Remember the fabulous cartoon “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” that ran as part of the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” series on TV? It was incredibly smart, as was the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” stuff, because it appealed to kids as well as adults. Those were the halcyon days of Saturday cartoons. If you could thread the needle to make kids laugh and pay attention, but also deliver life lessons and political satire to adults, you had a winner.
Mr. Peabody himself was a talking dog, which is pretty brilliant in its own right and is now copied regularly, but in addition to that he was the smartest being on the planet. He knew everything. Sherman, hilariously referred to as Peabody’s “pet boy Sherman” was just an inquisitive kid who wanted to learn about the past in the present tense. See what I did there? To accomplish that, Mr. Peabody would fire up the WABAC Machine (pronounced “Wayback” because it was a time machine) and take his pet boy to various moments in ancient times, to see how it all really went down and to learn some lessons. This stuff was aces. The writing for “Rocky and Bullwinkle” was as well, of course, as they played a role in mocking the Cold War but delivering jabs along the way. Who can forget Boris and Natasha, or the college Wossamatta U?
Well, these days on the interwebs there’s a thing called the Wayback Machine (I’m assuming the WABAC spelling is copyrighted) and it gives users a way to (somewhat) dig back into the past to find websites or web pages that no longer exist. It’s not a perfect thing, and most stuff from the late 90s and into the 2000s is pretty sketchy and incomplete when you search for it, but every now and then you can stumble upon a fun hit. Just like this screen grab of the 2004 version of delworsham.com. Those were the days!
As I said, the Wayback website isn’t perfect. It’s spotty in its coverage and it fails to load a high percentage of old photos, which is too bad. See, the web is forever. If you put something out there, and then get roasted because of it, so you then delete it, it’s not totally gone. If you know how and where to look, you can often find it, mocking you with its presence. There are entire colonies of web geeks who specialize in finding and saving deleted tweets, these days.
Every now and then, I’ll dial up the Wayback site and dig around. It really is a trip back in time. Del Worsham and I started the website in our first year together, which was 1997. It was rudimentary, of course, but we were on the cutting edge for NHRA teams even having websites. At the beginning, we contracted with a guy out in northern California to build it and host it for us, and it went through different hands and managers over the 12 years of the Checker, Schuck’s, Kragen program. In the beginning, I’d take the Kodak film out of my 35mm camera and haul it to the 1-Hour Photo store at a nearby mall. Then, I’d pick the photos I liked and actually mail them to the web guy (no scanner for me back then, and no digital photography that was worth using.) By the time we folded up shop, it was all pretty instant and digital. Times changed. So did we.
The Photo section of the site quickly became the top “hit magnet” we had. Why? Because it changed regularly. People liked the race reports, the stats, and the other info on the site but they went pretty nuts for the photos. I’ll rhetorically ask again… Why? Because, without even planning it this way or thinking it through, I just naturally came up with a plan that featured “behind the scenes” stuff, rather than racing photos. The on-track stuff was everywhere. I wanted to show our visitors what it was like to be “behind the ropes” and in the pit area with Del, Chuck, and Team CSK, and I’d try to come up with witty captions for the pics. It was a precursor for the philosophy I would develop for writing my blog, when that started in late 2005. Offbeat, stream of consciousness, and hopefully entertaining. People ate up that delworsham.com photo gallery. I was just ad-libbing and making it up as I went, but people ate it up. It was a cool time to be innovating and trying new things.
I was also really developing as a writer and PR rep. I was pretty rough around the edges when Del and I teamed up, because I was trying really hard to be perfect and hadn’t found my own persona, style, or way through it all yet. This bio, of Del back in 2004, is a great window into that time. It’s actually pretty darn good, if I must pat myself on the back. A little wordy and flowery, but by 2004 I was already a much better writer than I was when we started. And, in 2004, we felt like such veterans. Like we’d seen it all and been around forever. I started with Del in ’97, and by 2001 I’d been Team Manager for Worsham Racing longer than I’d ever held any other job in my life. By 2004 it felt like I’d never done anything else. It felt like it would never end, but I kept trying to get better at it every year.
So 2004 was our 8th season with CSK as our sponsor. We’d had the two CSK Funny Cars (red and blue) since 2000. Like I said, we felt like old pros and we were, by then, solid contenders. We won a lot of races and kept the CSK people happy even beyond that. We were a major part of their marketing and advertising plans and proud to be in that role. It was a business relationship, of course, but I think what Del and I were most proud of is how it became a personal thing, too. We were part of the CSK family, and very close to many of the people in the company. They were so supportive, and proud to be associated with us. The feeling was mutual.
Back to bios… As the PR guy, I annually had the uncomfortable task of writing my own. It took a long time for me to come out of that shell, and starting the blog in 2005 was a big part of it. The typical rule of thumb is that the PR rep is invisible to the public, and only there to further the exposure for the driver, the team, and the sponsor. As I got to be known, more and more each year once the blog started, I really didn’t have a choice but to represent myself, as well. Also Barbara, Shasta, and then Boofus & Buster, not to mention Neighbor Dave, Scott The Pilot, Crazy Jane, Kim the Lawyer, and all the other characters that populated the world of the blog. And let’s not forget Pond Cam!
This is my bio from that 2004 iteration of the Worsham web site. It’s written more “matter of fact” than the ones I wrote for Del, Chuck, and the team. You can’t really put “He’s the greatest PR rep in the history of publicity” in your own bio. Right? But I found it noteworthy that I was still making a point of outlining the fact I was (or at least still felt like I was) an outsider in the sport of drag racing. I think I was proud of that, and proud that I could absorb a lot of information to learn about the sport, or at least enough to be conversant in it instead of befuddled by the details.
Baseball is a game that often keeps its family roots from generation to generation. Drag Racing is way more so. As soon as I joined the Worshams it was obvious to me that anyone I was meeting or getting to know who WASN’T from a racing family was a rarity. It rightfully seemed like everyone out there was cut from the same mold as Del. Racing before walking. Racing before being born, even. That’s racing within the womb, and Del’s twin daughters can attest to that. It’s a family business, passed down to the next generation.
I definitely followed the old mantra “Fake It ’till You Make It” for years, while I listened and watched, and that goes for the PR stuff and my own knowledge about the sport. By about this time, in 2004, I was getting to be pretty fluent in the language, and fairly knowledgeable about how difficult it was to get a Nitro Funny Car down the track at top speed, without spinning the tires or blowing it up. I can thank Del mostly for that. From Day 1, he was an open book for me, and he (I think) enjoyed having me in the lounge watching what he was doing and what those squiggly lines he was analyzing on the computer represented. Tim Wilkerson was the same way, after I made the move to the Levi, Ray, & Shoup team in 2009. Always happy to have me sitting there listening and asking questions. By the time I joined Wilk, I’d put 12 years of Worsham wisdom into my head. That doesn’t mean I could tune a Funny Car in any way, but I understood more and more of what these geniuses were doing when they’d show me the graphs and charts or explain why we were doing specific things with the motor, the blower, the tires, compression, or even the wheelie bar. All of that stuff. And there’s so much of it. It was fun to absorb all that and somewhat understand a smidgen of it. And Wilk was never afraid to ask me “What do you think?” in terms of overall strategy. Most of the time, whether I said “Go for it” or “Let’s just get down the track and make them beat us” he’d reply, “Yep, that’s was I was thinking.”
All of this in today’s blog is a great illustration of just how appreciative I am of those 20+ years in the sport. I matured and grew as a PR person and a writer. I gained confidence in my own abilities, but never stopped trying to get better. I’m still trying to get better! You can always get better. I went from a novice to a rank amateur when it came to the tuning and mechanical stuff, but I always wanted to know more. Nothing made me prouder than when another driver or crew chief would stop me in the staging lanes and say “What happened to you guys on that run?” and I could actually formulate a coherent answer, even with details some of the time!
It was a wonderful experience, a priceless one, and like so many others and I’m sure many of you, I miss it right now. I miss baseball, too, because both sports are in my blood. I hope NHRA can find a way to safely get back out there and welcome back some of the greatest and most loyal fans in the world. I hope I get to smell the Nitro again sometime soon. I miss that whole part of my family tree. I hope baseball finds a way back, too. My evenings are not as rewarding without the ballgame on TV. My Sundays are not as exciting without having NHRA to follow, run by run and round by round.
We have to be safe. We have to be smart. We have to be patient. “Normal” may not be normal again for a long time, but we can’t get ahead of ourselves.
Maybe I can find Mr. Peabody and he can take me back to all these great memories in the WABAC machine. Until then, I’ll have to rely on the spotty results found on the internet with the alternate spelling: The Wayback Machine.
Hey, if you see a little button at the top of this blog that reads “Like” it would be super if you could click on that. Unless you really didn’t like it at all. But if you did, that would be great.
See you next week.
Bob Wilber, at your service and looking for Mr. Peabody.