Week 41: Ford Mustang Funny Car

I almost did not finish writing this blog post. You may not finish reading it.

Diversions lie ahead.

See, the car for this week's Daddy's Tiny Cars is a Mustang funny car, and I know what a funny car is because of a book I read as a kid.

Sometime in the 1970s I had a book -- I'm not sure if it was only about funny cars, about different types of race cars, or even about all kinds of things that happened to include funny cars, I just remember it was a soft cover book club book, probably Scholastic.

I began searching online with descriptors such as "funny cars" "1970s" "Scholastic Book Club," etc. hoping I might against the odds find that book. What I wasn't prepared for was the full tilt onslaught of nostalgia to hit me.

The first site I stumbled on was 70s-child.blogspot.com. That site alone almost sunk this post.

Page upon page of 1970s memories - such a great site. King Vitaman cereal! Dynamite magazine! Mikey! Awesome! Now what was I doing...? Yes, writing a blog... Must...look...away.... must...do...research...

After having completely forgotten my blog post, I came back to the present and reluctantly left 70s-child and continued searching, only to find these book covers on a 2008 posting on Boing-boing. No funny cars, but don't you know I once owned  three of these four books! Spooky Magic Tricks! I practiced those!

And so it went. On to another blog called Scar Stuff (a reference to a waxy, putty stuff from my youth used to make fake scars), which had pictures of my favorite Scholastic book and record, the Georgie the Ghost books, which then led me to seek out Scholastic monster movie books, such as those found on Rue-morgue.com. 

One book after another, I had that "I remember that!" moment, each time moving farther and farther away from funny cars.

Yes, the same guy who wrote Clifford the Big Red Dog. Yep, I had it.

Site after site of great blogs featuring pictures and references from books from my childhood. This Flickr collection from Brent Cox featured a book called The Forgotten Door, which I had actually forgotten, at least the name of it. Man, I loved that story.

I had read a lot more than I had thought.

Some twenty or thirty sites later I wound up on the website for Ohio's Loganberry Books which features a Stump the Bookseller section. Instead of helping me with my funny car book, it became a trivia game as a read through questions to see if I remembered any of the books.

Lester del Rey's Runnaway Robot? I read that! Which got me thinking of other Lester del Rey sci-fi books I had checked out of the library, but couldn't remember. 

I HAD to look them up. I had to know. 

YES! Tunnel Through Time, Day of the Giants, The Infinite Worlds of Maybe, and so on. But alas, no funny car book.

My research was incomplete, the day was finished, my head was happily filled with 1970s illustrations and book covers, and I had unable to find the elusive book.

 In fact, I didn't even remember what my original theme was to have been. 

What I did remember, however, was the faceless traveler from the book below! 

My ramblings into youthful book memories don't do justice to the great photo of the funny car shot by Phil Pekarcik. You know that isn't even a diecast of a 1970s funny car! *sigh*