12/07/02
What a great meeting! We had about 20 people show up. I want to thank Jay Jochec, Orin & Melissa Fitzgerald, Rob Walsh, Matt Young, Matt Little, Pete and Jeannie Carson, Mike Cook, Oie Keller, John Spiva, Rex & Joan Elsner, Bill Mullikin and Terry Ryan for making the long trek. We met at Jason, Matt Laverty and Erik VanDyke’s home in Vancouver, WA. What a great place! Thanks for hosting guys!
Everyone arrived around 2pm to discuss the plan for the 20-year anniversary celebration of the first Shelby-Dodge and eat some good food. Although I think next time we’ll have to be a bit more coordinated on what people are bringing. I left around 6 or 7pm, I think, and it looks like the Northern group didn’t leave until a bit later but they managed to average 95mph for about 215miles so they made it home pretty quick.
I think we almost had every type of FWD Dodge there was at the meeting… We had three T2 Daytona’s, Terry’s extremely quick turbo minivan, Rob’s GLH-S (beautiful car by the way), a Spirit R/T, an Pete’s 89 CSX-VNT (also very, very nice), a Joan’s PT cruiser, a handful of Neons and of course John Spiva’s Turbo K-car wagon. We won’t talk about the SAAB with the “Spider Man” window treatment ;)
FYI: The anniversary event will be held on April 26th, 2003 at Shelby’s HQ in Las Vegas, NV. I’ll post more details later as I get them gathered together, but it looks like there will be two groups of cars, converging at the Nevada border.
03/03/02
Well, that wasn't
quite the meeting I had in mind, it was fun none the less. Joel
Siegersma, John Spiva, Rex Elsner, Melody Bardsley and myself had a lot of fun
talking cars and things Sunday evening (two hours worth!) Too bad the rest of
you guys and gals didn't make it. Joel's Cottman's Transmission Shop is a
really nicely equipped and an excellent spot to hold meetings. If you have a
tranny need, go to Joel's place, he'll take care of you.
John Spiva offered the use of his garage for the next meeting, which I'm
thinking should be on a weekday evening, say Wednesday? My reasoning is that
with the racing season getting into gear again, people won't have quite so much
time on the weekends to make it to a meeting. Everyone please feel free to
express your thoughts and opinions about this.
In other news:
John Spiva has a source for custom license plates that are nice to hang on your
wall or to use on your car for car shows, etc. For more info contact him: [email protected]
01/26/02
The meeting started at about 2:30pm Saturday afternoon
January 26, 2002. We met in a meeting room at the Russellville Commons
Apartments. We ended up with 15 people total in attendance. They
were: Robert Withee, Robert's friend, Rex and Joann
Elsner, Austin Sakai, Adam Best, Joel Siegersma, John
Spiva, Erik VanDyke, Matt Laverty, Stefan
Mullikin, Melody Bardsley, Bill Mullikin, Matthew
Hasselmann, and Mike Ruete.
Refreshments came by way of
volunteers. Austin provided us with three great pizzas from Papa
Johns. Stefan and Melody brought Chex / Trail Mix. John brought
several bags of chips. Rex and Joann provided assorted iced down
soft drinks to wet our whistles. Many thanks to everyone!!!!
We started out with introductions.
Most people stood and gave their specifics and what cars they currently owned.
We have a good representation of the Mopar line up. Ownership ranged from
a '85 Shelby Charger to a '01 PT Cruiser. From a 2000 Neon to a '86
Lancer and many in between. Everything from early turbo cars to the
latest hi tech offerings were represented. I think we had a good turn
out for a first meeting of a new club.
Stefan and Rex led a discussion of
the pros and cons of becoming a SDAC Chapter. It was decided to
table the decision for a later meeting. It wasn't deemed a priority right
now.
What is a priority now is an
offical club name. Northwest Mini Mopar Club was suggested but
dismissed because it might give us a problem with a domain name issue. At
some point we want to have a web site and don't want problems in the
future. Pacific Northwest Front Wheel Drive Mopar Club was also
considered and dismissed as being Toooo Long! We also discussed Pacific
Northwest SDAC but, thought it may be too limiting in its scope. We
wanted to include all FWD Mopars, Colt to 300M, including the Eagle and DSM
cars sold by Mopar. We ended up with simply Front Drive Mopar Club.
Simple and to the point. If need be we can add NW or PNW
later. We are using the acronym FDMC for short.
We decided that ownership will not be a
requirment of membership. Only an interest in the
preservation,modification and fun of these vehicles is required.We decided that
for the time being we will not collect dues. We did agree that
may need to change in the future.
We agree to meet about once a month in a
mostly informal format. We are in agreement to focus on the fun
stuff as much as we can. Because our meeting is so late in January,
our next meeting will be Sunday March 03,2002 at 5:00pm. We will
meet at Joel's Cottman Transmission Shop in Oregon City. The address is
13851 Beavercreek Road, Oregon City, Or. His business phone
is 503-742-1200. Someone will post directions to the location sometime
before the meeting. Joel did tell everyone it is BYOC though. ( bring your
own chair! ) It is a shop after all!
It was suggested by John S. that we have
a " For Sale " section to our meetings. I think including that
sort of thing at the meetings would benefit those who attend the
meeting. It could also be included in any future newsletter we might do.
We will be forming a committee to deal
with the bylaws at a later date as well as any election of officers.
Those two items go together.
Last I want to thank Joann for taking notes and trying to keep us on point when we strayed. We strayed a lot but, that's all part of the fun.