He was known as the man of 10,000 best friends. The man behind the counter of Muncie Liquors on Wheeling knew no strangers. But this past March, Chris "Bubba" Smith left them all behind.
"Bubba's not the kind of guy you read about in the paper and you're like 'oh that's too bad.' He's the kind of person that really impacted people's lives," Chris "Boober" Osteen said. "He's not one that you just let it go away."
Shortly after Bubba's death, Boober and his wife, both close friends of Bubba, began to plan a benefit concert in Bubba's name. The idea started with a Facebook group and grew to reality. The inaugural Bubbafest will be held on Saturday from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. at the Dill Street Bar and Grill.
The event will take place both in the parking lot outside of and inside the Dill Street bar. Food from local vendors, auctions and raffles, a DJ inside and different bands playing outside with "Losing September" as the headliner will be featured, but the main attraction will be the tournament of drinking games, Boober said.
"It will be along the lines of the movie 'Beerfest,'" Boober said.
Bubbafest tickets, for those 21 and up, are $8 if bought ahead of time at one of the local Muncie Liquor stores and $10 at the gate. Money raised from the event will go to help the family pay off the rest of the funeral costs and purchase a headstone for Bubba's grave. Any leftover funds will go to four different charities: Special Olympics, an American veteran association, the Muncie police and fire departments and Save the Music Foundation.
Each of the charities has some link to Bubba's life. He used to be an aide on his mother's special needs school bus. Some of the money will go to veterans due to the current state of the country. Many of the Muncie police and firemen either grew up with Bubba or frequented the store. And the Save the Music Foundation because Bubba just plain loved music, Bubba's brother James Smith said.
"That was his thing. That was his life," said Smith, who inherited Bubba's music collection of "thousands" of CDs, most of them metal.
Bubba was Smith's best friend, he said. He recalls all the memories they shared and the trouble they got into playing practical jokes with bottle rockets, leaving drunken voice mails at all hours of the night and going to concerts and parties. When they were little he used to call Bubba his "little bump" which eventually transferred to the nickname "Bubba."
The first month after Bubba's premature death at age 39 was the most difficult, Smith said.
"For me personally every day I still think about him but it's getting to the point where I'm starting to accept it," Smith said. "It happened. You can't do nothing. You can't reverse it. You can't do anything. It happened and that's the way it goes."
They cannot bring Bubba back but they can try to keep his memory alive, which is exactly what they plan to do with Bubbafest. Boober and Smith, along with another of Bubba's closest friends Bret Unger, want to show what Bubba meant to the community, especially to his mother, Mary Atkins-Smith.
"My whole goal with this is that she knows and she hears how much Bubba has touched people's lives. She knows that but I don't know if she's ever actually been able to physically put a picture on it," Unger said. "I want her to be able to sit there and look around and go 'Holy s***, there's 500 people here that are here to celebrate Bubba.' I want to say, 'Look, Mary, this is what people want to do for your son and for you. And this is how much he affected everybody.'"
Bubba's former boss Linda Koger said Bubba was certainly known throughout town, and he never forgot the names of the people coming in to his store. Months later he could remember who they were and what they drank. He kept an infamous bat behind the counter, which is now on display, to intimidate the troublemakers.
Yet he was also known for writing funny sayings on customers' bags, she said.
"That's just the type of person Bubba was. He was a fun-loving person. He would do anything he could for you," Unger said. "Literally he would step in front of anything for you if you were a true friend. And not even true friends, even these college kids he stood up for. He loved his college kids. He loved Ball State kids."
Unger further described Bubba as a big teddy bear. Though intimidating when needed, he was a gentle giant who truly loved what he did, Boober said.
"He would have stayed there till he was 80," he said. "He wouldn't have retired. There's just no doubt about it this was his life."
The main goal of Bubbafest for Boober, Smith and Unger is to help the memory of Bubba live on.
"This incoming class won't know him," Smith said.
"And we want them to know him," Unger continued. "We want you when you turn 21, when you come get a beer or whatever you get for a party or hangout, we want you to go 'I remember Bubba. I don't know him but I heard all the stories about him and this is the place to come.'"
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