THE DRAG RACES

Remember my story about breaking into the fairgrounds, well it turns out that was not the last time I ignored a barrier!

Barry’s brother Dale was about the coolest dude I knew in high school. Well, Dale had already graduated, but hanging with him and Barry was at the top of my list of great cool things to do back then.

Dale had a baby-blue ’55 Ford with a huge 390 cubic inch engine nestled under its sleek customized hood. The hood ornament had long since been removed; the holes filled in, sanded, and painted over.

Damn, I wish I had a photo of that car, because I cannot, for the life of me, remember if it had baby-moon hubcaps or spinners, and that is such an important thing to remember, but sorry guys, I cannot see it in my mind.

I do remember it had a 3-speed stick shift and Dale kept either the original 4-barrel manifold, a Holley and manifold, and a 3-duce and manifold in the trunk. He normally ran around town with the Holley.

Just behind each front tire, and just after the section where the exhaust manifold connected to the exhaust pipe, were 2 inch “cut-out” or “knock-off” pipes. In the back floorboard you could always find a pair of leather gloves for turning the caps off these pipes when they were hot. Once off, the engine breathed added life and often exhaled fire as the large block contorted in response to Dale’s heavy foot!

God! Can’t you just hear that now? Only a true child of the 60’s can still hear and appreciate such a sound. The exhaust coupled with the deep-throated sucking sound of a 4-barrel carb is like the soft wet poke of a pretty girl’s tongue in your ear – at first shocking but suddenly and forever addictive!

Bumblebee car exhaust may sound super to today’s young boys, but to us old boomers, they sound so sick, and near death!

Each Saturday Dale went to the Harriman Drag Strip with Barry and me riding along as his makeshift pit crew. However, we rarely rode through the gate. We instead jumped out about a quarter mile from the ticket booth and ran down the corrugated fence line to the river’s edge.

The owners of the strip had built the fence straight out over the water, but time and wave action had eroded a huge hole beneath the fence. So, it was easy enough for us to slip down, under, and around the fence and onto the wooded bank on the inside of the drag strip.

By the time Barry and I came out of the woods, zipping our pants as if we had just taken a leak, Dale would have made it to the pit area, parked, and begun his perusal of the competition. Depending on who attended that day and what they were running on top of their engine, determined what class Dale would sign up to run against.

The classes were determined by several factors, but the major one to Dale was the carburetion package. So, when he returned to his pit-crew he would yell out which manifold package to get him out of the trunk.

Barry ran to the trunk and picked up the system Dale wanted and helped by handing him tools, while I busied myself taking off the hubcaps, the “knock-offs”, and emptying the trunk of all excess weight. This is not much by today’s pit-crew standards, but to 17-year-old boys, it was the big time!

Next, we all jumped into putting the larger “slicks” on the rear – setting up and pumping the jack, rolling tires back and forth, tracking the lug nuts, and then standing back proudly and breathing hard. We were on top of the world!

Dale won more than he lost, but the wins were great fun and some of my best moments. For Barry, he was so proud he almost exploded each time he worked and played next to his brother Dale. Dale had become father as well to him since the divorce. That relationship was the one thing I envied of Barry.

Dale’s life seemed a sort of fairytale existence, or at least it seemed that way to a daydreaming young man looking at him from far off. He had what I longed to have at the time, a great drag racing car and a beautiful blonde wife who adored him.

I have not seen Barry in over 40 years, but I did see Dale a couple of times at the plant where he and I worked a few years ago. Both times it was standing in line at the cafeteria and our handshakes and conversations were all too brief. I doubt Dale knew just how much that time years ago meant to me and how much I admired him, but I could tell in his face that it also meant something special to him.

The Dale Henderson’s, Charlie Gouge’s, and Austin Roddy’s of our high school days were knights in shining metal to us admiring younger boys. Hearing them slip effortlessly through three or four gears, tweaking the sound of a 4-barrel carburetor as the speed and RPMs rose, while we stood perfectly still until they were out of hear shot, will be the last sounds of the sixties to fade. They were our heroes, and they gave us courage to face life’s yet unknowns.

WHERE THEY’VE GONE

There is that day that occurs at the end of each summer, when a cool breeze slices the summer heat sending a slow crawling chill over your flesh, and pushes a painted leaf cheerfully rattling across your path. It is the unmistakable omen of the pending changes to come. It is a day that reminds me once a year of things that I could have changed but didn’t and things I did change but shouldn’t have. (Huh...maybe I'll use this opening paragraph in my next book.)

Regardless of the changes made or not, the fall of life is upon me. Sixty years now, where’d they go (to quote a Bob Seger song)?

Twenty years now

Where’d they go?

Twenty years

I don’t know

Sit and I wonder sometimes

Where they’ve gone

And sometimes late at night

When I’m bathed in the firelight

The moon comes callin’ a ghostly white

And I recall

I know quite well where they went; I just didn’t take note of their passing as closely as I should have. Oh, as a child I held on to summer bliss as hard as I could trying to hold back the inevitable day school would begin again, but all the while longing to be grown up and own a fast car and have a nice girl.

I spent my adolescence wishing school would end so I could own a fast car so I could have a beautiful girl; never noticing that some of the greatest days of my life were “slip sliding away”.

I passed my early manhood and the prime of my health wishing my time in the Air Force and in Vietnam would end so I could own a fast car and get a beautiful girl. I never realized the historical significance of the experience until twenty years later. I took few significant photos and even fewer names. It was an experience of a life time; one you would never want to do again but one you would not trade for brand new fast car.

I spent my twenties playing house and wishing I had made other choices; wishing I had bought the Shelby instead of the plain 302 automatic, the 396 instead of the 350, the Hurst instead of the plain 442, asking someone to marry me instead of accepting an offer.

Nonetheless, I have arrived where I am through more divine intervention than personal judgment. If things had been left to me, I’d probably be living in some rundown trailer park with a fat old “used to be” blonde with no ambition, and no hopes of ever retiring.

I sit and wonder sometime about what would have been had just one decision in life had been different.

What if had married that little blonde that adored me and that I treated like dirt? There would have been no higher education, no higher ambition, but who really knows, maybe I would have still had the fastest old primered hot-rod with four of the slickest tires in the park!

More than anything I wanted to get a job in “big time” advertising in Atlanta. Once I was intrigued by Doyle Dane Bernbach, on a field trip sponsored by the College of Communications at the University of Tennessee. It was 1972, just prior to graduation, and DDB had the Coca-Cola account and was running at the top of the AD game after hitting the country with the '60s Coke anthem: "I'd like to teach the world to sing/in perfect harmony . . . “! A group of us on mock interviews visited the brain trust hard at work in a large open room on the second floor of a downtown Atlanta building. They were just young kids, really, not much older than me at the time. I envied them and the freedom of creation they seemed to have. Their work seemed to consist of sitting around playing with little things colored Coke red and white waiting for the next big idea to be born.

What if I had been free to pursue a job like that in “the big time”? I say free, because my wife at the time would not hear of leaving her family and moving to a “big” town, and maybe down deep inside I didn’t want to leave either. After all, I had just returned from Vietnam where I vowed never to leave home again.

Truthfully, I’d probably have been a workaholic (or something that ended in “aholic”) with more than 3 broken marriages and children from all 3 that never got to see their father. I would have loved the big time, even worshiped it, and there’s probably a Clio (http://www.clioawards.com/home/) or two that would have almost been mine, but I’ll never know and divine intervention probably saved a lot of people heartache; and particularly me.

In my heart-of-hearts I know it would not have been the best move for me. I heard the horror stories of accounts lost and accounts swapped and how advertising folks moved from agency to agency following the accounts. I would probably have been miserable and insecure if I’m really honest with myself. However, I would have had the fastest car in the parking garage!

So, anyway, like I said, I have arrived at 60 having been married to 3 pretty gals, got 2 beautiful granddaughters, 1 pretty daughter, 1 handsome son, and having had at least 6 fast cars (including 3 Mustangs, a 442, and a Trans Am). So, I know where the years went “And I recall”, and it’s been a ball. I’ve had it all and it ain’t over yet – actually, I am contemplating another fast car soon! After all, like the blog title says, I AM A CHILD OF THE SIXTIES!