Fool.com: Five Years of Fooldom (Fribble) August 26, 1998

Wednesday, August 26, 1998

Five Years of Fooldom
by Bob Bobala (TMF [email protected])

As you may or may not have heard by now, last weekend Fool staff from across the land descended upon Williamsburg, VA, to celebrate another anniversary and to think about just what the heck it is we're doing with this venture called The Motley Fool. The gathering was a smashing success by all accounts -- except for maybe that of the undermanned bar staff of a place called Moody's Tavern, which our congregation of a 100 or so commandeered at about 11:00 pm on Saturday night.

Before Team Fool arrived in all its glory, the only other people there were a lounge keyboard player named Nick, who was singing to a woman named Claudia, who was celebrating her birthday with a small group of her friends. Oh, to share a birthday with the Fools.

We were pretty revved up after listening to some sixteen different Foolish speeches, including an epic poem highlighting five years of escapades since the inception of the long defunct printed version of Ye Olde Motley Fool. Unbelievable stuff, all of it contributing to my great fear that what I'm really involved in here is a cult from which I will never escape. It reminded me of something I heard in HQ the other day about how space aliens observing the Earth from a safe distance would think that Elvis was a religious figure. If that could be true, what would visitors from beyond think of the Fool?

More importantly, what did our poor bartender think of us at Moody's Tavern? There we were, pasted up against one other, shouting out drink orders to him in between yaking about beating the S&P, the lessons of Iomega, Starbucks, the Dow Dividend Approach, discount brokers, and the power of the internet. A police officer showed up behind the bar for a minute and I thought it was going to get ugly. But then our man Nick at the keyboards got into the melee. "You guys are from The Motley Fool?!" he said over the microphone. "I know you guys. I have stocks."

With that, he was off and running, trying to find songs in his digital repertoire that had the word Fool in them. Before we knew it, our own TMF Jules was at the microphone singing a gritty version of "Mustang Sally," and then, much to her chagrin, a rendition of "Don't Stop Believin'" from '80s powerhouse Journey. I was in a Foolish stupor, but surely these were the words that came out of her mouth: "Don't stop believin'� you can beat the S&P. Don't stop believin'� you can manage your own money. Don't stop believin'... you can buy good companies and just hold on and on and on and on!"

Something like that. I'm sure there are many more stories I could tell if space allowed. But it was something someone said as we were leaving Moody's Tavern that stuck in my mind all night: "I have never laughed so much in my life. Even during all sixteen of those speeches -- the smile never left my face."

I think that's a statement that a lot of us could have made about the night, and it's a statement that I've never been able to make about any other place I've worked. I've gone to company retreats before, and I've seen much needed pep-talks fall flat because no vision and no personality accompanied them. The Fool certainly suffers from no lack of any of these things -- pep, vision, or personality.

However, those things come not only from the staff but from the entire Fool community at large. One of the finest moments of this anniversary celebration was when a couple of non-staff Fools made their way to the podium and talked about how profound of an impact Fooldom has had upon their lives. Well, if that's true, you can imagine how much of an impact you all have on us. It's demonstrated every day with the hundreds of posts to the Fool's message boards and with lounge singers at places like Moody's Tavern, plugging the Fool as their gigs wind down: "That's www.fool.com, folks. Four years online. Happy Anniversary to Fools across the world!"

Indeed, Fools, happy anniversary.

[Hey Fools, why not pen a Fribble, yourself? We welcome submissions from readers. Just click here and read the "What's a Fribble?" item, pen a short masterpiece, and send it off to TMF [email protected].]