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The East Windsor Speedway is long gone now, shut down by noise complaints from the encroaching ‘burbs and then plowed over for more cookie cutter homes.\u00a0 It’s a pity, really.<\/p>\n
East Windsor always put on quite a show, but that 4th of July evening was a six sigma outlier on the right side of the bell curve.\u00a0 Stock car racing was first, then the 250cc class (love that smell!), then the big boys (including Nixon and Markel), then the main event (Evel Knievel!)…and it was all washed down with a 4th of July fireworks display that was as good as I had ever seen.\u00a0 That warm New Jersey night out started before the sun went down and finished around midnight. I think the cost to get in was something like $2.50.<\/p>\n
Evel Knievel was the highlight for me and I think for everyone else, too.\u00a0 Evel was just starting to get famous, and here he was in person.\u00a0 White leathers and a cape trimmed in red and blue on the 4th of July.\u00a0 (Gresh and I always wanted capes, but we had to wait 50 years<\/a> and go to China to get ours.)\u00a0 A Harley V-twin, with monstrous ramps set up on the infield (one for liftoff and one for landing), with a couple of Greyhounds in between (buses, that is…not the dogs).<\/p>\n The crowd fell silent as Evel revved the 750 Harley and then accelerated.\u00a0 But it wasn’t up the ramp.\u00a0 Nope, Evel (ever the showman) accelerated alongside the ramps and the buses when we all expected him to jump. Faked us out, he did. Then he looped around to start again.\u00a0 Ah, I get it, we all thought.\u00a0 That was just to gage his acceleration before hitting the ramps for real.\u00a0 The anticipation built.\u00a0 Thousands held their breath as Evel accelerated again, but he faked us out with another run alongside the ramps.\u00a0 Okay, all part of the show.\u00a0 A third time….maybe this would be it…but no, it was yet another tease.\u00a0 Back to the start point, more revving, and by now we were wise to the ways of Evel.\u00a0 We all thought it would be another feint.\u00a0 But nope, this was the real deal…up the ramp rapidly and suddenly there he was:\u00a0 Airborne Evel, sailing up and over the buses, suspended high in the evening air, and then back down on the landing ramp.\u00a0 He hit the brakes hard, struggling to stop before running out of room, the Harley’s rear end sashaying around like an exotic dancer in a room full of big tippers.<\/p>\n The crowd went nuts.\u00a0 A seismic cheer drowned out the mighty Milwaukee sound machine.\u00a0 We had seen Evel, the man and the motorcycle.\u00a0 Airborne and in person, flying over the buses that would have you leave the driving to them.\u00a0 It was awesome.<\/p>\n It all happened 55 years ago.\u00a0 Evel, my Dad, and the East Windsor Speedway have gone on to their reward and I’m officially a geezer drawing Social Security.\u00a0 But that evening?\u00a0 It will live in my memory forever.<\/p>\n Never miss an ExNotes blog…sign up for a free subscription here!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was the summer of 1966, I was a skinny little 15-year-old kid, my Dad owned a new Triumph Bonneville, and I was in hog heaven. \u00a0We were going to the motorcycle races.\u00a0\u00a0A big night out in those days was the East Windsor Speedway, a half-mile dirt track oval where they raced everything.\u00a0 Stock cars, … Continue reading “Evel Knievel and East Windsor”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12940,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[392,140],"tags":[2013,2012,2011,2010,158],"class_list":["post-12938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-back-in-the-day","category-vintage-motorcycle","tag-4th-of-jully","tag-dirt-track-motorcycle-racing","tag-east-windsor-speedway","tag-evel-knievel","tag-new-jersey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Untitled-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12938"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13009,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12938\/revisions\/13009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Evel1.jpg\")
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