I was fourteen years old when I found an old article written in1964 about Art Arfons in an old copy of Readers Digest. I didn’t know anything about land speed racing back then but I must have read that article twenty times. There was a drawing of the Green Monster LSR car in the article and I couldn’t believe that this was the design of a 500 m.p.h. car. It looked like a beer can lying on its side with a wheel bolted to each of the four corners of it. Something changed in me right then and there as from that time on I was obsessed with the LSR.
     I started collecting articles, books and photos and built models of my own designs. I studied aerodynamics, mechanics, jet and rocket propulsion. I began to fly model rockets and rocket powered model cars as well. I haven’t changed a bit in over 38 years. The only difference is that as an adult I work on full sized vehicles.
     When I was 15 my father told me that he had heard on the radio that Art Arfons who I was always talking about was going to be running a jet car at the Great lakes Dragaway in Union Grove Wisconsin which was about 90 miles from our Chicago suburb town of Carpentersville Illinois. My father offered to take me as he knew that thrust powered cars were my only interest in life. It was the summer of 1971.
     Art was there with his Super Cyclops jet dragster. It was powered by a big General Electric  J-79 afterburning turbo jet engine. There were numerous other jet dragsters there but Art’s cars were usually the fastest jet cars. Although the other jet dragsters were comparable in speed to the nitro fueled dragsters running there at the time. The Super Cyclops was by far the fastest. It would sit on the line with the engine whining, throw smoke and then... Blam, it would roar down the track trailing twenty feet of flame and set a new track record for the jet cars.
     A  J-79 on afterburner was very different from the other jet dragsters as the others were all running J-34 or J-47 engines. The J-79 was much louder and made almost twice the power. The Super Cyclops looked like it was only half built as the entire engine was exposed and Art sat on the side of the engine in between the front and rear wheels of the left side. The body work was minimal. 

     I remember Art let my father shoot a few pictures of him as he put on his lucky leather jacket and his helmet. I still have those photos in an Art Arfons montage hanging in my living room. Then Art climbed into the Super Cyclops and set a new track record. In the process a chute prematurely deployed and was popped into the jet plume where it was instantly melted and splattered onto the dragstrip. Track maintenance crew had to scrape the nylon glob of goo off the track.
    During the 1970s and well into the early 1980s The Great Lakes Dragaway had two fantastic drag racing meets a year. One on Memorial Day which was called “The Olympics of Drag Racing” and the other on Labor Day called “The Jet, Turbine and Rocket Car Nationals.”  Both of these meets lasted an entire weekend and these were the greatest drag racing shows on Earth even to this day. All the legends of drag racing would run there. All the famous jet cars and their drivers would be there. Arfons and all his drivers, Doug Rose with his Green Mamba, Fred Sibley with his USA 1 just to name a few. All the famous rocket dragsters were there as well. There were even Turbonique powered contraptions and even a few rocket powered go carts ran there during the years. Pretty much if it was fast and ran the 1/4 mile it was there.
     The guy who would put on this extravaganza was a crazy promoter named “Broadway Bob” Metzler. I wonder if he is still alive as he was crazier than a bed bug back then. I have seen him sit on the nose of a jet car (Doug Rose’s Green Mamba) and ride it at a pretty good clip down the quarter mile. I guess as it was his track he could do what he wanted... right?
     I would ride my 90cc Yamaha street bike on side roads because it wasn’t fast enough for the freeway and it would take me about four hours to get there. At the time I didn’t even have a motorcycle license. One time I was stopped and put in jail in Algonquin Illinois for riding without a motorcycle license and being under age for driving on the road. I have been riding motorcycles for over 40 years now and I have never had a license. Maybe it is because I hate taking tests. I really have to get around to doing that some day.
     Rain or shine I would go twice a year that is until I moved west to California in 1984. In the mean time during the years Art Arfons had brought the rebuilt LSR car he had crashed at Bonneville in 1966 and made a few passes. He also brought a few smaller designs powered by the much smaller J-85 turbojet engine. Usually someone else like Roger Gustin or someone would drive those.

     By the early 1980s things were very different as the rocket dragsters had been banned from most of the drag racing organizations. Some simply were parked because they could not obtain fuel. The rocket dragster became relegated to the pages of history. At that time the nitro fueled wheel driven dragsters were faster than the jet dragsters and that has pretty much continued to this very day.
     Through the years I wrote Art Arfons and a few times he even wrote me back. His typewriter had a font that looked like incursive writing and I still have that letter. In that particular letter I had written I told him that I liked his Super Cyclops the best of all his designs I also shared with him some ideas for a rocket powered motorcycle streamliner with metal wheels which I was thinking about.
     He wrote back and told me he had crashed the Super Cyclops and that he was OK but a couple of other guys had been killed in the crash. He felt very bad about that. He also said the rocket powered motorcycle idea of mine was a neat one. He always sent me autographed pictures or brochures or something and I have made a kind of Art Arfons shrine montage that is also hanging in my living room, I also have an Arfons family montage which includes photos of vehicles built by Art’s brother Walt, Art’s nephew Craig and Art’s son Tim..
     I guess the motorcycle idea stuck with Art because in 1989 Kenny Lyons and I met him and his team out at Bonneville as he was shaking down Green Monster number 27. It was a J-85 powered motorcycle riding on metal wheels. It had some teething problems as it had an automatically controlled vertical fin on top of it that was hooked to a Cessna autopilot. It was supposed to rotate and counteract the torque of the jet’s turbine as the engine was throttled up or down in order to keep the two wheeler on its wheels. The only problem with it was that the fin was located behind the center of gravity where it would act more like a steering fin instead of a counter rotator and balance the bike.
    Art made a few runs and could not keep the bike centered and on it’s wheels. It had skids on retractable arms to help keep it upright but Art never could keep it on the wheels long enough to retract the skids. I suggested Art remove the counter rotator fin and eliminate it as a possibility of the instability. Kenny and I thought that the real problem was that the metal wheels didn’t generate self aligning torque (because they didn’t flex like a rubber tire does) which is essential in keeping a bike upright. I mentioned it to Art but I didn’t want to seem like a know it all so I just let it go.

     I know a few guys who are building motorcycle streamliners of all kinds with metal wheels. All I can tell you guys is that if those wheels don’t flex enough to develop self aligning torque you had better build your roll cage strong. As you are going to need it.
     Kenny and I went to lunch and when we came back Art was bolting thicker skids on to the bottom of his retractable skids and using plywood to shim them up. He was trying to get them closer to the ground so the rocking from side to side would be lessened. He asked Don Vesco what was the fastest speed Don had ever driven with the skids down and Don said it was nearly 300 m.p.h.
     I believe Art was planning to try to take the motorcycle streamliner record which was at that time held by Don Vesco in a Kawasaki powered liner at 318 m.p.h. When Kenny and I saw the skids being shimmed we looked at each other and said at the same time. “Lets get out to the five mile marker!” We wanted to get out there because we both knew Art was going to crash.
     We waited for the run and then after a long wait he came out of the distance toward our position. I could hear the jet running at a pretty good RPM and the thumping as the bike rocked over from one skid to the other. As he passed us he lit the afterburner and blasted away, thumping back and forth even faster. We watched and I guess Art was doing maybe 350 m.p.h. or so when the bike stood straight up like it wanted to launch itself. The precis moment of the turbine stood the entire bike up at 90 degrees from horizontal and it danced on its tail for a second or two. And then fell back on to the salt in a cloud of spray.
     Kenny Lyons said... “He’s dead... man!” as we both jumped into the rented car and chased after him. He was easy to find as his bike left long trails of red and green paint marks on the salt for a what seemed like a couple of miles as it slid it was rolling from side to side, We were chasing it at slightly over a hundred miles per hour when it came into view. It was lying on its side at the end of the streaks and was leaking hydraulic fluid. I was surprised as it looked like it was in pretty good shape considering it had just crashed at 350 m.p.h.
    Art was already out of the bike and was sitting on it. Kenny and I were the first people on the scene besides a couple of Art’s crew. Art was sitting on the bike combing his hair. I asked him if he was OK and he said he was fine. I asked him why he was combing his hair and he said it was because the reporters would be there in a few minutes.

     This wasn’t Art’s fastest crash as in 1966 he crashed his Green Monster LSR car at either 585 m.p.h. or 610 m.p.h. (The speed depends on who is telling the story) It doesn’t really matter as at over 500 m.p.h. all bets are off. What does it matter if you fall off a twenty or thirty story building? The end results are usually the same.
     In the 1966 crash I believe Art survived because he was situated at the center of gravity of the car and essentially the car tumbled and crashed around him. If he were in the nose or the tail of that car the hammer effect would have reduced him to pulp. You see even back in 1964 when he built that particular Green Monster, Art knew that. That is one of the reasons why he is in my mind the world’s greatest LSR designer bar none. People like Ackroyd, Ayers and I understand this. People like Breedlove and Fredericks and many others never got it. If you run a car long enough it will more than likely crash eventually. So build it to survive the inevitable.
     My good friend the famous writer Harvey Shapiro was with Art in1966 (I was ten years old at the time) and witnessed that horrible crash first hand. Harvey told me that he never wanted to see anything like that again. Everyone was sure Art was dead and when he was still alive no one could believe it.
     I was at Bonneville with Harvey Shapiro, Slick Gardner and Franklin Ratliff in 1990 when he brought the bike back but this time it was converted into a three wheeler. A production company was shooting a documentary about Art and he was there to try again to eclipse Richard Noble’s land speed record of 633 m.p.h... The production company mounted a camera inside the cockpit to give the viewer an idea of what the driver sees during his run. Nowadays this is old hat but back then it was cutting edge stuff. Tiny CDC cameras were new technology and this one was state of the art. It was about the size and shape of a lipstick.
     Art made a couple of passes during this session which was during either a USFRA meet or a BNI speed week. I really can’t remember which now. After his last run which I think was 300 plus m.p.h. we watched the tape and Wow! There was so much vibration on that thing I can’t see how anyone could have driven that thing. I looked over at Art and just knew he was going to hang up his spurs. Instead later that day he made an even faster run.
     This time when the film crew arrived Art said that he was done and would not run again. I was standing behind him when he told the world that he was through chasing the LSR. Jim Deist tried to talk him into making some more passes but Tim Arfons said “C’mon dad lets get out of here.” or something like that and they started loading the car up.

     The night before Art retired, Slick Gardner a rich rancher who had bought Art’s previous Green Monster LSR car and I were getting tanked up in a casino lounge. Harvey was giving me a hard time because I bought Slick a couple of drinks. Harvey said that Slick was a multimillionaire so he should be buying me drinks.
     Anyway the Arfons team walked in and by then we all had downed more than a few. Slick took me aside and asked me if I could fix the problems with the current Green Monster. Slick said that if I really could make it work he would offer to buy the car from Art. I said it would cost about 50 thousand dollars but I know I could get all the bugs out of that design. So he asked me if I would go over and offer Art $25,000.00 for his latest creation. Art laughed and told me that he had over $100.000.00 into her and wouldn’t consider any offer under $250.000.00. This started a one man auction between Art and Slick with me acting as the go between. It was all in fun but I think if Art would have sold that vehicle for $100,000.00. Slick would have bought it right then and there.
     Art told me that when he sold Slick his last LSR car which was J-79 powered Slick hired Art as a consultant to run the car after Gabelich’s 622 m.p.h. record. This was in 1978 I think or right around then. Art told me that Slick was terrified of the car and had Art turn the afterburner settings down so low that the engine would barely hold an afterburner flame. Even in this setting the Monster with Slick behind the wheel made a pass of 575m.p.h. during which it made a 90 degree right hand turn immediately after entering the measured mile timing lights at Bonneville.
     This car was fitted with a new design of Cragar wheels which resembled radial saw blades. They had little plates running around the outside edge, acting as a sort of keel to hold the wheels straight on the salt. When the then named “Anderson Pea Soup Monster” made its 90 degree turn the wheels cut the timing wires tripping the clocks. The clocks gave a false reading of 3,500 m.p.h. and change. According to Art, Slick demanded the timing slip but the timer wouldn’t give it up because it was wrong and they didn’t want Slick telling the world that he went 3,500 m.p.h!

     In 1987 I went to Buelton California to meet Slick Gardner and asked him about the story which Art had told me. Slick laughed and said it was all bull and he had the 3,500m.p.h.timing slip right there. We had a good laugh and he said that the Monster was just plain unstable and so he modified it by placing a large tail fin on it and having the wheels keel plates trimmed off.  He also said that he had made three runs over 600 m.p.h. and one run of 650 m.p.h. when he was at Bonneville. Is it true? There is no way of telling but it’s a funny story anyway isn’t it?
     They tell me Art Arfons was buried in his racing suit with wrenches in his hands and a jar of salt from the Bonneville salt flats was placed inside his coffin. I sent flowers with a card which said how he was my hero and stuff. I can’t remember what it said exactly now as I was really bummed as I ordered the flowers over the phone.
      In Harvey Shapiro’s book “Man Against the salt” in chapter 28 Art talks about me and he says.....” I like Waldo. He is personable and intense. The guy eats and sleeps land speed racing. I think his project is intriguing. But it’s too far out for me, and too dangerous......”
     After all the times Art cheated death in his machines it was a weak heart that finally laid him to rest. I will miss him as now the world is a different place without him and all I know is Art.... I was never related to you but your blood runs in my veins.
     Lastly, I met Evel Knievel in 1993. I actually waited in a line to get an autograph from him. Evel was sitting at a table at the SEMA show in Las Vegas with a line of fifty people waiting to meet him. When I reached the table I told him that I knew Robert Truax ( the man who had built Evel’s “Skycycle” which Evel used to jump the Snake river canyon) and that I was working on a rocket powered ice racer and blah....blah...blah. He looked up at me with a look that said. “ I really don’t give a crap pal....They are paying me to sit here and entertain you yahoos when I would much rather be somewhere else getting drunk or getting laid so save the bull and move aside.”  This is how he made me feel but what he actually said was “Now, who do I make this out to?” He wrote on a photo card.....”Waldo, Happy Landings, Evel Knievel. 93 “Then he looked over my shoulder at the person behind me and that was my cue to move aside.
     I will never forget his eyes as I feel that a person’s eyes can tell me everything about them. Evel’s eyes were lifeless and disconnected like those of a Shark. He looked right through me as if I didn’t matter. I thought to myself that even though I respect his achievements in life this guy is an absolute jerk.