Rip Dick Trickle

From the Wisconsin Rapids Tribune:
Dick Trickle approached Ron Wimmer last July at the State Park Speedway with a request.
“Make sure you give me that date so I have it set aside,” Trickle said.
A short-track race car driver popular enough to have a Tom Cruise character named for him in the 1990 movie “Days of Thunder,” Trickle had planned to another visit to his central Wisconsin home this summer.
That’s what he did every year.
On Thursday, friends grappled with the details of Trickle’s death from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound while at a cemetery in North Carolina. They also remembered what set him apart.
“He wasn’t like the racers that you see today, all about the sponsors and being good-looking guys,” said Curt Keene, 30, an announcer at the Speedway, located in Rib Mountain.
“He wasn’t all about the show.”
Trickle, who was 71, came up in an era when drivers constructed their own cars. He never had the expertly-crafted cars that “practically turn by themselves,” said Wimmer, a part-owner of the Speedway.
A typical week for Trickle consisted of racing Wednesdays in La Crosse, Thursdays in Wausau, Fridays near Madison, Saturdays in Wisconsin Dells and Sundays in Plover, said Bob Mackesy, who ran that full circuit only once in 35 years of driving because it was too tiring.
Trickle achieved fame with short-track success, winning races throughout Wisconsin and beyond, before he moved to North Carolina to join the NASCAR circuit.
But even as he achieved national acclaim, he always returned home for the annual Larry Detjens Memorial Race each July at the Speedway.
When Trickle asked Wimmer to remind him of the dates for the 2013 race, Wimmer replied, “You know you’re coming to all of them.”
Wimmer said he had known Trickle for 45 years.
“I don’t know what made him do that,” Wimmer said of Trickle’s apparent suicide. “It had to have been something that set it off, to make him want to end it all. The guy had a high pain tolerance.
“To bang into walls like he did, his tolerance for pain has to be high. It doesn’t make sense.”
Mackesy said Trickle raced with a simple philosophy.
“His code was when you race you’ve got to finish first, but first you’ve got to finish,” Mackesy said. “You’ve got to be around at the end.”
To most, the end was surprisingly abrupt.   http://www.wisconsinrapidstribune.com/article/20130516/WRT02/305160439/Trickle-represents-best-bygone-era-short-track-racing?nclick_check=1
I used to watch Trickle in many venues in Wisconsin and was a fan of his.  Too bad it had to end this way.