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Photo courtesy of the Bob Metzler Collection.
We’re torn between emotional responses here: Sorrow that Broadway Bob, one of drag racing’s most genuine and bighearted good guys, has left us for good; or amazement that he managed to actually clock 83 years on this earth. After all, Broadway Bob not only understood risk, but embraced it gleefully. He invested in the highly unstable business of running his own dragstrip in 1955. His track, Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wisconsin, ultimately became one of sport’s landmarks.
A major part of the reason why was Broadway Bob himself. Put plainly, he was crazy. A good kind of crazy, in the sense that he lived life at zeppelin proportions, dangerously, but crazy nevertheless. A good case study comes from the hijinks that got Broadway Bob inducted into the Jet Car Hall of Fame: He not only expressed his love for them by constantly booking them at Union Grove, but also climbed astride the nose cones of jet cars literally hundreds of times, wearing a crushed-velvet tux or a tie-dyed T-shirt, swilling a Bud while the jet pilot boomed the afterburner and then rolled off with flames boiling. Broadway Bob was definitely our kind of guy. We’re grateful for his life and we will miss him greatly.
