We also had three nights of serious food. Shrimp scampi, tacos for an all-out "Taco Eliminator" eat-a-thon, homemade hot sauces, breakfast standbys, cases of domestic and imported beer, and bottles of Old Oscar Pepper and Jack Daniels. Plus enough medicine to calm down and relieve any hangover. Damn, we did it right.

When it came to time to hit the track, we went right out our front porch and would walk 50 yards or so, hike up the hill to the concrete walkway that rimmed the facility, find our row,

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and hunker down in the plastic buckets (with arm rests) located conveniently below the wet bar and restaurant.

What a hoot. If there was a big oil-down or crash, we were strategically located to make a charge to the mobile home for more beer or whatever and then sprint back up the hill to the seats, our hearts beating like Gene Krupa on the tom-toms when we landed. As the day wore on, that sprint back to the mobile home became a bit of a challenge, so we repaired to the bar and would watch a half dozen pairs or so of the nitro burners through the decorative booze bottles that lined the bottom of the bar window. Think of that, a bar in line of sight at the track.

When qualifying ended on Friday and Saturday, it was back to the mobile home and everything from frisbees to skateboards zipped about the immediate area. I usually got turntable duty, Niles' girlfriend kitchen duty, and Niles and the rest of the crew were saddled with atmosphere enhancement.

Don't forget that in 1975, 24 different Top Fuelers ran five-second runs and this came within a backdrop where just three 1974 NHRA races had five-second runs and just two in 1975. We saw one every pair that went down course and these qualifying sessions were long as the entry list featured roughly 30-40 fuel dragsters. Imagine that. Boys, broads and booze, and world records under barroom glass and filtered through a filmy, yet remarkably enjoyable psychedelic gleam in the eye.

In all my time of going to the drags there was nothing like the top end at Ontario, and for five to six years that's the way we did it.

Today, the only chance (and I stress "chance") of that kind of social ambiance would be if you were rich enough to buy a sponsor's suite. And really as wild as it gets in those things is POWERade, bottled water, and, if you're feeling really deranged, a cold beer and some shipped-in hors d'oeuvres. And people wonder why I'm down on conservatism.

In many ways, we and a handful of other hardened hedonists were pioneers on how to really attend a drag race in freewheeling, felonious, nobody-gets-hurt style, at least on the West Coast. (I think I said that before).

I won't go through the details of the '75 event, but instead just leave it at this: When fans talk about unreal, unimaginable performance events, this was the one they compared them to. I'd stretch that a little and say when it came my personal life, it was these golden years that I will always use as a standard.