That Time I Went to Lawnmower Races

 

On a recent Sunday afternoon, as I was a still a bit bleary eyed after Penn State’s thrilling win over Auburn the night before, I headed across the mountain to Mifflin County to Middle Road Speedway…to watch…are you ready for this? Lawnmower racing.

Apparently that's a thing, lawnmower racing. 

Even though it's within 30 miles of my house, I'd never heard of Middle Road Speedway until it—don’t ask me how—came up in a conversation with a waitress earlier that week. Wait, you’ve never talked to a waitress about lawnmower racing? I thought I was the only one! 

The track was a bit hard to find—there wasn’t a lot of cell signal where I was, so using GPS was a waste of time. I drove around a bit, soaking up the bucolic splendor of rural Mifflin County (Trump country!) before stumbling onto Middle Road. As far as I could tell the only thing Middle Road was in the middle of was the middle of nowhere.

I’ve been to another central Pennsylvania dirt track, Hesston Speedway, so I thought I knew what to expect. Wrong! Hesston has buildings, flush toilets, lots of bleachers, and actual parking lots. It’s like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway compared to Middle Road Speedway. Middle Road has no buildings, a no flush toilets, a bleacher (is there such a thing as one bleacher?), and no parking lot. This is a racetrack for minimalists.

 

The track is a dirt oval, smaller than some suburban lots. It’s 1/10th of a mile, which makes less than half the length of a high school track. It’s ringed by old tires and some chain link fence.  Presumably they’re there as safety measures rather than to add a soupcon of gritty urban ambience. There are a few and I mean a few, sponsor signs fastened to the chain link fence, but they’re of the local variety, such as Charlie’s A Cut Above Chainsaws rather than for national brands like Goodyear or Valvoline. 

 

 

The track hasn't changed too much since someone posted this 2011 photo on Facebook.

I parked my truck on the lawn and walked over to the bleacher. There was a group of spectators sitting on lawn chairs arrayed behind their car, but I was the only person to brave the bleacher.  It looked as if it might have been decommissioned by a Little League team sometime before World War II.

There was a concessions trailer across the track from the bleacher. The announcer mentioned EMTs were from the McVeytown Fire Department, but I didn’t see an ambulance. If someone needed to go to the hospital (as in, if you suffered grievous bodily harm falling through the bleacher) they were going on a lawnmower. 

I made myself comfortable-ish and wondered how many people died each year from falling off a single bleacher at a lawnmower race. 

One lawnmower was zipping around the track. And I do mean zipping. It was faster than any self-propelled lawnmower I’ve ever driven. But it wasn’t really a lawnmower, since the mower deck had been removed…presumably in the interest of speed and safety.

In addition to shedding their mower decks, the little tractors obviously had a bunch of modifications (new gonkulator, etc.) to increase their speed. They didn’t sound like the lawnmowers in my neighborhood.

A short while later I was joined on the bleacher by a nice twentysomething couple. They vaped a lot. And I mean a lot. It didn’t take long before the fresh yet masculine scent of my Old Spice was replaced by an intoxicating mélange of vape-sourced strawberry shortcake and lawnmower exhaust fumes. The woman said that she hoped the afternoon’s races wouldn’t be as “redneck” as they were on her last visit. She told me that a couple of the drivers got into a fistfight that day. 

Obviously, I’m a horrible person since I thought, “Oh, a fistfight…that would be a great story for the blog!” Your human drama meets my jaundiced eye! As Charlie Sheen would say, “Winning!”

It wasn’t long before an announcer came on the PA and said that warmups had finished and that they would be starting the main events shortly. He promised that “the girls” would come around selling tickets and 50/50 raffle tickets. 

 

During the ticket selling interlude an old Ford pickup carrying a big water tank drove around the track wetting it down, as they do to a baseball infield. 

The rig looked homemade but it did the trick.

“The girls” eventually made it over to the bleacher. I wouldn’t have called them "girls". I would have called them women who were younger than I am but still too old to know the names of any rappers.  Effervescent they were not.  Perhaps they had been sentenced to perform community service hours for displaying a Biden/Harris yard sign somewhere in the neighborhood?

Tickets were $5, but if you upgraded to the pit pass, $10. I had a ten spot and so told them I wanted the pit pass. They told me that they weren’t selling those—I had to go across the track for those. But they said, I didn’t need one anyway since no one would check. I could walk over there for free. Clearly no one explained the concept of upselling to them. 

I told them that with my admission I’d take $5 in 50/50 tickets, even though I think 50/50 raffles should be relegated to their natural environment: Knights of Columbus functions.

The 50/50 jackpot at the Penn State football game the day before was in excess of $30,000. This time around, if it reached $75 I would have been surprised. And yes, not that anyone asked, but I think it’s crazy to have a 50/50 raffle at a Penn State football game. Everyone knows that 50/50 raffles should be left to the Knights of Columbus. 

I turned around and gave my raffle tickets to the vapers. I said, “this is for saving my seat while I walk through the pits”. I found this terribly amusing since we were the only people on the bleacher. They looked at me as if I were crazy. Perhaps vaping dulls one’s response to irony?

Since I had the “all clear” to see the pits, I went right away, before someone decided that I really did need the $10 ticket.  There were maybe ten or fifteen utility trailers that had been towed by pickups. It looked as if each trailer toted a few lawnmowers. The mowers were higher mileage than the ticket selling "girls"…I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

In addition to mowers there were some go-karts too. Apparently there are several different classes of these tiny speedsters. Most of them had some sort of race car body that looked as if it was made in a Mattel Vac-U-Form. Some had roll cages, too. I marveled that an adult with arms and legs could fit in any of them.

I got the hairy eyeball from some of the people in the pit area. None of the racers were doing much talking—it was sort of Clint Eastwood-y. I cocked my head to listen for the theme song to the Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  

And since I know nothing about lawnmowers or anything else that has an internal combustion engine, I didn’t’ stop and say, “Wow, I’ve never seen a Gravely with a gonkulator like that.” That didn’t seem like a high percentage way to make new friends. I didn’t linger.

 

Yes, there was a merch tent. FYI, the feet with the pink plastic Birkenstocks are not included in the sale of a purple t-shirt. 

 

As I was walking back to my seat, the announcer came back on the PA to announce the playing of the national anthem. Fortunately, it was a recording of some symphonic band and not a live performance by someone’s relative. Unlike at Beaver Stadium, the announcer did not need to remind spectators to rise and remove our hats. Everyone did it without being reminded. 

 

The announcer worked in a minimalist booth that was more Gilligan's Island than Mies van der Rohe. In fact, if you added some palm fronds and bamboo, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell, III would have felt right at home. What they would have said about lawnmower racing is anyone's guess.

After the National Anthem, the announcer read the name and hometowns of the drivers as four lawn mowers drove onto the track for the first heat of the day. As they took another warmup lap they kicked up plenty of dust—even though the track had just been sprayed down--and made even more noise than during warm ups. 

At the end of the warmup lap, as the racers came around to the front stretch, the starter waved the green flag—just like at NASCAR—and they were off.  The scrum of zippy mowers made it to the second turn when one driver lost control and his ride went into the fence. The red flag came out stopping the race as the driver got up, and dusted himself off. He seemed to be ok, but something was broken on his machine (the gonkulator, no doubt) and he pushed it off the course.  

Once the remaining mowers got going, the race was equal parts exciting and scary. Those little mowers are quick. My grandfather would have said that they went like scalded cats. 

In the second race, there was a more serious wreck. One of the mowers went into the fence near the pit area, wiping out a couple of the sponsor signs and a bit of fence. The EMTs walked over at the speed of guys who’ve just had a hip replacement. Even my vaping buddies commented on how slow the EMTs were. I started to think that the EMTs were Christian Scientists hoping that prayer would fix whatever was wrong with the driver.  It took a while, but eventually the driver stood up and waved to the crowd. 

After that wreck the drivers seemed to get the hang of it, high tailing it around the course, occasionally on two wheels in a turn. And if you’re thinking that these men (and the occasional woman) have bodies like jockeys or fighter pilots…wrong. Lots of them looked as if they didn’t stint on the carbs or anything else for that matter. There was a whole lotta jiggling going on. I suppose if you're driving something with no suspension over a dirt track at high speeds, built in padding comes in handy.

After I don’t know how many races, it was time for intermission and they brought out the Ford truck to wet down the track again. 

Even though I would miss the seeing the featured race, I decided that it was time say my goodbyes and beat the traffic--had there been any traffic. I would have stayed longer if there were going to be a fistfight, but alas, it seemed like everyone was on his or her best behavior. 

There’s one more weekend of racing this fall, October 9 and 10. I'm up for a return trip. Shall I save you a seat?

Clamshell Pitching and Other Summer Diversions

Even though summer is my busy time at work, I try to leave room for a bit of adventure.

In June, I finally got the chance to go to Hesston Speedway, the dirt track that’s about an hour from State College. Rob, the bf of my old intern Karen, drives a sprint car in his spare time and was racing there. Karen offered me the chance to go. I said not just yes, but hell yes.

Readers, you might want to sit down for this next part.

It wasn’t even hot pants night. 

I’ve been to lots of low end events, but this ranks among the lowest. For starters, it’s really, really, rural. When  you roll down the window of your car on the way into the place you hear the opening bars of the theme from Deliverance. When political pundits talk about the part of Pennsylvania between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh being Alabama, Hesston Speedway is exactly what they’re talking about. The parking lot, buildings, and track itself look as if they cost about ninety-eight cents to build. If you can build a speedway without a plan, let alone plans, permits, and so on, this would be it.

It’s a short dirt track and by dirt, I mean the kind of dirt that gets into your order of French Fries about a nanosecond after you pick them at the concession stand. They race a few different kinds of cars; sprint cars, some other class that look like stock cars that have been stepped on by a giant, and cars that look like Chevrolet Monte Carlos that belonged to the Hatfields and McCoys.

The drivers race hard; while the place is low end, there’s plenty of excitement.

After it was dark, the announcer--who has an accent you have to hear to believe--asked the folks parked on the far side of the track to turn on their flashers so that the blinking lights would remind us of, I dunno, fireflies, or perhaps of people parked on the opposite side of a much nicer racetrack. That was crazy.

The best part of this selfie is the guy sitting behind us.

Of course, Karen and I had a great time, and might have had more fun than Rob, whose race for glory was cut short by a flat tire in the second big event of the night...the first big event being that woman ahead of me in line at the snack bar.

I’d go back in a heartbeat.

Especially if it were hot pants night.

And then there was the Arts Festival, where I celebrated the tenth anniversary of being run over by not getting run over.

The following weekend I drove to Ohio to help a friend recycle some furniture by bringing it back to Happy Valley. The worst part of the trip was spending the night in a Hampton Inn that smelled like the inside of a sneaker. The best part, other than quality time with an old friend, was that no furniture fell out of the truck; something that’s actually happened to me before.

When it was time to head to the shore for my post-Festival weekend of R & R my eyes lit up when I saw an ad for the 6th Annual W. Norman Mackey Clamshell Pitch sponsored by the Avalon Historical Society. And frankly it wasn’t so much the idea of clamshell pitching (say what?) or the idea of honoring the presumably late W. Norman Mackey (never heard of him) but the vintage photo that sold me on the idea of clamshell pitching:

Do these guys look as if they’re having fun at the Jersey shore or what? My guess is that at least two of the guys were avid fans of The Jack LaLanne Show.

What did I know about clamshell pitching? Absolutely nothing. I wasn’t even sure it was safe to do in a month with no R.

Soon enough I learned that the premise of the game was simple: you toss a clamshell, from which the actual clam is long gone, into a hole in the sand. You do it on the beach, below the high tide line when the tide is out, so that you have a hard surface of sand on which to play. I suppose you could do it in other locales, but I think it would lose something (and it doesn’t have much to start with) in the translation.

My compadres Bruce, Martha, and Pam and I were game for this historical adventure and so we drove up to the Avalon Community Building to be there at 9:00 a.m. sharp. We parked, crossed the dunes and walked onto the beach. We passed the beach Crossfit class and then a beach yoga class (think downward facing beached whale) and walked towards a gaggle of presumed clamshell pitchers milling around at an E-Z Up, the universal symbol of someone who doesn’t want to buy a decent tent. There weren’t nearly as many people there as I expected. Apparently there’s a limited market for clamshell pitching, a condition exacerbated by the Avalon Historical Society's terrible-slash-non-existant marketing.

We made our way to the registration table, all set to sign up. We were eager to do our part for local history and a sport where having been picked last in gym class might not actually be an impediment to success.

After I’d signed on the dotted line and was ready to pay, I learned that you needed to have actual cash or a check to register, a fact that the organizers failed to mention ahead of time. Apparently processing a credit card with a gizmo on a cell phone, or battery-powered terminal, or an old-fashioned knuckle-buster, or even writing the credit card number down on a piece of paper for processing back at the office was not in the cards.  Did I miss the fine print that said the event was being put on by Amish? Fortunately Bruce had a wad of cash so we were able to sign up and get our free ($15) unattractive even by New Jersey standards tee shirt.

We had to decide if we wanted to play singles or doubles, and we opted for mixed doubles. Bruce and Martha made up one team and Pam and I the other.

The organizers also failed to make clear that registration opened at 9:00 but the actual event didn’t start until 9:30. So we had plenty of time to do more milling around, or if you prefer the technical term, flogging one’s yo-yo.

During the yo-yo flogging, someone pointed out two holes in the sand, seemingly the “regulation” 25 feet apart. There was a plastic milk carton filled with clamshells at the ready. Several of us took the time to practice.

It was then I discovered that there was a good reason that clams don’t fly—in addition to lack of wings, feathers, or even the ability to put their tray table in an upright and locked position for takeoff and landing. It was because they have the aerodynamic qualities of a clamshell. As in…none.

The beach is a breezy place, and as my clamshells went hither, thither, and yon, I thought to myself, “What ho! Now I know how Jordan Spieth must have felt at St. Andrews!” Less the white trousers and kazillion dollar Under Armor endorsement deal, I mean.

I wondered if the AHS people were expecting the crowd to grow, but when 9:30 came and went it was apparent that clamshell pitching isn’t quite as popular as going to a gallery opening to see Jane Seymour, her VPL, and what passes for her painting, or riding around on the island jitney from bar to bar with a bunch of over sunned, over served, and over sexed weekending twentysomethings.

The good news was that there was a diversity of ages there. There were some old geezers and some middle geezers (as in people our age) too. Amazingly there were perhaps ten young and mostly (ok, somewhat) attractive people, all of whom seemed to work at Jack’s Place, a bar in Avalon that caters to the college crowd. I’ve never actually been there, but have driven by a million times and each time I do, I think to myself…”Jack’s Place….I wonder if Jack’s off tonight?” And I chuckle to myself each and every time.

After more yo-yo flogging, someone had the bright idea to add a second court and out came what appeared to be a rusty Chase and Sanborn coffee can for the purpose of digging the hole in the sand. The AHS opened up what golfers would call the back nine.

After an extraordinarily poor showing of teacher voice on the part of the “organizers”—and I use the term loosely—the first guys were called up for their singles matches. They stood about behind their Chase and Sanborn-made holes in the sand, 25 feet apart, rather like Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr wearing not knee breeches but Lands End swim trunks and armed with clamshells instead of dueling pistols.

Each player had two clamshells to toss, and the players were to alternate throws, first player A, then player B, and back to player A and then Player B. The guy with the clamshell closest to the hole got one point. If he got the clamshell in the hole that was two points; and if he tossed the clamshell in the hole on top of the other player’s shell, he got four points. At least that’s how I think the scoring worked. I’m not sure all of the historical judges used the same historical scoring system.

After the first two players tossed their shells, a clipboard toting historical judge, who I believe was old enough to be the first European settler in New Jersey, got out a tape measure and proceeded to measure the distance from clamshells to the hole to aerospace industry tolerances. This took until at least Tuesday.

At this point I realized we might be there until after Labor Day and I uttered my first “Kill me now” of the day.

While they were playing, the pitch honchos tried to set up a bracket on whiteboard, presumably to spur office pools and betting action. This was made somewhat difficult since they couldn't actually spell all the contestants' names. I thought about making an emergency call to the NCAA but decided to let the shells fall where they may.

After some time, presumably overhearing my grumbling, and after an Avalon beach tag inspector walked by wondering “WTF?” the folks in charge decided to open a new course so that more people could play simultaneously. It think I heard someone say that there was a shortage of historical judges, though everyone was perfectly capable of keeping score themselves. It couldn’t have been a space issue—the beach is seven miles long after all.

Bruce and Martha were in the first game on the new pitch, and went down in a blaze of clam juice against a couple of the twentysomethings including a shirtless bear from Jack’s Place (“I wonder if Jack’s off tonight?”).

Pam and I were called up to played against Tom and MaryBeth. Tom’s claim to fame was that he was handsome and had a great body. MaryBeth was hungover, not at all chatty, and seemed to be there only because Tom was there; in and of itself, not a bad idea.

Tom had some sort of job in IT, but also worked at Jack’s Place ("I wonder if Jack’s off tonight?”). He wore red board shorts that were much too long. Seriously, the Speedo was invented with this guy’s body in mind. No matter what he made at Jack’s Place (“I wonder if Jack’s off tonight?”) he would have made WAY more at The Blue Moon in Rehoboth being objectified and overtipped by gay men. He might even have realized that he could have done better than hungover MaryBeth and learned something about window treatments in the process.

It may come as a surprise to regular readers, but I do know my way around certain clams, and I kept team Rick and Pam in the contest, if I do say so myself. Even so, we did not make it to the second round.

 

Although at one point we had a five shell lead, MaryBeth, sensing that Tom was considering the Blue Moon option, brought on her A-game late in the match and we were done for.

We didn’t bring home the suitable-for-hanging-in-the-garage clamshell plaque. And really, that’s probably OK. I got an incredibly unattractive t-shirt that I cherished briefly instead.

I suppose that it’s an occupational hazard that someone who organizes an event for living goes to his share of crappy events.  This was the worst tourist experience since the Las Vegas Mob Tour, something that was so horrible that it’s in a class by itself. The 6th Annual W. Norman Mackey Clamshell Pitch could have been amusing but instead it was like going to a beer party where they ran out of beer five minutes after you got here, and instead of beer, they gave you a calculus exam. When it's time for the 7th Annual W. Norman Mackey Clamshell Pitch, I'm washing my hair.

In order to get the taste of that out of our mouths, Bruce and I drove over to North Wildwood to take in an antique car show on the Boardwalk.

North Wildwood is just over the Hereford Inlet Bridge—toll, $1.50, E-Z Pass not accepted—from Stone Harbor, but it’s quite different from its smart and upscale neighbor.

Although Wildwood (technically The Wildwoods—North Wildwood, Wildwood, and Wildwood Crest) is making great strides to rebrand itself as the epitome of 1950s doo-wopness, I still tend to think of it as Altoona-by-the-Sea.

That's my mother, on the far right, with her older sister Doris in the middle, and their cousin Ollie on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, 1936.

My mother told me that even in the 1930s, Wildwood was “pretty rough”.

 

Young hipsters might prefer it because it’s “more diverse”, but as someone accustomed to Stone Harbor, which actually has a shoppe devoted to Lilly Pulitzer togs, it’s like a Diane Arbus photo come to life.

There were about 35 cars in the show, the oldest being a pair of boring old Ford Model A's.  Interestingly enough, there was a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible, a car my mother had. Gosh, what a land yacht that thing was!  It reminded me that she called my grandfather’s even larger Cadillac sedan, the Queen Mary, after the Cunard liner.

To me, the most interesting car was an Edsel built for the Canadian market. I had no idea that American cars made for the Canadian market cars weren’t the same as American cars made for the American market, but there you have it. And the differences went beyond the two choices for upholstery:  plaid or the Hudson’s Bay Blanket. The owner’s manual was written in more polite English and it had a do-hickey where you could plug your dipstick into a heater during the 11½ months of winter in Canada.

Even with cool cars, Wildwood is still Wildwood, and after an hour of checking out tail lights, radiator ornaments, and carburetors in addition to the tats, bad makeup, and an Easter parade worth of Glamour don’ts, we headed home.

In the evening we took a stroll downtown after a dinner of Back Bay Crabcakes, a local delicacy. A clerk at the hardware store, where we stopped for a 3/16” drill bit, gave me the two thumbs up on my orange Vans and urged me not to pay attention when my wife said “You’re not going out looking like that are you?”

I gave Bruce a knowing look and assured the clerk that I wouldn’t.

Bruce went home early, but Pam and I stopped to enjoy Philadelphia’s Ferko String Band which was in concert in the parking lot of the Stone Harbor Water Works. We missed the first half of the show, so when we got there, the light was fading and some in the assembled crowd had obviously enjoyed the offerings of the adult beverage stations and perhaps even a flask of Geritol or two. Apparently drinking on municipal property in the shadow of the town water tower is A-OK in NJ.

Pam and I settled into a prime standing room spot behind Stone Harbor's leading citizen, Sister James, the force of nature who keeps Villa-Maria-by-the-Sea in tip top shape. 

I was totally clueless about the band until the emcee reminded the audience that The Ferko String Band performs in Philadelphia’s Mummer’s Parade each year and will be at the Stone Harbor Christmas Parade this year.

Mummers, I don’t understand.  I suppose they’re like a krewe in New Orleans or those troops of guys who dress up like the Cisco Kid in the Rose Parade. Mummers wear crazy costumes and have bands with accordions and banjos and what not and have a special dance, the Mummers' strut. As a fan of the "more diverse" Wildwood would say, they're totally whack.

Liquored up old folks--twentysomethings were conspicuous in their abscence--were bobbing their heads and tapping their feet to string band standards like Waitin' for the Robert E. Lee and Alabama Jubilee.

Three band members, decked out from head to toe in their New Year's regalia did the famous Mummers' strut as the band played a tune called Hindustan.

It was kitschy, joyous, and hilarious.

The crowd loved it. When the band got to the finale and the Mummers' signature tune, Oh, Dem Golden Slippers, the audience bolted from their aluminum lawn chairs to dance. You have not seen moves until you've seen a retired nun do the Mummers' strut.

I’d expected the clamshell toss to be the highlight of my day. Wrong!

Instead, it was a gaggle of retired nuns doing the Mummers' strut under the Stone Harbor water tower.

I wonder if the kids from Jack’s Place ("I wonder if Jack’s off tonight?")  know what they are missing?

Planes, No Trains, and Automobiles

At the end of August, I went to the shore for a few days of not doing much of anything. I’m not really good at not doing much of anything. In fact, if we had played Not Doing Much of Anything in high school gym class, I would have been picked last. Accordingly, after about 15 minutes of not doing much of anything, I resolved to do something—even just once thing—every day. Early on, I scratched training for a marathon and writing The Great American Novel off the might-do list. I needed something to do, but I didn't need that much to do! I rode my bike around the island (14 miles), walked to Stone Harbor Point and back (5.62 miles), and cleaned the garage. Not much, but it felt as if I'd done something.

One of days when I was doing my 5.62 miles along the beach, I saw a B-24—yes, the WWII vintage bomber—fly overhead. That’s not something you see every day. So I called my brother Rob who knows about these things and he told me that it had to be from the Commemorative Air Force and I should look at its web site to find out what the deal was. A quick trip to the interwebs told me that the B-24 was spending a few days at the Cape May County Airport, otherwise known as the former Wildwood Naval Air station. I decided to head over there that very afternoon.

I’d never seen a B-24 in person, but I remembered that one of my father’s competitors in the insurance business flew a B-24. My father, the self-described world’s best pilot, could get under this man’s skin instantly at social functions by referring to him as an airplane driver, rather than as a pilot. This is something my father, the former fighter jock, particularly enjoyed. He was a better pilot, better looking, got laid more, could hold more liquor, and do a better job solving the NYT Crossword in pen (at least after he met my mother), than any old airplane driver and he made sure that the airplane driver knew it.

I’d been to the Cape May County Airport once before and thought it was a sad sort of place that must have about 23 customers per year. On this visit, however, it was packed. I practically had to park in Delaware and then I had to wait in line to pay my $10 admission fee. They were having some sort of expo to cash in on the visit of the vintage planes. In addition to checking out the exhibits, you could sample beer or buy some sort of contraption to keep the flotsam and jetsam out of your gutters and downspouts..

The B-24 and its cousin, a B-17, were parked on the tarmac outside the hanger that houses the Naval Air Station Wildwood Museum. The bombers’ friend, a P-51 Mustang, was also part of the exhibition, but it was undergoing some “procedure” so it wasn’t available for my viewing pleasure. You could ride in all the planes, too. That, however, was not for the faint of wallet. The fare was $450 for a thirty minute ride on the B-17 or B-24 and $3,200 in the P-51. Yeah, I passed. But I did think about it.

They need to tell people not to smoke in the bomb bay?

I took the self-guided tour of both the B-17 and B-24, the pride of our military industrial complex circa 1944. They seemed as if they’d be scary as hell to fly in, let alone with people shooting at you while you bombed Germany. Seeing the planes and hearing about the conditions in which men served on them really does fill you with awe for the accomplishments of the guys of the greatest generation.

No one told me that Tom of Finland did US Navy Recruiting posters.

Nothing makes a better backdrop for a jazz combo than an  old German V-2 rocket.

Some think that had James A. Garfield been treated in an airplane hanger in New Jersey, he'd be alive today.

After I toured the planes I walked through the exhibits again. The museum has a nice enough collection mixed in with a bunch of cheesy stuff, especially the mannequins depicting wounded soldiers. Even with a huge crowd—which there was—the place look as if you could drop a few million bucks into it before anyone even noticed. Still, it was nice to see people soaking up some American history for a change.

Interestingly enough, this was not the logo on the back of my mother's Studebaker.

I thought the vintage planes were about as vintage as Cape May County events got until I checked out Twitter on my iPhone on October 3 and saw that there was a vintage auto car show and race in Wildwood. My friends Bruce and Martha the phone Luddites--as in flip phones with broken screens—give me a hard time about my close relationship with my iPhone, but had it not been for my iPhone and Twitter account, we’d have never found this this thing. Thank you Cape May County Herald for posting something about it!

The Wildwoods (as in North Wildwood, Wildwood, West Wildwood and Wildwood Crest) are just across Hereford Inlet from Stone Harbor but they might as well be a million miles away. My grandparents started going to the Jersey shore in the 1930s and my mother told me even then Wildwood was “pretty rough”. If your favorite dying northeastern city had a few miles of nice beach next to its downtown, that would be Wildwood.

Frankie Avalon buys a Kohr Brothers ice cream cone in Wildwood back in the day.

The city has started a heroic job of rebranding itself with its 1950s doo-wop era architecture but the place has large sections of town where no one has put the bop in the bop shoo bop.

The car show was in the parking area next to the Wildwood Convention Center. Most of the cars were from the 1950s and early 1960s—usually tricked out in some way. There were lots of low riders.

Interestingly enough, they don't sell these bumper stickers at Nuns' Beach.

It was all pretty informal—the cars didn’t even have signs in the windows to identify them. I had to ask someone sitting at a table selling t-shirts where the car races on the beach were. He said they were about 10 blocks up the Boardwalk and that I should just look for the large Ferris Wheel.

The Boardwalk is well, something you just have to see to believe. It hasn’t changed very much since my last visit, longer ago than I care to remember. It’s sort of like the midway at a low end county fair, except instead of smelling of cotton candy and farm smells, it smells of cotton candy and ocean smells, in addition to cigars, someone who used too much Axe body spray, and someone who didn’t use enough Axe body spray. As my college friend Peggy would say, it’s quite something.

There are lots of shops selling things that make you scratch your head and say to yourself “Who buys this stuff?”

In October some places are closed. I couldn’t check out Paul’s Balls.

Grabbing a wiener wasn't an option either. Yep, it's right there by Paul's Balls. I think both Paul's Balls and Grab a Wiener would do really well in Rehoboth Beach.

After our ten block walk, we were near the large Ferris Wheel and could see the tents that presumably marked the race course out on the beach. For whatever reason, Wildwood is one of the rare places on the shore where Mother Nature deposits sand rather than taking it away, so it's quite a walk from The Boardwalk to the beach.

The tents marked the site of the weekend’s main event, something called The Race of Gentlemen. Yes, it sounds as if it should have been sponsored by Ralph Lauren or perhaps Vineyard Vines. Elaborate tailgate parties spilling from vintage woodies, women in pink and green, men in rowing blazers, top shelf liquor, that sort of thing. WRONG.

The event turned out to be unlike any car gathering I’ve been to, and as someone who comes from a family of motor heads I’ve been to my share. It was a gathering of hipsters with old cars and motorcycles. Come to think of it, I think the only way to get a hipster to the beach would be to lure him with an old car or motorcycle.

I think this guy is the mascot for the Oiler's Car Club.

I think the event was sponsored by Harley Davidson and perhaps—I wasn’t quite sure—Old Crow Whiskey. You could have told me that it was sponsored by Zap Comix and I’d have believed it. There wasn’t much info about it online, so I really didn’t know what to expect.

I couldn’t believe that they’d really race cars on the beach. Who did they think they were, Barney Oldfield?

 

None of the cars were newer than 1930-ish. A long time had passed since anyone had described any of them as "cherry". The motorcycles were of the same vintage and condition.

There were about twenty cars, and a few were still spattered with sand as if they'd just been in a race. The collection of cars was way more Abramson’s Junk Yard than the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Actually, it was more Abramson’s Junk Yard than it was Port Royal Speedway, even on Hot Pants Night. Several of the cars were being tinkered with by their owners.

Kinda makes me want to take up surfing.

No one seemed concerned about the effects of salt water or even sand on their machines. According to the event’s web site, admission was supposed to be $30, but it looked as if the person selling tickets had said "Screw it!" some time ago so we walked in for free. I even walked around looking for someone to pay since the experience was certainly worth the thirty bucks.

There were half sheet pans under cars and motorcycles everywhere. Apparently the racing gentlemen were concerned about keeping dripping engine fluids off the beach.

Trust me, it was just coffee.

They really went all out with the potato chip display.

Food wise, well, it wasn't exactly a spread to send Alice Waters into orgasmic hosannas. Unless they were hiding the food booths at an undisclosed location, there seemed to be a choice of coffee, beer, potato chips, and pork rinds. There was special booth just for the artisanal free range heirloom pork rinds. Crazy.

There was a very strong hipster vibe, in other words it was a pastel-free zone. In a fashion nod to Henry Ford’s remark about the color of cars, you could wear any color you wanted to as long as it were black. Skinny jeans and tats were the order of the day.

 

We missed the racing on the beach since the tide had come in. It looked as if the finish line, or perhaps that was the reviewing stand, were about to float away in several feet of water. We did however, see people do donuts and hear lots of engine revving by cars in various stages of tune up.

Four young women asked me to take their photo and so in lieu of listening to the unsolicited advice from one of my friends on how to do it, I handed her the camera so she could do the honors. I asked if they wanted to put their beer cups down for the photo but they were having none of that. Apparently their mothers know that they are not as pure as the driven 1930 Ford V-8.

A nice old Mercury at the doo-wop WaWa.

Some guy doing security told us to come back at 8:00 for the bonfire. Perhaps they'd grabbed some wieners and were going to be roasting them--it didn't seem like a s'mores sort of crowd. In the end, the bonfire interfered with the obligatory visit to Fred's. That meant I never had to come clean to a tattooed hipster that I didn't know the difference between a banger and a flatty.

My friends and I said to ourselves that we’d come back at 7:00 am the next day--when the tide was out-- to see the racing. Big surprise: that didn't happen. But I think we all believed we would when we said it.

I hope the Race of Gentlemen returns to Wildwood next year and isn't just motor racing's version of Brigadoon,  fading into the ocean mists (and a cloud of exhaust smoke) off an improbable spot at the Jersey Shore.

For more info on the Race of Gentlemen, check out this New York Times article:  Race of Gentlemen Looks Back to Simpler Time

And this great video on Vimeo-- Race of the Gentlemen