Ah, the days when muscle cars raced

Published 6:10 pm Saturday, July 5, 2008

They moved west onto Freeborn County Road 17, also known as Conger Road, out of Albert Lea and into the sunset of a hot day in the summer of 1968. The muscle cars moved out slowly, carefully, by ones and twos. No one wanted the Sheriff’s Office to crash this party.

It was part of a post-World War II ritual, played out in thousands of places across America. All the kids in all the cars in all these towns and cities were headed to the same destination, a flat straight stretch of well-maintained road, a piece of countryside whose normal evening quiet was about to be shattered. Again.

Drag racing on Conger Road was as common as the fireflies whose tiny lights flashed in the background. West of Conger was an isolated two-mile stretch of asphalt ideally suited for this purpose. There was little traffic by late evening and what there was could be seen approaching from quite a distance.

Email newsletter signup

Noise was, and is, common to this rural area. The dull, throbbing roar of the farm tractors in the fields and the trucks hauling livestock to the giant packinghouse in Albert Lea were part of the rhythm of life. But their noise was dispersed over wide areas and usually ended by sunset.

The music of the muscle cars was different. Explosive, pulsating, urgent sound marked the universe of the dragsters. Every drag race began with a challenge, and in 1968 Albert Lea most such challenges began at a stoplight on downtown’s Broadway.

Read the full version of this story in the Sunday print edition of the Albert Lea Tribune.