A LITTLE ABOUT ME
Name Mark, Born on date 5/10/58, married 29 years to my Super wife Tracy as of 8/17/08 with 2 children.
I`m in this hobby I would guess because of my exposure to it early on. Around 1966 my father took a part time job at a local slot car shop name.. "FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY" He worked a full time job at GE, and after he got off he would pick me up from school and off we went. When we arrived at the shop, I would head to the back room to take care of any homework 1st. Then Dad would set me up on the BIG!! no idea how big but big banked track. And this is where I would be until 8:00 pm..every night. Sucks heh-- hee hee, that was the start. Dad was a owner and engine builder for many of the local 1.1 racers as I grew up. So my exposure to racing was non stop. There were always racers at the house that I could associate with when we went to the local Fairgrounds, and I got to know many of them personally. As I grew older as we all do, my interests changed to girls and other things I shouldn`t mention, you know the 70s. 
When I went to high school I wasn`t much of a bookworm, so I found myself a few classes I liked (shop, & vocational welding class). The others I just squeaked by in enough to graduate. I associated mostly with the "motor heads" in school, sports and all that stuff never interested me. After school was complete (you guessed it no collage here) and a couple years passed,I had met Tracy and we got married. Three years later we had our 2 children. I worked 18 years in a local warehouse, during this time I started some weekend 1.1 roundy round racing. We did this for about 5-6 years. Also during this time my son started racing slots at the local commercial track. I enjoyed helping him prep his cars and watching him race on Friday nights. But this was as far as it went. I never warmed up to the commercial racing myself. So when he lost interest, that was it. We got into collecting hotwheels for a few years then his interests change. Then in 1995 I started work at Ford Motor Co. building F250/F350/F450/F550 pickups. This was the end of my racing because of the night shift hours. As the kids grew up and eventually left the house, I needed a hobby. Having a ton of hotwheels I tried to get back into collecting,but it just wasn`t the same. I grew tired of the little things hanging on the walls of the basement, and just sitting in showcases. Then one night while killing some time in a local mall with Tracy, I wondered into a specialty shop. After so many years of collecting the diecast cars, it was inevitable whenever I went to a store I still looked. That is when I spotted them, what looked to me like a odd scaled dicast car in a crystal case (CARERRA). When I went to pick it up and give it a once over. It was obvious this wasn`t heavy enough to be metal. Still unaware of what I had in my hand, I looked the area over and found two large slot car track sets on the lower shelf. Needless to say that was the beginning, and sinse my birthday was just around the corner, I thought it a nice present to myself. After buying a few extra track parts over the next few weeks and a table to get off the floor I was set. It was a very enjoyable hobby for about 3-5 months, but I soon grew tired of the single man racing. By this time the specialty store had closed it`s doors, and that left me no place to even try and run across any other players. So the track sat dormant for about 6 months. I ran across a add somewhere online of a fellow in New Albany (Kurt Moser) that was looking for racers to join/form a slot car club. Kurt had 2 other guys that had been running with him on a weekly bases. After meeting with these guys, the spark was back in my eyes for the hobby. We have sinse grown to a decent size club of about 25-30 members. We get together twice a week for some fun running, no racing. I have sinse created this web site and have really enjoyed every minute I`ve spent playing with these little cars.
Just a simple good time like I remember doing so long ago.
So I guess I`ve come full circle. AND I LOVE IT !!!