Pythian Games

 In 1977, I was hired by a Board of Directors to be the Executive Director of the Alamance County Arts Council.  The Arts Council was a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose bylaws instructed me to promote ALL ASPECTS OF THE ARTS to ALL residents of Alamance County.  I remained in that position for 8 years until I decided to work for a Community College promoting industrial training.

While I was at the Arts Council, any research that I needed to conduct must be done in the library.  University libraries had more research materials than public libraries and since my father was an alumnus of a university, I was able to use the university library.

In my research, I discovered that the Pythian Games pre-dated the athletic Olympics and consisted of music, oratories, pottery art and drama.  Since I was working for an Arts Council, the idea that I had was to recreate the FIRST MODERN PYTHIAN GAMES to be held in Alamance County at the park.

To read more about the Pythian Games, CLICK HERE...

How to accomplish this?

About this time OPEC was beginning to become recognized by the USA and the rest of the world, so I thought I would contact the OPEC countries that had Embassies in Washington DC, and convince them to agree to ARTIST EXCHANGE PROGRAMS between Alamance County Artist and their artists.

Once I got them to agree to do that, my next job was to organize those artist exchange programs.  The idea I had was to get that started then visit each of these embassies, explain the Pythian Games to them and get them to finance whatever needed to be done to get the games to Alamance County.

As an incentive, I would name each of the art games after each OPEC country that agreed to donate.

At the time Telly Savalas was a recognizable movie star and I was going to ask him to be one of the judges.  Malina Mercouri (also an actress) was Cultural Director for Greece, and I was going to ask her to be one of the judges as well.  Additional judges would come from the OPEC countries that donated as well as a local government official.

I am sure that I could have convince another company to pay for having medals being forged.

The competitions would include:

1. music
2. painting
3. sculpture
4. weaving
5. crafts
6. print making 
7. pottery
8. drama
9. poetry
10. photography

Obviously, each main category would have numerous subcategories.

One of the tricks of the trade that I learned while I was employed as the Executive Director was that if you got the EDITOR of the local newspaper involved in your activity...  like being the MC for the event...  you would receive all sorts of free publicity.  The ego of editors could not resist the attention.