The Pinewood Derby

Back when my youngest son was a Boy Scout they used to have an annual event called the Pinewood Derby. This was basically a model car race. Not cool, sleek cars with shiny paint jobs and chrome wheels -- like Matchbox Cars. These were hand made (from kits), had wooden bodies, cheap wheels and were hand painted.

I looked up the word model in the dictionary and it said: model (n.) a smaller, cheaper imitation of the real thing. These cars fit that description. (I'm starting to rethink all the times my wife has called me a model husband.)

To be fair, the kits were pretty nice. They came in a box and everything. They consisted of a block of wood that was roughly car shaped and a wheel kit. The idea was to carve the car into a sporty or aerodynamic shape, don't f**k up the wheels, and then paint it some bright color. It was necessary to whittle some wood away because there was a weight limit on the cars so, as the theory went, since you had to hack part of the car off anyway, why not make it look sporty?

Also, this was supposed to be a Boy Scout project. Parents were not permitted to help. Which they were pretty good at not helping -- some of them actually did the project. You could tell because most of the entries looked like whittled down wooden car kits smeared with poster paint. But some of them... some of them looked like Matchbox Cars on steroids. There were '69 Camaros, Corvettes and street rods. They had custom lacquered finishes and rumor had it that they were drilled and leaded to meet the weight limit and to put the weight in the front end. They were beautiful. They were obviously not made by ten year olds. And they always won.

On race day the regular kids would take their turn placing their Franken-car at the starting position at the top of the curved ramp. The ramp was four lanes wide and the lanes were divided by wooden strips. It was about 15 feet long and had the curvy bumps found on water-slides. A gate would drop, four cars would begin rolling and the first one to pass the finish line at the bottom won. It was an elimination race done in heats.

I said the regular kids would just set their car at the top of the ramp and then run back to their friends. The cars built in Dad-troit were handled differently. These kids would carry the cars as if they were loaded with nitro. They would carefully position the cars in the center of their lane, micro-adjust them, look at their fathers for approval, look back at the cars again and then walk to their fathers' sides.

These cars were fast. The regular cars didn't stand a chance. And the scout leaders were in on it because the Daddy cars rarely faced each other until the final heats. As the race progressed the early losers wandered off to play among themselves and the room took on the charged atmosphere of back room gambling in a cheap gin joint. The fathers got bolder in cheering themselves and jeering their opponents. I swear I saw twenty dollar bills clenched in their fists.

The outcome was inevitable and the winners were predictable. Every year the kids got bigger, the parents fatter or grayer, the cars faster and sleeker. And the same "kids" won every year.

Which really pissed me off because I put a lot of time into those damn cars.