America Is Family

That newspaper clipping isn’t about a record.

It’s about a legacy.

As America celebrates 250 years, I don’t think about famous families. I think about mine.

My dad was the youngest of fourteen children. They worked a farm in rural Georgia that wasn’t theirs. My grandmother died when he was 17. Some of our history disappeared with her. We can’t even say for certain my dad’s birth certificate is accurate. That’s what happens when families spend more time surviving than documenting.

My trail begins in Georgia. That’s enough for me.

On my mom’s side, my grandfather became a Teamster after the family left Kentucky. One brother went to Chicago. Another settled in St. Louis after the coal mines slowed down. Different roads. Same work ethic.

I call myself a child of Highway 41. My heart has always belonged to Georgia, but the Southeast and the Midwest raised me. Those highways carried generations of working people chasing the next opportunity, the next job, the next chance to build something better.

Trade shows have been part of my family’s story for three generations. Since 1979, there has been a Mitchell helping build the events that bring industries together across the Southeast and Midwest. We weren’t the keynote speakers. We were the people who unlocked the dock doors before sunrise and made sure the lights came on before anyone walked through the front entrance.

That’s America.

Not the headlines. Not the boardrooms. The builders.

Somewhere along the way, the American Dream changed. It used to mean earning your paradise. Building it one day at a time. Today, too often, success is measured by obtaining it as quickly as possible.

I think we’re entering a new kind of divide in this country—not between North and South, not between red and blue, and certainly not one that should ever be settled with violence.

It’s a divide between collars.

Blue collar. White collar.

Not because one is better than the other, but because somewhere along the way we forgot they need each other. Ideas don’t build themselves. Products don’t move themselves. A company isn’t complete without the people in the office or the people on the floor.

Run The Damn Dock has always believed the dock isn’t the end of the process. It’s where every process becomes reality.

America was built the same way.

By families.

By labor.

By faith.

By people whose names will never be in history books but whose fingerprints are on everything we touch.

Happy 250th, America.

Here’s to the builders.