Post a Pic in Your 20's...Your Prime! :)

I'm back row, center. That's my older brother on my left (your right).
Except the dude with the glasses, the rest are cousins, one of whom is named Vinny.
My cousin Vinny is the guy in the doofy shorts making a doofy face.

I was about 24, I guess. I forget what the party was about, but does it matter?

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@Murrmurr I think Cousin Vinny had just been groped by the guy behind him!
 

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Well that's a heart breaker. Just look at you smiling at your wife while still so painful looking.
Well... that was my sister. Wife took the picture. I guess I should have clarified.
Yeah, it hurt a bunch, but what was worse was trying to drive my race car. Even with special gloves, I had trouble with my grip. Still managed to win from the rear........... sometimes. ;)


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Well... that was my sister. Wife took the picture. I guess I should have clarified.
Yeah, it hurt a bunch, but what was worse was trying to drive my race car. Even with special gloves, I had trouble with my grip. Still managed to win from the rear........... sometimes. ;)


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My dad built similar racecars called super-modified hardtops.

This is one of them....

SMH-Roseville Speedway-mid 1960s.jpg

That's my dad with the glasses. The kids are the driver's kids. It's not a great pic of the car but I can't find the others. (or, too lazy to....too many files)

I raced in one of his cars a few times, just 2 exhibition races and a time-trial for the heck of it, but my mom had a cow over it, so I didn't pursue a "career" in racing. I was way too hot-tempered back then, anyway, and dad got into a fist fight almost every race, so she had enough to deal with.
 
My dad built similar racecars called super-modified hardtops.

This is one of them....

View attachment 385175

That's my dad with the glasses. The kids are the driver's kids. It's not a great pic of the car but I can't find the others. (or, too lazy to....too many files)

I raced in one of his cars a few times, just 2 exhibition races and a time-trial for the heck of it, but my mom had a cow over it, so I didn't pursue a "career" in racing. I was way too hot-tempered back then, anyway, and dad got into a fist fight almost every race, so she had enough to deal with.
Cool stuff. We've been at this racing for many years. (me... a lot longer than the wife... cause I'm older than dirt) ๐Ÿคฃ Turned out the wife had a natural ability to drive and was very successful at it. She got to race with some of the best late model drivers in the mid-west, and the west coast.



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Ah! there are some race folks on here๐Ÿค ๐Ÿค 

As a kid I went to the Sharon Speedway with frequency to watch the track favorite, Lou Blaney. Ryan Blaney is his grandson. One of the Blaney family businesses was a lumber mill. That was where I got the shavings for my horse stalls โ€” back when shavings were free for the taking - two huge scoops with their front loader.

My late husband raced NHRA and built his own cars. Once upon a time he won the Pomona Winter Nationals.

Years ago, when I raced 1/4 mile, it was called โ€œPowder Puffโ€. My one and only trophy disappeared after I married my sonโ€™s father because he didnโ€™t like the fact that I had a trophy and he didnโ€™t.
 
Cool stuff. We've been at this racing for many years. (me... a lot longer than the wife... cause I'm older than dirt) ๐Ÿคฃ Turned out the wife had a natural ability to drive and was very successful at it. She got to race with some of the best late model drivers in the mid-west, and the west coast.



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That's awesome, Dog. Those are some beautiful cars.

When my brothers and I were little, dad sort of broke us in with go-kart racing. My sister wasn't around yet; she was born when I was 17. My youngest brother, Mac, was born a couple years before her, and he was around for the last several years that dad was crew chief for the hardtop owner, and by that time, super-modifieds had been accepted into the NASCAR circuit, and the car was in some international races.

Mac was killed in a car wreck (on the freeway) when he was 32 and had 3 young sons. One of his sons is in his 30s now, and races every season, mostly at the Sacramento Raceway and down in So-Cal. And my oldest bro's grandson has been into racing for a few years now. He's 12, I think, and competes with kids aged 9 to 13 in specially modified racecars.
 
That's awesome, Dog. Those are some beautiful cars.

When my brothers and I were little, dad sort of broke us in with go-kart racing. My sister wasn't around yet; she was born when I was 17. My youngest brother, Mac, was born a couple years before her, and he was around for the last several years that dad was crew chief for the hardtop owner, and by that time, super-modifieds had been accepted into the NASCAR circuit, and the car was in some international races.

Mac was killed in a car wreck (on the freeway) when he was 32 and had 3 young sons. One of his sons is in his 30s now, and races every season, mostly at the Sacramento Raceway and down in So-Cal. And my oldest bro's grandson has been into racing for a few years now. He's 12, I think, and competes with kids aged 9 to 13 in specially modified racecars.
We've raced on the west coast at El Centro, Winterhaven, Blythe, Yuma and Havasu.
We also raced in Arkansas and Missouri.
And, we raced in Vermont, New Hampshire, Upstate New York, and even made the trip to Granby Canada.
Raced on dirt in about every class there is. Street stock, pro stock, late model, modified, and me with a 410 sprint car.
Fun fact... the wife got to race semi trucks once. (that was cool)




semi.jpg Camaro.jpg Granada.jpg 410 sprint.jpg
 
dav_electronics_12-76.jpg
Here is David in 1976 in a small Santa Clara apartment, age 27, five years into my electronic tech career. As long as my hair ever got that I wore so maybe 3 years before shortening it to mouth level and never having a beard again for much of the rest of my life. The peak of my Counterculture years life when I was going to lots of rock concerts.

I designed and built small LED display boxes with shapes like Christmas trees as Christmas presents that would blink and change. Still have that ancient Tektronic vaccum tube oscilloscope as I spent a couple years fixing and calibrating general electronic test equipment and got some things that were junked. Those are small electronics parts cabinets. As part of my job in engineering support at Ampex Corporation would build all manner of test fixtures for testing products from parts I purchased from the several Silicon Valley hole in the wall, salvage component shops.

As a backpacker, I bought lots of USGS topographic maps from the Menlo Park USGS offices. Those on that wall show Lake Tahoe. Lots of science books. Still have that old blue chair I'd snagged from my parents.
 
Ah! there are some race folks on here๐Ÿค ๐Ÿค 

As a kid I went to the Sharon Speedway with frequency to watch the track favorite, Lou Blaney. Ryan Blaney is his grandson. One of the Blaney family businesses was a lumber mill. That was where I got the shavings for my horse stalls โ€” back when shavings were free for the taking - two huge scoops with their front loader.

My late husband raced NHRA and built his own cars. Once upon a time he won the Pomona Winter Nationals.

Years ago, when I raced 1/4 mile, it was called โ€œPowder Puffโ€. My one and only trophy disappeared after I married my sonโ€™s father because he didnโ€™t like the fact that I had a trophy and he didnโ€™t.
Roseville Speedway was the home track of the cars my dad was crew chief on. The driver owned a Chevron gas station in Roseville, CA. His name was Larry Burton, but he was known to racing fans as The Roseville Rocket.

The Roseville Speedway was a dirt track (oval) when they started racing there. Burton eventually bought the track. He had it paved in the 80s, or maybe the late 70s, and made a bunch of other improvements, including a higher, sturdier fence between the track and the stands. The year before, a racecar lost a tire and it flew into the stands and killed a guy. My mom was sitting only 3-people away from him on the same bench-seat, and another fan dove on her to shield her from the fray.

The other track they competed on regularly was the Sacramento Raceway, which was paved long before the Roseville track was. That was a bummer for the drivers and expensive for the car owners because they had to switch tires and make various modifications for dirt-to-paved track racing every single week.

They raced at the Roseville Speedway every Friday, and at the Sacramento Raceway every Saturday and Wednesday.
 
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@Murrmurr That is some very interesting race track history, although the part about the tire and your mom is pretty scary.

Sharon Speedway opened in 1929 and is one of the oldest continuously running tracks in the U.S. I canโ€™t remember when someone had the bright idea to pave the track but that idea was not well received by drivers or fans. It was almost the end of the track before someone put it back to dirt.

The Blaney family are part owners these days. I have been gone a lot of years so Iโ€™m not sure if they were instrumental in returning the track to dirt or not.

https://www.sharonspeedway.com/

Whatโ€™s funny about the track name is that โ€œSharonโ€ is Sharon, PA, a few miles over the border from Hartford, OH where the track has always sat since its inception, lollol
 
A photo of myself (2nd from left) with co-workers, at my first job at the Parliament Bldgs. I was 20.

You had a head full of beautiful hair, young lady๐Ÿ˜‡๐Ÿ˜‡

Try as I might in my youth, I could never get my hair to look like yours. I ended up wearing my hair in a perm of some sort โ€” spiral perms when they came out. I found there were. O mistakes by just washing my hair and letting it dry because it always has done what it pleases anyway๐Ÿ™„๐Ÿ™„
 
Probably 1986 when I was 29. Photo taken at the Engelhardt Brewery in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, Germany. I'm on the left, in the middle is a dear friend named Ingeborg, who taught rudimentary German to GIs as part of the onboarding process in Berlin. Next to Inge is the commander of my unit (298th Army Band) CW2 Dave Smith who became a good friend after we both retired from the Army. Dave passed from brain cancer in 2016 as a result of exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

A quick story -- after this brewery tour in which much beer was sampled, we wobbled out to the bus which was legally parked on the street. Some chump parked his Citroen 2V (a French car made of aluminum foil) such that the bus driver couldn't move the bus without punching a hole in his Citroen.

So a bunch of us picked his car up and moved it onto the sidewalk. The chump came screaming down from his apartment uttering all sorts of nasty stuff. He was ignored until he decided to get in Dave's face. That was the point the chump was surrounded by 20 of us who encouraged him to STFU, take his undented car, and drive away.

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The post-race fight stories are even more interesting, but I'll save those for another time. ๐Ÿ˜œ

Ahhh yes. Going to the fights and some racing breaks out. ๐Ÿคฃ Having the wife drive and being reasonably successful, usually meant there was bound to run into a red neck somewhere who figured women don't belong.
We have had our share of broken race cars because somebody didn't like getting beaten. There was one episode out west where some guys showed up with 2 cars and the word in the pits was "that bi**h won't finish tonight. They were right, but, had it not been for a burly cop tackling me, there was going to be some split skulls courtesy of my trusty tire flat bar.
This happened on a fast racetrack (radar clocked us at 124 going into the 3rd turn), so, this could have been really bad.



camaro.jpg camaro side.jpg camaro side2.jpg
 
My dad built similar racecars called super-modified hardtops.

This is one of them....

View attachment 385175

That's my dad with the glasses. The kids are the driver's kids. It's not a great pic of the car but I can't find the others. (or, too lazy to....too many files)

I raced in one of his cars a few times, just 2 exhibition races and a time-trial for the heck of it, but my mom had a cow over it, so I didn't pursue a "career" in racing. I was way too hot-tempered back then, anyway, and dad got into a fist fight almost every race, so she had enough to deal with.
Turns out that not to far from me, a guy is selling one of those. (minus the hilborn injection... now carbed). So tempted, but where would I run It these days? :)



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