From Delegate to DJ: Rob Ray's NAJAC Journey

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the Young Famous Podcast, and if you hit play, you're probably here for one or two reasons. The first is you probably saw the title and you were somebody that had attended the National Junior Achievement Conference, and you knew that we had a reunion back on August 9th, 10th, and 11th, and you kind of wanted to hear what you missed. And if you press play and you're not somebody that attended the conference, you probably said, Hey, I wonder who Marv is talking to and what's this all about?

Either way, I wanted to make sure that I took the time now to lay the groundwork for these next few episodes, because even if you did not attend the National Junior Achievement Conference, I do hope that you listen, because I think you're going to understand a little bit about why I decided to do this podcast. It may have started out just reaching out to friends and stuff during COVID, but it it's now turned into something where I wanted to find a way to honor what I think is something that we don't really think about a lot until it's late in life, where when you look back over your life at what you remember most and what you cherish the most, most everybody realizes that it's not going to be the things you've accumulated, the awards you've won.

It's usually going to be, you know, your relationship with your family, possibly your faith. But it's also going to boil down to the relationships that you had with friends and the experiences that you had. And the Junior Achievement Conference was one of those experiences for me that while it may not be the same as, you know, growing up in Satellite Beach and seeing people from elementary school, junior high and high school, it may not rival the college relationships that I had or the grad school relationships or the work friends that I've had.

Junior Achievement is something different. And many of you know Junior Achievement from the organization that, you know, is focused on youth entrepreneurship and financial literacy. But the National Conference was something different.

You know, it began in 1944. Obviously, I wasn't at the first one, but it lasted for 50 years. And it was a conference that on the surface, you know, brought together Junior Achievement delegates, people that had participated in the company program, had won contests, whether they were, you know, President of the Year, Company of the Year, Vice President of Production, Vice President of Finance.

And you got to go to this conference and have general sessions with some pretty famous keynote speakers, meet some business and industry leaders. There were breakouts, workshops, seminars, networking opportunities. There were scholarships given so that some people actually attended college because of their participation in Junior Achievement.

And I attended the conference. I think it was a total of 11 years, two years as a delegate and nine years as staff. And we've been doing these reunions off and on, but in the beginning, they were just small groups of three or four.

And in 2019, we did one, and I thought the number was 70, but I've been told that the number was actually over 100 people attended that reunion. And you know, the question is, why? Why would you attend a reunion for a conference that you attended?

And for my tech friends out there, this isn't like a regular tech conference that we would go to where we would see people for a couple of days. We sit and listen to vendors and a keynote speaker, maybe see a conference at the end. The National Junior Achievement Conference was something that was truly an experience.

Later on in one of the interviews, you'll hear me talk about it being this crucible, this time where literally we would descend upon the campus of Indiana University for a week with 3,000 students, three to 400 staffers. And for literally 24 hours a day for a week, we would put this conference on. And the friendships and the bonds that we shared as staff members is something that we can't explain.

And when you have a reunion, whether it's high school, college, or whatever, the tendency is you want to go and reconnect with old friends. You want to relive some nostalgia. You want to, you know, have some, you know, curiosities answered about classmates, maybe some networking opportunity.

But the junior achievement NAJAC reunion that we just had was something different. It was more of a kinship, fellowship, a brotherhood to some degree. And you're going to hear with the interviews that I did that it is hard to explain, but we try to do that.

We try to talk about the bonds that we had and the fact that we could do this conference year after year, not talk to each other, but yet show back up on campus as if we had not missed a beat. And that the closest thing that I could probably compare this to is maybe something like a fraternity or a sorority where if you attended one of these, you had your brothers and sisters that came before you, you had your brothers and sisters that came after you, and you had this thing that you could share. Well, the National Junior Achievement Conference was something like that.

A lot of the people that I saw were people that attended years before me, sometimes 15, 20, 25 years they attended this conference. And somebody like me who only attended 11, and then there were people that only attended one or two, but still had that connection to us. So you're going to hear us talk about, you know, what it's like to come back and relive that history, to capture that energy, those feelings, those relationships, that what I'm finding out, they're actually a lot more deeper in some than they even are for me.

People that got married, people that became best friends, even though they may live hundreds of miles apart. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of framework about these next few podcasts that I'm going to do. Obviously, if you are a part of NAJAC and you could not join us, you'll get to hear some of the reflections of the people that did attend.

We are going to be doing this again in a couple of years, so we hope that you can attend then. And if you are not somebody that was a part of Junior Achievement or NAJAC and you're one of my friends from another circle, I hope that you will kind of listen and find out another part of what makes Uncle Marv tick. I think it's something that I'm going to work on in this podcast is to share the overlap of my life.

For a long time, I kept things compartmentalized and my work people didn't know about my personal life and my Junior Achievement people didn't know about my other lives. So I'm starting to blend all those together. I think that it helps for people to understand me.

I think that there's an opportunity where people can learn from others in this network that we have. We all have these multiple networks. We all live separate parts of our lives that if we were able to blend them together, people would get a better understanding of who we are.

And I hope that that happens as you listen to these shows. I'm going to start with Rob Ray, who was one of the people that helped organize this past reunion. I'll be putting in my commentary throughout the episodes, but I hope that you enjoy these.

And I'll get started right now with my friend Rob Ray. I'm here today with one of the event planners for this year's Junior Achievement Reunion Conference, a very recognizable name and face and voice. For those that have attended all those many years ago, I'm here with Rob Ray.

Rob, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you, Marv?

I am doing good. Well, Rob, I hope I laid out a good introduction that you didn't hear right now, but in the podcast where I talk about Junior Achievement and how I got involved in the conference and how I got involved. So one of the things that I want to first ask of every person I interview is what got you involved and how long ago was that?

[Rob Ray]
1970. 1970. My mother worked for Sam Kovac, who was the executive director of Junior Achievement of Dallas at the time, and she got me involved in it.

And I won the first year, my sophomore year, I won vice president of production, and the second year I went as just a general delegate, and my senior year I didn't go at all. But my first year of college, I was selected as a group counselor. I wasn't a very good group counselor, but I was a group counselor.

We all did that. So, you know, and then the next year I wound up in PR and worked there for a year. And then the third year I worked in security.

And after that, I wound up, it was really funny. The year I was doing security, Al Vacanti and I, it started raining. And Al Vacanti, and so they had everybody in the basement of McNutt.

And you know how hot that gets and how sweaty that gets when it's very humid. And so the kids were just milling around and there was a jukebox there. And so Al rigged up a microphone and we'd punch a song on the jukebox and didn't have to put any money in it.

It was free. And then we would talk between the songs and the kids started dancing and they danced for about two hours. Well, Jim Sweeney, for some reason, I guess he was just coming down to see what was going on, saw it and said, this would be a great idea that we could do during the week and keep the kids busy.

So the next year, we did it several places. We started out one year in the old field house. And that was okay, but it was still awful hot and humid.

So they moved it the next year to the tennis courts. And we were there a few years and we had a lot of things happen. We had everything from I shipped my equipment up there one year and Federal Express busted it all and had to go buy all the equipment and that kind of thing.

And so we had those kind of things, but we kind of evolved and it started catching on because we would do them on Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night. We take Wednesday night off and then we would start about nine o'clock after the president's ball was starting to wind down a little bit and the kids would change their clothes and come out and then we would go until, you know, as close to curfew as we could. And it kept them busy and it kept them dancing.

They had a good time and that kind of thing. Well, it got so big when, you know, by the time we had the year that we had three thousand kids for a couple of years. We'd outgrown the tennis court.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Rob Ray]
So we excuse me, we moved it to the swimming pool, the same swimming pool where Mark Spitz trained. And I got ahold of a guy who had all the equipment and I didn't have to bring it. I just brought some of the records.

And we sat up on one of the one of the springboards and he put the he had a big speaker system. He put them all around. And at the time I was DJing in Dallas a lot.

And so I had I had a good number of records and I kind of knew how people wanted to want to do it and what they wanted to hear and that kind of thing. And so we started doing it at the pool and we didn't lose anybody in the pool. Nobody jumped in or fell in.

So that was lucky. But that's how we that's how we got started. And that was at the same time, right after I started doing the dances, they moved me to the assistant activities director to work with Doug Boyd, which means we did a little bit everything.

We unpacked the conference, delivered. We had a storeroom downstairs of Briscoe where we stored everything, including the J sign. And we were in charge of putting all of that stuff up and making sure everybody had the equipment that they needed and that kind of thing.

And so that's how it just kind of evolved itself and kind of wound up being a really good thing. And the other thing we wound up doing was being able to play music for Blow Jack and keep that going. And it was several different Blow Jack parties.

We asked we had to ask IU to extend us an hour because people were having too much fun. So that was that was very gratifying to me. But it was also everybody was enjoying themselves.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. Yeah. So it is absolutely fantastic to hear the origins of the tennis courts and the in the swimming pool, because by the time I had gotten there in the mid to late 80s, it was in full swing.

And it was it was a big deal. And seeing you with all your equipment and to be honest, the first year I thought, man, who is this DJ that they flew in for this? Because you did have all the equipment there.

And I'm like, I'm sure they paid a lot of money for that. So very interesting to hear the story.

[Rob Ray]
And what one of the I forgot to tell you, one of the other things we did starting in the early 80s, when MTV was hot, I started sending letters to MTV and saying, hey, I'm DJing for three thousand kids for a week. Can you send us some stuff? And every year for about five years, they cleared out their closet and sent us stuff.

That was very cool and very nice of it.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. Very nice. So, Rob, let me ask this question, because as I did the interviews during the weekend, the thing that kind of stood out is.

The joy that everybody had being back together is almost indescribable, you know, when people go back and do a high school reunion or a college reunion, you know, those were people that you kind of grew up with or you saw every day for years at a time. But in this sense, we most of the time only saw each other for that week, plus or minus, plus or minus a few days. But yet the connections that we made were in some sense more ingrained than the people we grew up with.

Right. Oh, yeah. As somebody who came, you know, before me and you're part of what we consider the old guard in a sense, you know, how does it feel for you to have attended for all those years and then to come back and meet everybody again after.

Fifteen, twenty years.

[Rob Ray]
Yeah, I can't explain it. You can't explain it to anybody that had not been there. They don't understand.

They don't understand the camaraderie. I mean, these people are like brothers and sisters to me. We talk on the phone some and we nowadays we Zoom a little bit, but we had that connection and that feeling that that nobody can describe.

No, if you haven't been there, you have not. You can't understand it. It's one of those things that's just deep in your heart and you have the love for these people.

You know, where else could you work all day long and then party at the time till 2 a.m. in the morning? You know whether it's whether it's at it's at a bar or whether it's sitting out in the on the benches at Briscoe and just talking or whatever, it's just an indescribable feeling. I'm closer to most of these people that I see at these reunions than I am to some of my friends here.

[Uncle Marv]
Hmm. So over the years, is there anything that stands out to you that if you were to try to explain it to somebody, do you have, you know, a memory, an event that you could share that would try to explain it?

[Rob Ray]
Well, you try to you try to tell them when you have that many kids and you have that many students and you try to see what they're going through and what they're learning and you know, you're helping them, but you're also doing it with your friends. You know, that's this is something so rare, Marv, that it's just almost indescribable unless you've been there.

[Uncle Marv]
One of the things that I got told and I had known over the years that there were people that, you know, had met their spouse at these things. And I was trying to explain to my wife, you know, it's hard to realize that you could meet somebody over a weeklong conference. Now, granted, I mean, you didn't meet somebody in a week and fall in love.

But over the years, that camaraderie that you talked about stayed. And, you know, back in the day, you know, staying in touch was much harder. You know, it was it was long distance phone calls that cost you lots of money.

It was it was quite a few phone bills, you know, having to write letters. And that was your communication. There was no cell phone.

There was no email. It was it was all quite interesting.

[Rob Ray]
So can you imagine what it would be like today with the conference, trying to run the conference with cell phones, no beepers, not even probably not even need as many walkie talkies as we had, you can just it would be amazing.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, well, you know, what's funny is, is I so I tend tech conferences all the time and some of the tech conferences, you know, they may have twenty five hundred people at max. Most of them are around a thousand. And hearing some of the stories that they complain about in doing a conference that are self-contained inside of a hotel where, you know, the rooms are there, everything's taken care of.

We were doing this on a college campus across many miles, marching students back and forth across the campus in the middle of August in the heat, like you said, with walkie talkies. Right. And there was only a handful of them.

It wasn't like we all had walkie talkies, right?

[Rob Ray]
Right. That's right.

[Uncle Marv]
The logistical nightmare of doing that, getting everybody in, getting them checked into the dorms, getting to keep everything on schedule, coordinating all of the activities, all the visitors. You know, we had we had CEOs of million billion dollar businesses that we had to bring in. And, you know, there was no thought of safety back then.

[Rob Ray]
No, no, not at all. It was a lot at all. It was one of those things that all of us had been involved in some form or fashion.

Most of us had anyway, with the Jamco's.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[Rob Ray]
So those were kind of many national conferences, I would say, you know, locally, regional. And so we had an idea how to put it on. But, you know, on the scale, I give credit to the to the national office and to the summer staff and the people that did all the groundwork before we even got there.

You know, and the more you do it, the more you do that job, whether it's for a week or whether it's for a little longer, but the longer you do it, you get good at it. And it wound up being a very, very well done machine.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So now let me ask you this, because I know that, you know, since my last attended conference, which was 1993, there were several times where I would meet up with a few buddies and pals, you know, three or four of us would meet here, five or six here. And 2019, I believe, was the first time we had ever gathered.

I think the number was 70 of us.

[Rob Ray]
Something like that. And it wasn't the first time we had had another conference a few years before. And I don't remember the date.

There were about 30 of us there.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I remember that one.

[Rob Ray]
And yeah, and so it was a few years before, but that was the first one we really organized in 2019. We had, I think it was somewhere around, it was over a hundred people.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So it was big. So I kind of wanted to get an idea of what was it that caused you as part of the planning group?

I think it was you, Tom Kushner, Radar. And Doug. To come up with this idea to try to get as many of us together as we could.

Tell me about that process. What was what was the start of it? How hard was it to do?

[Rob Ray]
You know, it wasn't that difficult because it was the 100th anniversary and we did several things. We were just talking on the phone. Radar and I were just talking on the phone one night and we talked about putting a union together.

And I think he called Tom and I called Doug. And we started getting on conference calls and kind of planning it out. And Tom's connection had a very good connection with the national office.

And the other thing we did that really helped was we put up a BLOJAC group on Facebook and people started seeing that and talking to other people. And all of a sudden, where we thought we'd have 50 or 60 people, you know, it's like this person's coming, this person's coming, this person's coming. You know, all of a sudden it was like organic.

It started building itself. But we started out and we had we had monthly conference calls to plan out the stuff. You know, our IEU contact, God rest his soul, Dick Clausen, even came to the 2019.

And that's you know, that's wonderful. And we got to see a lot of people and have a have a have a good time. We had a golf tour.

We played a little golf. We were able to do a lot of things. And it was it was it was fun.

It was great. And we thought we'd have it every two years. And then COVID hit.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[Rob Ray]
And so five years later, this was the first time we felt like it was it was OK to have it again. And. And there it was planned very well this time, but we didn't get a hold a hold of as many people as we want because we wanted we wanted to keep growing it and make it bigger if we can.

And, you know, we're going to try to have it again in two years and do the same thing and try to contact as many people as we we're going to try to start this January and contacting people that are were in their departments and know how to get hold of other people and see if we can get our numbers back up. And hopefully we will.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I to be honest, it kind of snuck up on me. I don't know how that's possible. But you're right.

We didn't have the same push this year as we did in twenty nineteen. So an effort will be made certainly to, you know, push for 2026 and, you know, get back to the hundred plus and make it happen.

[Rob Ray]
Well, I have to give Tom Kushner a lot of credit because he carried this on his shoulders this year with his new job and that kind of thing. He did a great job in putting it all together and making sure we had hotel rooms and a good time and, you know, that kind of thing. So I give him a lot of credit for that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So what's the one thing that you took away from this past conference? What, you know, stays in your mind as we remember that weekend?

[Rob Ray]
Very easy. These are the best friends that I have. It's like when we get together and you'll agree with this, it's like we hadn't missed a step.

You know, it's like we hadn't missed a step. I always say now the first week of August, if we're not getting together, is the worst week of my life because I remember I remember the conference so well. And Fred and I used to go on Facebook in our group chat.

And before we started these reunions and we would text back and forth on Facebook what we were all doing and what we were all doing at the conference on that particular day. And people really enjoyed reading that. That was kind of fun.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, I remember seeing some of those and, you know, having a rival day, you know, the buses coming in and in the kids coming off, you know, cheering and doing all their stuff.

[Rob Ray]
Yeah. So I don't know if you remember this, but one of my vivid memories is the first year we had three thousand kids and they were in the balcony and it was a general session and they were all yelling and screaming and the balcony started bouncing. Yes.

It's just it was incredible. You know, Doc and his security crew was scared to death that the balcony was going to come down.

[Uncle Marv]
That was something I do remember, you know, those years. And it is a testament. I think the first year I went there.

They had maybe a few people up in the balcony, and then the next year I came back, the balcony was full and it was almost to the point of, man, if this conference keep growing, where are we going to have general sessions? Right.

[Rob Ray]
Yeah, that's exactly right. So, yeah, that I remember that to this day.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. So, Rob, the memories you mentioned, you know, all the places that people know McNutt, Briscoe, Foster, the Memorial Union, general session, walking back and forth in the heat. The Coke tent came up.

And of course, we put together our own version of the J.A. Bowl at the reunion. So thank you to John Topper and Rob for doing that and turned out to be a good weekend. Thank you guys very much for making sure that we did it again.

[Rob Ray]
It was a good weekend. And, you know, as I say, Tom carried most of the load on this one, but he was we tried to help him out as much as we could. And when it got down to Helene found the place for us to have dinner and Doug and I went and found Scotty Paschal's tree that we had and had a little memorial service.

You know, and Rob Montgomery said something to me that made a lot of sense because I asked him, I said, you know, how often should we get do these? How often should we get together? And he said, you know, we're not getting any younger, so we ought to have a more often.

We've lost so many people, you know, over the last few years.

[Uncle Marv]
So, yep, we have. So obviously, I will do my best to assist and help spread the word and make sure that we get people to join us again in 2026. And again, Rob, thank you very much for helping put this together and making sure that we remember.

[Rob Ray]
It's my esteemed pleasure to be able to participate. Absolutely. It's my honor.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, Rob, thank you again. And obviously we'll be in touch and I hope that you get a chance to sit back and listen to the rest of these interviews as we recorded people live in Bloomington and, you know, for many, it truly was the best week of our lives.

[Rob Ray]
Till then.

[Uncle Marv]
That concludes the first interview from the NAJAC reunion. I want to say thank you to Rob. And as you can tell, Rob really emphasized the deep familial type bonds that were formed through the NAJAC staff, describing them like brothers and sisters.

And, you know, he talks about how the camaraderie experienced is unique and often stronger than connections made in other places. I do want to talk about Mark Spitz, who he mentioned, for those of you that do not know, Mark Spitz is a former American swimmer, Olympic champion. He was the most decorated swimmer before Michael Phelps, noted for his best performance in the 1972 Olympics in Munich, where at the time he had won the unprecedented seven gold medals in a single Olympic Games.

So that happened there on the campus of Indiana University and why he mentioned it. So just something else to add to the legacy and the history of where we attended those events. So again, thank you to Rob and hope that you enjoyed the first recap of the NAJAC reunion that I attended and that you'll come back and listen to more as we move on with additional episodes of the Unfamous podcast and remembering the 2024 NAJAC reunion.