Best thread on this board in years!
I was eight years old, probably racing on our Eldon set older brother Skip bought at Sears (I think), set up out in the garage. I spent the first $5 I ever had for a 1/32 Eldon Mustang (still have it), and never beat his Camaro (I don't think I have still beaten him, in 46 years of slot car racing). I remember he picked up a routed banked oval and later had it in that garage, but I never remember racing on it. I remember the "Gilligan's Island" style radio out there, with the Evil Kneviel/Harley red-white-and blue #1 painted on it, playing Top 40 hits like Bill Withers' "Aint No Sunshine", The Undisputed Truth's "Smiling Faces", and some James Taylor and Carole King thrown in, and hopefully a Charlie Daniels' "Uneasy Rider" or Commander Cody's "Hot Rod Lincoln" to lighten things up. My brother's 70 Camaro would have been in the driveway, soon to be joined by his and my dad's Bucket T street rods, an occasional dune buggy, rail dragster, kit car and even an old Trans Am racer at one point, and a few stock cars for the local race track (the last one of those in that driveway was my 66 Galaxie in 1987). Grates in the driveway let us conveniently pour the used oil right into the sewers.
Speaking of local short track, here's a pic of me around that time, leaning on Bobby Isaac's K & K Insurance Dodge Daytona, just after it set the world speed record, behind the grandstands of our local Louisville Fairgrounds Motor Speedway (eat your heart out for the purple hippie-flower britches, boys):
My 1964 Cadillac Coupe De Ville stock car (pictured in my avatar) or 1972 Buick Centurion race car were not housed in that same driveway, but my last race car (with me in it), the 66 Galaxie "Executioner II" (bearing the wounds of my last wreck in it) is parked in the same driveway and front on the same garage, about 15 years later:
The dawn of the Internet in the mid-90s opened the world to us, and even let us preserve globally our past, but in turn we lost the mystery of our worlds being defined by our neighborhoods and things that plopped into them from our mailboxes or touring shows, and we lost a lot of the wonder we enjoyed in those days.