H.O.R.O. Newsletters

In 1982 I was in my own little world collecting slot cars as I had since I was a kid. I started playing with (yes I said it), and collecting slot cars in or around 1962. In 1983 in an effort to build my collection, I took out an ad in the Oregonian, a local newspaper. In the ad I stated I wanted to buy toy slot cars. I was almost immediately awakened to the fact that I was NOT the only collector of slot cars on the planet. The Friday the ad came out I was contacted by Bart Currie and Mike Bell, both local slot car collectors. Shocked and amazed we set up our first meeting. Bart and Mike were friends already, and both wondered who I was and where I had come from! In those years there were few collectors around, and finding old slot car stuff was difficult. I'll save the collecting stories for another time, but Bart, Mike and I are still friends to this day.

Also during 1983 I had started construction on an HO track in my basement. Bart introduced me to the local HO club HORREO. After meeting the guys in HORREO I increased my efforts in completing my track (again another story for another time). After I completed my track we started holding some races. Somewhere along the line we met Dave Smith in Salem, and Lee Freitag in Lebanon and held races on their tracks also. In Lebanon Oregon on January 8, 1984 the name HO Racers of Oregon or HORO was adopted for our group. I've always disliked the term club.  It seems so exclusive and strict. I always referred to our organization as a group, even though in reality it actually was a club. At any rate one thing I figured out right away was, for any club to succeed it needed two things; 1) dedicated members, and 2) new members. Dedicated members to keep things organized and scheduled, and new members to keep enthusiasm and interest high. I also realized additional benefits (in addition to the tracks and scheduled races) could help bring in new members, and keep existing members. I thought possibly a newsletter would be of some value, just as I hope this website of our's adds extra value.

So In January of 1984, I put together the first of what would be quite a few H.O.R.O. Newsletters. The first newsletter was mostly designed to test the waters. I asked for responses and solicited for articles to be submitted for print. The response I received was great, and newsletter number 2 included some of those submitted articles. The newsletters were very labor intensive! Numbers 1 through 4 were type written on an old manual typewriter with a bad ribbon. They were crude and hard to read. In newsletter number 3, I added a cartoon from an old magazine. I photo copied the cartoon, cut out the picture from the photo copy, and pasted it onto a blank section I had left on one of the pages of the hand typed newsletter. The manual typewriter was getting to be a pain. It was so old I couldn't find a new ribbon for it, and it did not function well at all. Of course I couldn't (and still can't) type well either, so constantly retyping entire pages was getting old too!

Newsletter number 5 had a new look. I'd had enough of that old manual typewriter so I went out and bought a brand new Brother electronic typewriter. It was more like a word processor as I could type out one or two lines, see it on the readout, and make any necessary corrections before it was actually printed to page. Man, I was HIGH TECH now! By newsletter number 8 the cost of ink/ribbon  cartridges, photocopying, envelopes, and stamps for mailing was getting out of hand. My mailing list was expanding and the costs were ever increasing. In an effort to save some money I changed the format of the newsletter. I got this idea from Jimmy Watts of Tacoma, who put out a great little booklet for an HO drag race he organized between Washington and Oregon teams (yes, yes, yet another story). Anyway I switched to a folded 7 inch by 4 1/2 inch paged pamphlet. That resulted in fewer copies per page, but it made it more difficult to read (I did receive some complaints - maybe the first enactment of Too Bad!). Numbers 9 through 13 retained that smaller format, although I increased the number of photocopied pictures in each issue to try to help break up the printed pages.  This required more of that cut & paste technique (literally) I had developed.

For newsletter number 14 I thought I would try to break away from the H.O.R.O. specific club theme of the newsletter. I decided to rename the newsletter Slot Line. I had gotten involved with a few other clubs and my intent was to cover races, events, and other information from all the clubs. Unfortunately, at that point my life took some unexpected turns and the project died. Eventually and gradually I came back to slot car racing but I never resumed the newsletter. The newsletter replacement for me was this NASTE.org website. I must say that in this respect, the future is good!