President’s Column, January 2007

by Bob Morin

Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a terrific holiday season and that you’ve made some great New Year’s resolutions.

Since my last column, we held the outstanding “What Goes Around…” TSD Rally on November 19th.  It’s a real shame that more members did not come out for this event as Ev Newton did a fabulous job and the roads and scenery were great, even if you just wanted to take a drive.  In fact, we kept our copy of the route instructions and probably will take the drive again one of these days, just to do it.  I don’t know what it is about actually driving our BMWs in an event that isn’t a Driver’s School (which always draws a crowd), but apparently our membership didn’t really buy their cars to drive them.  I guess we had about 13 cars, but I was very disappointed for Ev, as a tremendous amount of time and effort goes into successfully planning one of these events to have the result be so poorly supported by the membership.  Unfortunately, for those of us who do thoroughly enjoy rallying, it will probably be difficult to find someone willing to put that effort in again in the future for so small a return on investment.  Thanks to Ev for organizing the event and to Frank and Nancie Giacalone and Rudy and Cheryl Basztura who helped Ev out as checkpoint workers.

Next up was our Holiday Party/Yankee Swap on December 2nd.  Attendance was much better at this event (apparently, we don’t have any trouble getting excited about eating and exchanging gifts).  There was plenty of food and drink for all and the Yankee Swap was quite entertaining as usual.  There were several gifts that were exchanged more than once and a few that went around quite a few times.  Thanks to jerri & Willy Wiley for organizing this event and for making the arrangements for the location.  Also, thank you to our Yankee Swap Mistress Barbara Bisset for keeping the evening lively.

Our next event will be the Annual Dinner on January 27th.  By now you should all be aware that 500 Blake St, where the dinner was to be held, closed rather unexpectedly in late November and jerri had to scramble to get the Manor Inn in Southington, CT.  We have Michael Mitchell lined up as our guest speaker.  Michael is the Office Manager and Curator of the BMW Car Club of America Foundation and is expected to speak about the Foundation’s Street Survival program for teen drivers.  We are planning to attempt our first Street Survival event in 2007 and we hope that Michael can get you all excited about the great rewards that can come from this program.  We can literally help save lives with the program by making teenagers better drivers. 

The second part of the Annual Dinner is of course our election.  This year we have a contested position for one of the officer’s positions, so I encourage you all to vote.  As an added incentive, we always draw a ballot at random and award that member a one-year extension of their membership.  All you have to do to enter is to vote.

Moving ahead into 2007, March 10th will be a Winter Doldrums Party in North Granby, CT at the Morin's.  As of this writing, the Winter season has been so mild, there may not be too many doldrums to wipe out, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a party anyway.  The F1 season for 2007 will be getting underway the following weekend, so there may even be some room for speculation among the race fans who attend. 

In News From National, membership is 75,631, up .74% over last year.  On December 1st the club began a new national membership drive that will work like last year’s drive, but for those newcomers, the primary reward will be that for each new member you sign up, your membership will be extended by one month.  There is no limit to how many months your membership can be extended.  Complete rules have been posted at www.bmwcca.org and all prizes will be awarded at Oktoberfest in Fort Worth, TX.  There should still be time to get in on Techfest Tacoma 2007, if you are interested.  And last but certainly not least, the Membership Reward Program has been extended through December 31, 2007, in case you have plans to purchase or lease a BMW during ’07.  I am often amazed at the number of clients with whom I meet who aren’t even aware of this terrific benefit of membership. 

I’d like to close this month’s column by thanking everyone who attended an event in 2006 for coming out and joining us and especially thank all those who planned, organized or otherwise helped out at any of our events in 2006.  Without our volunteers, we could not hold any events.  And finally, if you do not fall into either group, I hope we will be able to count you among at least those who attend an event for 2007.  Trust me, we don’t bite!