Davis Rally returns for 38th year

The good news, Melanie Davis said with a laugh, is it’s not “all new” this year for Davis Rally organizers.“It’s nice to have last year under our belt,” she said. “Everything was all new to us in a lot of ways last year so having that year of experience is great for us.”A year ago, the Davis Rally experienced plenty of changes — the biggest coming at the top as Gordon Davis Jr. and his wife, Melanie, and Dan Davis and his significant other, Amanda Quinton, took over as rally directors.The 2015 rally also ran for two days, instead of the traditional three, and that’s a change this year’s Davis Rally will keep when it opens its doors to business on Friday morning at New Hampton’s Mikkelson Park.“I think that was a change people really liked,” Melanie Davis said. “Honestly, we didn’t have a lot of Sunday activities anyway so it wasn’t a huge change.”This year’s rally will be the 39th edition of the rally that was started by the Davis brothers’ grandparents — Gene and Luci Davis — in 1979.The brothers took over the rally last year after their father, Gordon Davis Sr., and his wife, Elaine, ran the rally for 10 years.The new directors instituted changes in an effort to increase attendance, which peaked near 4,000 in the early 2000s but has slowly dropped since then.For the complete story see the 9/6/2016 New Hampton Tribune.