ARRA Historian Bill Hanna Honored Post Mortem With His Final Submission Of Research of Rags Carter Career
Ringoes,NJ – Pennsylvania’s ARRA Co-Founder of ARRA, Bill Hanna left a void in the organizations research efforts that is still felt by its members! Bill was a dedicated historian and researcher and absolutely proud of his membership and his contributions to documenting the sport of auto racing history. Just finished up, another addition has just been added to the ARRA roster of researched and documented drivers of note. Floridian Alan “Rags” Carter came North to ply the Northeast dirt tracks after enjoying great success on the oval in the Sunshine State. Little known to the other historians at the time…Bill had been working behind the scenes putting together the win list of Carter’s Northeast modified division wins. We will let ARRA President Fred Voorhees explain:
“After Bill’s untimely passing, it took a while for his family to take the steps to take a look in his computer. Among the files on his computer were his racing related stuff.” revealed Voorhees from his Ringoes,NJ office. “When Bill’s Daugher Kimmy got in touch with me to ask that I come out and see if there were any files that I could use while they were digging around in his computer, I drove out and took a look. Among the items was the Rags Carter file. When I opened it up back home, I saw that Bill had compiled Rags’ Northeast wins. He hadn’t mentioned anything about it, but I knew when I found it, that I would pick up the ball and see what I could do to expand the depth of the research in Bill’s honor and exclaim the submission Bill’s final effort towards our organizations mission to document the sport! It was a passion that I took up to complete as best I could.”
Voorhees sat on the file for a while because he had other projects to finish up. When he did, get around to picking up the effort, he found that he still had other work to do before he could finish the Carter research.
“I had forgotten that our file on the Nazareth Speedway half mile was not as complete as I had assumed.” stated Fred. “We didn’t have the weekly winners list for Nazareth and I needed that information to track down all of Rags’ 45 feature wins at the now defunct speedway. So, I had to halt my Rags research and go back and begin looking into the weekly results of the Nazareth half mile. It certainly added a great amount of work needed to do before I could finish the Rags Carter stuff. I also added Rags’ Northern win record stats onto the “Northern Invasion” page, joining other famous Floridians Gary Balough and both Buzzie and Wayne Reutimann.
A few ARRA historians had a part in putting the project together, including Bill Braga Jr. with some of his former research, along with historian Will White whose own statistical website had some of Rags’ Florida wins and also a great help was the Carter family and their generosity of lending the family scrapbooks of Rags’ Florida win articles. Many thanks to Alan Carter Jr. for having the trust in the ARRA organization with their cherished family items while we used the articles to help with our research.
Fans interested in viewing the newest ARRA page can click on this link: https://sites.google.com/site/arracarsdriversevents/rags-carter
Auto Racing Research Associates is a growing group of thirty seven auto racing historians across the country banded together for the purpose of the research, documentation and displaying of auto racing history such as driver win statistics, track, racing series and organizations histories and also the background of racing personalities, particular cars from the past and various other interesting facts of racing history that should not be forgotten. ARRA continues to build a network of associated auto racing related websites to unite for better chances of furthering the understanding of the past of our sport. ARRA offers looking up services for those looking for one particular piece of information from the past. They are the official statistics information source of the Flemington Speedway Historical Society and have been doing much of the research work for a number of years for the Northeast Dirt Modified Museum and Hall of Fame in Weedsport, NY. We encourage you to visit our new website if you have not had the pleasure yet.
|
