Tom Hardy Steps Down From The Blue Ridge Parkway Association
(But after a winter in Florida, he’ll be back on the roadway.)
For years, Tom Hardy has taken his motor home to consumer shows to promote the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Executive director of the nonprofit Blue Ridge Parkway Association, Hardy has logged many miles in that RV while talking up the virtues of the parkway, as well as those of the two national parks that the scenic corridor connects—Shenandoah National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He’s been a booster as well for the businesses that line the Parkway in Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina.
But “that’s going to change in November,” Hardy says with a laugh from the association’s office in Asheville. After 36 years with the organization, he’s retiring, taking his wife, Vickie, and the motor home to Florida for the winter. His career making people aware of the parkway and the towns that are near it has been vastly rewarding, he says. But another cold February in the Southern Appalachians? Not this year, he says.
“We’re looking at spending a warmer winter in Florida than we have in Asheville,” he says. Even though they’ll be sleeping in the RV, they’re not exactly roughing it. “Most people don’t consider the motor home ‘camping,’” he laughs again.
Hardy has lived in Asheville for years, having previously worked as the advertising director of a trade association in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area.
“It never really felt like home,” he says of the years he spent in that busy urban corridor. He missed the mountain scenery and the pace of life in the Southern mountains. “It’s a little bit slower and gentler than the big cities,” he says.
So he got a job with the Blue Ridge Parkway Association, first as executive secretary and then, 11 years later, as its executive director.
The Blue Ridge Parkway Association (BRPA) is the Parkway’s marketing partner. Since 1949, it has produced the Blue Ridge Parkway Directory & Travel Planner, a 100-page compendium of where to hike, bike, picnic, camp and have other kinds of fun along the 469-mile scenic drive and in the towns that surround it (the free travel planner can be downloaded at the association’s website, blueridgeparkway.org). The BRPA also produces a parkway map, available along the road (it’s also available via the association’s website).
Hardy spent his days talking with the association members (motels, restaurants and shops among them) who help support visitors to the parkway. Under his watch, membership grew from about 170 entities to some 500 today. Hardy cultivated many of the 75 destination marketing organizations—chambers of commerce and the like—that advertise the charms of their towns in the directory.
As such, he’s gotten to know the parkway corridor much better than he knows the parkway itself.
“I don’t travel the parkway as much as people think,” he says, laughing noting the irony. But he’s loved his job. “I don’t know how it would be to promote something that isn’t as respected and revered as the parkway,” he says.
Hardy says he’s proudest of making the association more robust during the years that other destination-oriented partnerships fell apart. “Our organization has grown and is doing more things,” he says.
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