Around 1965 Tim, Gary, and I got into the latest thing, which was building slot racecars from kits and racing them at slot car places. They had a place on Perkins Ave. in Sandusky to race them and we used to hitchhike there every Saturday with our slot cars for a Saturday afternoon of exciting racing and cool crashes.  As I recall it was located by the present NAPA store, which resides there now. This was good timing for us because it was about a year before we got our driver’s licenses and our own cars and it afforded us an outlet to vent our hormone-induced racing and crashing instincts in a safe manner at least then. My car was a green sports car with yellow decal numbers and Tim’s was a blue sports car too as seen in the below photo. He won an endurance race one Saturday and got that swell trophy! Gary’s car was the coolest in my opinion. It was a 57 Chevy as I recall and when he got it going full speed the hood would come up and tend to slow it down. It was cool though because when it crashed the car would roll and the hood would come open and look like a real car crash! I don’t recall if it ever occurred to him or us to secure the hood with tape or something, or maybe we all liked the cool crashes when the hood would open as it was rolling over. We used to take sand paper and rough up the silicone tires to gain more traction to help prevent spinouts on the curves. Even though the curves were banked, if you went too fast the cars would still spin out and crash. If you were really cool and had the money you could get “a rewind”. This consisted of one of the employees of the slot car track place replacing the wire in the electric slot car motor with a smaller diameter resulting in higher rpm’s and thus more speed. I always figured that was quite a big job since I had taken many small electric motors apart and knew there was a lot of wire wrapped around the armatures! To replace all that small copper wire with even smaller diameter must have taken a long time of continuous wrapping and plenty of patience! Certainly, I wouldn’t have had the neither the inclination nor patience to do it myself. You could tell the “rewind cars” because they would scream around the track almost at a blur! None of us had the money for a “rewind” after buying the kit and paying for the slot track race time. Some of the cars had nylon gears so they would just whisper around the track. When we wanted to drag race we would turn the hand transformer “accelerators all the way up to full scale while holding in the power “brake” button, then releasing it. On most the “rewind” cars this tactic would cause them the fishtail and spinout due to the higher rpm and torque. One of the neat things about this was that all the slot cars had a hinged front arm that had the contact and you could do “wheelies” which was really cool! We all had slot cars and tracks at home, but they were HO size and these cars and tracks were much larger and made things a little more realistic. All in all, it was a great place to spend a Saturday. Unfortunately, when we were finally 16 and had our own real cars, we gave up the “toy slot car” road and drag racing and spinouts and continued it with real cars! Now that I’ve come “full circle” I wonder if there is anyplace like that these days??? If there were, I’d love to build another kit car and race it (and maybe even this time get a “rewind”). Hey, just because I’m finally retired doesn’t mean I don’t like to live in “the fast lane” every now and then!