The Legend of the Socko Rocket Car...

At the time we made the trip to Reno in 1987, this Budweiser rocket car, the first land vehicle to go supersonic, was the kind of thing people imagined, when you said "rocket car." 

After a few months starting at the American Freestyle Association in 1987, under AFA owner Bob Morales, I got the job of driving the AFA van, pulling our new, 30 foot box trailer, up to Reno, Nevada.  There was a bike industry trade show up there for a few days, and Bob bought a booth to promote the AFA, and one of his side businesses with Todd Huffman, Mor Distributing, also had a booth.  The best, and most importantly, the cheapest, way of getting the booths to Reno, was to have me drive them up in the new box trailer. 

Bob had just bought the old 30 foot trailer from Gary Turner, the founder, and the "G.T." in GT Bikes.  Gary got into dragsters a few years earlier, when money started rolling in from GT.  He had started in his garage in the late 1970's, welding a BMX racing bike for his son.  Other people wanted bikes welded too, and GT Bikes was born.  The company grew, with business guy Rich Long handling that business side of things, while Gary led the shop and crew. 

When the company took off, Gary put money into drag racing, buying a top fuel dragster, I believe, like the ones you see at 15:40 in this clip.  Gary hired a driver, and bought a really stock looking, 30 foot long box trailer, to haul his car to the races.  After about three years, it was time to upgrade to a better trailer.  Gary asked around the BMX world, and Bob Morales was looking for a trailer to haul the AFA ramps and sound system to local contests at the time.  So we got Gary's old trailer for a good price.

That same year, 1987, Bob went looking for a larger sponsor for the AFA Masters series of national BMX freestyle contests.  Freestyle was growing in leaps and bounds, though there was little in the way of TV coverage then, there were six BMX racing and BMX freestyle magazines on newsstands nationwide.  That was 8 years before ESPN jumped on the action sports bandwagon with the X-Games. 

Somewhere, Bob ran into a couple of marketing guys looking to upgrade the name and image of a Gatorade-like sports drink called Super Socco.  It was marketed to little kids in soccer and traditional sports, and wasn't selling all that well.  They wanted find people to make Super Socco hip and cool, and popular.  But somehow they found the AFA and us freestylers instead.  Over a steak dinner at the exclusive Maxwell's restaurant at the Huntington Beach Pier, the two marketing guys, Bob, and me, threw potential new names for the drink around.  Somehow the name Socko got picked, and the drink was rebranded, and reformulated a bit.  I think it was all supposed to be incredibly cool, like this commercial for alcohol. 

Instead we got cases and cases of quart bottles of Socko, in three flavors, and my cute roommate (and manager of Bob and his mom's tanning salon) Jill, and her hotter friend Christine, became the Socko Girls, and handed out cups to anyone and everyone at AFA events all year.  Jill wound up in a phone sex ad in the back of Hustler magazine, buck naked and spread eagle, a few years later.  But that's another story. 

Anyhow, Bob had these huge Socko logo stickers made somewhere, 3 foot high by 4 feet wide, and we expertly applied them to the sides of the non-descript box trailer.  I had never towed a trailer for any distance before, but I learned quick, manning the classic, white AFA Ford van with the big trailer behind. I pulled that long trailer around Orange, L.A., and San Deigo counties, picking up ramps, taking them to get the Socko paint job, and driving to a couple local contests. 

For the trip up to Reno, Bob said he'd pay for a motel room, and a small food per diem, for me and whoever I wanted to go along to help drive.  The cool part was, we didn't really have anything to do all week, just wait, ride our bikes around Reno, and then drive the rig and trade show booths back. 

I got my riding buddy, and H.B. pier local, Mike Sarrail, and fellow freestyler Scott Robinson, to go on the trip.  They showed up one afternoon, and we got ready to load the trailer, and head out.   But in typical AFA fashion, Bob was busy doing something at the last minute, and we left Huntington Beach at about 4 pm.  We drove out, heading through L.A., right into rush hour traffic.  We drove into evening, got through the grapevine, and finally got moving at a decent pace.  The big trailer made the back end of the van sway back and forth.  I was really nervous driving it, but then I was really nervous doing just about everything back then.

We headed up the 395, through Sacramento, and up the 80 into the Sierra Nevada mountains.  It was just about dusk when I pulled off in the city of Auburn to get gas.  By that time, I was pretty used to pulling the big trailer.  But the gas station was packed with cars.  So I was trying to get the van close to the pump, without hitting anyone or anything with the trailer.  Some redneck in a big black pick-up cut in front of us, and I was pissed off.  I told Mike to jump in the driver's seat, and pull up the last ten feet- carefully- and I'd go pay for the gas inside.  The redneck gave me a dirty look as I walked in, because I had yelled something when he cut us off. 

I paid for the gas when I saw Mike pull the rig up to the pump, and I grabbed some drinks and snacks.  When I walked out a couple of minutes later, Mike was pumping gas, and the red neck had moved out of the way, around to the other side of the pump.  The same guy who mad-dogged me just minutes before, walked up and put his hand out.  "Hey man," he said, "I'm sorry about cutting you off,  I didn't know what you guys were hauling in there.  Good luck, man, I hope you guys break the record."  He jumped in his truck and took off.  I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.  I looked over at Mike, and he just smiled.  I set the drinks in the van, took over from Mike, and finished pumping the gas.  Scott came out with some more snacks, and hopped in, and I pulled the rig carefully out of the cramped gas station.

"What was that redneck guy talking about," I asked Mike, "he was like a whole different person when I walked out."  Mike smiled, "I told him that inside the trailer was the brand new Socko rocket car, and we were heading up to the Bonneville Salt Flats to try to break the world land speed record.  I also told him we had 750 gallons of jet fuel in drums, and if I hit his truck while trying to pull up, it might create a spark inside, ignite the jet fuel, and blow this whole gas station, and his pick-up, off the face of the Earth.  Suddenly he was cool as could be, and he pulled his truck around to the other pump."  Scott and I just started laughing. 

Good thinking on Mike's part.  For the next several months, every time I stopped for gas, someone always asked, "What you got in that big ol' trailer?"  The answer was the same, "I've got the Socko rocket car, and I'm heading up to Bonneville, where they're going to try and get that thing to 800 miles an hour."  I got into to some funny conversations, and I'm sure a few people checked the news later that week to see if we got the record.  The legend kept growing, and we added that the first car blew up, and this was the second (hand over my heart, "Rest in Peace Jim Bob for giving your life on that first attempt") and we kept adding to that story when hanging out and riding.  Old gas station owners would tell me they were going to say a prayer for Jim Bob, and stuff like, that as I walked out.  We had a whole long mythology of the history of the Socko rocket car by that fall. 

So that's the legend of the AFA box trailer and the Socko rocket car.  Now, as for Jill the Socko girl... she started hanging out with Tommy, the Huntington Beach coke dealer who lived near Beach and Ellis, and drove a black Corvette.  She started doing blow, partying too hard, "borrowing" a little money from the tanning salon, and...

I just started doing a blog for Marvin Davits, to help promote Marvin's dinghy davit business.  Check it out.