Safe to say, my near 55-year infatuation with motorsports began here - Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway - or close by. I didn't know it at the time that there was a career for me in racing but I still thank my dad for taking me to the 1955 edition of the sports car races in Del Monte Forest.

It rained most of Sunday and I caught a healthy dose of poison oak from campfire smoke but I was hooked.

A year later, when Ernie McAfee's tragedy effectively ended the through-the-woods event, the concept of Laguna was born, thanks to civic open-mindedness along with a U.S. Army general willing to "lend" some of his Fort Ord reservation with race drivers and fans.
 

My enthusiasm was further stoked by my high school driver ed teach, Paul Morland, who competed in a home-built Porsche special that definitely looked way more "special" than Porsche.

I was fortunate enough to see the inaugural race in the fall of 1957 and the next summer's event before being carried off to the midwest to finish high school. Ironically, it wasn't long before I saw my first dirt modified race in Moberly, Mo. - and that probably sewed the seeds of (as some might say) going from sports car racing over into the then dark side of "taxi cab" competition.

But back to Laguna - and I returned to California in the fall of 1965 married - and couldn't wait to see the annual Monterey Grand Prix which, of course, morphed into the Canadian-American Challenge Series.

I watched John Cannon win a superbly driven rain race in 1967. A couple of years later - after I'd talked my way into a turn announcing "job" with the California Sports Car Club - I landed a guest shot at Laguna. The old course between what then was Turn 2 and Turn 4 is gone, along with the oak tree upon whose limb we perched to give fans what amounted to a unique words-eye view ot the Can-Am competition.

The thing I recall about that day - like this weekend - it was incredibly hot for the Monterey Peninsula. Drivers in those days toughed it out (at least the engines, for the most part, had gone mid-chassis). Ferrari had a somewhat ill-fated Can-Am entry that gave fans a repeat of the fabled Ferrari pit stop - the one that amounted to more motion and less service.
 

A willing crew member filled a bucket with water to toss on the driver. Unfortunately, his aim wasn't very good. He forgot to hold onto the handle when he tossed. The bucket broke the car's windscreen and they soldiered on.

Not too many years later, living in Bakersfield, Calif., I learned that stock car tracks actually paid people money to send out press releases and talk on mics. So that was the beginning of the end of my sports car career - the standing out on corners in all sorts of weather when the reward was a baloney sandwich and at the end of the day a beer bust.

I went to work for NASCAR in 1983 and have covered a variety of series since from coast to coast, into Canada, and to Australia and Japan.

Over the past 14 years, after creation of the NASCAR Craftsman (now Camping World) Truck Series, I've chased pickups, survived prostate cancer and a heart attack and now I find myself back at Laguna with the Grand-Am Rolex Series - my employers being good enough to vary my schedule so that I might add fewer air miles to the million and a half or so I've done over the past 25 years.

So here I am - back in Monterey. Some has changed. The media center is in the infield. The track hairpins back through the infield and around an actual lake. There's way more asphalt in the paddock than I remember. And - the porta-cans that supplied a great background under the tri-lon in the photo I shot of Cannon throwing rooster tails of water - are gone. Funny what you remember.

I also remember that an erstwhile media member (I had a column in a couple of Bakersfield papers for about 15 years) might or might not gain admittance to the deadline reporting area. The passes of those years had a myriad of different numbers, some we joked, wouldn't get you into the rest rooms.

Amazingly, I never got a ride around the track until yesterday. I know that as a 16-year-old I'd have figured that I'd died and gone to heaven.

The cars are different - but certainly as fast as they were in 1957 when some of the "tiddlers" were lucky to make the top of the hill. The KONI Grand Sport and Street Tuners handle better than most of the old production cars but certainly aren't as exotic (or exotic sounding) as the Alfa Romeos, Morgans, MGs, Austin Healeys and assorted one and two off vehicles that somehow found their way from Europe to the American shores.

It's been a fun ride, though, one which changed my outlook from provincial to eclectic. If it has wheels or wings, it's worthwhile. I've been to Indianapolis, Daytona, Talladega, Watkins Glen and points north, west and south - places I never dreamed I'd see when Laguna opened its gates for the first time in the summer of '57.

So I am the luckiest person in the world getting in on the ground floor and proving you can go home again.