24th Annual Arzie Rogers Memorial Toy Run

About this event

Riders have turned out for more than two decades for a man whose name is on the event and nowhere else. Who Arzie Rogers was is not published by the organisers, not carried in the Cabarrus County press, and not recorded in any reachable memorial index, which is an unusual silence for a memorial run with this much history behind it and worth asking about at the start line. What is on the record is where the toys go: the Empty Stocking Fund and Cooperative Christian Ministry, both Cabarrus County charities, so nothing leaves the county. Speedway Harley-Davidson in Concord hosts it, but the run does not begin there. It begins a few miles east at Captain Steve's Family Seafood on Highway 49 in Harrisburg, where registration opens at nine and the bikes leave at eleven through the rolling Piedmont two-lane between Charlotte and the speedway. Lunch is free and there is a rain date the following day. The set piece comes at two in the afternoon, when the toys are formally handed over, and it is the one part of the day the organisers describe at all.