The Globe-Miami Chamber of Commerce has been throwing its signature fundraiser for nearly five decades, and the party has evolved quite a bit since 1977.
Danny Michels was there from the start, back when Tom Anderson and Bill Stinson ran the show. Downtown Globe and Miami were humming then. Every storefront was occupied; there was a Sears, Montgomery Ward, Walgreens, Gambles, JCPenney, a dozen dress shops, and retail outlets.
"There was a lot of money in this town," Michels recalls. "Besides the mines, it was a business-friendly town. It attracted business people."
The original fundraiser was built around a simple premise: sell tickets, throw a dinner, give away something worth winning. They called it the Cadillac Camaraderie because in those first two years, the first prize was a Cadillac. As costs climbed through the late '70s and into the '80s, the prize scaled back: first a loaded Chevy Silverado, then $6,000 cash, and finally the $5,000 grand prize that became the standard.
Tickets ran $150 apiece and included dinner. Michels remembers how the details got hammered out.
"Tom Anderson, Bill Stinson, and I used to sit down on a Friday at lunch with Danko," (the owner of the former Copper Hills), "and we'd negotiate the price of dinner. It'd all get rolled out on a napkin. That was the contract," he remembers.
It was, to put it plainly, a stag party.
Ellen Kretsch, who worked for Tom Anderson at the Arizona Silver Belt, was enlisted alongside Donna Anderson to track tickets and manage the raffle. In those early years, Kretsch and Anderson were the only women in the room.
"There was an open bar," Michels says, "and men who rarely drank got drunk at the Camaraderie."
The Sheriff's Reserve was on hand to offer rides home.
Kretsch remembers the theater of the final rounds: as the pool of winners narrowed to a dozen or so, the horse-trading would begin — men offering to buy each other out for $150 with a promise to split the prize if they won.
That all changed in the mid-1980s. With more women entering the local business community, Ingo Radike led the push to open the doors.
"Peggy Porter went the first year," Michels recalls. "She was with the bank, a big boss at the bank." The tone shifted too. "The drinking part calmed down big time."
Last year, Jesse Leetham — board president of the chamber, city councilman and local business owner — pushed for something more than a raffle. The board wanted the annual dinner to do double duty: raise money while also publicly recognizing the businesses and individuals driving the local economy.
The result was the Copper Globe Awards, with categories spanning the breadth of the community:
Business awards are limited to chamber members. Service awards are open to everyone. Voting is conducted through a chamber survey, with results reviewed by an independent panel of judges applying their own evaluation criteria. Winners receive an award and a plaque, bragging rights for the year ahead.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here