The Lost Art of Demolition Derby

Last August I stopped by my parent's house unexpected and found Dad wearing his good go-to-town blue jeans. Dad was getting ready to make his yearly pilgrimage to the county fair to see the Demolition Derby, something I hadn't done since my short-lived career as a derby driver back around 1980. Of course I tagged along, both to spend some time with Dad and relive old memories, not to mention the gastronomic wonders of a sausage and onion sandwich fresh off a food-stand griddle.

Reichholds Cafe - Basic Breakfast in the Great White North

Its been a while since I made a Breakfast in the 'Burgh post.  I just figured out how to turn on photo-backup on my phone, and shazam - I've got a bunch of pictures in my photo account that I forgot I had taken. This is Reichhold's Cafe, on Route 8 near the Allegheny-Butler county line - about 15 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh (map).

The Faceless Heroes of Shelby American (part 2)

If you read part 1 of this story, you've met many of the little known names that helped make Carroll Shelby a household name (at least in households full of gear-heads). But part 1 left off in 1965, with Shelby's greatest accomplishment yet to come, so sit back and read along while I try to wrap this all up.

The Faceless Heroes of Shelby American (part 1)

Out on the Internets Carroll Shelby has become a legend of Paul Bunyan proportions; he is credited with designing and building every Ford racing car of the 1960s and single-handedly putting Enzo Ferrari in his place.  Not only is Shelby's history as a racing driver largely forgotten, but so are a few people who did much of the real work of making the Shelby name larger-than-life. Trying to explain the history to someone on a social network is pointless, but maybe here someone will read and appreciate it...

The Death of Apollo: A Failure of Science Fiction?

One of the things that keeps me writing these little essays is that whenever I research something I find two or three other seemingly unrelated bits of trivia I never knew about, and since I'm willing to write about most anything, there is always a story to be told. In one of my recent missives I wrote about the demise of the 1960s muscle car, I mentioned that like the Vietnam War, spending on the 1960s US Space Program contributed to the inflation and economic turmoil of the 1970s. I still believe that is true, but proving it to myself sent me down a research rat hole to try to understand why the space program met with the same fate as the Pontiac GTO, so all that remains are a few artifacts in museum displays. Its an interesting tale, so pull up a chair...

Apollo 12 Command Module Yankee Clipper, on display at the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, VA.

For a kid growing up in the 1960s the space program was hard to miss.  At school the Weekly Reader (a kind of newspaper for 8 year olds) was full of stories about the astronauts and the Apollo program. As the TV generation, we were treated to frequent "Breaking News from the Cape" reports in the middle of our after school cartoons, and then there were prime-time TV shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek.  And for birthdays and Christmas there were space related toys - space helmets and ray-guns and model kits and action figures and flying model rockets. Not surprisingly lots of kids wanted to be astronauts, except the geeky kids like me who wanted to be engineers and build the space ships (we also thought Scotty was way cooler than Captain Kirk).

The Last of the V8 Interceptors - part 5 of the Muscle Car History

In the last installment of this mini-series I covered the immediate aftermath of what was the Muscle Car Era through the rebirth of the muscle/pony car in 1982, and after banging away at the keyboard, I was thinking I was pretty much done. I thought this was going to be where I wrapped up loose ends and made a few snarky observations about the state of the performance automobile and today's muscle car culture.  But it looks like that will have to wait a bit longer.

The problem with being 55 years old is that I tend to think everything that I've been around to see happen is recent history. It seems like just yesterday that I traded my well worn '69 Road Runner for a brand new '83 Mustang GT, but a lot has happened since then, and since I'm trying to tell the whole story I just can't leave 30 years out...

Life After Death - part 4 of A Muscle Car History

When I started writing this mini-history about the American Muscle Car phenomena, I expected to knock out 10 paragraphs and call it a day.  When you're doing this blog-thing, 10 paragraphs is sort of the sweet spot for telling a good story, keeping the reader's attention, and not spending all your time writing about things instead of actually doing things to write about. But somehow this story got in my blood and I decided to do a multi-part series, and even after I covered the backstory, the rise and fall of what is generally considered the Muscle Car Era (1964-1970), there was still lots of stuff left over. Let me try to wrap it all up in 10 sweet paragraphs.