Born too late to be a Hippie

jimintoronto said:
Wow, we do have a few things in common. My buddy Bruce Beddie was a talented air brush artist. I raced local oval tracks in the 80's with the Canadian Vintage Modifieds club around the southern Ontario tracks. One of my other friends was Dave Law, who was known as "Part Timer " for his car lettering skills and distinctive color schemes on race cars. He lettered my car and dozens of others.

One of the annual road trips with the Vintage Modifieds club was the three race week end in Michigan on the Canada Day, or the 4th of July weekend. The first race was on the Friday night at Kalamazoo, Saturday night at Spartan Speedway, and Sunday afternoon at Flat Rock, near the Detroit bridge crossing. We used to be able to have a 24 car field at these US tracks, which the promoters loved, as we were a totally different type of car, all coupes and coaches not the usual Camaros or Chevelles. Being paid in US dollars was nice, too.

Sadly, now the CVM club is down to just 11 cars, and they no longer travel, racing at just one track, 8 times a year. They have priced themselves out of the market now. Too expensive, and too little prize money. To build a CVM from the ground up will cost at least $25k now. No wonder oval track racing is dying at the local level. Jimb.
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Wow. Awesome!

The super-modifieds met the same kind of fate as your Vintage modifieds. They were taken over by what were called quarter-midgets; basically smaller versions of the same car. Super-modifieds ran best on mud tracks, and the quarter-midgets were equally quick and exciting on both mud and asphalt. The midgets took over when all but one local racetrack switched to asphalt.

But meanwhile, dad's team raced at Calistoga and Kalamazoo, and they went to Australia one or two seasons as well, for an international NASCAR event. I forget the years...early 70s, probably, like 71 and 72. By that time, they'd modified the super-modified to run on asphalt. The engine wasn't really the problem, it was mainly tires and breaks, but also steering and the cooling system.

Their major races were Fridays at the Roseville Raceway, Saturdays at the Sacramento Speedway, and Wednesdays back at Roseville. The driver's track name was The Roseville Rocket. (actual name, Larry Burton)

Good times!
 
jimintoronto said:
Wow, we do have a few things in common. My buddy Bruce Beddie was a talented air brush artist. I raced local oval tracks in the 80's with the Canadian Vintage Modifieds club around the southern Ontario tracks. One of my other friends was Dave Law, who was known as "Part Timer " for his car lettering skills and distinctive color schemes on race cars. He lettered my car and dozens of others.

One of the annual road trips with the Vintage Modifieds club was the three race week end in Michigan on the Canada Day, or the 4th of July weekend. The first race was on the Friday night at Kalamazoo, Saturday night at Spartan Speedway, and Sunday afternoon at Flat Rock, near the Detroit bridge crossing. We used to be able to have a 24 car field at these US tracks, which the promoters loved, as we were a totally different type of car, all coupes and coaches not the usual Camaros or Chevelles. Being paid in US dollars was nice, too.

Sadly, now the CVM club is down to just 11 cars, and they no longer travel, racing at just one track, 8 times a year. They have priced themselves out of the market now. Too expensive, and too little prize money. To build a CVM from the ground up will cost at least $25k now. No wonder oval track racing is dying at the local level. Jimb.
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Dude! I just googled Vintage Modified and they look very similar to our super-modifieds.

This is the car they took to Australia:

burton in ozzieland.JPG

About the same, right?
 

My hippie days were more like a glorified dream, a concept of life in an ever expanding space of ideas, raisins and imagination. I was raised to believe people and motives were honorable. Respect god, church and the bible were my basis for living, always tell the truth and everything will be fine. I was naive and innocent of fault.

hallucinogenics were my escape from closed mindedness
 
Murrmurr said:
Dude! I just googled Vintage Modified and they look very similar to our super-modifieds.

This is the car they took to Australia:

View attachment 333909

About the same, right?
Click to expand...
What a great looking SuperMod. All the right stuff. Long stacks on the Hilborn injection a must for asphalt - the grip was so good it'd pull a motor off its power curve. Splayed looks like it might have been a big-block motor? Yeah, we ran Sprinter small-block on dirt. We got by with short stacks on the injection.

What great memories it brings back seeing a picture like that. Lots of US dirt and asphalt cars going to international series in the 70s. Our part-time hot-shoe sprint driver in Nebraska raced a sprint series in South Africa during the Nebraska winter.
 
I turned 18 in 1971 and went off to college where I made it to "plastic hippie". I had the long hair, the verbal jargon, the dope smoking and a lot of acid, peyote and mushroom trips, but the political action, creativity and personal intimacy were outside my frame of reference.
Still, the seventies were an exciting time for me with a lot of personal growing and important relationships.......a good set of memories.
It would be nice to live those years again knowing what I know now.
 
Murrmurr said:
Dude! I just googled Vintage Modified and they look very similar to our super-modifieds.

This is the car they took to Australia:

View attachment 333909

About the same, right?
Click to expand...
Here is a link to the CVM 2019 season website. All metal pre 1948 coupes and or coach bodies, 350 Chevy factory crate engines with a 500 holley 2 barrel, on aviation gas, any cam any crank any pistons and any valves, with 8 inch Hoosier slicks. There are a couple of "hold outs " who still run the 250 cubic inch Chevy inline sixes, and they get a 250 lb weight advantage over the 350's. Link. Racing series Canadian Vintage Modified

Jimb.
 
I was born in 60. But a brother over 11 years older than me. He was a hippie. He even had a VW van he painted. My mother protested the Vietnam war. She was not against the soldiers. I can say she protested as a victim of war herself. I can give her that credit. My brother was going to go to Canada if he got drafted. I remember being in San Francisco and seeing the hippies as a kid.

Then one day my brother came by the house. He had cut his hair, became a JW, still is today and he was never the same. Should have stayed a hippie.

Years later my other brother was terrified to tell my mother he had joined the Navy. She took it very well actually.
 
ArnoldC said:
What a great looking SuperMod. All the right stuff. Long stacks on the Hilborn injection a must for asphalt - the grip was so good it'd pull a motor off its power curve. Splayed looks like it might have been a big-block motor? Yeah, we ran Sprinter small-block on dirt. We got by with short stacks on the injection.

What great memories it brings back seeing a picture like that. Lots of US dirt and asphalt cars going to international series in the 70s. Our part-time hot-shoe sprint driver in Nebraska raced a sprint series in South Africa during the Nebraska winter.
Click to expand...
Oh, man, I remember the sprintcars! So fun to watch. They were really popular here in Sacramento. Auto racing in general was a #1 sport here. At one time there were 5 tracks that I know of. Now I think there's one, the Speedway, and a drag track that's where the old figure-8 used to be. I drove for my dad when he got into go-kart racing at that track, when I was 13, 14, and 15.

Dad's modifieds had the open engine design until his last few years as engine master/crew chief. It was deemed that the open engine bodies caused deadlier fires, and after a popular driver lost his life, they were banned.

All dad's engines were Chevy V8s (356ci) until around the mid-70s, when the car owner went with Ford. The Ford seemed to do better on concentric tracks and in longer races, but they were never as quick as the Chevy engines....if you asked my dad.

Actually, I think he just knew the Chevy better. It's all he'd built until then.

That said, I've only ever bought one Ford, a 63/4 Falcon convertible. It was over 20yrs old when I bought it (in primo condition).
 
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Murrmurr said:
Oh, man, I remember the sprintcars! So fun to watch. They were really popular here in Sacramento. Auto racing in general was a #1 sport here. At one time there were 5 tracks that I know of. Now I think there's one, the Speedway and a drag track that's where the old figure-8 used to be. I drove for my dad when he got into go-kart racing at that track, when I was 13, 14, and 15.

Dad's modifieds had the open engine design until his last few years as engine master/crew chief. It was deemed that the open engine bodies caused deadlier fires, and after a popular driver lost his life, they were banned.

All dad's engines were Chevy V8s (356ci) until around the mid-70s, when the car owner went with Ford. The Ford seemed to do better on concentric tracks and in longer races, but they were never as quick as the Chevy engines....if you asked my dad.

Actually, I think he just knew the Chevy better. It's all he'd built until then.

That said, I've only ever bought one Ford, a 63/4 Falcon convertible. It was over 20yrs old when I bought it (in primo condition).
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The engine fire problem with the Chevy V8 engines was the location of the fuel pump which was on the front right corner of the block. Hit the wall hard enough and you had a fire in the engine compartment. Moving the fuel pump location to the rear close to the fuel cell, and switching to electric fuel pumps was the solution. BTW, some body mentioned Hillborn injection systems. John Hillborn was from Alberta, here in Canada and his patent made him a lot of money over the years. JimB.
 
Murrmurr said:
Oh, man, I remember the sprintcars! So fun to watch. They were really popular here in Sacramento. Auto racing in general was a #1 sport here. At one time there were 5 tracks that I know of. Now I think there's one, the Speedway and a drag track that's where the old figure-8 used to be. I drove for my dad when he got into go-kart racing at that track, when I was 13, 14, and 15.

Dad's modifieds had the open engine design until his last few years as engine master/crew chief. It was deemed that the open engine bodies caused deadlier fires, and after a popular driver lost his life, they were banned.

All dad's engines were Chevy V8s (356ci) until around the mid-70s, when the car owner went with Ford. The Ford seemed to do better on concentric tracks and in longer races, but they were never as quick as the Chevy engines....if you asked my dad.

Actually, I think he just knew the Chevy better. It's all he'd built until then.

That said, I've only ever bought one Ford, a 63/4 Falcon convertible. It was over 20yrs old when I bought it (in primo condition).
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Ever heard of Anthony Simone? RIP
He raced super modifieds (i think) around here.

Quite the character.
 
jimintoronto said:
The engine fire problem with the Chevy V8 engines was the location of the fuel pump which was on the front right corner of the block. Hit the wall hard enough and you had a fire in the engine compartment. Moving the fuel pump location to the rear close to the fuel cell, and switching to electric fuel pumps was the solution. BTW, some body mentioned Hillborn injection systems. John Hillborn was from Alberta, here in Canada and his patent made him a lot of money over the years. JimB.
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Yeah, you couldn't place the fuel tank too near the driver's seat, or fuel lines, either.

By open engine I mean that the engine wasn't enclosed; no body around it, so an engine fire was totally uncontained. There was a strip of sheet metal along the bottom of the front-screen that was 6 or 7 inches in height (guessing). Through the 60s and I think clear up to the early 70s, that's all the driver had between his face and the engine.

But the cars were slower then, and mostly raced on dirt tracks, so quite a bit less heat generated by both. More pertinent, the fuel mix was different. Fires were smaller and less explosive. Probably not as hot, too.

Yes, ArnoldC mentioned Hillborn.
 
dobielvr said:
Ever heard of Anthony Simone? RIP
He raced super modifieds (i think) around here.

Quite the character.
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No, I don't know that name.

I remember the names Larry Pagett and Tommy Sills Jimmy Sills. They were very popular drivers here. Sills started driving super-modifieds when he was only 17. A lot of the drivers were in their 30s, so they gave him the track-name Kid.

If I remember right, Jimmy Sills went on to drive formulas.
 
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jimintoronto said:
John Hillborn was from Alberta, here in Canada and his patent made him a lot of money over the years. JimB.
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Jim & Murrmurr, I'm afraid I have no experience with "Modified" track racing. I always lived pretty distant from auto-racing tracks. I don't know if you guys ever watched 1320 drag racing? Though far from home at the time, I watched a bit of that.

I had some relatives down in California. We visited there when I was a around 13, a ways north of San Francisco Bay. The dad of a cousin took us boys to a drag strip at a place called Half Moon Bay. The special attraction was that Don Garlits, famous at the time, was going to race there that day. At the time, I believe the top speeds those nitro-burning rail dragsters were achieving were up toward 200mph.

We got a pit pass, walked over by Don G, and watched him single-mindedly tuning his car's engine. No one gave him any competition on the track that day, but he set a track record. I think somewhere around 190mph with low elapsed time. Extremely loud & exciting! I'd never seen a car balloon-out a drag shoot before.

It may have been within 10 days, I saw Garlits run again when I was taken to a concrete track at a place called Cotati. Not quite as fast, but again a track record. This time too I had a pit pass, and I even asked Don a question or two after he drove his car back from a run to put it on the trailer. I regard him as having been very kindly, to speak at all to a young kid. One thing I remember him saying was that track really messed with his back on that last run we'd just watched.

So, not living near a drag strip, I didn't keep up with what went on. I know from information I later found on the Web that through the decades Garlits' cars kept getting faster, eventually achieving more the 300 mph.
 
I was more aligned with the beat generation. In 1960 I was 21. We spent time in Greenwich Village listening to jazz and poetry. I was also at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 when a riot broke out (just people without tickets trying to break through the fence) and Marshall Law was declared. My life was pretty conventional but I liked the art and literature of the time. Joan Baez is still going strong at 80 something.
 
Alizerine said:
I was more aligned with the beat generation. In 1960 I was 21. We spent time in Greenwich Village listening to jazz and poetry. I was also at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960 when a riot broke out (just people without tickets trying to break through the fence) and Marshall Law was declared. My life was pretty conventional but I liked the art and literature of the time. Joan Baez is still going strong at 80 something.
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I was going to ask if you saw Joan Baez??
Was Bob Dylan a part of the 'beatniks' scene back then?
 
My hippie daze were more like Wildwood's-Plastic People. Although I have fond memories it was not enjoyable. Shortly after high school, mental illness took control of my life. I tried to be cool smoking weed but weed aggravated psychotic symptoms and the most I could I do was rigidly sit comatose through it all. It was horrible, I couldn’t figure out how weed affected me different than everyone else, so I kept smoking. I was always on a quest for enlightenment because my former life was so FoCKed up.
 
Your experiences during the period you refer to as your "hippie daze" appear to have been a stark contrast to the commonly perceived carefree, bohemian lifestyle associated with hippie culture. The onset of mental illness and the subsequent complications you faced, particularly the exacerbation of your symptoms by marijuana use, must have been immensely challenging and isolating.

Your persistent pursuit of enlightenment, even in the face of such adversity, shows your resilience and determination. It is essential to recognize that the effects of substances like marijuana can vary greatly from person to person, and it is vital to prioritize one's mental health and well-being.
Have you discovered any alternative avenues or practices that have proven more conducive to your quest for enlightenment and healing, considering your negative experiences with marijuana?
 

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