Varner's First Ever Reunion

Above, Debbie Varner Rawls, daughter of Paul Varner speaks to the roaring-hard-to-shut-up crowd about how pleased her father would be to know so many people have good-time memories of his restaurant.


Mrs. Varner, Paul’s wife.



Fred the Varner's evening carhop and his wife.

Saturday evening was the first Varner’s Drive-In Restaurant Reunion.

And no, this has no relationship to the Varner’s Restaurant on Concord Road in Smyrna.

I think it was a huge success. There were hundreds of people there… in fact, it was so big people could hardly move and navigate themselves around to see someone they thought they recognized and in my case, take pictures.

I think the first one was such a success they may have already outgrown its venue on the first try.

Monty Calhoun did an excellent job bringing it all together and so did people like Horace Armfield, Paul Roper, Arnold Guest, Rupert Raines, Jackie Gaskin, Mark McGee, and more who helped him. But Monty is a hands-on type of person and had a hand in all of it.

I always enjoy seeing old friends that were around in my formative years. And it is always interesting to see what they metamorphosed themselves into. Some you can’t believe how much they have physically change but when they start running their mouth you discover it is the same old friend hidden in those sagging jaws and wrinkles, and as they talk more, the sagging jaws, mustaches, gray hair, nose & ear hair, and wrinkles magically disappear and you and them are back conversing as you would have fifty years ago.

I think this and Bell Boys Annual Reunion if better than the class reunions held every ten years. When in school we had a wider range of friends than the class we were in... we mixed with the younger and older students. It is for sure now, we have grown up.

Please excuse the blurriness of some the pictures – my dumb little digital camera automatically focuses on the closest object to it, which was sometimes my finger - or it could be because of my quivering hands.