1987. That’s Chicago Mike on the far right. The Kentucky guys dubbed him ‘Chicago’, and the by-product was the birth of my handle, ‘Chicago Jon.’ Mike died of diabetes; he was a wonderful fella.

Much like a nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner, this totally sucks, in epic quantities. The Burkster himself wrote several years back about the fate of quite possibly the most infamous of all campgrounds at Clermont, the notorious "biker camp" adjacent to the drive-in out on Crawfordsville Road.

I ventured out that way this year to see if there were any physical remnants. Nothing, nada, zip...as if it never happened at all. I had hoped for a picture of something I had noticed in the ’70s, a sign that stood adjacent to, nothing actually, but it was for soft-serve ice cream cones.

That a place where you expected virgins to be sacrificed at midnight beneath a full moon to be even SELLING ice cream was confusing, but the oddball sight of that once illuminated sign always made me smile, but now...emptiness. The drive-in as well has been bulldozed, and the presence of a dilapidated 4X8 of plywood with the word 'SOLD' crudely spray painted on it marks where the driveway to said venture is the only remnant of that enterprise. On the south side of Crawfordsville, roughly where the ROACH T-shirt trailer once stood is an office for IRP (now called Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis!), a non-descript little building that could almost pass for a quickie-mart.

It seems like it was just yesterday (it was 1987) and four of us from the campground meandered down to the T-shirt trailer at around 3 a.m. ("I'll get all the sleep I need when I'm dead.") because we happened upon a catch phrase for that year’s event, and we simply HAD to get T-shirts made up with it emblazoned on them. (Regardless of how it sounds, the joke was a reference to the sorry state of 'Jonnie Woodz' barely-there Chevette that he used to get to the race that year.) He probably welcomed the razzing we gave him over the car, otherwise we'd have moved on to his camping arrangements. In his haste to leave Kentucky he grabbed what he THOUGHT was his tent and sleeping bag, but what turned out to be a pup-tent and his daughter’s 'Star Wars' sleeping bag, which resulted in one of our entourage, good old 'Elephant-Race-Fan' (that’s another story altogether), standing in front of his tent every morning, bellowing out, "LUKE, I'm your FATHER, get the BLEEP outta bed, you hunk of BLEEP!"