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Please bear with me.
When I was a kid in Canyon, Texas my favorite place to hang around was Bud Rusk's Second Hand Store. Most of the stuff in there would have been classed as antiques anywhere else. I bought my first .22 there when I was 8. Bud was the only adult present. There were often 5 or 6 old cowboys sitting around that had worked for the XIT, JA, T Anchor and other well known ranches, maybe some less known. One was called Montana not because he was from there but because he had driven cattle there from Texas. He wore his hat in what they call a Montana Peak. They told stories of "the old days" and reminisced of others long gone. There was a Rusk at the Alamo and all of these guys had known Charlie Goodnight. One of them John Knight had owned the first blacksmith shop in town. He and his wife were the first couple married in Canyon. Sometimes they would take one of Bud's guitars down and swap old trail songs, Some they would clean up if I was around. I grew up on this and much of my own families stories too. Both sides of my family were part of it.
My point in this rambling is just to point out that we are those old cowboys now, those few old Bulletin Board Members who still hang on here and remember when this was an active and vibrant website and are saddened by what it has become. Some of us have been the guys who did it and have known the guys who did it. We lose more of them every day, some die and some have left the club/site. Maybe these are also the ones that created the interest. It seems to me like there was always a struggle to run it. The people who do stuff are not often the ones who take time to run stuff and something like this club and website take a lot of running. All big businesses have a PR division.
Like Bud's store the archives of this website are filled with treasures & inline information that exists nowhere else. It is the legacy of Inliners International. Somehow it needs to be preserved. Sadly its fate has fallen into the hands of the here and now crowd who are more concerned with picnics and show & shines than passing on this information. Partly because our leaders are more car club people than car people. Some of them don't own an inline engine much less built one. There is plenty of interest in our old inline engines. There is much discussion on other websites. We are ineffective in attracting activity here.
I tell those old Texas stories & I sing those old songs and people still listen, but when I'm gone? When Inliners is gone?
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