I’d never been to Outdoor Retailer before, so I arrived in Salt Lake City last week bearing no fond memories or emotional scars from previous shows. Not so my seasoned colleagues. For some, this was their 18th or 20th time working the floor, so over dinner, or during slow moments in the booth, they invariably reminisced about shows past. And when they did, I reached for my Flip Camera.

In the following clips, Larry Seidl recalls how, at his first show, he worried he'd be forced to "sleep with a guy I'd never met before"; Mark Downey recounts how he landed his current job while angling to trade a pair of shoes for books; and Max Phelps describes the tornado that caused a stampede on the show floor and actually killed a worker. Plus, first-time attendee John Groton offers his impressions of O.R.