The Lucy Baldridge of Drag Racing..........Silly Season seems to have heaved and ebbed in the coarse of a few weeks past the final So. Cal majors ( Bfield/Pomona). While the globe stops all activity (if you believe some of the marketing brahmans disguised as publishers 'round these parts..) to find out if 90-ish Wally Parks will do some weird 'last, defiant act' of selling the NPO roots off to Johnny Farce and the Sandtrap Interphew Arrghestra, I will continue to beat into the tarmac that this IS, REMAINS and perpetuates itself as a SPORT---as such, it has no direct life-support to any particular financial juice, does not find itself beholden and cannot, by nature, be co-opted. Drag racing started as match races between such as trains and horses....a tome' on the reputed roots of our sport in America was covered some months back in that edgy weekly LIFE magazine. Sorry, Wally; the quarter-mile started on the backlanes of major EAST coast towns like New Amserdam with equines side by side running for titles, cash and pride. Substitute cars, bikes, snomobileeez, Brotherhood Wheelchair races et al and as far back as the founding fathers. It's my sport; the NHRA is still a small part of it. Wally's contribution is as the Diplome' of it's 20th century aspects.