Everyone has a special person who is always there to listen or give advice.That one person was Dick Friedley in the Tampa Bay area..Dick was a retired teacher who tried to get us to listen before we shot our mouths off..He was the scribe for the Tampa Bay Area Racing Association and always came to Zephyrhills to shoot the DAARA cars in turn two..He was known as RACECENTRAL..A clearing house on for sprint car news and updates..We lost Dick on October 31 , 2001..I was talking to him that month when he was taken ill..Dick always loved his Christmas cards and this last one gave him a fit...He was waiting for the photos to come back from the developer when September 11 , 2001 happened....The computers with the codes and addresses were destroyed in New York City and the prints were setting in Orlando unnamed....He sweat it out for days before was able to get them back...So here is the final card....JIM
"Knoxville Bricks"...He did so much for his second family the racers..That when we tried to buy him a brick in the wall at Knoxville we had to stop contributions or he would have had a whole wall for himself...Dick loved the 1930's era air race planes..Pictures and models filled a cabnet at his house..When there was shuttle shot going up you would always find him out in the driveway looking east to see the launch...He has such a close family that the kids are known as 1,2,3,or 4...Christmas was one time of the year he loved to be with his family...If you were on his Christmas card list you never knew what to expect each year...This was the y2k classic...
Dick was known for his "Clicker Cart" at the tracks..It now resides in the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and Museum Located in Knoxville, Iowa at the Knoxville Raceway..Heck I even pushed him back to the pits at the old Lakeland short track...He was a big supporter of the DAARA and TBARA...He use to shoot at East Bay until Paulie Milim knocked him down in turn two with his sprinter..Paulie was a little out of control and jumped the wall..
