My friends, veteran street race watchers and participants at the “River Road,” a roughly two-mile stretch of frontage road between the Warner Bros. studios and the L.A. River on the Toluca Lake side of town and the Hollywood Hills, insisted I needed to go to the drags. They had gone a few times to San Fernando Raceway and nutted out over some of the cars, especially the Top Fuel dragsters.

They made outrageous —I thought —claims about the fuelers.

Them: You seen the stop sign way down at Magnolia Blvd., (a quarter-mile from where I lived on Beachwood Dr. in nearby Burbank). Imagine the loudest thing you’ve ever heard in your life surrounded by clouds of smoke, charging by your house in seven-seconds at almost 190-mph. That’s how fast those fuckers are.

Me: (doing my best Jackie Gleason takeoff) Har, har, har dee har!

It was either next-door-neighbor Howard Sheets, next-street neighbor and current Childs & Alberts salesman Ray Akerly, or cross-town neighbor Gary Peltier, who after enduring weeks of I-Don’t-Wanta-Gos, finally laid it down in terms that were unmistakable. The four of us were going to the drags and I was told: “Either go or we’ll kick your ass.”

Now, at the time, I was about 5’7 and weighed 100 pounds and those guys were a couple years older, two or three inches taller and about 50 pounds heavier and had far more fighting experience than I did. In fact, the only fight I was in during high school was a split decision loss to a sophomore princess in the homecoming queen’s court. So I deferred to their reasoning.

However, attempting to save a fraction of face, I did say that I couldn’t afford it, but that was handled when Akerly stuffed me in the trunk of his dad’s roomy ‘57 Olds 98. I curled up in a ball behind a Coleman ice chest and some blankets were thrown over me when we got to a spot on Glenoaks Blvd., about a half mile from the track.

Upon arrival, I exited the trunk and was greeted by bright sun. We had parked almost parallel to the top end traps of the famed “Frog Pond,” and had an unhindered view of the race course. The only thing that separated us at this point from the racers were redwood logs laid lengthwise along the top of a three-foot rise (the parking area) from track level. San Fernando had no guardrail at all on the spectator side, just a long-wide gravel expanse side-by-side with the 60-foot wide asphalt course, the gravel interrupted only by a small paved chain-length fenced hot pit area and return road, which went to dot in a horizon of more rocks, gravel, and dirt. The whole deserty view came to an abrupt white-bouldered halt just under the base of the Foothill Blvd. overpass, roughly 2,000 feet past the finish line.

I was standing, hands jammed in Levi® pockets and one foot on a log, elevated above the “more rocks, gravel, and dirt” part at about the 1,200 feet of the track. After a few stockers and Comp. type cars, I saw what would be my first drag race pass where I clearly remembered the details. My murky, brittle memory reel today does not include the fire-up of the race car on the return road headed toward the starting line. (Probably too busy smarting off to the gang to notice.)

But I do remember the run itself and it began with a “Martin, look!” a sudden turn of the head up course, and an explosion of sound followed instantaneously by a long, skinny, noisy thing with spoked bicycle front tires trying to power out of a thick 10-foot high column of cloud-dense, rear-tire smoke that followed it to about three-quarter track. I vividly recall that despite its eggshell fragility and the oddball marriage of fat giant rear tires and spindly fronts, the custom-painted, chromed car was a beast the likes of which I had never experienced before and, yeah, it could make it from Beachwood and Magnolia to past my house at the speed my pals figured. The thing seemed to grow in size and definitely in sound as it approached where we were. When the driver shut off, killing the roar of what seemed like a space launch, a large airplane parachute brought this brief but frighteningly powerful display to a steaming halt a few hundred feet short of the overpass. You could see oasis-like heat waves surround the 125-inch car, sort of like a halo, as the parachute began to go limp and the car coasted off track.

Immediately, I remember my eyes were burning a wee bit, I had a sudden case of the sniffles, and my ears were ringing like the Bells of St, Mary’s.

I couldn’t hear the announcer (racer Jimmy Scott was at the mike then) say who it was, because I was in a temporarily dumbfounded and slackjawed state. My expression at that moment probably looked as startled as that redneck sheriff’s in the white hat when Jack Ruby leapt out of the crowd and nailed Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police building five months later.

“Wha-, wha- what the heyell is this shit??”

But anyway, I did hear the speed. 190 mph, the first one in San Fernando history. As my pals and I were ready to trek to the small grandstand section at the starting line, I noticed that the 190-mph car was being pushed up the return road by (I was told) a blue ‘59 Chevy El Camino. As my colorblind self was informed that the fueler was light blue, I noticed the team name, Safford-Ratican-Gaide, was lettered on the cowl and later that the driver was Kenny Safford. That afternoon, I found he ripped an 8.82, 190.66 on that run.

And really that’s all it took. Oh, Bill Alexander in Ernie’s Camera Shop gasser, Tony Nancy’s 22Jr. A/Modified Comp car, and Bolthoff & Hampshire raced that day, but that one instance watching Safford proved to be the needle that prodded me down the garden path to addiction.

Late that afternoon after the show was over, we headed home to Burbank and I had graduated to the backseat of Akerly’s Olds. The inevitable, “What do you think nows,” hit me from all sides as the laughing teenaged Akerly shot past potential tickets on Glenoaks Blvd. at 120-mph. I had to constrain my genuine enthusiasm for the drags because of all my earlier whining so I kept my remarks to “They’re all right. It wasn’t that bad.”

Although before we got to Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake to talk it up even more, I did slip in a couple of “When are you guys going agains?”