About fifteen years ago I met Bill while he was working at the NASTAR race course on Whiteface.  My daughter Carah was five at that time and was learning to ski more of the mountain.  She saw the people racing and she was drawn to it and who better to greet her than Bill.  The two of them hit it right off and I was just a passive spectator choosing not to race.  Then I got talking to Bill and he convinced me to give it a try, and well the rest is history.  I was hooked on racing and every day that I stopped in Bill would greet me with "hey how are you doing? So good to see you".  That greeting has stuck with me ever since and that is how he greeted me.  For several years we raced and he helped me get better and better, aside from the fact that at times when I was in the start gate we would get laughing about some comment or a joke.   There were some crazy starts and there some slipups that made it part of the sport.  I look back on that time and it was a dream coming true, on a mountain made famous by the likes of Mahre, Stenmark, Street, Nelson, Miller, Ligety, Mancuso, Rahlves and other racers from the Olympics to the World Cup.  When NASTAR was shutdown it was a setback for Bill and he longed to see it come back.  Bill was a people person and he was so good with kids and the NASTAR setup gave him a chance to show those talents.  Bill, Ken, Karen and Jay made NASTAR work and it gave the puiblic a chance to challenge the mountain, now the mountain is for racers, but it also caters to boarders in their terrain parks.  Each year Bill would ask the question to bring it back and we talked about it all the time.  The Ken and Bill show had it's run and it was a great run at that and for the diehards who loved the racing we formed the NASTAR Junkies club and for a couple of years we were family.  Moving on from there my daughter became an instructor at Kid's Campus (or the Bear Den) and Bill also wanted to know how my daughter was doing in school, then how college was going and how she was doing in life.  His concern was real and it was spoken like a parent.  Even my last conversation with him a couple of weeks ago he still asked the same things about her and he asked if she would consider racing with the Team.  What a great man he was and will forever be.  A man I truly considered as a very close friend, a true friend.