The Summer of '64

By Jim Hill
DRO file photos
8/27/04

Jack Chrisman at the 1964 U.S. Nationals, John Durand photo

Ed Iskenderian (right) checks the mixture

he calendar has once again accelerated and suddenly we’re only days away from the Labor Day weekend. For many this holiday means backyard barbeques with friends and family and the last weekend holiday of the summer. For drag racers and fans, Labor Day weekend means Indianapolis and the much anticipated weekend of the “Grand Daddy” of all drag racing events, the NHRA U.S. Nationals.

This year’s Nationals marks the 50th annual milestone gathering of acceleration hopheads. That’s 50 years of smoking tires, screaming engines and an annual drag racing bash that has never been topped.  Yes, Indy and The Nationals are indeed something special.

Without getting sentimental, it has now been 40 Labor Day weekends since I saw my first Nationals. The year was 1964. I was a 16-year-old kid still in high school. Somehow I convinced my parents that my time was better spent traveling to Indy than being present the first week of my senior year at Hialeah High, in Florida. I pressed, they relented and ready or not, I was headed for Indy!

Like a lot of other ‘60s hot rod-crazy kids, I belonged to a car club.  The Cabriolets Road Club was a place where other gearhead delinquents, young and old, gathered to swap stories and work on racecars. Our club was “in tight” with NHRA due largely to our president, Jerry Tyson.  Jerry was known inthose days as “Mr. Chrondek, East”.

Tyson’s dubious title came from his role as the official representative for Chrondek, the company that made the timing systems used by NHRA. Chrondek also built those first “Christmas Tree” handicap delay systems, the forerunner of today’s sophisticated CompuLink equipment.  Due to Jerry’s close ties to NHRA, The Cabriolets were invited to operate the timing clocks at The Nationals. We were “paid” with a complimentary motel room at the old Holiday Inn across from the Speedway and a box lunch, consumed while we toiled in the tight confines of the “D-A Speed Sport Oil” tower. We supplied our own transportation from Hialeah to Indy, usually car-pooling with other Cabriolets club members. 

Although we were volunteers, our lack of “salary” meant little and in fact, as part of this amazing event, we thought ourselves the richest individuals on earth. Besides a room and lunch we also received a couple of those much-coveted NHRA Nationals shirts. These garish looking, white cotton, short sleeved shirts had the Nationals logo silk screened on the back and on the front. Not only did they identify us as “working staff” members, they were a badge of honor for as long as you could keep them alive and wearable. We were some kind of cool, and we knew it.