"This is the picture that won the Leslie Lovett Memorial Photo Contest at the 1996 California Hot Rod Reunion. Jess Sturgeon was driving. It was Irwindale in 1967 or 68. You can see his eye behind the goggle. Notice that its not quite dark; you still see clouds in the sky. Unfortunately, you also see some guys legs in the background."

Because my dad's publicity duties for San Fernando Drag Strip in the 1950s and '60s included action photography, black-and-white pictures have been spread across my dining-room tables for 40 years. Indeed, one of the first racing smells I remember is not nitromethane, nor methanol (I started attending when the Fuel Ban was still in effect at 'Fernando); it's the tube of stinky pink goop that came with each package of Polaroid film.

Dave Senior used a Polaroid for three reasons: It was the only camera owned by the San Fernando Airport and Drag Strip Corporation; Dad had neither the time nor the darkroom in which to process negative film; and his pictures had to be mailed special delivery, along with his typewritten race report, by 10:00 Sunday night to make Drag News' inflexible Monday deadline. (The paper printed each Tuesday morning.) When I was 10 or 11, he'd let me stand beside him on the starting line and "fix" the images that would magically exit his camera and develop before our eyes. (If you failed to smear each Polaroid picture with goop, the image would streak or fade away.) In spite of his equipment handicap, Dad perfected his action photography to the point where hundreds of his Polaroids were published -- at least one of which was enlarged into a full-cover shot.

At age 52, Jere Alhadeff is content to display his art at Goodguys nostalgia races and the annual California Hot Rod Reunion, plus the occasional memorabilia show and swap meet.

Drag News and National Dragster were joined by several other weekly tabloids in the early and mid-Sixties, fueling the Golden Age of drag-racing journalism. Publishers needed lots of words and action photos to fill all those B & W pages every week. Ironically, editors did not ordinarily pay their hard-working contributors; rather, individual drag strips were expected to provide stories and pictures to the newspapers, in exchange for "free" national publicity. Longtime Drag News owner Doris Herbert is the person most responsible for instituting this publisher-friendly system, which endures to this day at National Dragster and some other publications. (The only occasions I remember Doris calling my house were those rare Tuesdays when her post office had failed to deliver a bulging results package for San Fernando or, later, Lions or OCIR.)

Consequently, anyone with a camera and a darkroom stood a decent chance of talking his way out to the starting line at any strip in the country. If you actually showed up every single week, and could print and deliver a half-dozen in-focus eight-by-tens to the drag rags by Monday morning, you might even become the official track photographer -- and receive a coveted jacket confirming this enviable position. A fortunate few would be paid enough by the promoter to offset the costs of film, lunch and darkroom chemicals. If you were extremely lucky, you'd sell an occasional print to a racer or, even better, to a manufacturer or advertising agency that needed a "hero" photo for an ad.

"Thats Caspary & Hampshire, first PDA race, at Lions. I was just shooting across the track, trying to get a nice side shot, when the car came out completely sideways, toward me, with the front wheels turned in the opposite direction. Jeep [Hampshire] is basically looking straight at me, which is probably 75 degrees from the way the tracks going. But he kept on going; he got it straightened out."

Alas, decades later, the whereabouts of these wonderful negatives are largely unknown. Many of the pioneer photographers grew weary of the weekly 24-hour grind and vanished as suddenly as they'd appeared. Others hung around for a few seasons before blending back into the bleachers, then fading away. Some actually figured out how to make fulltime careers out of drag-racing photojournalism, at least temporarily, only to ultimately abandon the sport for more-family-oriented weekends or occupations with shorter hours and longer dollars. Even among the handful of professionals who continue to shoot the drags, few have been able to preserve and/or effectively organize their thousands of old negatives. Divorces, relocations and natural disasters have all taken their toll on these fragile strips of film.

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