“Who Speaks!” So what does that mean? In these days of CCSCC’s success, no one except Jimmy Hamilton appears to remember my original CCSCC nickname. (His was “bear”). It seems in past times, when they announced my name at the awards after an event no one could pronounce “Rowe”, pronouncing it like “row”, as in “row, row, row your boat”. My father always said the people who pronounced our name as “row” were the horse thieving branch of the family. I’m sure they said just the opposite…
Well, I made the mistake of correcting the announcer….. so when they would announce my name there was always a chorus of “WHO?”. The name stuck…. it was even on my helmet. My name became “Barry Who”. When I got married, Jimmy even gave Maria a CCSCC name tag that said “Maria Who” on it!
But that is not what this column will be about. CCSCC has had some wonderful times recently. Those of us who are older remember that we used to have to contribute money to a fund to buy insurance before our first event. Later in the year we got our money back. But now we are ‘plush’. Last year we bought a van. We are buying timers this year. But even better, we have already paid our insurance for this year! We have put money into the scholarship account at Parkland. Almost all of the money we get from events will be cash in the bank! I don’t know when CCSCC has ever done that well!
Of course we are what we are because of our members. Under Jerry White’s leadership we made major changes, including moving away from SCCA sanction / insurance for our autocrosses. We work with CIR/SCCA/HISCC on a higher level autocross series in central Illinois to expand our competition. We are working with the Indianapolis region of the SCCA on a combined rally again this year. Several years ago Jerry added two more board positions to the autocross program and that has helped us improve everything about the program. We now start at 11am instead of 1 or later.
We have great board members. How could we do without Jimmy Hamilton as treasurer? This is his 43rd year as treasurer. Bob Townsend has been registered agent for many years and keeps us legal with the state. John Li is the only secretary we have been able to keep for multiple years in recent times and is working on a more advanced and easier to update website. Russ Bedford still keeps points. Don’t argue with him on that! He really understands the finer points, so’s to speak. The Grables have returned as the Rally leadership team. Most events last year had larger attendance than they had for many years. Dennis Miller and Greg Lukach return as autocross chair and autocross steward. We add in Emanual Martin, who maintains the van and the equipment and Tom Ingles, whose knowledge of our registration / timing system is encyclopedic. Beau Renshaw returns as scholarship chair, which certainly helps us work with Parkland College.
We have some great new board members also. Adrian Astorina is handling Publicity and already has been working on it. Ask for some CCSCC schedule cards at the next meeting. Clint Griest has the social events for the year planned and mostly arranged. Other volunteers to help are Doug Miller who is Webmaster, Mike Blackwelder who repairs our electronic equipment (and puts on a fine Halloween rally each year), and Philip Cheshire, who designed and keeps current our online registration system, even though he is in Florida!
Truly we are lucky to have such a great board. We are sure to have a great year!