Teddy-Teddy has one hard and fast rule at his track -- you can't burn out across the starting line. "Now you can burn out across the line if you want to, and I'll let you, but don't come back, just keep on going, 'cause you're out," he'll say.

Teddy-Teddy is the starter. A nod of his head to the tower will tell those keeping score if he wants to make a quick bet and who to put his money on. But beyond that, Teddy-Teddy doesn't care who wins. He's fair.

Fran always seemed to win money at Putt-Putt. The last time we raced there, she had just blown an engine in her "Lady In Red" Nova and needed another, so we pulled the B&M blower motor out of our "B&M Wagonmaster" Malibu project car and dropped it in the Nova and went racing. Fran got runner-up that day to friend J.D. Reid, who refused to split the purse. Her take-home pay -- $300 in cash. Roger Reaves was nice about it; "Your lady did good," he told me. "I was betting on her to win." Fran was sorry to disappoint.

Putt-Putt Bush hooks and books. Fran recently traded her Nova to John Hobbs for his Suncoast Race Cars dragster, and in the first three times he has been out with it, Hobbs has won. The first time, he lost in the first round at the Atlanta Dragway Super Chevy show. So he loaded the Nova up and made it to Eatonton in time for first round, which he won, guessing at his dial-in. Then he won the whole thing. Then he won the next two races. The Nova being somewhat familiar to all those attending, Hobbs didn't tell me if the gathered crowd put any money on him to win; John looks a bit different than Fran.

BIRMINGHAM DRAGWAY

Birmingham Dragway, born and built as Lassiter Mountain Raceway in the late 1950s by the Black Widows car club, is the only active drag strip I've ever seen that has no guard rails on either side. None are needed. The Widows carved the track out of the head of Lassiter Mountain, leaving a 30-foot cliff on one side and a smaller one on the other. Give a good geologist a tall ladder and a free afternoon and he could have a field day with Lassiter Mountain's left-side guard "wall." It is nothing but exposed aggregate and hard sandstone and earth.

Lassiter Mountain was the first drag strip I ever went to, in the autumn of 1961. I would never dream that 25 years later, its leasee, David Neatherton, would be handing me an envelop full of $20 bills, 50 in all, for winning Super Pro on a Friday night in September. Nowadays, Birmingham Dragway hosts the kids of the fast and furious following, grudge racers all.

Lassiter Mountain has seen it all. There are Indian relics scattered about, plus abandoned coal mines and diggings, and its owner, the late Tony Lee, a television personality and once president of the IDBA, told me that he had found a moonshine still or two located near the track.

In the 1960s through the '80s, Lassiter Mountain was famous as THE place to race in Birmingham -- I personally saw "Dyno Don" Nicholson race his Super Stock wagon there, plus his "Eliminator I" flip-top Funny Car, plus Stone-Woods-Cook's A/Gas Supercharged Willys, Mr. Norm's Grand Spalding Dodge, Sox and Martin, Bill Mullins (whom I went to work for later when he had a fuel car), and many others.

They used to run "the Mountain" quarter-mile until cars got too fast. One time in the '60s an out-of-town dragster racer who had had too much to drink climbed into his slingshot to make a pass. "How do I know how far to go before shutting off?" he asked somebody. "Just go down there a ways and you'll know," came the reply. So he got his push-off start, turned the car around and headed it back up track. He blasted off and kept going. They found him and the digger hanging in the bushes a half-mile away. The first thing he was asked was, "Why did you drive it so far?" "I was looking at those lights up ahead and I thought that was the finish line," he said. The lights were from a television tower located a good 20 miles away, on Red Mountain overlooking downtown Birmingham.

Coming in Part 3: Baileyton, Green Valley, Winston County and Byhalia