[SilverCobra]

Gary – no reason for you to feel responsible for or blame yourself for anything that happened in Austin. If anyone has the right to feel bad about the whole deal, it is certainly me – it seems like everything I had anything remotely to do with got screwed up on a grand scale.

1. I recommended the Double Tree Hotel as I had stayed there before and knew they had a secure covered concrete parking garage for storing non trailered Cobras. I think they assured Stretch that they had provisions for parking trailers, but we know it worked out totally different. Double Tree made life miserable trying to make individual reservations and then failed to tell us that they had terribly overbooked the place expecting Catholic Youth Conference from all over the state. Don’t know what to say about roadwork on I-35.

2. The Bill Neale t-shirts were my next great decision. Donna and Alan brought the artwork over to me on a Friday pressed for time with a silkscreen deadline and asked my opinion about the unfinished look on the Cobra image. The three of us did not know enough about Bill’s work to know that this was the way it was supposed to look and we assumed that it for some reason the graphic just never got finished. I tried to contact you to no avail and then gave Alan & Donna the go ahead to have the printer finish out the image. You and I did talk on the following Monday and we must have missed signals as I thought you knew that the image was in the process of being changed. None of us intended to insult Bill or cause such an uproar.

3. Gary, when I got to the Lumberyard in Wimberley, my mouth dropped with all the TCC Cobra merchandise for sale. Prior to the event, I had received a request from Rob Robertson to e-mail him the JPG images that were used for the TCC pocket shirts that I had printed in May 2000. I understood that Rob’s company was going to print some special T-shirts from the Lumberyard to be presented to DRIVERS that completed the poker run from Austin. I did not see the harm in using the logo images for a one-time print of some 20-30 shirts. Those images (the Texas Flag and the State map with the blue Cobra) were designed by Tattoo Productions in Nacogdoches and are their copyright property. TCC or anyone else does not have the right to freely distribute and duplicate the image and/or sell to the public. If we want to use the graphics, we would need to order the products from Tattoo, get their permission to use the image or acquire the rights.

I too really enjoyed the Austin weekend, but sure had a lingering, nagging sense of embarrassment for everything that went wrong. I am going to build my car and try to stay out of trouble. I sincerely apologize to everyone in TCC that was and has been affected by the above.