For a guy who says he didn’t do too well in high school English, George Howard puts out a pretty mean racing flyer. He says he does it all himself, in pencil on paper on his dining room table.

“I just hand-write all this, fax it to my printer, Ken Graf of Birmingham (Alabama, Howard’s home town), then he gets me on the phone ‘cause he can’t read my writing, and we hash it

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out, get a proof and get it printed up,” George says. “I lay everything out, just rough on paper. He takes it and uses a lot of my ideas, and we use a lot of his. I’ve done this a lot of times (20 or more years of promoting bracket and drag races), so I OUGHTA be decent in it. You have to let people know when, where and how.”

One reason, Howard says, that these races have been so successful is BECAUSE of the flyers. “I put everything out front. There’s no small print, there’s nothing to hide,” he says. “I give an opportunity to the sportsman racer that nobody else has given them. It’s the world’s (meaning the drag racing world in general) biggest money, but we have to let people what’s going on. I like to get direct to the racer.”

That means no more “Sunday … Sunday … Sunday!” radio ads. Those days, as far as George is concerned, are over. An aside here … I grew up in Birmingham listening to the Rumores, Joe and Duke, on WVOK, and their ads for Lassiter Mountain Raceway and Helena Drag Strip. A lot of times, I’d head out to one or the other just because I heard Joe say who was coming into town that Saturday night --- Garlits, Mr. Norm, Ron Hassel, Stone-Woods-Cook, whoever. WVOK had one of the best drag racing ad campaigns going.

“There are so many commercials on the radio today that I kind of block them out when I’m listening, ‘cause 50 or 60 percent of it is commercials,” Howard says. “There’s nothing greater to anybody than getting a piece of direct mail that has their name on it, it’s addressed to them, and it’s talking about what they like to do, their hobby, and how much money they can win in the process.”

Read all about it. Those “Sunday … Sunday” radio ads are history.

wilson@dragracingonline.com