I sold the ’67 Camaro and was working as a trim carpenter for another good friend Fred Pope. Fred was a really sought after finish carpenter and we working for a couple of different builders on new houses. At the time I was making pretty good money but wanted to learn more about engineering to apply to drag racing so in the fall of 1976 I enrolled at Oklahoma State University in Mechanical Engineering Technology. I pretty much put racing on the shelf since I hardly had enough money to eat on. I graduated in May of 1979 and took a job with Amerada Hess in Seminole Texas. When I moved my ‘ole ’56 moved with me. I got married and adopted 2 wonderful daughters and still didn’t do any racing other than to go and watch and reading National Dragster.

I had tinkered with the ’56 from time to time and even had Roger Lamb build me a special set of disc brakes using the stock spindles. As time went on I decided that if I was going to get back into racing I was going to have a more modern chassis so I sold the ’56 to a guy in Queens, New York. If anybody know where this car is today I sure would like to get it back.

Another friend, Tommy Graham, who also worked at Amerada Hess was a drag racer and he really got me back into it. I decided to go to Dallas to the Super Chevy event in the summer of 1997 with the purpose of buying me a car to get back into racing. I looked around in the pits for cars for sale and spotted a Suncoast Beretta that looked pretty nice. I ended up making a deal on the car but the owner wouldn’t take a check with a bank letter so I ended up hiring a guy from work and he and his son went to Houston and got it for me.