Letters to the Editor - April 2000

HE WAS A GREAT COACH
Dear Sherri,
Thanks for all your efforts in publishing the SDOR and your recent call concerning our subscription. SDOR is well read in our house. The most recent issue (January 2000) really caused me to think back, I mean way back for some of you. Back to a time in the early sixties when I was playing baseball in the majors. Sometimes we would arrive early in the field for practice. But the clamor and chatter of baseball was soon broken by the roar of an approaching motorcycle climbing up and over dirt mounds where do car could go. I can remember standing by the outfield fence watching and listening (without any thoughts about baseball), as our "coach" was dismounting his two-wheeled monster. Many SDOR readers in San Diego knew this man as an avid off road cyclist, but I remember Niles Ussery as my little league baseball coach.
MITCH MYRICK
Ramona

GREAT JOB!
Steve and Sherri:
I enjoy each issue of SDOR to the fullest. Reading every article, with all areas of coverage from Baja, to desert, to motocross racing, personal stories and to complete it all, a passage from the Good Man up above. It's very inspiring and motivating in my daily life. Keep up the good work!
Thanks again,
WILLIAM JONES
San Diego

IN MEMORY
Sherri:
I heard your memorial to Cooper Jancic at his service. I only knew him two years but it seems like longer. We'll all miss his smiling face at the desert races. His life and death was an inspiration to me too! I now have in big bold letters "Make Every Day Count" on my dry-erase board in front of my desk. I'm inspired but I'd rather see him alive, on his bike or around the campfire talking about different lines on the course. In a way I guess I still will. We always will.
MARK BRADLEY

OFF ROADERS MUST BE POLITICALLY INVOLVED
Dear Sherri:

I have been reading your magazine for years and have enjoyed the coverage of the off road community. Your paper has been getting better and better. But we still face the forces that would be happy with our demise in the environmental community. We are in a political environment that determine where our right to our pursuit of happiness can be enjoyed. Every month (and perhaps every week) there are planning meetings going on in cities around the country and state that determine the future of OHV recreation. Yet when critical letters need to be sent, or a hearing on trails is happening, few people know what is going down. The result is that the OHV community gets sandbagged over and over.
The SDORC (San Diego Off Road Coalition) is doing a great job to help bring about more political awareness and you have promoted news on future parks and the problems that we have all had but the word has to go out every month. What I am suggesting is a regular section in the paper on political news. It could post planning meetings, public hearings for recreation, recommend the vote for politicians at the Board of Supervisors level who are favorable to OHV, where to write for your OHV rights, etc. Information could be solicited from other groups such as equestrians or mountain bikers who would also need to be represented. Together we could have a greater united group.

Your paper goes to people who have made a large investment in their OHV and we are being made a victim of the environmental incrementalism (the process of making change in small portions to complete a larger agenda) in California. I have seen this happen in the desert when I come upon a sign that says this trail is now closed to OHV in a planning area that I was free to ride in years ago . . . it makes my blood boil. Another petty clerk bureaucrat has taken away my liberty again. (Clinton's latest land grab across the U.S., is 80,000,000 acres, the size of the state of New Mexico and will take trails less than 50 inches wide.) Hello OHV community!!! Do you see the scope of your loss of liberty? Did you contact your congressman?

This can only stop this continued loss of our riding areas when we work together year in and year out to show our represented officials that we will not tolerate this any more. This comes with letters and contact to the elected representatives that we have a voice, a need a vested interest and a legitimate right in the constitution of this country for the pursuit of happiness and that happens with an OHV or a mountain bike.

You have a powerful voice in the OHV community and I hope you will find merit in my suggestion. Incrementalism has been going on for the past twenty years and the riding areas keep getting smaller and smaller. The greatest line that keeps coming up is the one that they only want to preserve this much and you get to keep that much. What you get to keep is less and less and less, with each new generation of environmentalists that must succeed in preserving something. Until there isn't anymore riding places to have, and if you want to ride you must become an outlaw. We have to get everyone who rides, plays, competes and enjoys, more involved.

Thanks for listening and spreading the word.
MARK BERGER
San Diego

This page last updated on 6 September 2000