Smoke in the Wires February 2017

Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire!
Marc Cherry
Editor
Yes, the Smoke is back. It turns out the fire wasn’t completely out on our newsletter. Clearly we’ve had
a busy year in our club. We officially brought 2016 to a close at our Christmas party and moved on to
next year with the installation of new officers. Now things are about to get even busier as we head in
to the new year and our 25 th anniversary car show.
Before we surge ahead to the future and our show, it’s important to first look back and hit a couple of
highlights. Thank you to Taber Tomkins for his service as our president for the past two years. He’s
done a tremendous service for us and has left office with the club fully poised to host a brilliant
anniversary show. He has overseen a challenging effort to update our longstanding bylaws and
overseen major changes in our event venues and activities. Paul Salm now moves up to the presidency.
Paul has done a lot of behind the scenes work and is probably the sole reason the Pensacola Euro Show
came off this past year, as he worked hard to preserve the advances we made hosting the show in
2015 before handing it off to a young and very informally-organized host club for 2016. We’re joined
on the executive committee by Tim Maynard for 2017. Tim has been a regular volunteer for many of
our events. We are extremely pleased to add a fresh face to the executive committee.
For those who missed our Christmas party at the Seville Quarter, it was a fabulous time and turned out
to be a great venue for our club. We had plenty of space, good food and were extremely well cared for
by the host staff. Thank you to Bob Manske, Liz Maynard, Tim Maynard and Paul Salm for organizing
the party. Bob asked for a special thanks to Liz, who prepared all the worksheets on budget items,
made all the centerpieces for the tables, and took on the building of options and tracking of expenses.
We are already set to return next year with several improvements already in the works.
Now looking toward our 25 th anniversary show in April, we have a lot of changes from previous shows
that we need to plan out. Our venue has changed to an outstanding, well-appointed new location. We
have also improved our goodie bags by several orders of magnitude. Finally, our trophies will be
entirely new and unique to PBCA and our 25 th anniversary. What hasn’t changed? Our volunteerism,
that’s what. We’ve already reconfirmed the vast majority of our volunteer army from last year. We’re
counting on the expertise of our volunteers to carry the day despite a sea of changes. The most current
volunteer list is on page 15. Please let me know if you cannot do the same job you had last year. I’ll be
talking to everyone to confirm your spot or to help you out if you’d like to do something different this
year.
This show is larger than any event we’ve held. We need your help in planning through members
registering their cars as early as possible. The more cars we know are attending in advance, the better
we will be able to accommodate them. We also need sponsorship to put on an event of this size. Talk
to your friends and local businesses and ask for the $40 donations that promote this show. Look at the
back of this issue for the entry and sponsor forms.
Probably the single biggest change is the venue. This year we will be in Seville Square in downtown
Pensacola. It is a great location and closer to the Commerce Museum where we hold our Friday red
beans and rice welcome party. While the Seville Square location has a lot more amenities, it also has a
Smoke in the Wires February 2017 Page 3