John B. Marek is a writer, farmer, outdoorsman and recovering economic developer. You can find his books at johnbmarek.com.
The window on the mountain is open today to a high in the mid-50s and mostly sunny skies – nice weather for the High Country in mid-December.
The college football playoff teams were announced this past weekend to some controversy, as 12-1 Alabama got in over 13-0 Florida State. Frankly, my interest in major college athletics has waned as NIL, transfer portals and one-and-dones have obliterated the game I once enjoyed. These days, I stick to watching the lower-level conferences where some semblance of the “college” in college athletics remains. My alma mater, Bowling Green, and my almost mater, Ohio University, play in the Mid-American Conference, a lower-level FBS league that maintains the charade of being “at the same level” as Ohio State or Georgia while obviously being nowhere close.
Here in the High Country, the home team is Appalachian State. The App State Mountaineers had a lot of success at the next tier down FCS level, winning three consecutive national championships between 2005 and 2007 before making the jump to the “big time” FBS. I had a neighbor who was a graduate, and I asked him about the switch to FBS status. “It’s okay, I guess, but we used to compete for national titles, and now we compete for a nondescript bowl bid where we play another unremarkable team for no particularly good reason,” he said. This year, the Mountaineers will play the Mid-American Conference champion Miami (Ohio) RedHawks in the Cure Bowl in Orlando. That’s a decent reward for a successful season, I suppose.
For the second year in a row, however, Bowling Green will play in the Quick Lube Bowl in Detroit, which is just over an hour’s drive from campus. I had hoped they might get a slot in the Bahamas Bowl, which is being played this year in Charlotte due to stadium renovations in Nassau. It seems a little unfair that a team would be assigned to a bowl in a cold, dreary city a short bus ride away two years in a row, although at least Ford Field is domed. They might have been relegated to the Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise, which is usually played in blowing snow and sub-freezing temperatures.
The temporarily relocated Bahamas Bowl is being sponsored by a Charlotte-based restaurant chain called “Famous Toastery,” and weirdly enough, I have a little history with that business.
Back in the early-2000s, my consulting firm, MarketPath, was located in a “historic” office building in downtown Huntersville. We shared a parking lot with a little cafe called Smilin’ Jim’s. It was convenient to drop in for breakfast, lunch or a cup of coffee, so I got to know the eponymous owner pretty well. One day, Jim informed me that he was selling the restaurant and introduced me to the new owner, Brian.
Brian told me he planned to change the name to “Toast” and needed a new logo. I’m not an artist or graphic designer, but I like to mess around with that stuff, so I asked Brian if I could give it a shot. He said sure, and I spent an hour or two coming up with some rough ideas. Brian really liked one of them, which was essentially a brown and yellow bread slice shape with a black drop-shadow and a similarly colored word mark. He offered me a free lunch for the design, and I readily accepted.
Within a couple of weeks, a new sign featuring the design was hung outside the building and all the service staff had polo shirts featuring it. Seeing something I’d created being used that way was pretty cool. A couple of years later, Toast opened its second location, followed by a third and fourth, and my logo and “Toast” wordmark adorned each of them.
But then Brian and his business partners decided to franchise the operation, and that created legal issues. The name “Toast” was common among restaurants and could not be trademarked. After much back-and-forth with their lawyers, they finally settled on the name “Famous Toastery” and had a new logo and wordmark created, presumably by a real graphic designer.
If you squint hard enough, though, you can still see just a hint of the old design, and that’s why it would have been AWESOME to have my alma mater playing in a bowl game sponsored by a business I had some small role in helping get off the ground.