The lakes are a funny place. You could really call it, an equalizer. What I'm getting at is if you're a racer, you're a racer period. Nothing else matters. Who cares if you've got a million bucks or ten cents to your name, the common bond is the cars and going fast. This also goes for ethnicity. Back in the thirties and forties the world was a different place and lines were drawn everywhere except for maybe us weirdos. The first conversation I had on the subject was with the magnificent author Robert Genat. We were chatting about WWII and what happened to the Japanese, especially in Southern California and then we got into the Nisei racers at the lakes like Danny Sakai and Frank Morimoto. We then segwayed into Black racers and all we could think of was Mel Leighton's name. The first time I found his name was back in May '37, running a Riley 4-Port and that was before there was an S.C.T.A.  Seems he was on the S.C.T.A. Contest board in '40, in charge of the Hospital fund in '41 and after the war, Treasurer in '42, '45 and '46.  He also raced roundy-round cars.  I had a simular conversation with Richard Parks later, on about the lack of photos of minorities, especially blacks in our sport.  So guess what, fellow Sidewinder, Phil Dally came over this last weekend to do some bench racing and brought over some pictures he had just gotten and bam, there's a shot of a black Roadrunner named "Si" Westbrook.  He's in a Class C Roadster stuffed with a Merc V8 and equipped with Edelbrock go fast parts and a Winfield cam.  Seems on July 6, 1947 he turned 115.83 mph in his #120 '32, and he got photographed. The photo attached shows Si and his crew behind '46 Champ Randy Shinn in his #1 car.  To his right is Ak Miller's Deuce #115.  I also just got this great pre-war shot of Howard Wilson of the Low Flyers.  He is seen sitting on the front wheel of his Cragar-headed Gow Job on June 15, 1941. The car ran 88.23 mph on that day. On his right, in the white t-shirts are supposedly Jack Ingle and Phil Remington. Is the man on the left in the captain's hat Mel Leighton? If you don't know, Howard was the man who drove Stu Hilborn's lakester to a record speed of 150 mph in 1948.  Next to last but not least is an e-mail I got this weekend with a story about the Fageol "SuperSonic" Dream Car displayed at the 1949 Indy '500.'  Seems it started life in the Joel Thorne/Art Sparks race car shop in about '39 that created the Big and Little sixes that raced at Indy.  It was originally built to capture land speed records at Bonneville. Sometime in late '40 Thorne sold the almost finished car without Sparks knowledge for $2,500 because he had overspent his allowance and needed some quick pocket money to spend on the girls.  Go figure.  The lucky buyer was Lou Fageol.  It showed at Indy in '49 and then it was gone again.  See http://www.fageolsupersonic.com/virtual/fageolsupersonic/Default.aspx, for more of the story.  Last is a little teaser.  We aren't the only ones interested in LSR cars.  The East Germans built some racers in the early '50 and called them EMW's after taking over a BMW plant in Eisenach.  I've enclosed a shot of one of their little cars to drool at.  The company later changed its name and produced a car that some of you might have heard of, the Wartburg.

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Editor: Many of those mentioned by our President are prominent fixtures in the early SCTA, including Leighton, Sakai and Hilborn.  Dad's book on the early days will be out as soon as David and I can edit it and get it to the printer.  Sakai died in a crash and his funeral service was huge, as he was well loved.  Another Japanese/American racing family were the Oka brothers.  Yam Oka went back to Detroit to work in the defense plants during the war.  The internment camps along the West Coast were intended to house non-citizens of Japanese, German and Italian origins, although the government gave up trying to separate the groups on the East Coast after seeing how difficult that was on the West Coast.  Some areas developed a great deal of resentment and outright hatred towards the Issei, Nisei, Italians and Germans living in the United States during the war.  However, I never heard anything but compliments from my parents.  During the Great Depression and then World War II, Black/Americans suffered from prejudice as they left the South and found jobs in the North and West.  The bias was not always about their skin color, sometimes it was due to the fear that people had about losing their jobs to people who would work cheaper.  There were large groups of Russians, Jews, Armenians and other ethnic immigrants living in Los Angeles and they came in for their share of torment.  Mel Leighton was African/American and very active in the SCTA. Dad and Mel Leighton were very close friends.  Mel had a very salty tongue and his jokes and humor, especially about women, took some getting used to, according to my mother.  But Mel was everybody's friend and one of the most trustworthy and loyal person that you could ever meet.  He had a presence that made the other SCTA members respect him.  The SCTA elected and re-elected Mel to the office of Treasurer for nearly a decade and his accounting was never called into question.  One of Leighton's main achievements was the creation and continuation of the Hospital Fund.  He nagged and pleaded with the members to support the fund and protected the assets in the Hospital Fund when the General Fund was depleted and hungry eyes looked at the Hospital Fund as a way to get out of trouble.  My mother told me a story about Mel.  My father and Mel had been out conducting SCTA business in 1946 and stopped by the house afterwards.  My aunt Virginia was visiting my mother and my father said, "let's get a bite to eat and then we'll take Virginia home."  They stopped in at a favorite diner and the four of them ordered from the menu.  Some of the patrons began to glare at a black man sitting next to a white woman (my aunt), while my father and mother were sitting together on the other side of the booth.  One man got up and exclaimed in a loud voice that "it ain't right for whites and ******* to associate together."  My mother says that my father got up, towered over the man and told him to go back to his seat and leave them alone.  That was about the closest my father ever got to being threatening to anyone.  It certainly was not as bad on the West Coast as it was in the rest of the country.  Part of the reason is that the area attracted a lot of new people and they were learning that it was more important to judge a person on what they accomplished than what they looked like.  Mel was one of those early pioneers that have been largely forgotten, like the Cannon brothers, Art Tilton, Ed Adams, Thatcher Darwin, Randy Shinn, Nick DeFabrity, Bozzie Willis, Tiny Tyler and many more.  We have a great deal of work before us to bring these men and women back from the darkness of obscurity and show the world how important they were to our very existence.  The photos sent by Jim Miller can be seen at www.hotrodhotline.com.