A Good Month

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June 23rd, 2016

There’s still one week left in the month of June, but by all counts it’s already been a good month in my life. For a lot of reasons. It’s been incredibly busy, frustrating at times, deliriously happy at others, and a good first taste of this new lifestyle we’ve adopted, wherein we live at “home” in Minnesota but Barbara maintains her executive position in Spokane. And it’s not over yet. It’s been…

A good month for “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts”…

June has been an enormous challenge for me, when it comes to “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts.” The cross-country move threw my routine out the window, under the bus, in the trash, and down the drain. Twice, during this last month, I’ve been forced to take entire weeks off because of that pesky thing called real life, but in the end it hasn’t really hurt my productivity. Surprisingly, the forced time off has made me more productive when I am allowed to have a week like this one; writing Monday through Wednesday, tackling this blog on Thursday, and then polishing, on Friday, what I’d written earlier in the week.

Chapter 22 is now in the can, and I’m not sure that would’ve happened in the same manner as it did had I not been forced to deal with things around the new house. Since January, I’ve had my routine down every week and found myself getting a little “writing tired” from time to time. Not burned out, just weary of doing the same thing each week. I’d often need to do mindless things on Monday mornings just to get my brain engaged.

When this Monday morning arrived, I was incredibly eager to get going but I had not one word written. That’s kind of a neat thing. I have the advantage of knowing what the subject matter is going to be for each chapter, because it is my life’s story in chronological order, but I rarely have a clue what the actual words are going to be. This week, actually starting last Sunday, whole sentences and descriptions were popping into my head and bouncing around like ping-pong balls. When I started on Monday, the words were ready to go. It was just a matter of getting them on the cyber page.

This chapter did present its own challenges in terms of ups and downs. The focus is 1991, the year I became the general manager at Heartland Park Topeka. I was coming off a very odd and strangely disappointing 1990, and ’91 gave me the chance to start fresh in a segment of the sports world I was almost completely unfamiliar with. Basically, at that time, you could say the vast majority of my experience in motorsports was watching the Indy 500 every Memorial Day. That was about it. I knew the names “Big Daddy” and Shirley and “The Snake” from Wide World of Sports, but frankly names like John Force, Mike Dunn, Joe Amato, and Gary Ormsby might have only been vaguely recognized. I knew Kenny Bernstein only because I’d been an attendee at the biggest sports-marketing conference in the country, a few years earlier in Chicago. Kenny was the keynote speaker at the large banquet lunch one day. I remember thinking it was neat to hear a guy speaking about sports sponsorships, but I wasn’t totally sure about what the whole world of drag racing was about. I thought he was well spoken, though!

So, in 1991 my life and my world changed. I was directly involved in a wide variety of motorsports at Heartland Park, from sports cars, stock cars, and motorcycles on the road course, to drag races on the strip ranging from local bracket cars to a Super Chevy Show, and from an NHRA Division-5 points meet to our biggest event of the year, the NHRA AC Delco Heartland Nationals in late September. It was all eye-opening, and it was a lot of work.

Fortunately, I had a terrific staff to work with. They all were dedicated and talented (that’s a good combination) and despite the fact we always seemed to have five different “most important things” on our plates at all times, we juggled those flaming plates to make every event run smoothly, with sponsorship, on time. They weren’t all successful, in terms of ticket sales, but we made it a priority to analyze why some of them failed to attract a crowd so that we could make adjustments in the future. If you hold a motorcycle race on the road course and barely sell 2,000 tickets, you don’t just hold it again the next year and hope it gets better. You have to figure out why. It was, and this is an understatement, a huge learning experience for me. It changed my life.

The key thing I discovered in Topeka was that NHRA events stood out clearly to me as the best possible piece of the motorsports pie. To be honest, we didn’t have a NASCAR Cup race and we didn’t host the Indy Cars, but we did have a stock car race with some NASCAR stars in it and we had the IMSA prototype Grand Prix race when IMSA was a big deal. Nothing, though, compared to the excitement, thrills, and packed grandstands of the NHRA national event. Compared to everything else we did, no matter how well and how hard we promoted the other events, the NHRA national event was in a different orbit. And starting that year, in January of 1991, I had never seen a drag race.

I wrote about how much of my staff accompanied me to Gainesville in March, to spend a few days at the Gatornationals shadowing the Gainesville Raceway staff to learn by osmosis. It was an eye-opening, lung-clearing, chest-pounding few days. If 1991 changed my life, the Gatornationals were a huge part of that. Here’s a snippet…

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When we arrived, sportsman cars were on the track doing their wheelstands and making what I thought was a lot of noise. I also thought they were going very fast. I had no clue.

I’d been warned about those wacky Top Fuel Dragsters and Funny Cars, and had seen them on Wide World of Sports, but no verbal warning would be sufficient when it came to preparing me for what I was about to see, hear, smell, and feel. The first time I watched a Nitro Funny Car warm up, I thought I was either in heaven or hell. The fumes were noxious, and bitter, and nearly asphyxiating. But, man oh man, they were cool!

When I watched the first Top Fuel car launch, from a solid 50 yards away, I was certain I could take the noise. With fingers planted firmly in my ears, it was still impossibly loud. But more shocking was the concussion that hit me in the chest and vibrated every ounce of me. It was pure sensory overload, and I was completely and utterly addicted. It was clear to me, in just one day, that NHRA Drag Racing was beyond special. It was a thing and an experience unto itself, and nothing in the racing domain could possibly compare to it. That was an assumption I made with very little racing experience. It’s one I’ve maintained and affirmed to this day.

—————

That trip to Gainesville was taken strictly as an observer. I kept my eyes open and my ears plugged, and I also asked a lot of questions. Six months later, when the NHRA tour came to my track, in the open plains of Kansas, it was personal. And it was incredible. I knew, before our national event was over, that NHRA was the place for me and that I had to find a way to be more involved at the team level. It wouldn’t be easy, and being broke trying to make it happen would be something I’d have to deal with, but I had the passion and the will to succeed. I just needed the opportunity and the time.

It was great fun to write about that tumultuous year. And yet there’s still so much more to go. As I said on Facebook yesterday, if this book were a drag race, I think we’re past the 660-foot timer now. That’s how far we’ve come. The finish line is in sight, and I’m putting my heart into the work to make the win-lights come on.

So the writing is rocking, and the process remains fascinating. To start a week with a time period in mind, but with little idea how the words are going to string together, and then to re-read it all on Friday, making a few punch-up changes, before putting it to bed and sending it off to Greg Halling, is magic.

And more about this month.

A good month for murder…

A few years back, my nephew Del Quentin Wilber took his career from successful to enormous, when he wrote and published the best-selling book “Rawhide Down” about the attempted assassination of President Reagan. This month, just within the last few days, he’s taken the next impressive step.

Can't wait to read this
Can’t wait to read this

“A Good Month For Murder” landed on my porch, from Amazon, just a couple of days ago. I’m eager to open it and start reading, but I need to hold off until the weekend. It’s hard to do that.

To write the book, Del (who my siblings and I still call Del Three, because he is Del Wilber III) immersed and imbedded himself within the homicide unit in Prince George’s County, which borders Washington, D.C. on the Maryland side. It was a brutal stretch of violent times, and he was there every step of the way. His writing style is perfect for this sort of book, just like it was perfect for “Rawhide Down.”

He writes precisely, and eloquently, but he smartly avoids flowery hyperbole. He draws you into the drama and makes you feel like you’re there. When you read his words, the physical book in your hands disappears, as the words travel straight into your cerebral cortex and create movie scenes in your mind. I can’t wait to dive into this book, and I know I’ll have a hard time putting it down.

The New York Times has reviewed it, and Del had some frustrated fun with that. The reviewer gave him high marks, for the most part, but complained about a couple of things. I think that’s because any NYT reviewer feels they have to criticize to earn a living, but to complain about the title was sort of ridiculous. The title is a direct quote from one of the detectives, reflecting the gritty detachment they need to have in order to do such a difficult and horrifying job. The reviewer also mentioned that the book is strictly a recounting of the author’s time with the homicide unit, as if it would’ve been a whole lot better if Del had veered off into fiction and fantasy. Silly reviewer. And hey, it’s a heck of a lot better to have a few nit-picks in your New York Times review than to be ignored by the paper. I can guarantee, to a 99.99% degree of certainty, that “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” will not garner a review in the New York Times.

Well deserved raves
Well deserved raves

As you can see here, the rest of the reviews have been fantastic. (As always, you can click on the image to enlarge it).

Proud of him? Oh my gosh, off the charts proud. This will embarrass the hell out of him, but I still see him as “Little Del” shooting hoops in the driveway at the Wilber home in Kirkwood, Mo. Or playing catch in the backyard of his family’s home, in McLean, Va. I watched as he went off to Northwestern to play some college baseball and pursue his journalism degree. I watched him land a job at the Baltimore Sun, and win accolades for his work. Then the Washington Post. And Bloomberg. And “Rawhide Down” which put him on the national map. To walk into a bookstore at the Las Vegas airport and see my own nephew’s book at eye-level, in the “Best Sellers” rack, well that would make anyone proud. His folks are amazing. His sister Lindsay is brilliant and wonderful. And Del Three is really something.

A good month for being home…

We’re continuing to juggle jobs, book writing, and settling (we’re settlers, son) and we’re also continuing to make additional headway. That’s a good thing, and it’s good to be home.

Racked and ready...
Racked and ready…

The lower level is about 80% complete, though I’ll admit that 19% of the remaining 20% is the one guest bedroom we haven’t tackled in the least. It remains a scary pile of bedding, pillows, knick-knacks (I had to look up how you spell that), and other “stuff” and it looks like a small version of Mount Everest on the unmade bed. Hey, we have to have additional challenges, and we’ll get to it.

Despite the original plan to leave all the wine on the floor until we decided what to do about racks for the wine room, I hit the point of no return over the weekend and simply had to do something. Over the course of a couple of sweaty hours, I filled our existing rack and moved much of the rest of it out of the way. Today, or maybe tonight, I’ll be storing the rest of the wine in the room, out of sight, and the final wall in the lower level will be adorned with framed art. It’s the racing wall, so I’m eager to get after it.

I do have some adjustments to make with a couple of the bigger pieces in the portion of the lower level that acts as my office, but that’s just a matter of taking them down, measuring a new height, and putting them back up. One of them is the large frame that holds my father’s old Twins jersey, and it’s a bear to hoist and hang by myself, so we’ll pick a time when we can both be involved. It’s not a priority. Getting the racing wall hung is an absolute priority.

Hello pears!
Hello pears!

Up here, we have a few of our original oil and multi-media pieces on the wall, including the huge piece we call “the pears” on the landing going down to the lower level. We’ve always had “the pears” in our formal dining room, but this house doesn’t have an area for formal dining, and we still have plans to add a hutch to the wall by the table, so we felt “the pears” needed a new home. This way, when guests enter our very beige house through the front door, the giant splash of color will grab their attention.  I think it looks fabulous there.

And it’s funny how perspective changes with phone pics. This thing is pretty massive, but it looks kind of little in the photo. It’s actually big enough to be so heavy it’s hard to lift, and it needs reinforced triple-nail hooks to hold it up!

A good month to be boyz…

As much as it’s great for us to be home, there’s no denying it’s also a great for Boofus and Buster. They haven’t completely settled in, and are still a little wary of new things, but they’ve managed to scope out and claim their new favorite spots in this house.

We put one of their kitty condos in our bedroom, right next to the window, and we thought we were just putting it there temporarily while we got the house organized. Silly us. Buster loves sleeping the afternoon away up on the top perch, keeping an eye on the birds outside the window while he gets his cat-naps in. There’s no moving it now.

It's a tough job, but some cat has to do it.
It’s a tough job, but some cat has to do it.

Boofus absolutely loves being out on the porch. I’m pretty sure Boofie would live out there if we’d bring him food and a litter box. Buster likes it too, and will spend hours out there with his brother, but he’s a bit more “husky” than Boofie and if it gets up over 80 degrees he gets hot and comes back in. Little Boofie just sits in the condo by the corner or stretches out on his white blanket atop the glider. Sometimes he just sits on the floor behind the rocking chair, because there are trees right outside the porch and the birdies flitter around the branches all afternoon. It’s like a cat version of a video arcade.

A good month to be a blog writer…

10 and a half years. That’s how long I wrote my blog on NHRA.com, and that’s how long it took to develop and attract a huge and loyal readership base. That’s how long I had the pleasure of seeing so many people at the races, who I never would’ve met had it not been for that blog, and Pond Cam, and Shasta the cat, and The Boyz, and travel stories, track stories, and complete and utter nonsense stories.

When I wrapped up my career last year, Phil Burgess was enormously kind enough to allow me to continue writing that blog until the middle of December, and as part of that he allowed me to promote this new “Bob’s Blog” in an effort to spread the word to my loyal NHRA readers, and help all of you migrate over here.

Many of you have. If you haven’t, you won’t be reading this sentence so I guess it’s not worth it to write “come on over and join the new blog party.” But it’s great to get emails and Facebook messages from so many people who are out there, still following this thing. I get surprises every single week, when I’ll hear from someone I don’t know, or I haven’t heard from in ages, and they tell me they’re still reading every week.

And the Thursday Blog Day routine has helped a lot in that regard. I had no real “plan” for how I wrote my NHRA blog. I just wrote whenever I had time or whenever I had the subject matter to put out there, and mostly all of my readers would just check the blog page to look for updates. Now, barring unforeseen circumstances, you know where to find these words every Thursday.

There’s always room for more at this table, though! If you read this, and like it, and look forward to Thursday Blog Day, please feel free to spread the word to your friends and neighbors. And don’t be afraid to “Like” this installment by clicking on the button at the top. Social media is a great way to spread the word, as well. Feel free to tweet, post, or Facebook. The more readers the merrier!

Since this is a private family site, I don’t make a penny writing this blog and you don’t have to wade through weird ads to read it. It’s just for fun. And great fun it is.

See you next week!

Bob Wilber, at your service during a good month for a lot of things.

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