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| The press got paid back at Indy, at least
this group did. It's possible that the DRO-ids ticked off NHRA with
something we wrote; I don't know. However, while many of the press
were getting asphalt behind the Parks Tower, not so the O'Fallon
Felons. We entered some compound called Gate 3 behind the facility.
This grassy, weeded vacant lot was probably five acres big and we
were in the fifth acre, right along with the bulls and cows, the
venomous snakes and the Jeff Corwin Experience. A press area, it
was not. |
Right after we exited our car in this press hinter, a
guard dog on a golf cart roared out of the brush and started barking,
"You can't park there. You can't park there. You can't park there."
Burk and I tried to hit him with a rolled up newspaper, but he continued
to the point where we figured, "Frig it, the Andy Gump looks okay.
Yeah, that one, the one outside of Notre Dame stadium." Oh well,
as our friend and mentor Don Gillespie sagely put it, "When you
pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
For 10 years, I was a Daily DRAGSTER staffer at Indianapolis.
I usually got so caught up on the circus inside that I never really
noted how many people picked up our papers after our all-night thrash
to encapsulate the previous day's activity. I'll just say this, that
as late as 2 p.m. on any of their first two days, there were literally
hundreds stacked at the entrance gates we traversed. I thought that
would've upset me, but hey, I was still trying to get the press parking
bulldog to let go of my pant leg.
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