Yesterday, I travelled back in time, way back over 50 years to the sixties. A very nice gentleman named Julio took his nephew Robert and Robert’s two best friends, Jim and myself, to a place called Raceway Park, an eighth mile oval racetrack to watch car racing. That day, a spark was lit in each of us. He took us to other tracks like Santa Fe, a half mile clay track, O’Hare, a figure 8 demolition derby track, and Illiana Motor Speedway, a half mile asphalt track in Indiana. One afternoon Illiana was closed, and Julio took us to another track down the road – US 30 Dragstrip. We never went back to the oval tracks. Within a couple of years, we all had our licenses and we went almost every week. We walked the pits looking at cars, we even raced ours own cars just to say we did it – I did the quarter mile in just over 25 seconds in my 65 VW! We started going to Union Grove, a track just north of the Wisconsin border. The earsplitting sounds and the breathtaking smells of nitromethane washed thru my brain as I walked the halls of this museum. One room was devoted to Don’s top fuel rails – almost all of the Swamp Rats are there. Other rooms were full of funny cars bearing the names Snake, Mongoose, Kalitta, Muldowney, or a smaller room filled only with engines and carburetors. Another was filled with old cars that Don and family and friends had restored over the years. Lots of Fords from the 40s along with oddities like Ike’s 1956 Imperial, a 1950 Mercury driven by the Fonz, and a 1974 Karman Ghia that was never titled – 27 miles on the odometer. The only thing missing was having Jim and Robert walking with me.