Herdan reports on McPhee, Overly, Bobby Vee

John Herdan writes:

TB, -- Since I have my name and picture on the blog site with an official title, I figured I had better get to work here.

First of all, if you love rock and roll and you're around St. Joe next week we have a great party going on. Tuesday, July 3rd is the big concert with Bobby Vee singing his great string of hits from back when we were kids. The concert is held in the parking lot at the St. Joe Church two blocks south of the Holiday Station in downtown St. Joe. Four bands will be playing with a great fireworks show right after Bobby Vee finishes. Interestingly, my son's band, The B-Team All-Stars opens the show at 6:00. This concert drew 12,000 people last year and the kids are pretty nervous.

The big 4th of July parade starts at 10:00 Wednesday morning. The parade usually draws around 25,000 people so come early to find a place to park and stay late for the parish festival with more live music all day. Interestingly, my son's band will also be in the parade.

If you come to St. Cloud for the big fireworks show on the 4th, come early as my son and myself will also be performing at the Freedom Fest Celebration downtown next to the library that day also. We will be playing from 3:45 to 5:00 with a 15 member big band. We will be followed by The Killer Hayseeds, who are a great band.

I took my family out for dinner the other night and was very pleased to see that the home lets Jim McPhee out on occasion. He not only recognized me but was pretty coherant. We were both with big groups so we didn't have much time to talk but I think he wants me to join him in retirement. Sounds good to me.

In March, my son Michael and I went to Moorhead to watch Rocori (where Mike used to coach) play Park Rapids (the 6'7" center is Mike's fiancee's cousin) in basketball. As they were warming up I noticed one of the kids had the name "Overly" on the back of his jersey. 30 seconds later Dave and I were deep in conversation. Dave's son Seth was one of the starting guards. (Rocori won) About three weeks ago Mike went to Bryce's graduation party in Park Rapids and ended up talking to Dave for quite a while.

The topic was the athletic accomplishments of Dave's and my kids. They are considerable with many state tournament appearances, a couple state championships, college basketball, football, and track. Dave was pretty puzzled and was kind enough to point out that neither he or I accomplished squat in sports. In fact, I was recently elected to the Cardinal Athletic Hall Of Shame. The have my picture hanging in a janitors closet near the gym.

That's it for today from St. Cloud!

John

The picture is my son David playing one of his saxophones with his band at a recent family wedding.