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Like many of us I followed Dan's career in the '60's through Henry Manney and the pages of Road & Track magazine. In 1971 I entered my first Cal Club Regional race in a Formula Ford at Riverside Raceway as a preliminary race to the Can Am event. The $40 entry fee got me, the race car, and four friends into the paddock with the big cars. Probably slept in my driver's suit the night before.
So the day of the big event I'm standing in line to get a Coke at the garage area hamburger stand and the guy in front of me stepped back, right on top of my foot. He turned and apologized profusely. It was Dan. We spoke for a few minutes standing in line. He couldn't have been nicer and he wished me well as we parted ways.
We met again 25 years later when I was managing Buttonwillow Raceway and AAR was running the Toyota Indy Car team. Dan came up to watch the testing prior to the Long Beach Grand Prix and ended up in my office for a half hour reminiscing about the early days of sports car racing and how proud he was of the Cal Club for building their own race track. What a great moment.
What a lucky guy I was!
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