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22 years ago seems like yesterday in so many
ways! 22 years ago this month I remember a group of 120 people
sharing adventures like the beaches of Ibiza, the bull rings
of Spain, the long bus rides through Extremadura - and who
could forget the unforgettable castle evening of "The Trujillo
Trots"? And I can still smell those mussels and potatoes boiling
on the open fire in that vineyard in Galicia, and taste the
Sangria that Kevin Kiger, Chris Goodwin, and I drank all afternoon
(oh shame on us) in Barcelona while waving the flags of Cataluna!
How can it possibly have been 22 years ago?
I think why I find it so hard to believe that
so much time has passed since we were together, is because
my entire life today is an outgrowth of the UWP experience
- from my career to my friends to my faith and to my family�..
After the final Total E performance in Connecticut
in December of 1981, I had but a mere 2 weeks at home prior
to returning to Arizona along with Rande Nelson from our cast
and others to begin my next year on the UWP Promotion Staff.
The first semester of 1982 I spent in the southeast USA with
Cast A and then returned to my alma-mater Cast E for the second
semester tour of New England and Scandinavia. Those last six
months with UWP and Cast E 1982 were the ones that truly changed
my life forever - as traveling in that cast was a fiery, light-hearted,
and energetic lady from Belfast, Northern Ireland who stole
my heart lock-stock-and-barrel! Dawn Brand and I were married
in Belfast in June 1984 - accompanied by the music of our
very own Anne Thompson-Hirschfieldt and under the watchful
eye of my transatlantic traveling buddy Barb Hemberger-Morgan!
Dawn and I now have three children, Kyle, who
turns 15 in just a couple weeks, and twins Haley & Devin who
are 8 years old. Parenthood has been, and continues to be
quite a wild ride for both of us. As you might guess, the
gene pool, has insured that our kids are anything but shy
and mild-mannered and they keep us completely on our toes
at all times! So I am most fortunate that every day of my
life now, as I look into the eyes of my wife and the faces
of my children, I am reminded at how much UWP has done for
me.
Not only did UWP ultimately determine the direction
for my family life, but like for so many others of us, it
ultimately determined the direction for my professional life
as well. UWP offered my first opportunity to travel abroad
and to work in marketing and promotion, and once it was wetted
with Spain and Portugal and those great "PR" experiences,
my appetite for such became insatiable! After leaving the
road in late 1982, I first dabbled in marketing consulting
as part of a Denver based start-up company with several UWP
friends from my CAST A experience, I, like Barb Hemberger-Morgan,
gravitated towards the airline industry. In late 1983, I joined
the start up team of a new airline, Frontier Horizon and moved
to San Francisco to open that city for them. That began a
9 year airline career that took Dawn and me from San Francisco
to Minneapolis-St. Paul where I worked at the world headquarters
in sales & marketing for Northwest Airlines. One of my responsibilities
at Northwest was to oversee sales and marketing efforts within
the meetings & conventions industry. And this is the segment
of the travel & hospitality industry in which I still work
today. After the airline, I first worked for nearly 7 years
in the convention & visitors bureau sector - first in New
York City as SVP of Sales & Marketing, and finally as CEO
in metropolitan Detroit, where we still live today. After
7 years in this sector, I opted to leave community and organizational
politics behind, and returned to the private sector. Since
1999, I have been working with Conferon, the nation's largest
meeting & incentive management company - we are headquartered
near Cleveland with offices nationwide. I work from a home
office here in Michigan and manage a national sales team and
products and services for the corporate sector. The industry
is dynamic and changing, the people are great, and I LOVE
working from a home office with schedule flexibility and summer
office attire of shorts and flip-flops!
Our families are still largely healthy and intact.
Dawn's family in Northern Ireland and England, and mine now
all in northern Florida insure that our travel adventures
are frequent and varied. And the faith seeds that have were
planted and sowed so patiently by several of our closest UWP
friends over the years have truly taken root in our family,
as we have become Christians and are active in our contemporary,
non-denominational church as well.
And thus the fabric of life for the Binford
clan is full and rich, and woven throughout it all are elements
of the UWP experience. Looking forward to the next time that
"the roads come together" for us all!
Rick
Binford
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