44th annual TOY RUN & Hub City Bike Fest
Saturday, October 17, 2026 · 10 AM · Carl Perkins Civic Center, 400 South Highland Ave · Jackson, Tennessee
About this event
A charity ride that has run for forty-four years usually has its route and its rituals fixed. This one now finishes somewhere it has never finished before: Jackson's first bike rally, which the toy run rides into.
The run is presented by the Red Dog Saloon Bar and Grill in Jackson, and the toys go to St Jude Children's Research Hospital, an hour and a half down the road in Memphis. Counting back through the editions the local television station has covered, the first one went out around 1983. Four decades of the same town doing the same thing every October, long enough that the organisers' own billing now simply calls it the St Jude Toy Run.
It stages at the Carl Perkins Civic Center, the city-owned arena named for the rockabilly guitarist who grew up here, and rolls at ten in the morning. The riding is flat West Tennessee on the US 45 and 412 corridors, an escorted parade rather than a distance ride, which is the sensible arrangement when the load is toys.
Worth knowing that the Hub City Bike Fest at the finish is a separate, first-year event rather than another name for the run. Hub City is what Jackson calls itself.
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