From the Breakfast Flakes: Congrats on Your Retirement, Bill

In case you haven't heard, Bill Dutcher is stepping down after forty years of working at MetraPark. We've been lucky to know him.

Cat Country's relationship with Metra goes back to when we started in March of 1988. If you are in the business of promoting trade shows, athletic events, and country music concerts, then you are going to get to know your event staff well. We have done just that.

From our perspective, as an emcee, you spend quite a bit of time standing around backstage. By the time that it's time for the concert to start, guys like Bill Dutcher have already done all that they can do to make it a great event. This gives us a chance to chat and get some behind-the-scenes stories on that night's entertainment and so forth.

Bill has been so upbeat and great to work with. When we had to reconfigure last year's Flakesgiving into a "stay in your vehicle" event, Bill, along with Ray Massie, were quick to help us figure out how to get it done.

Working at a county taxpayer event center can be challenging because you have to try to keep taxpayers as well as vendors happy. And this administration has done both very well for a long time.

We also share with Bill Dutcher many great memories of Bill Chiesa. Bill was the manager of MetraPark when we started and extremely instrumental in helping us present the country concerts at Metra back when all of the acts had to do two shows each night. I recall emceeing both performances by Alabama one night and Mr. Chiesa and I sat through both sets just being wowed by how good they were.

Since Bill Dutcher stepped in, the operation has run quite smoothly. Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Dutcher. You've certainly put your time in.

A Taste of What a Flakes Trip to Mexico is Really Like

The Imaginary Twitter Feed for Mark Wilson. Yes, It Is About Beer.

If Mark had a Twitter account, he might tweet about music, and probably about golf, but most definitely, he'd tweet about beer.

LOOK: Best Beers From Every State

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.

Filed Under: metrapark