[Geerhead55]

In April of '68, I'm in 9th grade and me and a couple buddies have been reading Hot Rod, Car Craft, Popular Hot Rodding and Super Stock & Drag Illustrated for about 3 years already, and I mentioned how cool would it be to go to a drag race if they had any around here. My one friend says they have a dragstrip out in Puyallup! I didn't even know it existed! None of us had a driver's license, so we talked his mom into dropping us off at the gate one Saturday, at the track, which was about 20 minutes away. We walked by the cars in tech, and found our way to the stands, and sat up front across from the tower, as the stands were still pretty empty. I remember the announcer talking to us,, asking how were we doing, if we'd been to the races before, you know, all the usual things you would ask " first timer kids".
The cars started making runs, and soon were we in sensory overload from all the noise, smoke, wheelstands, watching the gearbangers,, all really cool to us!
Some of the cars I recall from that first outing were "Wild Bill" Ireland's '66 Fairlane, Harry Holton's "Hemi Count Down" '65 Plymouth and Crazy Corky's "Charlie Brown" Javelin.
There were lots of dragsters and altereds, coupes and roadsters there too, but I can't recall any of them. It was the stockers and superstockers that impressed me the most, and its stayed like that with me all these 45 + years later.
Thats my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Danny Durham