Arizona Crawfish Festival
Though I occasionally volunteered for various organizations over the years, the only philanthropic entity I ever created--with a LOT of help from some very special friends--was the Arizona Crawfish Festival, an annual fundraiser that morphed into quite a beast over the years, and it's a pretty cool story.
A lot of people in Phoenix called me "Crawdaddy." I can play some Louisiana funk for sure, but that’s not where the moniker came from. I had learned about crawfish when I owned a fresh seafood market in Florida. After selling the business and moving to Arizona with my new wife, a few friends were jones-ing for some crawfish. So I called an old supplier back in Opelousas, Louisiana, who air-freighted forty pounds of crawdads out to Phoenix. On a beautiful spring day, we had a blast sitting around a condo swimming pool eating crawdads and drinking beer.
The next year we did it again, and the next, moving the event to my backyard, and it kept growing. By year five, our backyard party had burgeoned into the Arizona Crawfish Festival, a fundraiser supporting two youth-at-risk charities. We also wanted the festival to support the local music community, so we always hired a variety of local acts. Every year the music was top shelf, featuring many of the best bands and players in Phoenix—correction... the world! Everything from soul, jazz, rock, country, and rhythm & blues to funk, ska, reggae, cumbia, and zydeco.
By year eight we were sponsored by Budweiser and America West Airlines and always made the evening news. AZ Crawfest had now grown way too big for us to cook all the crawfish ourselves, so I persuaded a great local restaurant, Baby Kay’s Cajun Kitchen, to handle all that as volunteers. We moved the event to The Devil House, a massive warehouse-size college bar with an equally enormous outdoor patio and stage, near ASU in Tempe. The Devil House loved us for the bar business alone. By year ten, AZ Crawfest was no doubt the largest crawfish festival in the Southwest, cooking 3000 lbs. of crawfish for a thousand people.
We raised a lot of money year after year for Phoenix Youth At Risk and Phoenix Day Child Development Center, but after a dozen years, exhaustion kicked in. So, we trained the charities who received the proceeds how to put the event on themselves. I had had my fill of crawdads, but the nickname stuck. So, when people ask, “Why do they call you the Crawdaddy?” I happily tell them about the enormously fun crawfish festival I was a part of all those years.
