Photo by Jeff Burk

7/7/03

ETT-IE INTERESTING. . .he said in his best attempt at the old Laugh In TV show's Arte Johnson. You remember the little guy dressed as a Nazi on that show? Two naked girls would run across the stage or some such thing and the director would cut quickly to a closeup of Johnson in a WWII German helmet, holding his cigarette European-style and observing, "Verrie interesting."

Nostalgia aside, that's how I feel about America's first genuine Sports Car. This year, General Motors is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Corvette. Over the last half century sporty-type cars have come and gone from showroom floors, but the Corvette, for me, has always been the topper. Really. Until the Viper came along I would have rather had a Corvette than any car made in Drive-In-ville.

I was six years old when the Corvette came out (Please let me get this right) in 1953, and, of course, then I was far more interested in dodgeball, a Schwinn bike, or those little blue comic books my Dad kept in the garage. However, as I aged I began to take notice of more complex things like cars (about 12 years later). My pals were all car people, all Chevrolet fans, and most of them ate up the Corvettes.

As I staggered wide-eyed into my teens, I also noted that the increasingly important "chicks" dug Corvettes, too, dude. And as a young kid who could get a woodie looking at a Barbara Ann bread wrapper, I made the connection. Whether it was hanging out at the beach, the Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake, Calif., or in front of my high school after classes, the message was loud and clear as hell: Get a 'Vette, Get Wet. The ultimate chick magnet.

There were kids who liked the Euro Cars, the Porsches and the Maseratis, but I think they were more infatuated with the image of the ascot around the neck and the Playboy-pipe smugness. It looked medium cool to me, but the big difference between the Euro cars and the Corvette was that in a drag race the foreigners would be brutally hammered, claw-end first. People didn't run illegal 24-hour enduro races (where the European cars would've cleaned house), they drag raced, or more politically correct, street raced.

Ironically, as hot as the Corvettes were on the street, they never really ripped at the drags. Certainly not at the time I was introduced to drag racing and that was in June of 1963. When I first started going to the races, I figured being brand new, that the smaller, lighter, swoopier 'Vette would run heads up with Plymouths, Dodges, and the Ford Thunderbolts. Not so. Seems there was this small matter of classes. Cars ran in certain classes and the Corvette, being a sports car, ran in that netherworld of the NHRA/Standard 1320 record pages of Sports and Modified Sports. Moreover, sports cars never really caught on and the technology and development went to the "muscle cars." Consequently, despite their lighter weight, the bigger cars were stronger -- a half to three-quarters of a second stronger at that time.

Por ejemplo'. At the 1964 NHRA Winternationals, my junior year in high school, the A/Sports and B/Sports class titles went to Bill "the Red Light Bandit" Bagshaw and Dick Castro respectively with 12.49 and 12.77 efforts. Both cars looked cool, especially Bagshaw's, but that and a C/Stock win by Steve Bovan were all that Corvette won. The "Melrose Missiles," the "Hayden Proffitt's" the "Gas Rondas" got all the glamour ... and that's the way things stayed, for the most part.

The Corvette was glamorous and could be turned into an all-out drag race machine like the blown gassers of "Big John" Mazmanian and Bob Pickett here on the Coast, but that was it.

The ole glass slipper really didn't get into the limelight until after my high school years with the Funny Cars in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Out here that meant the Beach City Chevrolet roadster 'Vettes, Charlie Wilson's Corvette, Johnny Wright's "Hellfire," and other bizarre creations that for some reason always died violent, fiery deaths on the top end. Gary Gabelich blew a motor one night in the Beach City Corvette and took the blazing ball of fire through the sand traps and up onto the slow lane of the Santa Ana Freeway where it gasped its last in front of disbelieving eyes of mesmerized motorists. For all they knew the thing was a UFO.