It’s Thursday. That’s Blog Day. This is the blog. Everything is in balance. Well, not everything. My office in the lower level of our house isn’t exactly perfect, in a Feng Shui sort of way. I do have a new giant frame, filled with jackets, that needs to go on the wall, but it’s really heavy and very bulky and it will take some effort to get it hung, so for now it leans against said wall. And, I’m actually a little behind in the writing process this week. We are finally into the Worsham years with Chapter 26, and the flood of memories is hard to stem. I keep going back and adding stuff to what I’ve already written because “Well, that has to be in there” or “I can’t believe I forgot to write about that.”  For instance, in this chapter I not only meet Barbara, my wife to be, but she also gets to know my wonderful cat Shasta, who moved in with her before I did.

That made me realize I had forgotten to introduce Shasta in the appropriate chapter, after he adopted me at the Topeka Humane Society when I worked at Heartland Park. See, this whole book-writing thing is like a puzzle. You just never know when you’re done. Imagine if this was fiction! Sometimes my life seems like fiction, but if it really was I’d be stumped to keep the story lines straight.

Looking back to last weekend, I did indeed watch the “live” coverage on FOX, from Denver, and I thought they did a really good job of keeping the flow going. I felt absolutely sick, though, when I was watching Saturday’s qualifying on NHRA All Access and saw Wilk hit the wall again. Absolutely sick. The bad news was filled with lots of items, including him being unable to race on Sunday because of the wreck and the fact it cost him a lot of money (again) but the good news was the fact John Force wasn’t in the way when Wilk’s LRS Mustang made a hard right again. And the second piece of good news was that Tim now feels they have finally gotten to the root of the problem that also bit them in Topeka, and it has to do with a fuel line problem. I sure hope so. No one works harder and no one works smarter than Tim, Richard Hartman, and the rest of the Team Wilk crew. They are truly being tested right now, with these crazy incidents, and here’s hoping they come back stronger than ever.

I’ll be there in Sonoma on Saturday to cheer them on, and I can’t wait to get there. What will make it even better is the fact Barbara will be sitting next to me on the plane, on the way to Sacramento, and she’ll be at the race with me, as well. I know a lot of people are eager to see her, and she’s just as eager to see all of her racing friends. Plus, as I mentioned in a previous blog, our friends Vince and Mary Bienek will be going to the race with us, for their initiation to NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing. Bring on the Nitro! Advice to them: Wear comfortable shoes and clothes you can layer. Sonoma Raceway can go from blistering heat to shivering cold when the marine layer floats in.

So, you add together the fact I’m a little behind schedule this week, with my writing of “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” with the fact we’re traveling to California tomorrow, and you come up with an answer that says “I’m taking my laptop on the plane and will try to finish Chapter 26 before we touch down in Sacramento.”

And, when you get off the plane at the Sacramento airport there really should be a sign that says “Welcome To Sacrament0 – The Proud Home Of Gary Gerould.”  Someone needs to work on that.

As for a snippet, I haven’t done that in a few blogs so I might as well do it today. Here’s the set-up…

It was 1997, my first year with Del and Chuck Worsham. I had written a paragraph about the day Chuck asked me to pitch in by putting a couple of new decals on the car. When I put them on straight, he declared me to be officially in charge of decals, and that would be something I’d do for the next 19 years. Had I botched those first decals, I might have never done it again.

And then I continued on by writing the two paragraphs below. In ’97, things like websites for racing teams were in their absolute infancy. We were all figuring it out and exploring the concepts without much of a plan, but now that I look back on it I can see how my approach to our popular website was a key indicator of how I’d later write my blogs. The approach wasn’t to show race cars doing burnouts. The approach was to give viewers (and, later, readers) a peek into the life we all were leading. It went like this:

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At around the same time, I made another new inroad in terms of my career. I talked Del into launching DelWorsham.com and I managed every facet of the fledgling website. Being on the internet was changing every aspect of the sport, and every aspect of life, for that matter. Our site took off and quickly became one of the most popular in the NHRA realm, and the “Photo Gallery” page was the main reason for that. Little did I know, at the time, that my approach to photos was a preview of how I’d approach blogging, eight years later.

Pictures of the race car launching or doing a burnout were fine, but they were everywhere. As I told Del, “I want fans to look at the photos from each race and think that it feels like they were right there behind the ropes with us. And I can take them there in photos.”

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Chapter 26 is about a lot more, and my guess is that 99% of the folks who read it will be surprised by some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that eventually all worked out to spawn a 12-year run with Del and Chuck. As we say in the publishing world, “You’ll have to wait for the book to learn all about that stuff.”

I actually don’t know if that’s what we say in the publishing world. I’ve never been in it before.

So (he writes, as a signal that he’s shifting gears to a new subject), what about this giant frame that’s leaning against the wall behind my desk? You asked that, right?

Well, the move back to Minnesota created a need to do some additional purging of a lot of old stuff. I had two closets here absolutely jam-packed with old jackets, sweatshirts, and crew shirts. That would be okay if we had a surplus of closets, but the two in question were the closets in the two guest bedrooms, so I needed to clear the space. I’d already gotten rid of a lot of it thanks to my Kickstarter campaign, and was down to what I thought was the bare minimum of some of the other items, but after analyzing both closets completely I realized I could do more. Charity is the way to make that happen, and in Minnesota it’s always a good idea to contribute things like coats and jackets to charity. Being warm is kind of critical.

When I came upon my high school letter jacket, I had an idea. I could take my high school jacket and put it together with my college baseball jacket and the three jackets that represented my professional baseball career, and make a nice display out of it. That would clear a lot of space out of one closet, and it would give me another piece of memorabilia that would make me smile. Having them all stuffed into a closet didn’t make me smile.

So, I apologize for the lousy photo but here it is. It’s huge, it’s very heavy, and it’s bulky as well, so I couldn’t arrange a photo that didn’t have reflections on it, but you can get the idea here. My St. Louis U. High letterman’s jacket (Class of 1974) is the main piece, with my SIU Cougars, Detroit Tigers, Oakland A’s, and Toronto Blue Jays jackets surrounding it (in clockwise chronological order). Yes, you can click on it to make it larger.

And, you ask, what’s that thing on the left sleeve of the high school jacket?

Well, the St. Louis University sports teams are called the Billikens. I attended high school at St. Louis University High, so we were the Junior Billikens. The SLU Billiken is kind of tough and mean looking. Our Junior Billiken looked like a cuddly little Buddha with big feet.

So, you also ask, what the heck is a Billiken? I’ve heard a lot of different stories over the years, but the most credible one is that the original Billiken was a charm doll, invented in the early 1900s by a woman who claimed she saw the mystical character in a dream. She considered her Billiken to be “The God of things as they ought to be.” I know, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either, but by all accounts a Billiken is supposed to bring you luck. I can vouch for that.

And here’s the next funny thing. When the owner of the art gallery that framed my jackets brought it to the house himself, he helped me lug the thing downstairs. When he left, I looked on the back and found this. It’s the sketch made by Kyle, the young man at the gallery who has coordinated most of my framed items, over the years. He drew this to show the framers exactly where everything was supposed to go.

It cracked me up, because he really took a lot of care and put a lot of detail into the sketch. So much so, he actually drew the Junior Billiken on the sleeve. With his big feet!

And for the record, I was never the Junior Billiken mascot during my four years at SLUH. We did have one, and it consisted of a guy in a blue sweatshirt, white pants, and a big smiling plaster Billiken head. And also for the record, since SLUH is an all-boys Jesuit prep school, our cheerleaders were guys as well. No, they did not wear skirts. They did, however, get our student section to be incredibly loud at football games. And they formed a human pyramid every game. The smallest guy got on top and stood on the backs of the two guys below him, who in turn were kneeling on four guys below them. Good times.

I’ll always be proud of being a SLUH Jr. Bill, and I’ll also be proud that I got through four years there without flunking out. I came close, as a Freshman, but I made it through one of the most difficult curriculums of any high school in the country. Put it this way, college was an absolute breeze compared to SLUH.

A few years back, when I was in town for the St. Louis race, I was behind a car at a stoplight, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the decal in the window. Every Wilber car from 1960 to 1974 had one just like this in the rear window. The design hasn’t changed one bit from when Del Wilber Jr. (Class of ’63) or Rick Wilber (Class of ’66) roamed the hallways of “the U High” before me.

So that’s about it for this week. I have to get a haircut, do some editing, and then do some creative packing well before dinner, because we’re actually going to a play tonight. We’ll be leaving for the airport by 9:00 tomorrow morning, and then off to Gary Gerould’s home town before we drive down to Sonoma.

I wonder if we can drive right past the Vacaville exit without pulling off the highway for In-N-Out…  The force is strong, with this one…

Bob Wilber, at your service as a former Junior Billiken.