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INDY SPECIAL ISSUE?
REALLY!!!!
by Chris Martin
8/9/04
I know there's a lot of people who can't get enough of drag racing in the press. The websites get a tremendous amount of traffic, just ask us at DRO. The room temperature is always in three figures with all the hits we've been getting. On the mojo wire.
That information enthusiasm also spills over to the print medium, despite the fact that there very few all-drag racing magazines. Twenty or so years ago (actually more "or so"), one could be titillated by Drag Racing magazine, Super Stock, Drag Strip, and a host of other books that still featured a lot of event coverage and features on drag racing. Naturally, there were many drag race newspapers. National DRAGSTER appeared for the first time in 1960, and maybe the best paper of the early period (roughly 1955 to the early 1970s), Drag News.
I recently found a lost copy of Drag News that hit me like the first blast of scotch by a drinker who fell off the wagon. It was Volume 12, number 15, and for a huge supporter of this publication's pivotal role in the sport's history, it may be the -- lemme see, how can I say this -- the most horribly gaffed paper the small Gardena, California staff ever put out.
Leafing through the pages is like looking at an "X-Files" victim who has some horrible parasite living in him. Mulder and Scully beam in on him, and all of a sudden, a giant grasshopper pushes through his chest and spits all over the FBI agents. They get this incredible look like I did, one that says, with a few millennia of hard work and effort, I someday may evolve into a mammal.
Ghastly, stuff.
The issue I'm rambling about was their 1966 NHRA Nationals pre-race issue. On the cover a banner announcing "Special Indy Issue" slants diagonally across a photo of Don Garlits and Don Prudhomme's B&M Torkmaster dragsters smoking the tires at some track. It wasn't Indy, but might've been either Englishtown or Atco, New Jersey's plants or the old New York National at Center Moriches, L.I., New York. Whatever.
I remember when I bought this paper, it took me a few minutes to realize what was wrong with the cover. In those days, I hadn't started messing with hallucinogens, but I was getting in shape with every assisted suicide planner's vegetable of choice. The heavier stuff would follow a few years later, and I went from Eagle Scout Chris Martin to "the Son of Sam."
Upon close inspection I noticed something seriously wrong. Prudhomme's dragster, smoking the tires in the foreground, was not at the event the photo was taken. Apparently, the editors cut out a picture from some track and pasted it alongside what looks like a single subject of Garlits. Prudhomme's car looks like one of those 1/24th scale models alongside the 1966 Swamp Rat. I had never seen anything like that; certainly not in drag racing and in the "drag racer's bible." If this issue was their typical "bible," it looked as though it had been put together by Aldous Huxley.
But wait, it gets worse.
On page two under the heading of "About the Cover," the writer captioned the photo as Prudhomme putting away Garlits in the Top Fuel final at the 13th annual Cordova Raceway World Series. Hmmmmm.
No, it wasn't.
As I trekked into this wild issue with the slightly crazed cover, I got hip to something -- there was absolutely no original copy on the NHRA Nationals. If you went strictly by any of the copy or photos, there was nothing as in "no thing" about the Nationals.
Instead, there was great coverage of the World Series race, a two-page spread on the NASCAR drag racing circuit, a huge ad for the Cecil County Mr. USA Eliminator invitational Top Fuel show, and a full-page ad announcing the NHRA World Championship Series race at Ern Walkers' Amarillo Dragway.
An ad for Indy -- Nada. A special issue for the NHRA Nationals? It was special all right. The staff probably consumed more Jack Daniels those nights of prepping than they had all year.
The only way you could tell that there was a race at Indianapolis Raceway Park was from about a half-dozen ads from the drag racing parts and pieces people.
As a crowning glory to this was the back page ad, which for the last few years at that time had been dominated by the country's biggest high-performance Mopar dealer, Mr. Norm's Grand Spaulding Dodge at 3300 W. Grand Ave. in Chicago. Even Norm and the boys had trouble. On top of an ad with the ultra hot Mr. Norm '65 Dodge Coronet blown Funny Car, there is a huge chevron, which states in all caps, "WELCOME to the NHRA SUMMER NATIONALS."
I put the paper aside, and exhaled like Hurricane Gilbert. What a strange trip.
I think I know how this Jim Carrey version got out. Having been involved in drag racing journalism for some time, there are days and then there are DAYS. There are issues and then there are ISSUES! Put the book to bed? No not that; set on ground, light it up, and get away.
From conversations with a wonderfully informative and historically important Doris Herbert (the book's long-time editor), it was a very small crew that would stay up from Sunday night of a race through the wee morning hours of Wednesday, the day the paper hit the streets, after wrestling this rabid Wolverine into submission.
Maxwell House coffee must've done Halliburton-type business as the tiny crew pushed themselves to bare wires. Sometimes, the vision goes, the stamina becomes emphysema hacks, and maybe the booze comes out, I don't know for sure. However, this paper to a veteran writer smacks of a crew slapped into the shape of an Abu Ghraib test subject.
Still, 38 years later, this fall down the journalistic staircase is not without its charm. Like a fart in church, a howl at something that was not very funny, Drag NewsÌ Special Indy Issue was kind of special.
Really.
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