Photo by Jeff Burk

Hey, pal, how about a new car? And a few other unrelated Subjects

4/7/03

Veteran drag race fans remember! A/FX pioneer Phil Bonner was sponsored by...Archway Ford out of the Beltway in Maryland. Pro Stock Hall of Fame brilliante Bob Glidden's early efforts were backed by...Ed Martin Ford in Indianapolis. The Sox & Martin Comets in the middle 1960s benefitted from the largesse of...Brinsfield Lincoln-Mercury in Grimsboro, North Carolina. Tom "the Mongoose" McEwen's 1964 career-building Top Fuel dragster was moneyed up from...the Yeakel Bros. Chrysler Plymouth Dealership in Southern California. Force's first steadfast backers was...Don Steves Chevrolet in Orange County, California, and so it goes.

I was at the Studio Suite in beautiful downtown Valley Village, California, right next to movie hog heaven Universal City, when I got to thinking about car dealerships and their backing of drag racing. You know that in the middle to late 1950s and 1960s, car retail outlets were one of the few backbones of drag racing sponsorships in the good ole days. Today, their influence is marginal at the very best, and I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

I can't believe that, at some time in the past or even present, every town of any size at all didn't have a local car dealer who hogged the TV airwaves with his or her own particular brand of obnoxious, but oddly enough, at times entertaining ads. Los Angeles, certainly in the 1950s, was one of the world's leaders.

In L.A., one of the more particular and somewhat contemporary examples lies with the all-encompassing Foothill Nissan in the San Fernando Valley enclave of La Crescenta. A few years ago, they had a salesman named Ron Schucken, a cocky self-assured guy with Marine-close cropped salt and pepper hair and a pair of aviator sunglasses.

He'd shoulder up to the camera and lay it all down for you. "One thousand dollars cash American if we can't get you financed at Foothill Nissan," he'd brag, and all this with a red flashing button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen ordering the viewer to "Pay Attention." Literally. No joke, I'm telling you to pay attention to what I'm saying. Don't you dare divert it elsewhere.

I loved his commercials. What a delightfully moronic stance, and from a guy I'd learned to salivate with years earlier.

Quick. Who sponsored the first blown and injected nitro Funny Car, Jack Chrisman's 1964 Mercury Comet? Helen Sachs and Sons Lincoln-Mercury in Downey, California, that's who. And you know who the head salesman was? Ron Schucken. And it was the same Ron Schucken who hammered the audience at Foothill Nissan. Schucken worked at Sachs and then later his own Ron's Chrysler Plymouth when he wiped out poor Mrs. Sachs (or so I'm told.)

Back in the 1960s, Schucken was obviously younger and even more cocky. You'd be watching "Jalopy Derby" on L.A.'s Channel 5 or "Roller Derby" on Channel 13, and on would come Schucken. He was stone cold aggressive and sure. He didn't walk, he'd swagger into the lens.