For the last month Attitude's CompetitionPlus.com has staged its War Stories Showdown. Three rounds ofierce combination has narrowed down to the two best story-tellers in the competition. Voting will be open until Thursday, January 21 at 8:00 PM, EST.

Here are the rules –

The field was seeded by reader vote. The participants are paired on the standard NHRA professional eliminations ladder. Each story represents an elimination run for the participant. The readers will judge each war story on the merits of (A) believability and (B) entertainment value. Please do not vote based on popularity. You are the judge and jury, so vote accordingly. Multiple votes from the same computer IP address will not be counted.

For the next three days we will settle the month-long debate as to who is the best.

Who will join Scotty Cannon (2007 - 2008), John Force (2008 - 2009) as the champion? You decide.

RACE COMPLETED: NO. 9 BILL DONER (51.41) DEF. NO. 3 PAT MUSI (48.59)

No. 9 Bill Doner  vs. No. 3. Pat Musi

NO. 9 QUALIFIER – BILL DONER

TO THIS POINT:
FIRST RD - (59.38) DEF. #8 TOMMY IVO (40.62)
SECOND RD - (62.26) DEF. #1 BILLY GLIDDEN (37.34)
SEMIS - (75.68) def. #5 RICKIE SMITH (24.32)

WAR STORIES CLAIM TO FAME – ONCE ESCAPED AN EVENT VIA HELICOPTER WITH RAYMOND BEADLE

TELLING THE STORY OF: LINDA AND THE OPEN, PART 2

And so it is now early Sunday morning, April 1973...not even daylight, but for those of you who were here for the first installment of this story, I spent the night on my office couch at Seattle International Raceway after a couple of lunatics brought Linda Lovelace, partially unclad, to my front door at 2:30 in the morning.

My wife found no humor in the situation and I didn’t think it would help to argue...so I bolted.

The employees began wandering in and I jumped into the office shower. Of course it was cold, but that’s probably what I needed with the Northwest National Open ready to fire.

I was informed by the Washington State Patrol that traffic was backed up a couple of miles on the Interstate, so we put together an emergency crew and opened the gates at 6 am, it was still dark outside.

The next couple of hours it was nothing but chaos with six lanes of traffic being pushed through ASAP.

By 10 am the track was probably two-thirds full and the first round of eliminations were still two hours away.

Then I was summoned to my office for a meeting with the race sponsors, an outfit named Skipper’s Fish and Chips.

In no uncertain terms the Skipper’s folks let me know they didn’t want to be associated with Linda Lovelace in any way, shape or form.

In fact, they wanted me to announce on the P A that Skipper’s had nothing to do with bringing Ms. Lovelace to the Northwest.  

These guys were hot!

I, naturally, fanned the flames by saying I wouldn’t announce anything of the sort.

And then it got worse.

The Olympia Brewing Company, which had just built me a super new tower at the starting line and had a hospitality suite on the top floor, informed me Linda was not to enter the tower at any point.

This time I had no choice but to say OK.

Those in the know, including the dozen or so pro drivers that had become part of Team Gulp, wanted to know how I was going to handle the Lovelace matter.

In fact, I had no idea as the pre-race ceremonies began. The Skipper himself, an old guy in one of those yellow fishing suits and a rain hat, went down the track waving to the fans and I thought that might take a little heat off.

But before I could finish announcing the Skipper and his family, here came Wild Bill Shrewsberry’s candy-striped  LA Dart wheelstander coming out of the staging lanes and there, of course, was Linda Lovelace standing out of the front of the car where the windshield should be.

Now I had no choice, Skipper’s no Skipper’s, to tell the crowd what was going on and the fans, of course, went nuts.

It was definitely a Kodak moment before there even such a thing as a Kodak moment.

My pal J Michael Kenyon was so excited at this point that he was doing wrestling flips on the starting line and landing flat on his back in the trick-traction compound.

What I haven’t told you, is that one lucky or unlucky member of Team Gulp was going to win a date with Ms. Lovelace following the race.

Things have changed a lot in the last 35 or so years, but not enough that having a date with the biggest porn start in the whole wide world, and at that time the only porn star anybody had ever heard of, simply wasn’t broadcast publicly.

It wasn’t in this case a very well kept secret and room 137 at the Jet Inn lay in readiness.  

This might be TMI (too much information).

Then it all began…dragsters, funny cars, the works dong side-by-side burnouts and engulfing the entire Kent alley with the sound, speed and fury of professional drag racing.

God it was a great show.

The Snake, The Mongoose, 240 Gordie, Ed The Ace, Jerry Ruth, Don Moody, Jim Bucher, Gary Beck...an absolute lineup of the who’s who of the sport at the time.

When the smoke had cleared and the 18,000 fans were trying to get out of the track, Moody with Wes Cerny tuning the car had won Top Fuel just as they had at virtually every race for the last year.

There was a picture of Cerny wearing the Skipper’s hat in the winner’s circle.

Funny car, of course, was a different matter.

Oregon’s Kenney Goodell was up against Ed “The Ace” McCulloch.

The crowd by that time had gone bonkers, knocking over the spectator fence lining the actual race track. If was bedlam.

As the staging lights were coming on, the crowd was all around the starting line and tripping the staging lights.

Before he could turn on the top two bulbs of the starting Christmas Tree, the red light came on in McCulloch’s lane.

Goodell, sensing the upset, left the line immediately. McCulloch, not knowing what to do, left moments later.

Naturally Goodell’s win light came on, but this being a Doner production, I decided to take an arbitrary and some say a capricious stand and declared McCulloch the winner due to his faster elapsed time.

Goodell stormed the tower and demanded to know how he “been cheated” out of the win.

I tried to explain, but he wasn’t having any of it. Then it dawned on me that if I paid him the same win money as McCulloch, he might calm down.  

It worked and for a moment or two there was calm.

But here came T. B. Smallwood, he along with J Michael being the guys by my house the previous evening thereby causing me to vacate the premises and unwind my marriage once again.

Smallwood was a world class rabble-rouser and screamed at me, “I’ve never seen a worse bunch of crap as that in my whole life.”

I threatened to kill him and just then here came The Ace wanted to know what was going on.

Those of you who know McCulloch, are aware that he was and probably still is, nobody to mess with.

Problem solved.

As to who got the date with Linda that night, I think it’s best to leave that alone.

I assure you it wasn’t me, although I did spend the night at the Jet Inn.

Just not in room 137.

Once again, as the credits roll it says:

Skipper’s Fish and Chips went out of business.

The Olympia Brewing Company went out of business.

T. B. Smallwood burned down his room at the Jet Inn that night after smoking some of the strongest hemp in the Northwest. He is no longer with us.

J Michael Kenyon is semi or maybe completely crippled from his starting line flips and lives in exile in Oregon.

Ed “The Ace” is the chief mechanic for Ron Capps’ funny car team.

Doner lives in La Quinta, Ca. with a lot of memories and a folder full of autographed Linda Lovelace photos.

Linda. Well, may she rest in peace!

The End

NO. 4 QUALIFIER – PAT MUSI
TO THIS POINT:
FIRST RD – (61.68) def. #14 Jim Rockstad (38.32)
SECOND RD - (50.4) def. #6 Gary Densham (49.6)
SEMIS - (53.93) def. #2 Louis Force (46.07)  

WAR STORIES CLAIM TO FAME – ONE OF NEW JERSEY’S HOLLYWOOD KNIGHTS

TELLING THE STORY OF: 30 WHITE CASTLE HAMBURGERS - $13.50, 2 – EX-LAX SPIKED CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKES - $11.75, SEEING A 350 LB MAN GET ON A PUBLIC BUS FILLED WITH IT ALL -- PRICELESS

Back in the 1980s, we used to have this fella that worked with us at the race engine shop, and he was a rather large guy – didn’t miss any meals if you get my drift. This guy was always hungry and always snacking and eating at the shop. He wasn’t shy about making his appetite the topic of conversations.

If you’re going to work in our shop, and never mind the fact, we are here in Jersey, there are times that you are going to get called out on any number of things, if you brag about it. And, if you hang around us long enough, we’ll prank you on something whether it’s snatching your pants down on the starting line of a race or handcuffing you naked in a hotel elevator.

To save our buddy further embarrassment, we’ll just call him Fat Albert.

Now Fat Albert was a good 350 pounds, maybe 400. In other words, this wasn’t some skinny guy.

So, one day, it’s after hours and we’re sitting around and Fat Albert is jawing about one thing or another…and in his case…it was food. Out of morbid curiosity I asked him how many White Castle hamburgers he could eat.

And, just as I had asked that question, it appeared to me this would be a great opportunity for one of our pranks.

“How many of those do you think you could eat?” I asked.

“I can eat 30 of them,” sayd Fat Albert.

To which I replied, “I bet you CAN’T eat 30 of them. $50 says you can’t.”

Well, Fat Albert accepted the challenge.

I grabbed one of the kids from the shop, gave him the money and pulled him off to the side before he left and gave him the following instructions.

“You get him the 30 White Castles and the two chocolate shakes and stop at the store, and get the powdered Ex-Lax. I want you to put enough in those milkshakes for 100 adult doses.”

The kid comes back, and our buddy Fat Albert has two things on his mind…that $50 and the food. I look over at the kid and he winks back, letting me know he’s “loaded” it up.

Fat Albert wasted no time in putting away those White Castles. He downed those things in record time, and sucked down the milkshakes and collected his $50.

Now Fat Albert lives far enough away that he can’t walk and he doesn’t have a car, so he takes the public bus.

We all bid our farewell as he walked out the shop, and I couldn’t help but think, “Man, this guy is a walking atomic bomb.”

So we don’t leave the shop, we’re sitting around waiting on the phone call because we know this is going to be good. Somehow, somewhere and this is in Carteret, someone will call us and let us know what happened.

I give him enough time to get home and I think up a reason to call Fat Albert’s house. The phone rings and rings, no answer.

Two hours later, I get a call from Fat Albert. He doesn’t sound healthy on the other end.

“Man, they want to know what you did to my food,” Fat Albert says.

So I fight back the urge to laugh and respond, “What are you talking about? Where are you at? I’ve been trying to call you.”

“The hospital wants to know what you put in my food,” he said.

I tried to play it off surprise, “What do you mean, why are you at the hospital?”

Fat Albert says, “You know what happened.”

So he begins to tell me, and this ain’t exactly the scene you want to be around.

It seems Fat Albert was on the bus when he felt a bit of discomfort and reached up for the handle to get off. As soon as he pulled the cable, it started going full force … both pant legs.

The little old lady behind him starts screaming, “He’s s*******, he s*******.

It was so bad, that bus driver pulled over and everyone got off the bus. I heard they had to end up fumigating that bus. But anyway, Fat Albert gets off the bus, lays down in the grass alongside the sidewalk.

As he’s telling me this story, it’s taking every ounce of energy I have to keep my composure.

“This s*** ain’t funny, they want to know what you did…they’re going to have to pump my stomach,” Fat Albert said.

I responded, “Man, you ate 30 White Castles…if that won’t clean you out, I don’t know what will.”

So this is Jersey and August, he’s laid out on the ground and the stench was so bad I heard that the EMTs were arguing over who was going to tend to him. He was a mess and had a mess. They didn’t even want to put him in the ambulance.

Ole Fat Albert didn’t come back to work for about 3 weeks and although we didn’t cop to anything, he swears we did something to his food.

We’re still pulling pranks to this day, just ask Tony Christian, but after that episode, we decided to take Ex-Lax out of our arsenal…we just caught too much s*** over the last one.

{Voting Completed}

Your vote determines this year's champion.

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