When I first got to know them in Maine jalopies were all similar. A guy had a car no longer roadworthy, or found one sitting in somebody's field, and got it for nothing as that is all it was worth to the owner. Most were Fords. Some were Chevrolet and some Chrysler products with flatty sixes. The car was gutted and fenders and stuff cut off to lighten it up and motors were made to run. In the beginning they cost almost NO money, something Mainers at the time were very familiar with. There was no money to build racing engines, just mostly stock as they came in the car. But there was tons of "backyard engineering" all across the racing folks. Soon they separated into 6 and 8 cylinder classes. Again almost no money to do that and almost no rules, as Rett said above, very much to our liking. We ran a 1955 265 Chevy motor in our first venture. Factory stock like most all of them. Cars had cages built into them before racing. Around Maine we called that "piping up" the race car as all that pipe came from local dumps or other scrap piles. You could see that in some jobs as fancy corners in that work were not required. Not sure just how "safe" many of those cages were.
Unity, Maine Raceway, mid 1950's as I first saw it.
unity1 by
Nathan Pitts, on Flickr
And Sat night or Sun afternoon the racers went to the track. And along with the car came wives, parents, maybe grandparents now and then, siblings, friends and so on. In Maine racing in the late 50's was most definitely a family affair. For those who did not have a connection it was fun and entertaining and cost very little to get in. It was then a very common form of fun and it didn't cost much, to the racers or the fans.
One of the things about this aging process is that we look back with fond memories upon those earlier years. I miss those days very much. In some ways I think America was a lot better place back them, and families seemed to be lots stronger.
