Lucas Piatt flashed back to his adolescence, to the wooded hillside he roamed, unaware of what the property and hundreds of acres surrounding it would become – and his family's ultimate role in that.
"I had a long rifle and was shooting deer, probably illegally," Piatt recalled Wednesday afternoon, eliciting laughter throughout the ballroom of the Hilton Garden Inn Pittsburgh/Southpointe.
But as humorous as he was, Lucas was a mere warmup act for the star. The focal point of this silver anniversary fest was the silver-haired man he introduced: Jack Piatt, his dad.
Jack, the founder and chairman of Millcraft, was a major force in the park's development. Now 90, he regaled the audience with his memories, on a day the Southpointe CEO Association presented with the inaugural Spirit of Southpointe award.
Like how, in the late 1980s, he was motoring along Interstate 79 with Delvin Miller, the horse racing legend, when Miller said, "we should build a golf course here." They were passing the tract that would become Southpointe.
Like how this grew into a private-public enterprise that, fortuitously, worked a decade after the region's industry had tanked and Washington County's economy was suffering.
"We had a vision, which included a lot of green, and adopted the philosophy of 'work, live and play,'" said Jack, whose company developed much of the 589-acre Southpointe I, which has since been complemented by the rise of the 217-acre Southpointe II.
"I don't need that much depreciation," Jack retorted.
The ballroom consensus was he already has.