[ INTERNET GEEK ] [ DISK JOCKEY ] [ TOY CAR RACER ]  [ REAL CAR RACER ] [ OTHER BORING STUFF ]

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As if anyone really wanted t know right? But, just in case you have nothing better to do today than to read about me, here is a brief piece which I may feel the need to elaborate on as time continues. By the way, vanity prevents me from using a current picture. This is how I wish to be remembered. Not old, fat and grey. :-)

INTERNET GEEK: I wound up in the internet business in 1997 when I decided to place my "Scale Auto Racing News" magazine online, and had quite a bit of trouble with my local ISP. They didn't know how to work with my Macintosh computers, so I decided to show them that an all Macintosh operation on the internet was possible. After checking out what it would take to bring my own T1 line to the Ford Publishing offices, I found it was affordable and within a few short months, I was in business as the 3rd ISP in the Aransas Pass, Ingleside, Rockport, Texas area. In a very short time, the provider that told me they couldn't work with Macintosh computers was out of business. This made me happy, and our growth was phenomenal, but I never thought that 3 years later, the 2 Fords Network would be the largest independantly owned internet provider in the entire Coastal Bend. Between 1997 and 2000, we made over a million dollars during the very lucrative years as internet providers. Of course, with broadband competition like DSL from the local phone company and cable internet from the local cable company, the lucrative years for a dial up internet providers are over now. The good news is that with the National exposure of our magazine, "Scale Auto Racing News" we have expanded outside the South Texas area with the NATIONAL SLOT CAR NETWORK, and sell our internet service all over the United States. If you have nothing better to do,.... read on!

DISK JOCKEY: From a very early age, some of my fondest memories were from sitting and listening to the radio. This was long before Television, and every saturday morning, you couldn't get me away from the wonderful stories coming out of that little box. I decided right then and there that I was going to make my living working inside that little box. My main profession was to always be a broadcaster. I spent 35 years in the radio and TV industry. I started out at the age of 15 as a helper to a local disk jocky in Fort Worth, Texas and went on to major in Radio and Television Broadcasting at Texas Christian University. I earned a First Class License and was not only a disk jockey, but also the Chief Engineer at many radio stations I worked at. As "Johnny Dark", I worked at a ton of small radio stations in small towns in Texas until I became good enough to hit the "big" markets. I worked for nearly all the top radio stations in Texas as well as in Oklahoma City and Chicago. I never left the midwest though, and in the late 70's, I finally put "Johnny Dark" in a different box and let my alter ego stay there. My favorite saying as a disk jockey was "It's Dark in the Daytime". Pretty lame when I think about it. By 1979, it was time to move on to other things.

TOY CAR RACER: I started out racing rail type model cars back in 1957. I had battery powered cars that followed one rail of my destroyed Lionel train track. The bodies were mostly carved out of Balsa wood, although when plastic kits came on the scene, I tried my hand at fitting them to the crude chassis. To me, it didn't matter what it looked like underneath as long as it looked good running around the track. About 1959 I discovered Action Speedway in Dallas, owned by a really neat old German guy named Mr. Clinkenbeard. We all called him "Mr. Clink". His place had the first "slot" car track I had ever seen. It was great! The cars could slide around the corners almost like real cars. Of course, in the years to follow, the Fort Worth, Dallas area literally boomed with slot car racing centers and since I had my drivers license and an old 1949 Chevy we all called the "Black Rat", I was the public transportation for all my slot racing buddies. In 1965 I left the DFW area to take a job as an afternoon "drive time" disk jockey in the town of Temple, Texas. They had no slot racing center. I fixed that problem right away, opening my first commercial raceway which I called "Temple Model Raceway". Along the way while working in various locations in the broadcasting industry, I would open a raceway if the town didn't have one. I have owned a total of 15 Slot Car Racing Centers including the ill fated partnership to keep Action Raceway in Ft. Worth, Texas afloat. Each raceway was always successful and when I had to move, or was transferred to another radio or TV station, I would simply sell the raceway to one of my customers rather than shut it down. With my divorce from my first wife came a move back to Fort Worth, Texas to be near my two children. In 1977 there was no commercial slot car raceway in Fort Worth. It was driving me nuts and in 1978, my girlfriend Linda Short said she was tired of my complaints and suggested that I open another "place to play with my toys" in an empty building down the street from where I lived. What a great idea! I decided to ask her to marry me. She said yes and we've been the "2 Fords" ever since. I revived the American Slot Car Track company in 1978 and Linda and I travelled around the area buying up old tracks in storage and selling them at a profit. I wanted to tell people about what we were doing, but there was not a magazine to place ads in. No way to get the word out that we were rebuilding old tracks and helping people start their own model car racing centers. At the time, Linda worked at Hart Hanks Publishing in Dallas. She convinced me that we could do a magazine about slot racing and then we would have a place to tell about our "New American Tracks". So, in December of 1979, we put out our first issue of Scale Auto Racing News. It was in magazine format, on newsprint paper and sold for 25¢. The cover featured the late Randal Webb, a popular slot racer from Dallas. It was shipped to some 30 raceways which was all I could find that existed, and 25 years later it is distributed to over 500 raceways World Wide. My New American Tracks was also successful. Between 1980 and 1997 we built over 600 slot car tracks and held many World and National records. The way every modern day slot track looks is because of my original design back in the late 70's. Instead of the bulky tracks we were all accustomed to, I designed a much lighter weight track piece which had no bottom floor, and sides which were narrow and flowed with the surface of the tracks. With the legs painted black, I envisioned the illusion that the track would actually be levitating off the floor. In the proper light, the effect still works. Hasse Nilsson and I built the very first "New" American King track in a raceway of mine in San Antonio, Texas. (Alamo Grand Prix) This new method of building was also much faster, and meant that only two people could set up a track in less than two weeks from bare wood to finished product. Hasse and I travelled all over the United States building this type of track for many years. Hasse would build the track from the ground up in about 10 days, and then I or one of my workers would show up and do the painting, braiding, and wiring. Somewhere here, I have to give credit to Casaba Ziglehidi (Chubba) of Chicago who is the first one to come up with the triangle designed legs we all use today. Before that, we used square pieces to make up the legs and Chubba showed Hasse how to make the same concept with fewer cuts of the saw. It looked better too. At this same time, there was another development in the way we routed the slots. In all original American Tracks, a perfect radius was cut for all the slots in the turns. Using a jig that was originally designed for me to re-rout the donut of an American Imperial (Red) track, we found that the turns were more "elliptical" than perfectly round. This was not the reason for the original design of the first jig. I just wanted something that would follow the sides of the Red track donut and give me a clean cut without having to dis-assemble the track to do it. The jig was simple. It had cabinet wheels at one end and the router at the other. The router would be adjusted so that it would fit into the slot at the entrance and exit of the donut and the wheels would follow the inside edge of the sides of the track. Several years later, we found that this was the best way to rout the first slot on a fully assembled track. We hung the wheels off the edge and let them follow the outside edge of the track while the router cut the first slot. Subsequent slots were cut using pins to follow the previous slot. To the best of my knowledge, every slot track built today is build using this method. I guess I am most proud of my New American Slot Tracks company most of all. It was very gratifying to know that I had a factory with a dozen guys cranking out as many as 5 tracks a week. I made video tapes of the operation just to remind me of how big it really was. I credit it's success to the ability of having a place to advertise. I truly believe you can make anything popular with proper advertising and American Tracks always ran full page ads and placed stories of where Hasse and I had been with pictures of happy racers and happy raceway owners all having fun on American Tracks. Hasse went off on his own for several years and our factory continued. He later came back and used our factory to build tracks in but health problems caused him to return to Sweden where he is now living and building tracks all over Europe. With Hasse's leaving, I closed American Tracks. My own health problems prevented me from building tracks any longer, and the time was right for the "second" ending of a slot racing legend. American Slot Car Tracks.

REAL CAR RACER: I have raced real cars for many years. I started out by drag racing my old 1949 Chevy coupe with a hopped up 6 cylinder with 3 one barrel carbs and a home made exaust system. My first "real" drag car was a 1958 Corvette which had a de-stroked 283 with Hilborn injectors and a beefed up powerglide tranny. The sound of that engine could break windows just before shifting into high gear in the Powerglide two speed transmission. In 1965 I special ordered a Pontiac GTO with a dealer installed 421 with two four barrels and a Hurst 4 speed. I raced it for about 4 years and it was always my favorite. Tons of fun to drive. Also fun, but a bit scarey was my blown and injected hemi powered 1932 Bantam, 97 inch wheelbase altered which could easily break the 200 mile per hour barrier. Did I mention it was scary? I have also owned several circle track racers. A modified quarter mile oval car I raced in Fort Worth, and a World of Outlaw Sprint car I had when I was in San Antonio. I still love racing the model cars though. I can whack the wall and it doesn't hurt nearly so much.

OTHER BORING STUFF: Are you still here? Man, you really didn't have anything to do today did you? Linda and I have been married since 1978, and I have two children by my first wife (Barbara) and 3 grandchildren, Britania, Scotland and Holland. My son and his first wife (Deedee) had a thing for naming their children by countries. My daughter, Jaina, galavants all over the World doing various things for a travel agency owned by her mom, and says to tell you she is still available to the right guy! My son, John Jr., owns a recording studio and among other things has just gotten married for the 2nd time. Her name is Cassandra, and she has two children by a former marriage and now a new one Sophia, making me once again, a Grandfather. Aside from doing Scale Auto Racing News, I am also a "Webmaster" and you can see a list of the websites I have done by clicking here. Since being married to Linda, we have lived in Fort Worth, San Antonio, Aransas Pass (Near Corpus Christi), Alice which is located between Corpus and San Antonio, once again in Fort Worth, and fianlly, in our place of retirement, on the east side of a mountain outside the town of Malvern, Arkansas about a mile off Interstate 30. About 20 minutes south of Hot Springs, 30 minutes west of LIttle Rock, and 1.5 hours east of Texarkana. (Can't get too far from Texs you know.). Arkansas only had one raceway in it when I came, but that has already changed. We are helping with the construction of a new place called DeeCee's Raceway located about an hour from our new home.
Since others have asked me about the little toilet I use for my "Notes" logo, I'll wind things up by telling that story and keep it brief. When I started doing the magazine I had to learn to write things to be read, instead of writing things to be said. A good friend who is a writer of stories told me something I always remembered. He said, "You should not write anything longer than it will take to read in one good 'sitting'". So with my name connection to the device he was speaking of, and those words of wisdom, I chose the little white crane convience as my logo. ;-)