Jimmy Earl is rolling as he rattles off the names of individuals who have received the Charles A. McElravy Award. It is the public assembly venue industry’s most prestigious award, named after one of the industry’s founders and given during VenueConnect by the International Association of Venue Managers.
“I’m looking at names like Ray Ward, Jerry Barshop, Cliff Wallace, Roy Saunders, David DeWald, Larry Fontana, Dean Justice … all of these people,” Earl says. “Brad Mayne, Frank Poe, Carol Wallace and on and on and on … Bob Mayer, Dexter King.”
Earl is just getting started.
“Folks like Dennis Finfrock, Don Jewell and a lot of these folks are also McElravy winners. Tom Parkinson, for gosh sake!”
After this year’s VenueConnect, that roll call will include one Jimmy Earl, long-time senior associate director of the Frank Erwin Special Events Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He served as IAVM president (now known as chairman) from 2004 to 2005. His only other career stop was also in Texas, as manager of the Tarrant County Convention Center in Fort Worth from 1987-1990.
Earl, who will receive the 2016 McElravy Award during VenueConnect in Minneapolis, is a 35-year veteran of the facility management industry, a profession the man did not know existed when he stumbled into it in Amarillo, Texas.
“I was just doing some odd jobs around the Amarillo Civic Center in 1976 and one day I came in on a Friday and David DeWald (long-time venue director) said, ‘OK, on Monday you report to my office and wear a tie,’” Earl recalled. “He told me I was going to be his executive assistant. I said OK, only to find out that was just a fancy term for gofer, but I learned so much from him. I learned there was a facility management industry. I had no clue. David gave me the chance. He gave me an opportunity by hiring me to work part-time and then going from there.”
As grateful as he is, Earl has done plenty to improve his own knowledge of the field through education. He graduated from the Venue Management School at Oglebay in 1993, attended the IAVM Senior Executive Symposium at Cornell University in 1997 and has been an active member of IAVM since 1987. He has served on a number of committees and sits on the IAVM Board as Director-at-Large Universities. Other volunteer roles Earl has served in include the Board of Governors Senior Executive Symposium and the IAVM Foundation as a trustee. He attained his CFE designation in 1995.
As Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl” belted out at IAVM’s annual conference in 2004 in Washington, D.C., it was Jimmy Earl’s time to make his opening remarks as the association’s new president. It would serve as a distinct highlight that Earl still finds difficult to put into words.
“It means a lot to me,” said Earl. “To be recognized by your peers is the ultimate thing. I always held the past award winners in the highest esteem and realized they were at the pinnacle of the profession and the industry. I’m very humbled and grateful to even be in that category.
“What really, really causes me to become awed and emotional about this is when I look at this list of names on here. This is something that is not awarded every year, so I know it is significant. I remember my year as president and the discussions we had about possible recipients for the award and what a big deal it was.”
Earl said that the local reaction has been very positive. He even received a card from University of Texas football coach Charlie Strong, offering congratulations.
The card sits an arm’s length away on Earl’s desk, and he was only too happy to share its contents:
“Jimmy, congratulations on the Charles A. McElravy Award. You are clearly very deserving of the honor. Thank you for all the great work you do for all at the Erwin Center and the University of Texas. All of us are better for it. Congratulations again. Hook ‘em, Charlie Strong.”
“How much better does it get than that? That one is on the desk for me to read periodically,” Earl said with a laugh.
Earl said that he also places the award in a historical context.
“Our country and our society has been through a whole lot of things,” he said. “I wonder if in 1929, when Charles A. McElravy was president, how many African Americans you think might have been in the association. That was just the culture. Then you go down the list (of presidents) as far as I know all the way to Carol Wallace in 1999, who is female and African American.
“The transition not only socially but technologically is probably the biggest advance we have had … what computers have done and how they’ve impacted our business. Then just the growth of our industry from when it started to now, from so few people to now nearly 6,000 members.
“I think about stuff like that and just how far we’ve come and just to have the opportunity to be in that group. I remember when I got the phone call from (IAVM chair) Karen Totaro. I haven’t had that feeling in a long, long time, when you get that kind of airy, butterfly-in-your-belly feeling. I was just very grateful and very humbled.”
Earl’s appreciation of history makes it easy for him to think on what McElravy himself, the association’s founder, would think of the profession as it stands today.
“I think he would just absolutely be wide-eyed and in awe,” Earl said. “How could you ever imagine it? Just imagine you have new venues opening everywhere. You have the new one in Las Vegas, a new one in Minneapolis and on and on and on. Each one is state-of-the-art and they improve it each time and they get better and better. He would be like, ‘Wow, check this out!’”
“If you could see the future it would really be something.
“I think the most impact this has had on me is when my son asked me what I would do differently that I know now but didn’t know then. I said that when I was younger I wish I had been more compassionate and humble. But then I got older and started figuring out, ‘Wait a minute, I’m closer to where I’m going than where I’ve been!’”
Interviewed for this story: Jimmy Earl, (512) 471-4716