seacow
07-04-2010, 05:28 PM
What a great day is the annual 4th celebration. Every such day for 35 years I used to race and later spectate at Lodi Lake. It was real Americana. Community outdoors pancake breakfast, live dixieland music, throngs of spectators, fireworks over the lake at night and the best spectator course I have ever experienced, plus robust fields of alky boats to make the sweetest holiday symphony. The water fowl did not seem to mind. They came out and entertained between heats. It was always hot but those beautiful trees on that idyllic park grassy lake shore offered good shelter. Where else in CA other than Lodi and perhaps Oakland Estuary could a spectator be so close to the action that he/she could smell, hear and feel what it was like in the cockpit?
Lots of folks rooted for the champion and local hero - the Parsons FRR. There now stands a Parsons memorial on the lake shore kiosk but no more racing. The short course really tested driving skill. Also remembering Art Nunes from Newman CA; an antique of a man with his antique C alky OMCs with the hand crane hoist on his trailer. And how Ernie Rose made folks breathless as his BRR inboard porpoised, pranced and sped on the edge around that edgy tight-turn course.
So many good drivers were there, close-in from the surrounding central valley. The town had adequate food, shopping and other amenities including vineyards and of course the cereal plant was always silent witness to the regatta.
Lodi has become more successful than it was then. New homes, good shopping wineries and suburbanites. But it has come of a price: less farms, less rural valley folks and no boat racing. Never-the-less, God bless Lodi for having been a reliable and amenable host with a history of more than 60 years of our sport.
Going to and participating in that celebration of racing and the good old USA was always the best way I knew to to mark the day. Now I celebrate in part by recalling and reminding about one of the greatest, yet little-known pageants that tapped the vein of what is American Independence Day.
Lots of folks rooted for the champion and local hero - the Parsons FRR. There now stands a Parsons memorial on the lake shore kiosk but no more racing. The short course really tested driving skill. Also remembering Art Nunes from Newman CA; an antique of a man with his antique C alky OMCs with the hand crane hoist on his trailer. And how Ernie Rose made folks breathless as his BRR inboard porpoised, pranced and sped on the edge around that edgy tight-turn course.
So many good drivers were there, close-in from the surrounding central valley. The town had adequate food, shopping and other amenities including vineyards and of course the cereal plant was always silent witness to the regatta.
Lodi has become more successful than it was then. New homes, good shopping wineries and suburbanites. But it has come of a price: less farms, less rural valley folks and no boat racing. Never-the-less, God bless Lodi for having been a reliable and amenable host with a history of more than 60 years of our sport.
Going to and participating in that celebration of racing and the good old USA was always the best way I knew to to mark the day. Now I celebrate in part by recalling and reminding about one of the greatest, yet little-known pageants that tapped the vein of what is American Independence Day.