Elon Werner Puts A Little Something In The Oven

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December 10th, 2020

Hello again, boys and berries. I’m taking a few minutes to edit and post another fine effort by the one-and-only Elon Werner, and this one will have you entertained in multiple ways. There are cookie stories, book recommendations, and some classic John Force tales. Enjoy! Now I have to finish this chapter I’m halfway through for my new book.

Bob Wilber

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I am getting in the holiday spirit and beginning to pull plans together for CookiePalooza, Werner style. Historically, my family has hosted an annual Christmas party for our neighbors and family friends in the middle of December. We started hosting this shindig the first Christmas after we moved to our current house, as a way to get to know the neighbors. It started out relatively small but each year more people get added to the guest list and it now includes neighbors, family friends, racing people, and a few of the kids’ friends.  It is a come-and-go afternoon event and I lay out a nice spread of cookies, dips, and balls. (Insert your Saturday Night Live joke here.)

Last year we skipped the party because a few weeks earlier my wife organized an awesome 50th birthday party for yours truly that the great Bob Wilber and his lovely wife Barb very kindly attended, all the way from Minnesota. We felt that two big parties just weeks apart was a bit much. In hindsight we should have had the Christmas party, but who could have predicted 2020. Am I right?

I do all the baking because I love to work in the kitchen. I have a weekly baking schedule that culminates in an early morning bake off to finish the broccoli balls and sausage balls, so everything is fresh and ready to go for the mid-afternoon event. This year, with no party to host, I am still going to do the baking but instead I will be making cookie platters for my neighbors the week before Christmas.

In between baking and delivery, my wife and I will make a two-day whirlwind trip to Mizzou to move daughter Abby out of her dorm for good. She will be enjoying her spring semester in Washington DC as an intern for Growing Hope Globally, as part of her degree program in Strategic Communications and Political Science. Growing Hope Globally links the grassroots energy and commitment of rural communities in the U.S. with the capability and desire of smallholder farmers in developing countries, to grow lasting solutions to hunger. It is a great organization run by Max Finberg one of my CBIII friends.

The plan next week is to bake in the evening Monday through Thursday. Then head up to Missouri on Friday, move Abby out Saturday morning and drive home to finish up some baking late Saturday. I will pick it up again on Sunday morning with the plan to deliver cookies in the afternoon.

Here is breakdown of the cookies I will be baking. Some cookies get added to the list each year and some rotate off. There are must-haves and neighborhood favorites. This is the line-up for this year’s CookiePalooza:

Chocolate Cherry Dips (vanilla wafers filled with cream cheese and cherries dipped in chocolate)

Angeletti (an Italian cookie that is basically a mix between a shortbread and a sugar cookie)

Peanut butter cookie with Hersey’s Kisses (traditional favorite)

Fudge Crinkles

Triple Chocolate Cookies (semi-sweet chocolate, white chocolate and bittersweet chocolate)

White Chocolate Dipped Peanut Butter Cookies (we love our peanut butter cookies)

Thick and Chewy White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies

Egg Nog Snickerdoodles (the best Christmas cookie I have found)

Gingerbread Cookies

Raspberry Walnut Crumble Bars 

Pecan Pie Bars

In addition to baking I have been getting my holiday shopping knocked out, one visit to Amazon.com at a time. I used to hate online shopping because I loved going into stores and feeling what I was buying. Now I enjoy the online hunt to find a good deal and I’ll also try a smaller retailer. It is really cool since now I find myself looking for a customized item or specialty trinket. While I feel like I have a good handle on my shopping, I know there could be some people out there waiting until the last minute. For you procrastinators I have some holiday gift suggestions. In no particular order, here are three excellent books that I can highly recommend.

The coolest man who ever drag raced, and no one is a close second.

The legendary Don Prudhomme put his life story on paper and let me tell you if you thought you knew the story of The Snake you don’t have a clue. The incredibly talented Elana Scherr from Hot Rod, RoadKill, Car & Driver and @challengeher on Instagram fame (she’s a must-follow in my opinion) spent almost a year with Snake listening to him tell his life story and probing for additional details. I actually think Elana should write a book about the process of writing the Don Prudhomme book.

I was lucky enough to get an inside peek during the process of the writing of Don Prudhomme: My Life Beyond the 1320 and some of the stories and the situations where Elana heard the tales are tremendous. The book reads as if Prudhomme is telling you the story himself. His childhood was very tough and his rise to drag racing legend was anything but easy. He tells stories of the early days with TV Tommy Ivo and goes very deep into his relationship with Tom “Mongoose” McEwen, both personally and professionally. The fact they brought Mattel Hot Wheels into the sport of drag racing and made the sport mainstream is a career achievement alone. He talks about his career as a driver and a team owner with Larry Dixon and Ron Capps.  The book is a true unvarnished look at a legendary life and Snake doesn’t hold anything back. You can order an autographed copy here. 

The next book I will have to recommend on faith. Drag Racing’s Warren “The Professor” Johnson: The Cars, People, & Wins Behind His Pro Stock Success hasn’t come out yet but I know it will be fascinating. My (and Bob’s) great friend Kelly Wade spent the better part of 2020 working on Warren’s story. He is a Pro Stock legend and while many people gloss over the Pro Stock category when they are looking at drag racing results no one can argue that the class is one of the most technically sophisticated in the sport. Whether you are talking about the magicians that tune the 500 cubic inch, 200 mph door slammers or the men and women who must have nearly psychic reaction times and ninja-like shifting skills to get win lights, the class is one of the toughest in drag racing. Warren Johnson was one of the best of the best and Kelly had unfettered access to not just Warren but also a lifetime of scrapbooks and historical information thanks to Warren’s wife Arlene, who fastidiously kept just about every scrap of paper from time slips to newspaper articles to National Dragster magazines.

Warren was known as “The Professor” and he earned that title as the driver who continually took his competitors to school. He is the all-time winner in the class with 97 Pro Stock NHRA victories, and he did it all with smarts and a very determined attitude. To some he came across as gruff and dismissive but that was his laser focus and perfectionist attitude. If you took the time to engage him in conversation you were guaranteed to come away with a better understanding of Pro Stock, or drag racing, or Warren’s thoughts on any topic. Kelly is a writer’s writer and story-teller without equal. I know she will make Warren’s story interesting and informative. You will be a better person and racing fan for buying this book and taking the time to read it. You can place your advance order here.

Editor’s Note: I pre-ordered Kelly Wade’s book about Warren Johnson the hour it went live on the internet. I’m a Funny Car type of guy, but I know the greatness of Warren Johnson and I know the equal greatness of Kelly Wade as a writer. Buy this book. -BW

A great read

My last recommendation is not a motorsports book but it is penned by one of my all-time favorite writers who also “dabbles” in motorsports. Ryan McGee is a nationally known ESPN columnist and on-air personality covering college football and motorsports. He does a lot of NASCAR but any chance he gets to write a drag racing piece is he all over it. He has done some of the best writing on John Force, Ashley Force, and Antron Brown, to name just a few of the NHRA stars he has brought to the pages of the sadly now defunct ESPN: The Magazine.

He is also a New York Times best-selling author thanks to some work he did with a driver you may know named Dale Earnhardt Jr. a few years ago. His latest book Sidelines and Bloodlines: A Father, His Sons, and Our Life in College Football is a tribute to his father Jerry McGee a long-time and legendary college football referee. From the very first page you are brought into a world of amazing stories, crazy characters that are real people, and behind the scenes situations that are both funny and heartwarming. Ryan worked on the book with his father and his brother Sam and the love these three men have for each other leaps from the pages. You can tell Jerry loved his sons, Ryan and Sam loved their dad, and they all loved college football. You can but Ryan’s book here.

Those are my three recommendations and since you have made it this far I will throw in some funny Christmas stories involving the great John Force. Every year, when I worked with John Force Racing, as the season wound down we began internally talking about what we would send as the JFR Christmas gift to the media members that had covered the team and sport of drag racing that year. Usually we sent die-cast cars autographed by Force or an autographed photo from a big win or the championship winner’s circle.

Open the visor! Open the visor!

One year we sent John Force helmet shaped coffee makers. They looked just like his Castrol GTX helmet, but when you lifted the visor the coffee pot pulled out. There was a flap on the back to add water. It was a very cool piece.

We sent them out to a lot of media that year and a few months later, as the next season was starting, I was talking with a writer and I asked him how he was enjoying his JFR coffee maker. He said he didn’t get a coffee maker and my heart immediately sank. This was one of my top three media contacts and I was horrified to think we had left him off the list or his gift had been lost in the mail. I immediately went full panic mode, apologizing and stumbling all over myself. After about five minutes of me babbling he said he hadn’t gotten a coffee maker but he had received this great racing helmet. I let him know that the great helmet was actually the coffee maker. He was blown away. The cord was tucked underneath and he was so thrilled to get a JFR helmet he immediately pulled it out of the box and it went straight to the shelf in his office. Crisis averted and he had a great laugh about that.

Open to the first page! Open to the first page! Sheesh.

Prior to me joining the JFR team I worked at the Texas Motorplex as the PR director and eventually the general manager of the facility. One year, before Christmas, I received a copy of Force’s book I Saw Elvis at 1000 Feet. I immediately flipped through it and when I was done it was placed on the memorabilia shelf in my office.

A couple days later, I was talking with the Dallas Morning News motorsports writer Mark Zeske and he brought up the Force book. We were talking about how cool the book was and also how nice it was that JFR sent out gifts like that. Mark was especially blown away by the lengthy note John wrote to him on the fly page and he asked me what Force had written on mine. I honestly had flipped right into the book and hadn’t looked at the first page. I opened my copy up and sure enough Force had added an incredibly nice personalized note. He was and still is a class act.

Thanks for reading and I hope everyone continues to stay safe and has a festive holiday season.

Editor’s Note Number Two: Take my advice and buy those books Elon recommended. All three sound spectacular. And now, in yet another moment of shameless self-promotion, I will remind you that my book “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” makes a heck of a gift for any person on your list who is a baseball, soccer, drag racing, or life-in-general fan. It’s still available on Amazon and I checked today to see what the shipping info is. For the print version, they say it will be delivered before Christmas. For the Kindle version (which is only $9.99) you’ll have it instantly. Support your local blog writers!  -Bob Wilber