Welcome Race Fans...

Memorial Day Weekend has always signified the start of summer to me, and, special memories of my Dad. He initiated me to the world of motorsports and always fostered my interest. He had a part-time job as a special policeman at Trenton Speedway, working the inside of turn one. In the late fifties & sixties, in the days before well equipped safety crews, if you crashed in turn one at Trenton, after he got you out of the smoking car, you got to meet my Dad. He mysteriously always came up with tickets to the races for my brothers and I, and would wave to us from time to time, somehow knowing right where our seats were. We did not find out until much later, going through his things after his death in 1968, that he'd worked all those days in trade for our seats. We joked about it then, if he wasn't dead already, Mom would've killed him ;)
Trenton Speedway was only a little over a mile from our house and we would skoot right over there on our bikes when we heard those engines whine. We had so many places to sneak into the track and unlike today, could get right up to the drivers. That's how I met Mario Andretti in my ninth year:
After college in the late seventies/early eighties, after girls and parties and photography, I started going to Indy every May until the mid nineties, when the politics of racing started ruining tradition, and a new family and more adult resposibilities kicked in. I still go every other year or so and on one occasion, met up with Mario again, signing bottles of wine from his new winery. I gave him a copy of the old photo (I just happened to have with me :) and we laughed at how much we have changed. We then switched poses for a new one:
So when people ask me today, how come I like auto racing so much, I just tell them it goes back a long ways, a different time, when nobody I knew liked auto racing, except my brothers, and especially, my Dad.