In 1967, Tommy quit racing to raise a family (made up of he and Tim’s mom, two sisters and Tim), and parked the J in a barn. In the early ‘70s, he got it back out, got it running, and painted it yellow. He titled it as a ’48 Henry J and it became a street rod, and the family went to a lot of National Street Rod Association meets, from 1976 through the 1980s. Tommy then parked the car again, this time for lack of interest and a divorce. In 1984, the Nostalgia Drag Racing Association started, and the crew were having a meet in Tulsa in ’85, so  Tommy got the car out in the winter and pulled the nose off, put a bigger racing engine in it, mounted pair of old M&H slicks on the back and the whole family went to Tulsa to the first NDRA meet ever held outside of California. Tim remembers the famed Mooneyham and Sharp No. 554 coupe being there plus a lot of other big California cars and racers, old fuelers with hard slicks burning rubber the whole length of the quarter-mile. That was Tim’s first taste of real nostalgia drag racing --- everything he’d seen before had real sticky slicks on the back. He got a hankerin’ to race the J himself on a regular basis....

…including against “Fat Jack” Robinson and his orange ’46 Ford, supposedly the world’s fastest street rod. Tim treed him at the race and beat him for about three feet, and then his 1,300-horsepower blown and fuel injected motor on alcohol left him in the dust. That was when Tim was 14 years old, and father Timmy told him, “Get out there, bang it in first, hit second and then lift. When you get topped out in second, let off.” “He didn’t want me to make a full quarter-mile run. I went out there and pulled 6-grand in second and clutched it and said to myself, ‘To hell with this,’ so I stabbed it again and took it into third. I ran 89 mph on my first-ever pass. We pulled the J with his ’36 Dodge pickup, and then we went from there to Oklahoma City for an NSRA national, so we had a whole week of drag racing and hot rodding. He sold louvered hats and other stuff at the events,” McCray says.

They did a lot of nostalgia drag races all over Missouri and Illinois in the 1980s, and the J became a street rod and drag car, like it is today. It’s his story, Tim says, meaning his dad’s. Back in the 1970s, when the McCrays were doing all the NSRA meets, dad, mom and the two sisters and Tim would ride all over the country in the Henry J. It had two bucket seats plus the back floorboard, and the family would lay blankets out, and with a little trailer on the back, they’d go from Columbia, Missouri to Indianapolis, to Kentucky … “we’d go on 700-mile trips one way to go to NSRA rod runs, mostly with 10 or 15 other cars. It looked kind of funny, an old drag car with a trailer on the back with clothes and coolers stuffed inside,” Tim says.