Well, it's Passover of course, and I've been was waiting as y'all inexplicably passed over someone who I figured would be all but immediately memorialized. And that eventual poster being someone, ANYONE less anti-speed, anti-racing, anti-all-things-fast-cars-and-the-like than I decidedly am, but no one led the way.

Breedlove died of old age on Tuesday, April 4th, unlike Donald Campbell (crashed 1967) and Jessi Combs (crashed 2019).

I remember both Breedlove as well as his rival, the murdered Mickey Thompson (though Breedlove was never a suspect!) during the '60s, because they had deals with Aurora and Revell for scale-model kits of their record-setting cars.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
==================https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Breedlove

Don't know if thess links will work--images URLs tend to get garbled, to my perplexed experience--but this should be a photo of the Revell kit for the four-engine Challenger driven by eventual double-murder-victim (along with his wife, in their driveway by agents of an angry business partner) Mickey Thompson.

Another link is for an off-brand company's model kit version of one of the various later iterations of Breedlove's Spirit of America.
============STYBLE/Florida
-----------------------------------
https://www.ebay.com/itm/394458655032?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&mkscid=101&itemid=394458655032&targetid=1264870804984&device=c&mktype=&googleloc=9011973&poi=&campaignid=14859008593&mkgroupid=130497710760&rlsatarget=pla-1264870804984&abcId=9300678&merchantid=6296724&gclid=CjwKCAjw586hBhBrEiwAQYEnHYjP_GLU9CMH46ReMxNxEpibIPurL2d0xiXoL47SINppCxkS_CE74BoCP-IQAvD_BwE
-------------------------------
q=model+kit+Spirit+of+America+Craig+Breedlove&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiI_YeR35_-AhUTcjABHe2sAwAQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=model+kit+Spirit+of+America+Craig+Breedlove&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoECCMQJzoFCAAQgAQ6BAgAEB46BggAEAgQHjoHCCMQ6gIQJzoHCAAQigUQQzoICAAQgAQQsQM6CggAEIoFELEDEENQwwpYurIBYKC5AWgGcAB4AYAB9QOIAd5NkgEJMjYuNjUuNS0xmAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWewAQrAAQE&sclient=img&ei=iDo0ZIiZEZPkwbkP7dkO&bih=1284&biw=2412#imgrc=M-yFhBuOLKOARM

Here's another try at that built-from-a-kit model Spirit of America car piloted by the late Craig Breedlove.

STYBLE/Florida
=============
https://www.ebay.com/itm/165983559708
========

For those unfamiliar with the above-referenced sad demise of Craig Breedlove rival Mickey Thompson and his wife at the hands of masked gunmen, the unfortunate facts are chronicled in the link below.

STYBLE/Florida
=============
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Thompson

This "Wildest Ride" documentary has a lot of classic Craig Breedlove record-run footage, plus the infamous Spirit of America nose-down-in-the-salt-water crash (though for some reason the precise date for that isn't in here, unless I missed it; ABC Wide World of Sports covered it too, though that, uh, widened the definition of "sports").

Breedlove's boyish exuberance following the crash was more than understandable and unprofessional; who wouldn't feel elated after emerging unscathed from that?

STYBLE/Florida
============https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CF2JVqN8e0

This additional Craig Breedlove doc linked below from Speed Channel may be WAY too slipshod with factuality--for instance, Eisenhower was NOT the eldest-elected President until 1953; Andrew Jackson was, as anyone who paid attention in middle-school history should remember--but it DOES provide a much more personal view of Breedlove's death-defying career than does "The Wildest Ride", which those who watched it saw is focussed on that one disastrous and near-fatal Salt Flats run.

And this Speed Channel treatment discloses a glorious fact that I was somehow unaware of all through all my years (1981-88 and 1991) being a proud-YET-unmonied resident of upscale West Los Angeles: that Breedlove's far-sighted parents back in the late 1940s selected Mar Vista of all L.A. neighborhoods as their (and their death-defying son's) family homestead and future hot-rod garage for what would eventually turn out to be the Spirit(s) of America assembly spot.

And yep, I am HUGELY biased here, as my Mar Vista move utterly transfigured my own obscure life. For it was barely a year after my summer 1980 "goin' Hollywood" relocation following my 1978 biggest-mistake-in-life-yet Houston sojourn that I stumbled onto Mar Vista (and its then-almost-secret status as the last affordable west-of-the-San Diego-Freeway sector of L.A.), thusly allowing newly-struggling-in-La-La-Land types like me (that is, always broke yet still somehow middle-class) to insinuate ourselves [though me only managing onto still rowdy Pacific Avenue at Centinella/Bundy] into the otherwise-quite-affluent-(and-gratifyingly-Jewish) West Side professional and society culture. (Just HOW life-upgrading for me? Well, barely a year later, (1) my Metro traffic reports were heard over some two dozen SoCal radio stations*; (2) I was madly in love with a Jewish attorney from a media-successful family and (3) working for a series of Jewish attorneys who would welcome me into a well-paying day-job career (as well as soon enough disabusing me of what little religious faith I still then harbored). Not to mention then residing but a five-minute all-but-daily drive-by southeast of Mr. Inscrutable's combination rehearsal hall/business headquarters/world-touring base/professional hangout.

Thus one can readily see why I so cherish those Mar Vista years of my life.

So Favorite Son of Mar Vista, the usually-smilin' Craig Breedlove, I can't honestly say that approved of your lifelong love of Breed--I meant SPEED!--but I WAS elated to learn your earnest-if-dangerous planetwide-publicized activities helped put modest but marvelous Mar Vista on the national map.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
_______________________
* And delighted--if positively STARTLED!--to learn whilst hanging with the celebrated recording artist in Santa Monica after a gig by The Clash and Los Lobos in late January 1984 at the Civic Auditorium--that often the basketball-tuning audience included a certain hoops-fan radio listener of Lakers-flagship-station KLAC at 570 kHz** who was none other than that tuneful future Nobel lit laureate HIMSELF***.
** Where I was privileged to serve as Metro's "Laker's Line" traffic reporter under the tutelage of NBA Hall of Fame broadcaster Chick Hearn.
*** Yep, so fate would unfold such that NOT MERELY had little ol' ME listened to HIM back in suburban St. Louis via AM radio (starting in 1966, though by 1971 I would pretty much hear his roughhewn, much-underappreciated voice almost exclusively over FM music-playing broadcasts rather than AM-band info-dispensing programming), but improbably enough, so would HE also hear MY voice via Los Angeles AM radio (starting in 1983). And that eventual Nobel Lit Laureate with the funny nose, the funnier hair and funniest voice still rocks on, for (1) tonight at age 81 (but "tomorrow" night over the dateline in Japan) closes out a three-concert Tokyo residency; (2) turns 82 late next month; (3) and whose most recent Neverending Tour performance featured his FIRST-EVER public performance over a six-decades-and-counting career of his sometime backing band's The Grateful Dead's signature tune "Truckin' ", inexplicably enough. (Or just maybe QUITE explicably, as Rock's Rasputin has been truckin' along with an electric guitar strapped over his right shoulder ever since 1956 up in decidedly desolate**** Hibbing, Minnesota....though Wednesday night's rendition in Japan of the catchy classic penned by Robert Hunter with Jerry Garcia was accompanied on a baby-grand piano, NOT a Stratocaster, Telecaster or Les Paul Signature--six-stringed instruments which The Neverending Tour musician's reported arthritis, alas, severely limits his employment of these days.)
**** Though there is ZERO evidence he was thinking of his Gopher State hometown when composing the 11-minute tune which constitutes the tenth and final track of "Highway 61 Revisited".
=========================================https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOAJadgCmn8