festival with more than eighty events can afford to lose one, and most people will never notice it's missing.

But it was there on August 8, 1981, before the parade, before the balloons, before any of the rest of it.

Somebody has to remember the first thing.

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Three things worth knowing this week:

Hot Air Balloon Glow | Friday, 8 PM at dusk | Fort Henry Drive The balloons stay tethered and light up from the inside after dark, which is a completely different thing than watching them fly. Free, and weather permitting. Details

Breakfast with the Balloons | Saturday, 6 AM to 9 AM | Memorial Park Select vendors from The Taste open early for breakfast while the balloons inflate for the 6:30 rally on Fort Henry Drive. Worth the alarm clock. Details

The Taste | Friday and Saturday, 4 PM to 9 PM | Memorial Park, 1625 Fort Henry Dr. Restaurants and food trucks packed into one park, which is the most efficient way to eat across this whole region in an evening. Details

One more: LeAnn Rimes and Brothers Osborne close the Sunset Concert Series Saturday at 6:30, with the Eastman Fireworks Spectacular around 10 or right after the concert ends. That's the finish line.

Forty-five years selling basically one thing, and the line downtown settles any argument about whether that was the right call.

It rests on the chili. Family recipe, not for sale, goes on nearly everything. People who moved away hours ago still write about not finding a replacement.

A plain dog runs under four dollars. The loaded version, with relish and kraut and slaw and jalapeños stacked on, still comes in around six. Dorito nachos and sweet tea round it out.

The Rasnicks own it now, and the original at 1025 East Sullivan is running the same short menu it always has. Open 11 to 7 weekdays, 11 to 5 Saturday. hotdoghutkingsport.com

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That's it for this week. Thanks for trusting me with your inbox. Let's tell some stories.

Talk soon,

Ryan