CRESTVIEW — This year’s Triple B CookOff is expected to attract more than last year's 13,000 people, but the event didn’t always draw a crowd.
Here’s a timeline of the festival’s growth.
2001: Mike Wright Reynolds, a barbecue judge and photographer, founds the event, part of the former Family Fun Day festival in Spanish Trail Park.
2002: Community leaders Ken Frost, Mike Holovack and Cal Zethmayr notice throngs of people sweltering during the Spanish Trail Cruisers Club car show on Main Street and decide to move the barbecue festival there.
Then-Crestview Area Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Wayne Harris, despite initial doubts, agrees to let the committee try one more festival, this time in the downtown location.
The event becomes a cooperative effort between the chamber of commerce and the Main Street Crestview Association, with help from the city.
2008: The Crestview Area Chamber of Commerce’s Professional and Inspired Leaders of Tomorrow, or PILOT, committee are primarily responsible for organizing the Triple B. As the festival grows, it needs its own organizing committee.
2009: A second entertainment stage is added near the railroad tracks, bracketing with music the food and festivities in between.
2010: The Triple B adds the People’s Choice award.
And unlike many “professional” competitions, the local festival remains a community event at which the people get to enjoy the fruits — make that meats — of the pit masters’ labors as much as the judges do.
2013: The chamber's former Arts and Culture Committee becomes involved, expanding the festival’s cultural aspects.
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DID YOU KNOW?
The Triple B Cookoff evolved from Family Fun Day, a 1990s event held at Old Spanish Trail Park.
Family Fun Day waned, but after two years, a committee of local business leaders endeavored to keep the event’s barbecue competition portion alive by moving it to Main Street.
With a new venue, the committee believed the event needed a new name.
"We talked about calling it the Bluegrass Music and Barbecue festival," Cal Zethmayr, one of the event’s founders, has said. "Then somebody tossed out, ‘Let’s call it Blackwater.’ Blackwater, Bluegrass and Barbecue. We liked it. It had alliteration."
While some may say the Blackwater River and Blackwater State Forest are miles from Crestview, the city sits in the middle of another "black water," Zethmayr said.
The county name, proposed by founder W.H. "Bill" Mapoles, is a Choctaw Indian phrase describing the Yellow River, according to Betty Curenton and Claudia Patten’s book, "Crestview: The Forkland." "Oka" means water, the book states, and "loosa" means black.
The Triple B Cookoff evolved from Family Fun Day, a 1990s event held at Old Spanish Trail Park.
Family Fun Day waned, but after two years, a committee of local business leaders endeavored to keep the event’s barbecue competition portion alive by moving it to Main Street.
With a new venue, the committee believed the event needed a new name.
“We talked about calling it the Bluegrass Music and Barbecue festival,” Cal Zethmayr, one of the event’s founders, has said. “Then somebody tossed out, ‘Let’s call it Blackwater.’ Blackwater, Bluegrass and Barbecue. We liked it. It had alliteration.”
While some may say the Blackwater River and Blackwater State Forest are miles from Crestview, the city sits in the middle of another “black water,” Zethmayr said.
The county name, proposed by founder W.H. “Bill” Mapoles, is a Choctaw Indian phrase describing the Yellow River, according to Betty Curenton and Claudia Patten’s book, “Crestview: The Forkland.” “Oka” means water, the book states, and “loosa” means black.
DID YOU KNOW?
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: TRIPLE B: Move to Main Street saved the Crestview cookoff