In Memoriam
This year's HugTrain USA is dedicated to the memory of Trey Pennington, a loved social
media consultant who battled depression and who took his own life on September 4, 2011.
With permission, here is part of the obituary Olivier Blanchard wrote:
"I could write chapters on the time I got to spend with Trey Pennington these past few years.
I could sit here and tell you how much respect I had for the guy and how much I liked him
- genuinely liked him – like when you meet someone for the first time and you instantly
know you’re going to be friends for life. I could tell you about all of the Social Media Clubs
he started all over the South East, about all of the lives and careers he touched all over
the world, about the selfless work he did behind the scenes that no one knew about, that
he never sought to take credit for. I could tell you about the rat-hole of a hotel he and I
accidentally stayed in on one of our trips to London, and in a spectacular turn of fortune, the
conversations about life and love and the future he and I had a year later, stretching late into
the night in the warm heart of Dartmoor’s luxurious Bovey Castle…
I could go on and tell you that the world was better with Trey in it, that we needed more of
him, not less, that he should have made a great CMO, the perfect marketing professor, a
golden mentor for an entire new generation of marketing and business professionals, but so
what. All I know is that he was my friend, and now he’s gone. Gone. Forever. No rewinding
the tape. No turning back the clock. No re-do. Gone…
Guys like him don’t grow on trees. He was the only Trey Pennington, and now he’s gone,
and that’s it. I feel like someone just hit me in the stomach with a cricket bat, and writing post
really isn’t helping…"
Learn more about Trey Pennington on his blog.
