Category Archives: Americana

The Winternationals

Americana, Around home, Cars

Last weekend – well, when I started this it was last weekend, now it’s two weekends after last weekend – Malcolm Pearson and I went to the Winternationals. I am sure that there are lots of sports – and I want to get to that – that have a Winternationals, but, in the car universe, there is only one Winternationals, the racing weekend that starts the Drag Racing Season. It is always in Pomona, Southern California, and is always the second weekend of February. I am not a drag racing fan and neither is Malcolm but this is where drag racing started, it is where hot rodding itself started, and this was more of a pilgrimage than a trip to see a race.

Because this was a pilgrimage to an unexplored country, at least to us – although I had been to several legal and official drag races in the 50s and even ran in one with a ’48 International flatbed truck – Malcolm and I wanted it to include some background to help us understand what we were pilgrimaging to. In this case, our homework is going to the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum which is, unironically, “dedicated to safety” (sort of like a Rock and Roll Museum dedicated to ear health).

 

Ever since the second car, people have been trying to make them go faster. In the entry to the museum is a 1932 Ford three-window coupe, the kind of car a young doctor might take on house calls, facing that transportation device is the same car, now without fenders and a bigger engine, being transformed into a Deuce, the classic hotrod. 
At first, I guess, hot rods were just cars that could go faster, however, by the fifties – when I first started driving – the Hot Rod had become a separate, identifiable,  genera, divided into three basic species, Hot Rods people drove on the street, Hot Rods modified for top speed, and Hot Rods modified for maximum acceleration. The most visible species are cars designed to drive on the streets. These Street Rods, it should be noted, however, are not meant to be road racers, they are meant to be cars that look good, within strict parameters, and can be driven on the road (the road racing hotrods, like Troutman & Barn’s Scarab or Max Balchowsky’s Old Yeller, are, for some unfathomable reason, not considered Hot Rods). It turned out, to my surprise, that Street Rods, my favorite, are in short supply at the Wally Parks, but a couple of very classic Hot Rods were hidden in a corner.
There was also a Custom ’49/’50 Mercury on display and I was reminded of how disdainful I was of “Lead Sleds” like this when I had a real Street Rod, a five-window Deuce (even though it was really a 1932 Plymouth with a Ford Flathead engine).
After saying that road racers are not Hot Rods, I want to show the exception, a recreation of the original Hot Rod Lincoln built by Bill Stroppe to race in the La Carrera Panamericana in the early 50s. 
While the Stroppe brothers were building Hot Rod Lincolns, other hot rodders wanted to see how flat-out fast they could go. With the fortuitous combination of a large number of engineers and mechanics that had worked in the aircraft industry during the war and dry lakes, Southern California soon became a hotbed of very sophisticated, if somewhat obscure, hot rods that became known as Lakesters or Streamliners. The car on the right had a top speed of 178 mph with a flathead Lincoln engine producing about 120 hp in 1952! The car in the middle went 307.977  with a supercharged four-cylinder Chevrolet engine.   
We had come here for drag racing and that meant drag racing cars. The National Hot Rod Association – hereinafter called the NHRA – was founded in 1951 by Wally Parks, in Southern California, but it took years for it to spread. We did not get an official drag race strip in Northern California until I was 17, in 1957. Before that, we raced on the streets and one of the favorite streets was a usually deserted section of Cañada Road near the Pulgas Water Temple. Occasionally, some out of towner would show up with a ridiculously fast car which always made me wonder how an out of towner would know about us but the police never caught on. One Friday night, a friend’s mother showed up and was shocked at what was, obviously, risky behavior. Even more shockingly, her reaction was to write an editorial in The San Mateo Times campaigning for a legal drag strip. And even more shocking than that was that we got one, at the Half Moon Bay Airport. The tradition of ridiculously fast cars showing up to challenge the locals continued and the car above is one of them, Called Swindler A, with a blown Crysler Hemi, stuffed into a 1941 Willys, cars like this toured around challenging the locals. These cars still burned gas but they were well on their way to becoming specialized dragsters.  
A couple of early dragsters. The purple car in the background, BTW, is the Glass Slipper and I saw it turn a 166 miles per hour at Vacaville Raceway, in 1959 or 1960. I was going to write about the Winternationals in one post but there is too much here so I will do this in two parts.

Originally, this was going to be a single post but it is running longer than I thought so I will show the actual races in the next post. 

Super Moon(s)

Americana, Around home

This year, as luck would have it, the last Super Moon of a cluster of three fell on Michele’s birthday. And to make it even more special, according to Michele, this Super Moon was a Blue Moon – meaning that it was the second Super Moon of the month – with a total eclipse that resulted in it being a Blood Moon just before the dawn of her birthday. If you are into that sort of thing, which I am not, but Michele is, it is almost too exciting to bear. The day before ended with a sweet sunset. On the West Coast, the moon eclipse was about five in the morning and Michele’s plan was to get up every hour starting about three. I slept so I can’t attest to how many times Michele got up, but about five she woke me and it was pretty terrific.

It was dark and cold, silent except for the sounds of a couple of owls, with a light fog layer hanging over the tidal flats of the upper Tomales Bay and, above that, was a red moon, much bigger and rounder than I expected. Michele took several pictures and this is the one I like best (BTW, Michele’s reflection is on purpose).      , 

 

The Post and the Women’s March

Americana, Around home, Bay Area Walks

Michele and I saw The Post, the other night and I liked it, a lot. Maybe because it is political, maybe because it is a sort of homage to old-timey newspaper movies, but, mostly, I think because it is so comfortably familiar. I’m not normally a Steven Spielberg fan but he was the perfect director for this movie. The scenes of Merrill Streep walking into a room of all men, all in their dark power suits, seem so familiar  from my growing-up past and Streep’s tentative reaction is perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t grow up in that environment, but I did grow up in an environment that was trying to ape that life. A life in which rich, cultivated, women were close to powerless but had the time and money to look great in their clothes. It was a time when a woman  being powerful was considered crass. Merrill Streep is great as one of these powerless women, Kay Graham – trusted only to manage the family while her husband was given a newspaper to run by her father – is forced to take control.  

This movie tells of a time, that seems longer ago than it was, when it wasn’t as obvious that men were killing the world (to paraphrase Mad Max Fury Road). It takes place in 1971 and Spielberg’s suburban, optimistic, sensibility is perfect for the time, giving us scenes like Graham leaving the supreme court and walking past a group of almost Rockwellian women, seemingly waiting for change. What a difference it was getting off Bart and going up an escalator into an immense crowd of, mostly women, who are no longer waiting; they want control now. Control of their bodies, control of their lives, and, I hope, control of the world.

Almost always, however, control is not freely given, it is seized. In this case, the only way to seize political power is through the ballot box and while slightly more women vote than men, only about 68% of women voted in 2016; I would guess that that number was considerably higher in this crowd. Everybody was in a celebratory mood and the most heartening thing to me was the high turnout of young women.

To answer the President’s question

Americana, Psychological Musings

“Why Are We Having All These People From Shithole Countries Come Here?” President Donald Trump

First of all, even though it was in-artfully said, it is a legitimate question. I’m going to define shithole country as any country tourists don’t want to go to. As an example, I don’t know anybody who went to Nigeria and stayed in a hotel in the capital, Abuja, on vacation. Abuja is a pretty fair-sized city of 2,440,000  and I bet it is interesting as hell. However, for the sake of this conversion,  I’m going to call Nigeria, a shithole country by the arbitrary definition that it is not a tourist destination. I mean, nobody is going to call France a shithole country (except when they didn’t want to put troops into Iraq, but they were a shithole country then because they were hard to boss around not because nobody wants to go there). So I’m going with  Nigeria. 

As I understand Trump’s question, If we don’t want to go to Nigeria, why do we want Nigerians to come here? Well, there are already about 275,000 Nigerians that have come here and a fair question is How are they doing? Nigerians, it turns out, are a hugely successful immigrant community, as are other African immigrants. According to Bloomberg, Nigerian immigrants “have a median household income well above the American average, and above the average of many white and Asian groups, such as those of Dutch or Korean descent.” Dutch or Korean success is a pretty high bar, but Nigerians are well-educated people – who value education – whose education level is way above our National average. A high proportion are Doctors and Engineers and this is a community that adds more to the country than their less educated European immigrant brethren. 

And, if you take longer to look at it than Trump obviously took, educated, ambitious, people are more likely to leave shithole countries because these countries are usually more violent and have more limited opportunities, than, say, Belgium. To answer Trump’s question, we should invite people in from shithole countries because they are the people who will Make America great again.

 

Feeling the earth shift from Cameron to Seth to Oprah

Americana, Around home, Film

 

I watched Buffalo lose to the Jacksonville Jaguars yesterday afternoon. It was the first football game – only part of a game really – I have seen since watching Bama beat the stuffing out of Arkansas, 41 to 9, in Mobile AL. On Facebook, Karen Amy had said something like So, is everybody rooting for Buffalo? I am, and I thought Man, it’s playoff season and I have no idea who in the playoffs except, now I know Buffalo is in and Baltimore probably isn’t, and it’s playoff season and I had better catch up. I turned on the game and it ran the background until we went to the Farmer’s Market. At the end of the day, I turned on the recording of the Cougars and Saints game, again pretty much in the background, while Michele put a chicken in a Römertopf. At one point, I watched Cameron Newton get slammed. Over and over again, by David Onyemata, and I thought These guys are like Roman Gladiators, risking getting hurt, or worse, only for their glorification and our entertainment. Yes, skill counts, very much so, but skill put to the use of overpowering the other.

As the chicken cooked in the Römertopf, we watched the final two minutes of the Cougars/ Saints game before switching to the Golden Globes. Seth Meyers opened with “Good evening, ladies and remaining gentlemen. I’m Seth Meyers and I’ll be your host tonight. Welcome to the 75th annual Golden Globes, and Happy New Year, Hollywood. It’s 2018, marijuana is finally allowed, and sexual harassment finally isn’t.” and I felt the world start to shift. 

The masculine skill of overpowering the other, that football so admires and showcases, may have got us into this modern world but, in a civilization drowning in its own excess stuff and carbon excrement, that skill has turned toxic. We need change, we need cooperation and collaboration, not alpha males bragging about the size of their buttons.

Halfway through the awards, Oprah was presented with The Cecil B. DeMille Award for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment, and we were treated to a glimpse of the future. One of the most powerful people in the world gave a speech that was both a call to action and a call for inclusion:

But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics, or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. They’re part of the world of tech and politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military.
 
And there’s someone else, Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.
 
The world shifted a little more.