The periodical’s promo – four color, top of the section – said ‘Motorhead Jack D. Welch peers through the fumes of tractor-pulls and customized cars for an inside look at car shows. Page 1.’ From November 23, 1988.
Photo by Carla Perry.
Answer: Changing tires, changing lightbulbs, changing channels.
Question: What are the limits of my mechanical dexterity?
To me, automobile mechanics is brain surgery. Yet, despite technological dyslexia, I have had a lifelong love affair with cars. When other guys were reading Sports Illustrated or Outdoor Life or even Playboy, I was memorizing Hot Rod.
Answer: Changing tires, changing lightbulbs, changing channels.
Question: What are the limits of my mechanical dexterity?
To me, automobile mechanics is brain surgery. Yet, despite technological dyslexia, I have had a lifelong love affair with cars. When other guys were reading Sports Illustrated or Outdoor Life or even Playboy, I was memorizing Hot Rod.
I collected car magazines for years until my Grandpa Charlie pointed out I could have purchased an actual automobile for the same amount of money. Old people are so practical sometimes.
I didn’t have a car and I didn’t have an operator’s license. I couldn’t afford insurance anyway.
In the summer, a couple of friends and I, we’d borrow somebody’s car once in a while.
This was best done late at night when the vehicle’s owner was soundly asleep.
I changed my ways the time I stalled out turning around in a driveway just as the state policeman who lived there came home.
Trooper Pelligrino explained to me, slowly and at length, the implications of grand theft auto vis a vis my future.
Seems I was risking two to four years of varsity eligibility.
I got to the Twenty-First Annual World of Wheels Motorsports Expo just in time for the 4:30 p.m. performance in The Globe of Death.
A better name might be The Cage of Permanent Disability.
The contraption is a thirteen-and-a-half-foot sphere of metal into which drives a white leather-clad motorcyclist on a Yamaha Enduro 100. He’s got the name “Butch” lettered across his butt and “Laswell” down his thighs.
Starting low, Butch drives the motorcycle around and around the globe and up and up in wider circles until – through the magic of centrifugal force – he’s parallel to the floor.
It’s very loud. I’m getting dizzy, and Butch keeps circling, even taking one hand off the handlebars.
He slows to a stop at the bottom.
(Students using this column for Newspaper In Education Activities should note this movement inward toward a center or an axis is centripetal. Adults can ignore this word as just another example of information you learn in school and never see again in your entire life.)
Another biker drives in. The two men start chasing each other inside this circular cage so small they could reach across and touch hands.
They touch hands. At forty miles an hour.
A break in the action allows a young woman with a flash camera to enter. Butch’s buddy gives her a kiss, the 100cc engines crank up and a moment later both motorcycles are circling above her head as she stands, taking photographs in the center of The Ball of Unreasonable Risk.
The Expo itself is basically a beauty pageant for customized automotive sculptures. Polished to a finish so reflective you can check your back teeth. Dozens of filled, louvered and French creations line the floor like so many works of art. There’s not a drop of grease. Most of these rigs are too treasured to use and, if my insurance rates are any indicator, too expensive to drive.
One 1955 Thunderbird, coated with forty-two (42) layers of Torch Red lacquer, required 2,140 hours to restore.
That’s more than a year of forty-hour work weeks. To me, it seems a bit much. But, let he who is without a hobby, cast the first stone.
The most memorable chassis of the show belongs to November Playboy Playmate Pia Reyes. This confirmed my long-held suspicion I erred in my adolescent choice of periodicals. Miss Reyes is autographing eight by ten glossies. Waiting to meet her is a line, a long line, of young men. They are startlingly unable to look as cool as they want to look. And not a one of them will give me “cuts.”
A smaller crowd was lined up outside the doors an hour before the start of the Grand National Truck and Tractor Pull 1988 World Finals Tour. Some thirty-six trucks and a couple tractors are arrayed around the Coliseum’s main stage.
In the center a large pseudo-steam roller is smoothing out a 250-foot track of packed dirt. “Rednecks, white socks and Blue Ribbon beer.” The P.A. system is blaring out country-and-western music. “A little too rowdy and a little too loud.”
The celebrity of the show is Bigfoot, the original car-crushing monster truck. The Ford pickup with the ten-foot tires is introduced to the C&W ditty, “I’m proud to be an American.”
Don’t ask me why, but I was suddenly compelled to rip off a corner of the souvenir program and put it between my cheek and gum.
Now, the object of a truck pull is to see which vehicle can pull the sled – it weighs anywhere from ten to thirty tons – the farthest down the track.
Up to 60,000 lbs. That’s a lot of lbs.
The sled, really a weight transfer machine, involves a weight box which travels forward from the rear wheels to a skid plate that drags on the ground. The box moves throughout the pull until the friction between the plate overcomes traction or horsepower, whichever the truck runs out of first. Simple.
The pull itself usually lasts anywhere from twelve to fifteen seconds. It takes about three minutes to set up the next competitor, so there’s ample time for the ringing in your ears to stop.
If the World of Wheels is a beauty contest, this is a freak show. One truck called The Buzzard is so ugly, it owes the aerial scavenger an apology.
A tri-engined tractor called Captain Chaos puts out 3,600 horsepower… eleven rows up, my seat is actually vibrating. It feels kinda nice.
The sled always wins, so, what’s the point? Now, Bigfoot, I understand. It’s fantasy time, bigger-than-life imaginary mayhem. It’s the primordial revenge motive. This is the top of the automotive food-chain for four-wheelers, and Bigfoot is B-A-D.
With a chilling roar, the monster truck attacks a half-dozen junkers, bounces higher than Jerome Kersey on a tomahawk dunk, and sends glass and metal flying to within a foot of the spectators who have rushed to the railings to get closer to their mechanized hero, giant-tired Goliath.
Bigfoot. I can appreciate the concept. It’s an image I’ll carry with me the next time I’m stacked up on the Banfield.
This will baste somebody’s bird, the whole thing reminded me all too much of the recent Presidential campaigns.
Examined, the sum of the parts is less than a whole. Slick images and empty promises, then noise, smoke and not enough action.
The show seems to go on forever and yet, when it’s over, you had to ask, “Is that all there is?”
I began to feel like a character in a Solzhenitsyn novel – I would have left if only I’d remembered I was free to go.
Norma Louise was right again.
I should’ve stayed home and watched “Murder, She Wrote.”