Photo Credit: Courtesy of Ron Ciancutti
It was the summer of 1983. I had just graduated from college, and the employment outlook was actually worse than it is today. It’s true; you can check the record books. When people talk about the current recession and jobless rate, they always say, “It hasn’t been this bad since 1983.” I was young, inexperienced and struggling to find direction. My peer group was a misfit set of old high school buddies and their roommates from the local college; occasionally, an acquaintance from our softball team or the pool room or one of our fathers or uncles would join us out on the porch on hot summer nights as we analyzed life in the small-town wanderlust of Berea, Ohio. The next opportunity just didn’t seem to be presenting itself. We were all working low-paying manual jobs to make ends meet, but boredom and the incredible fear of moving into the adult world on a permanent basis loomed. We were a little leery about “The American Dream” after finding a four-year degree to be less of a ticket to high wages than promised.
I recall one Saturday when Uncle Joe was cutting hair at the barber shop he co-owned with my grandfather, and a few of us were hanging around drinking coffee and telling lies, when out of nowhere, a suggestion popped out of my uncle’s mouth. “What you guys ought to do is find an old wreck, tune it up, and run it in Spectator Stock at Cloverleaf Speedway. Make some memories.”
Cloverleaf was a quarter-mile oval track nestled in the Ohio Valley near Cleveland. It had been the home of some highly competitive and professional races, but more exciting than those were the races in which the fans participated. They were invited to find themselves a junk car, rip out the entire interior except the driver’s seat and the front window, plop down behind the wheel, and race every Sunday night in the “Spectator Stock” competition. Requirements were a helmet, seat belt and $30 racing fee.