Chet M. Ogorzalek's Street Drag Racers of the 60's is a vivid, firsthand account of teenage gearheads, roaring muscle cars, and the underground drag racing scene that defined a generation in Ludlow, Massachusetts.
Chet M. Ogorzalek is proud to announce the release of Street Drag Racers of the 60's, a memoir-style narrative that puts readers right in the driver's seat of an era when American muscle cars ruled the road and the quarter mile was king. The book is now available through ARPress and major booksellers nationwide. This is a story that car enthusiasts, nostalgia lovers, and anyone who grew up in that era will find hard to put down.
Street Drag Racers of the 60's follows a group of teenage boys from Ludlow, Massachusetts — Bill, Bob, Chet, Ted, Rick and Dan — who bonded over their shared obsession with horsepower, carburetors, and the thrill of street racing from 1963 to 1970. The story is rooted in real experience. Author Chet Ogorzalek was one of those gear heads, and he spent decades thinking about writing this book before finally putting the memories on paper. What started as conversations at cruise nights with his son, who shares the same love of old muscle cars, eventually grew into something much bigger — a vivid, honest look at what it meant to grow up car-crazy in a working-class New England town.
Spread across thirteen chapters, the book walks readers through everything from learning basic engine work on the family car to building a street-legal 427 big block Chevy from the ground up. Readers will follow Bill, the book's main character, as he teaches himself to do tune-ups, brake jobs, carburetor swaps, and valve adjustments — all while chasing bigger power and faster quarter-mile times. The story doesn't shy away from the harder parts of that era either, including the Vietnam draft pulling friends away one by one, the difficulty of making ends meet on a working-class budget, and the bittersweet moment when Bill has to sell his beloved 1962 Chevy Impala SS to pay for aviation school. The book also includes a remarkable final chapter in which the car resurfaces decades later — restored and valued at $125,000 — and Ogorzalek gets the chance to sit behind the wheel one more time.
About the Author
Chet M. Ogorzalek grew up in Ludlow, Massachusetts, where he spent his teenage years elbow-deep in engine bays, learning the trade from the ground up alongside a tight circle of like-minded friends. He went on to earn his airframe and powerplant certificate from East Coast Aero Technical School in Lexington, Massachusetts, taking his mechanical instincts from the street to the sky. After a full career, marriage, and raising a family, it was his son's love of old muscle cars that finally inspired him to write down the stories that had been rattling around in his head for more than fifty years. Ogorzalek still attends cruise nights in the area, and says he continues to be amazed by how many of those old cars have survived — and how well people have taken care of them.
