(click here for part 2)

by Chris Martin

It had to be that damn kid again. The old man had been suddenly roused out of sleep by what sounded like a jukebox parked in front of the trailer court a lot or two down the street. His wife had awoken too, and it took only a little prodding from her to get him to open the window of their street-facing bedroom and yell out at the offender. "Shut that damn thing off, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning!" he hollered. It would take more than that to rouse the culprit, who was parked in a ’54 Chevy with the windows partially open to escape the summer heat, the sounds of the Beach Boys wailing into the nighttime smog on his vibrasonic stereo. John Force heard none of it as he stared out the front window of his car. He obviously wasn’t asleep, but the teenager was definitely dreaming.

"Dreams," was the first word out of Force’s mouth as he opened the back door of his Yorba Linda, California race headquarters. "Dreams. If you haven’t got ’em, you’re not going to go very far in anything you do," he opined. "No matter how tough the going gets, you won’t go far if you don’t have something pulling you. Those are dreams. That’s what I was telling my new guys."

"My new guys," were Kevin Poynter and Dean Antonelli, two young men in their early 20s who had been hired by Force to replace longtime crew members Kirk and Kevin Butterfield. Entering the work area of his shop, the mile-a-minute Force was in mid-lecture to the new pair, giving them the racing gospel according to John Force.

This fit in nicely with the overall plan for the day. The purpose of the visit to Force’s shop was to see what he had been doing over the winter and this partially answered the question. Since he is the decade’s most successful pro racer, Force’s shop was the logical "Go" square of the figurative MonopolyŽ board.

The "What’s happening John?" query brought the expected torrent of information on anything remotely connected with his racing life. Drag racing’s human dynamo was "coffee’d up," as he likes to say, and had plenty on his mind.

First, he talked about his two new additions to the crew. "I got my guys together this morning and I told them I’m going to make you do some things you’re not gonna like, but when I’m all done, you’re gonna be champions. You ain’t gonna have not life, you ain’t gonna have no girlfriends, and the day will come where you will leave like the Butterfields. But you’re gonna leave here as champions, as winners. That’s something no one can take from you. It’s something you can’t put a price on.

"I got this one new kid right out of the Marines and I told him, ‘I hired you because your mind’s right. You’re used to busting your hump. Your mind better stay right and that earring better be in the right ear.’ I said, ‘You’re gonna work and you’re gonna hate me and hate [crew chief Austin] Coil, but when it’s all said and done, you’ll leave here a champion.’ Which reminds me, I gotta leave here in an hour, but why don’t you come along and we’ll talk about anything you want."

The day’s conveyance was Force’s white 1994 Z-28 Camaro and when he hit the Weir Canyon Blvd. on-ramp to the 91 Freeway going north, one thing became obvious. Force’s driving style was far more subdued than his speaking style. When he’s on a roll, Force’s speech builds like a snowball rolling downhill. He picks up in speed and, depending on the emotion, volume the more he gets into a topic. There is nothing subdued about his approach. Driving? He and Sammy Hagar have little in common; he can drive 65 and live with it.

While we were progressing up the 91, Force suddenly pulled the Camaro over to the side of the road. "See that?" he yelled. "That’s my house over there on top of the hill. My house stands out because of the picket fence. The realtors sold us our land there and it was all cactus. I took a bulldozer and cut my mountain square [the house was built on the steep slope of a hill and Force had landscaped it impressively]. I made chicken salad out of you-know-what. The city said I couldn’t do that, but I said ‘yes, I can" and I made it livable."

Force took off again, but a half-mile down the freeway he made an alarming discovery. "Stone on empty," he exclaimed. "Damn, I run out of gas every day. Well, if not every day, every week. Thank God for cellular phones. I wind up coasting to a stop and calling Coil to come and get me. I have so much on my mind I just forget about stuff like that."

Force got off at the Tustin off-ramp and pulled into one of those all too common gas station/mini-marts and, again, he showed some more stuff he forgets. He stuck the nozzle into the tank and a few minutes later discovered that he hadn’t turned on the pump.

He was too busy on the phone at the moment. He told Fedderly that Coil narrowly avoided having to come get him and that he didn’t want any "oil smoker" forklift messing up his shop. He said he hoped that Fedderly had described what he wanted to the salesman. Fedderly said that he had.

Once back on the road and jacked by the trip to Bell Gardens, Force cranked up on his parent’s family and history. The first thing he laid on his audience was the fact that his name, in the strictest sense, was not John Force. His father was born Harold LaForce in Ohio. The French surname was abandoned by his parents when Harold was a boy, for reasons John does not know to this day. His father came out to California in the early 1930s and met his wife-to-be Betty Condit, who had relocated from Oklahoma with her eight sisters during the Dust Bowl exodus to Southern California in 1938. The couple met in the "Hooverville" section of downtown Los Angeles where the poor and unemployed were sheltered in tents, not unlike today’s homeless. They were married in 1940, and when John came into the world in 1949, the couple had already adopted a nomadic lifestyle.

"I consider myself a race car driver," Force said, "But my Dad led a life like one. Back in the late 1930 and 1940s there were very few truck drivers who had routes that would run the length of California. He was one of the few, maybe a half-dozen, who had one of those routes and that made him a hero. He’s pull into a truck stop with a load of lumber, and people would say things like "all right, there he is. There’s Willie.’ My dad’s nickname was Willie and he was known at almost every truck stop. When I was younger I’d tell people he hauled elephants for the Barnum and Bailey Circus, but in reality, he hauled hay. I was always BS-ing and conning —even as a little kid."

It was the truck driving that made the Forces so mobile. They kept a trailer in Bell Gardens and in the fall and winter lived down there and in the spring and summer, they lived in either Arcata or Klamath, California near the Oregon border. Usually when the work ran out up north, the Forces would head south. This back and forth movement created problems for John.

"One year I was in Bell Gardens in grade school," he remembered. "We had this class project where we’d color dinosaurs. Each week we had a series of dinosaurs and we’d color them and build this book. One day, my dad picks me up after school and says we’re going up north. I said something like ‘You don’t mean that. My whole life’s here This is where we live.’ My mother was all upset, but we had to go. I was the baby in my family. My brothers Walker, Tom and Louie, and my sister Cindy were all older and he told them they could do what they wanted. Then he hitched up the trailer to our ’56 Buick and off we went.

"I remember some years back when I was racing I wanted to see if I could get that book back and drove over to the school. I used to have dreams of dinosaurs chasing me through my living room when I was a kid, so I guess this was my way of dealing with that or whatever. Anyway, it was long gone."

Force had made it to the Fullerton stop on the quest for the forklift. After a few false stops, he pulled into a Commonwealth Avenue address. The driveway crossed between two rows of tired-looking, sooty old industrial shops that looked more like a lot of you-keep-the-key storage rental units. No one was home at the desired address, and Force was back on the cellular to Fedderly.

"What did the guy say to you?" inquired the slightly peeved Force. "Well, he’s not here now. Think he went to lunch? Oh, he did and said he’d be back at noon? He’s not here now. We’ll go on to B.G."

The trip led west on the 91 to the Firestone Boulevard off-ramp in the city of Norwalk, about three miles south of Bell Gardens and a mile east of Downey. Force detoured to Firestone because of the various points of interest, especially in Downey. The street played a large role in his development as a teenager.

Firestone is not a residential street but a business boulevard and it was here that Force went to school of another kind.

After looking for Paramount Chevrolet, where he worked as a counter boy (it had closed down years earlier), Foster’s Freeze (where he fried burgers and made cones), and Albertson’s Market (where he got his first credit card), Force showed off the Taco Bell restaurant, a major stop in his life.

"I used to work here when I was in high school," he said. "I’d go to school, then go to football practice for two hours and then come over here at 5 or 6 p.m. and work until 10 p.m. I was on my feet 12 to 15 hours a day. I worked my butt off there.

"I also came here when I didn’t feel like staying home at the trailer, and that was a lot. I’d come in here at night and tell stories and entertain my friends, and if they had a good time, they’d buy me dinner. I wasn’t poor, but a free meal is a free meal. This place used to have the fire pits in front of it wand when it got cold you could keep warm here. All kinds of things happened to me here. My senior class girlfriend got mad at me and took off her ring and threw it at me. hit me right in the eye and then it disappeared in one of the ire pits. Never did find it.

"Some of the guys I told stories about didn’t like what I had said. One of them would come up to me and say something like, ‘You said this and this about me!’ And I had only two ways to go. If the guy was a monster, I’d try and talk him out of it, and if not, we’d fight. I usually wound up getting in fights and getting beat up. I’ve always had the gift of gab, but sometimes it backfired. People didn’t go away laughing all the time, like that time at Taco Bell."

A mile west of the Taco Bell was Johnny’s formerly known as Harvey’s Broiler and one of the biggest car hangouts in the Los Angeles area. A line of cars a mile long would stretch down Firestone as kids from all over the area waited to get in to the restaurant or car service. The parking lot was a hub for the hot rodders and Force was part of this scene in the 1960s.

Editor’s Note: In the next installment, Force talks about his first street cars, funny cars, his father, and life as a teenager in Bell Gardens.