Welcome back. Glad you're here.

Block Parties kick off today, which means the countdown clock on summer just got a lot louder. Before the balloons go up and the stadium fills, I went looking for how this whole thing started. Turns out the answer is stranger and better than I expected.

In today's post:

Ten spots. That's it. That's the whole thing.

We cap sponsorships at ten local businesses at any given time, and every one of them is industry exclusive. One coffee shop. One contractor. One realtor. When your category is taken, it's taken.

This newsletter will never be a wall of ads. That's a promise. Which means when your name shows up here, people actually read it.

Spots open up rarely and fill fast. If you want yours, reply to this email and we'll send the rate card.

Everybody in this town has a Fun Fest memory. The balloon glow at dawn. A Pal's milkshake on the parade route. Standing in the grass at J. Fred while a band you'd only heard on the radio played to a stadium full of people you went to high school with.

What almost nobody has is the reason.

Fun Fest was not born out of civic pride. It was born out of the opposite.

Rewind to 1979. Kingsport was not getting along with itself. The city had moved to annex Colonial Heights and portions of Indian Springs, and by the recollection of Bill Bovender, who joined the Chamber board in 1978 and chaired it a decade later, the city was not loved. Add a liquor-by-the-drink vote splitting neighbors from neighbors. Add the athletic rivalries of the era, Dobyns-Bennett against Sullivan South, Central, and North, which were not the friendly kind. The ill will was affecting work. It was affecting morale. It was affecting whether people would look each other in the eye at the grocery store.

So the Chamber board went to Wolf Laurel for a planning retreat. Frank Brewer moderated. He put the question to the room: where does Kingsport actually stand as a community, and what are we going to do about this?

The answer they landed on was a party.

The theme was Community Unity. Not as a slogan on a T-shirt. As the entire point. The stated objective was to promote unity, harmony, fellowship and cooperation among the people of the greater Kingsport area. Get folks in the same place, on the same grass, on the same day, and let proximity do what arguments could not.

The first Fun Fest was August 8, 1981. Frank Brewer was the first chairman.

Here is the part that gets me. For the first eight years, nobody on the Fun Fest payroll ran Fun Fest, because there was no Fun Fest payroll. The large employers in town loaned an executive to coordinate the whole festival at no cost to the organization. Everyone else was a volunteer. The officers, the directors, all of it. The T-shirts came later. The parade came later. The ice cream at Allandale, the concerts, the balloons, all of it accumulated year over year because people kept showing up and adding to it. By 1989, when Bovender himself was chairman, the sponsors said plainly: you need to hire somebody.

Forty-five years on, it's nine days, more than a hundred events, over forty locations, and north of a hundred thousand people. Most of it still free.

And it starts, every single year, with Block Parties.

That is not an accident. Before the stadium fills and the balloons go up, the first thing that happens is neighbors dragging tables into a cul-de-sac. That was the whole idea in 1979. That is still the whole idea. Everything else is just the part that got famous.

It's happening today, tomorrow, and Sunday. Fun Fest proper runs July 17 through 25.

So go stand in a street with people you don't know yet. Turns out that's the tradition.

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Three places in this town doing the work. Pick one.

Rivers of Love Coffee
A pay-what-you-can coffee house. That's not a promotion, that's the model. They call themselves a "Give from the Heart" coffee house, and the stated mission is to make love known in every human heart one drop at a time. If you've got it, leave more than you took. If you don't, take the coffee anyway. Give

Petworks
Kingsport's animal shelter. Every dog that ends up on somebody's couch in this town came through a place like this first. Details

Grace House
Kingsport Homeless Ministry. The people doing the part of community work that doesn't come with a festival. Details

I met Jordan around 2013. I was a busboy at Cheddar's and he was behind the bar. Twelve years later he's not working anybody's bar. He's running his own thing.

Ask him when the hot dog thing started and he'll point you to his mother.

"If I didn't have a hot dog, a bag of Cheez-Its, and a Sprite before school, it was going to be a rough day."

That was Florida, where he grew up. He moved to Church Hill in 2006, straight out of high school, and it took a while to adjust. The mountains helped. In 2018 he and his family moved back to Florida, chasing the beach and a change of scenery. Three major hurricanes in three years and a cost of living that kept climbing sent them right back to East Tennessee. Turns out this was where they belonged.

He's got a wife and four boys now. He says everything he does is for them.

The cart came out of a simple idea: bring something to the Kingsport food scene that the chains don't have. Specialty hot dogs. Cooking has always been the thing he loved, and there's nothing better than watching somebody enjoy a plate you made. Food gets people in the same place. That's the whole trick.

"Thank you for supporting my family's dream. I look forward to serving you one hot dog at a time."

512 Wood View Court | 3 bed, 3.5 bath

Speaking of cul-de-sacs.

The view is the pitch here, and the listing knows it. Bays Mountain, Sullivan Gardens, the valley, and the city itself. Ten-foot French doors open onto a new back deck, which is where you'd actually spend your evenings.

Primary suite is on the main level, walk-in closet, oversized bathroom. Two more bedrooms and a full bath upstairs. There's a bonus room that could be an office, a playroom, or a fourth bedroom depending on what season of life you're in.

Then there's the basement. Roughly 2,300 unfinished square feet with fourteen-foot ceilings. That's not a crawl space. That's a second house waiting on somebody's imagination and a contractor.

Full listing at sellstateline.com.

What do you think they're asking for 512 Wood View Ct

Vote down below

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This newsletter works best when it's a conversation. If you know a story that needs to be told, a person doing something interesting, or a place in Kingsport that matters to you, send it my way. Every documentary, every feature, every post starts with someone saying "you should look into this."

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

Talk soon,

Ryan