Steve's '63 Chevy

    “Hey Steve, there’s a highway patrolman out here wants to talk to you.”

     “Oh sure,” Steve said.  We were standing in his living room twenty miles from any paved road.  “I believe you.”

    It was a Sunday morning.  I’m not sure why Brother John and I went up there, maybe for him to catch a ride back to Denver.  We drove the half mile or so east from what is now County Road 28, then known as the “mail route”, into Steve’s yard. 

     Neither of us had noticed anybody following us, yet when we got out of our car, there was the “highpo” pulled up behind us.  It was not a city cop or a sheriff’s vehicle.  It was a state trooper’s cruiser, white with chrome lights atop the roof, the Mickey Mouse symbols, state patrol logo on both sides.

     We of little faith found it hard to believe, a state trooper out here, 20 miles from nowhere, even when we saw it with our own eyes.  State troopers weren’t supposed to get off the paved roads, at least in our minds.  No wonder that Steve, who hadn’t looked outside, thought we were trying to pull one on him.

     Steve had this sleek dark blue ’63 Chevrolet.  He got it new when he graduated from high school.  It was built for drag racing with a 327 engine, 4-11 rear-end, and four-on-the floor.

    Those were the days when “CDR” meant drag-racing, Castle Rock, Continental Divide Raceway.  Steve often made the Sunday trek to Castle Rock to buy a ticket, sit on the hillside and have his ears blasted off by unmuffled “mills” roaring down the quarter mile strip, trailing burnt-rubber smoke.

    When he got his ’63, Steve was able to join the elite down in the pits where he got to pull up beside a competitor and try his skill at popping the clutch off the line and speed shifting gears at just the right rpms.  I don’t know how successful he was.  The privilege of joining the competitors was expensive both in terms of entrance fee and mechanical work necessitated by dragging your car.

       To enter the race, the car had to have a “scatter shield” which protected the driver in the event a clutch or flywheel disintegrated and sent shrapnel flying.  Then of course there was always clutch, transmission, and differential failures that had to be repaired along with various engine modifications designed to improve speed and performance.

     I made the trip to Castle Rock one warm spring Sunday in 1965.  The ideal was to take a beer cooler and sit back with a cool one while you enjoyed the races.  We weren’t 18 yet, the age when you could buy 3.2 beer.  We had something to drink, maybe brandy which we mixed with Coke.

     By eleven o’clock, I had enough to drink.  By noon I had enough of the heat and noise.  Watching the “slings” took some of the fun out of it.  The professional dragsters put together a machine that looked like a long pipe with bicycle wheels out in front, a huge engine balanced on the pipe, large racing-slicks for rear tires at the other end of the pipe.

    The engines were so souped up they couldn’t idle at less than 2500 rpms.  Two of them pulled up to the starting gate and sat there snorting and roaring like two stallions waiting for the gate to open so they could get out to a field of mares.

     I think there was no transmission.  When the light turned green, the driver rammed a hand clutch forward (like an old tractor?) and floored the accelerator.  Bicycle wheels popped up off the ground, rear tires smoked and squealed (not that you could hear them over the engine’s roar) and in a few seconds, the machines had covered the quarter mile.

    Then the amazing thing happened, amazing the first time I saw it.  A parachute popped out of the rear end of the slings after they crossed the finish line and travelled down another quarter mile or so getting stopped.      

     After experiencing the professional racers, the Chevys and Fords and revamped Willys seemed pale imitations of the real thing.  They weren’t nearly as loud, and as they crawled down the quarter mile strip, they seemed positively slow. 

     I was happy to leave early in the afternoon.  I never went back.  Drag racing wasn’t my sport.

     One Sunday night, probably before my trip to Castle Rock, I had a much more exciting experience.  We went to the movie in town.  Afterwards we got in with Steve to ride around.  We ended up south of town on a smooth level stretch of highway with no traffic. 

     Kenny was a few years older than us and had lots of experiences to tell us about.  He had a ’61 Chev and there was nothing for it but to see which Chevy was faster.  I got in with Kenny so that each car had the same weight handicap.

      The guy in the right seat of the left car rolled down his window, raised his hand, and when both drivers were ready, he dropped his hand and yelled, “Go!”  Away we went.  All I remember for certain was that in one of the three or four races, Kenny missed third gear.  There was a terrible grinding when he tried to shift but hadn’t coordinated shoving the clutch down at the same instant he rammed the gear shift towards the dash in search of third gear.  We lost that race for sure.   

     Both guys had been there before because they knew where the quarter mile started and stopped.  That was much more fun than watching the professionals.

      Apparently the local gendarmes were aware that such things went on.  One time at a safety presentation the highway patrol always put on at the high school, the patrolman talked about drag-racing and how it was a good sport when done on an approved drag strip.  “But the drag strip isn’t 109 south of town,” he said and he pointedly looked right at Steve.  Steve blushed and looked down, but later his notoriety gave him bragging rights.

     So here was a patrolman standing by his cruiser in Steve’s yard waiting for him to come out of the house so they could have a conversation.  Steve was having none of it.  Finally, we maneuvered him around so he had to look out the window where he could see the patrol car.  Then there was a change.

      His face registered shock as he arranged his person and hurried out the door to see what the cop wanted.  We took occasional glances out the window as we whiled away the time Steve spent with the policeman.

     Finally, Steve got out of the patrol car and headed back to the house as the cop car turned and headed west out of the yard.  It seems the patrolman had chased a car the evening before and had lost it.   

     The cop had the numbers of the license plate, but not the letters.  He suspicioned it had been Steve, but he knew it wasn’t Steve as soon as he saw Steve’s car.  So he told Steve the story of how he had chased the car , with license numbers different than Steve’s, was using radar to track him when suddenly the car disappeared from radar and view.  Did Steve have any idea who it might have been?

     Well, yes, Steve knew exactly who it was, another young farmer, who had a ’62 Chevy, who lived in the area the policeman described, who had a metal farm building that would shield his car from the radar.  That’s what he told us.

     But of course he didn’t tell that to the cop.  He did call Jerry right away and got the other side of the exciting story of the chase, which ended in the Quonset.  It was a long time, months, before Jerry dare venture out in his ’62 Chevy.  His pickup was good enough to get around for a while.

 

      Once Uncle Jerry, who as city manager did cop duties, said to me.  “Sure it’s fun trying to get away from the cop.”  He took a drag on his cigarette, hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets, exhaled smoke, smiled and said, “It’s a lot more fun trying to catch ‘em!”