A Little ...

Drag Racin'

I had bought a 1937 Ford when I was thirteen for $300.00, spent three years restoring it and had it in pretty good shape. Sold it and a shotgun (Browning Sweet 16 my Dad had given me), Gramps made up the difference and I went down and bought me a '65 Comet Cyclone, 4-speed, 289 ci, 4-barrel. 'You know, besides the car, I'd sure like to have that Sweet 16 back'.

Spent a little time and the rest of my money and started running G/Stock (Formula 3, I think) AHRA on a 1/8th mile strip at Catawissa (Pacific), Missouri. Done pretty good too.

Got my drivers license in 1965 and 'Dyno Don' Nicholson was my guy. I'd seen him run his '65 Comet Cyclone and there was nothing tougher. He's one of the most famous drivers of the sixties and early seventies. In 1966 Nicholson debuted the first flip-top funny car ever built. The one-piece body was based around a '66 Comet and mounted on a tube-frame chassis. Nicholson called simply, "a killer car". The car was different from everything that had come to that point because there were no doors. The driver entered and exited the car by moving out of the space created when the body was flipped up.

Nicholson ('Dyno Don') showed up with his new 1966 Cyclone for a match race with Wayne County Speed Shop. He had sold his '65 Comet to a fellow that was there that night to run it. Can't remember his name, but he had run before, just not something like Don's '65. He staged by himself and lit it up! Got out of it! Lit it up again! Got out of it again! Musta been kinda embarrased so he lit her up one more time! Got out of it, and I mean 'got out of it' and started looking for a new buyer.

I wish I could tell you that I was the guy who bought it. It would have been somethin'. I couldn't and I didn't. But I did, as soon as I could, trade the '65 for a '66 Cyclone Convertable, 4-speed, 390 ci, 4-barrel.

Nostalgia

It strikes me that the doom-laden insecurity about the future is precisely what many people loathe about nostalgic types – that stifling sense that nothing will match up to an imagined and irretrievable past. There is no way forward, only back – except that you can't really go back either. Great.

And yet nostalgia, which we might define as "history after a few drinks", is increasingly a feature of our age. Literally "the longing to return home", it is the natural offspring of what the geographer David Harvey calls "space-time compression", his phrase for the giddy pace of change in Western society. This, he observes, is "exciting, stressful and sometimes deeply troubling", as it whisks away the reassuring handrail of all that is certain and familiar.

With rather more panache, in her compelling study, The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym puts it like this: Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of a mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values... a secular expression of a spiritual longing for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.

I have always been a little skeptical of psychological and sociological evaluations of people and events. I believe things are usually what they appear to be, so it is fruitless to look for "hidden meanings." But to some social scientists, things are never what they seem to be. They believe that some awful truth lies hidden beneath the surface and must be uncovered regardless of how unpleasant it may be.

Taking that objection a step further, I maintain that a social scientist can create a problem where none exists. And if a social scientist is pushing a political agenda, they can and do create special terminology to gain favor for their program while discrediting those who oppose it. In other words, they subject those who criticize their program to creative, manipulative language that insinuates that dissidents are either biased or have some other mental defect.

A recent case in point is the novel use of the word: "Nostalgia." The expression implies that our memories of the past are false; clouded with a wistful longing for a time that really never was. Because people are threatened by social innovations, they yearn to return to a comfortable yet fictionalized past. This yearning for the past is caused by a complex psychological mechanism: Nostalgia.

What we normally think of as the contented traditional family is not fiction; a creation of "nostalgia" based on 1950s television programs like "Ozzie and Harriet," "Father Knows Best" and "The Donna Reed Show." People like me who grew up in the 1950s remember families that were like the one on "Leave it to Beaver."

If I may wax nostalgic, and bring to mind the oft quoted lines of Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring." Social scientists pass judgment on the pluses and minuses of society. But social science faculties at many colleges include former graduates who stayed on to become assistant professors without any detour into the real world outside the walls of academia. This is like obtaining a driver’s license by taking the written test only and skipping the driving test.

These professorial types seem to think that with the passage of time, things get better and better. But I believe there is an equal probability that things might get worse. In fact, I think the societal changes of the last fifty years prove that things can get worse.

Nostalgia might shade our memories of the past but it certainly cannot make the sum total of our recollections wrong. Opposition to much of so-called "modernity" is actually based on common sense and the nostalgia ploy is nothing more than a devious technique to stifle dissent. In any event, social scientists now have a new term to manipulate us with – "nostalgia," an expression that will probably take its place in the vernacular alongside sexism, racism, and homophobia.

In Part By: Gail Jarvis, a CPA living in Beaufort, SC, is an advocate of the voluntary union of states established by the founders. Nostalgia. LewRockwell.com April 15, 2005.

My Favorite Rides

I can remember when a car was something you had to have. It wasn't an option; it was a neccessity. Muscle was the main factor. Growing up you worshipped the guy who could afford it and was able to pull the left front wheel off the ground on the street. I knew every car in town, who owned it, how fast it would go and was considered a motorhead. Muscle was my favorite ride even though I was never able to pull the left front wheel.

On Pine Street in Rolla there were drags (sort of) that took place every year and guys either ran each other or just burned the rear tires. They drew cheers and jeers from the crowd gathered depending on what they did. People would hook up their machines, for there wasn't a street machine that didn't double as a dragster on the weekend.

A bunch of UMR Students generally watched and became an overwhelming force for the two cops on duty to handle. They weren't neccessarily in the control of the RPD (unless they were off campus) but were in the scope of the Campus Police. They would usually be broken up by someone on the St. Pat's Board (they had special jackets) because they had lots of power.

Before you get outa here. . .

Super Stock: Drag Racing the Family Sedan From the late 1950s through the 1960s, the same cars that drove people to work and the grocery store were actively raced on Sundays at drag strips all across the country. This was the exciting time when the factories of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors competed against each other under the slogan, 'Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.' Author Larry Davis experienced the period firsthand from the driver's seat, as he competed in various Stock and Super Stock categories between 1960 and 1970. Read this completely illustrated, year-by-year history of Super Stock racing from 1955 to 1968, including first-person accounts of action from match races to the Nationals, and appendices featuring all major event winners, NHRA rules, and the engine/chassis combinations.

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