From the August 1995 Issue of Car and Driver

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In the winter of 1961, without much fanfare, Chevrolet introduced a V-8 model with an engine of considerable proportion: 409 cubic inches. That February, a Southern California drag racer named “Dyno” Don Nicholson entered a 409 Impala at the Pomona Winternationals and promptly chewed up the entire field.

About 1500 miles to the north in far away Canada, the news would have a life-changing impact on a young mechanic who owned a small shop in Calgary. Dale Armstrong was only 20, but until the 409 Impala turned up he’d been a staunch Ford and Olds man. Now Armstrong had to have an Impala 409, though he knew he couldn’t buy one from the meager revenues of his repair shop. And he certainly couldn’t afford the $3378 price of the 409 with the Super Sport package—a model then so rare that few auto buffs even knew it existed.

A quarter century later, Armstrong would finally acquire the keys to what may be the first SS409 ever built. The wait cost him about $47,000, but Armstrong could afford it—in the interim, he’d become the crew chief for Kenny Bernstein’s championship Funny Car.

Armstrong grew up in the tiny prairie town of Holden, Alberta, and he can remember helping his dad keep the family tractor alive. “I’ve been mechanically interested forever,” he says. When he was 15, his family moved to Calgary, and soon he bought his first car, a 1936 Ford coupe, for $5. It had one small drawback—the engine block was cracked. “I just took it home and went at it,” he says.

Armstrong did not go to an automotive mechanics school. His first job was wrenching cars at an Esso station, and he describes the pay scale thusly: “The owner would give me a few bucks now and then.” After graduation from high school in 1959, he worked for a year as a yard hand for the Canadian-Pacific Railroad, on the grave­yard shift. During the day, he worked on the cars of his friends—much more fun than sleeping. A year later, he quit the rail­road, rented a small garage, and opened his own repair shop.

Like many young car buffs in those days, Armstrong was drag-racing his daily transportation, a 1954 Olds Eighty Eight sporting a ’59 Rocket V-8 and a McCul­loch supercharger. But he and his racing pals were restless. “You were always reading about Southern California and all the drag racing down there, so a couple of buddies and myself decided to drive down around Easter of 1962.” To farm boys from frozen Calgary, Southern California might as well have been on another planet. “There were cars and car stuff going on everywhere.” He returned to his shop determined to build a car to compete in the 1964 Pomona Winternationals.

Then a strange thing happened. A 1962 Impala SS409 two-door hardtop turned up at a used-car dealer in Calgary. It had been shipped from the east, and the engine block had cracked enroute in the bitter winter. Although less exclusive than the ’61 orig­inals, the ’62 car was a find in Calgary. “Nobody had parts for it, or knew how to work on it, so the used-car lot let go of it for fairly cheap,” Armstrong recalls.

He traded in the Olds and got his par­ents to co-sign a $2400 loan for the Chevy. He turned the repair business over to a friend—”it didn’t amount to much of any­thing, anyway”—threw as many tools as would fit into the trunk, and took off for paradise, which turned out to be an apart­ment in Redondo Beach near L.A.

Armstrong worked as a mechanic for two Chevrolet dealers—Lee White in Redondo Beach and Dana Chevrolet in South Gate—and both sponsored race “Canuck,” one of the earliest of a new form of drag racing called “Funny Cars.” It was a 1963 Chevy II that Armstrong cooked up and White sponsored. These new Funny Cars (so named because they were often wildly modified) “were home-built pieces, and pretty crude,” says Arm­strong. “I’m surprised we didn’t kill ourselves. In one race, I had a transmis­sion explosion that blew shrapnel through the roof. Rather than fix it, I just cut the roof off and made a roadster out of it.”

In 1970, Armstrong opened his own Union 76 service station. Two years later, he moved to a rented garage in “Gasoline Alley West,” a collection of garages and shops on Normandie Avenue in Torrance assembled by race safety-equipment maker Bill Simpson.

At Gasoline Alley, he was experi­menting with fuel-injected alcohol Funny Cars when the National Hot Rod Associ­ation created the flexible Pro Comp class in 1974. The kid from Calgary was gaining a reputation in West Coast drag racing as a savvy innovator willing to try anything to go faster. He raced alcohol-fueled blown dragsters and nitromethane-fueled unblown dragsters, and he tried mixing nitromethane in with nitrous oxide. He experimented with weight, engine dis­placement, body types, and drivetrains. In 1975, he won the NHRA’s Pro Comp championship. Two years later, he took the Grace Cup, a year-long points accumula­tion award from the NHRA.

By 1980, Armstrong was driving an AA Funny Car for Mike Kase of Pennsyl­vania. He finished fourth in the NHRA’s points total that year and seventh the next. It was the beginning of the era of big money in pro drag racing, when racing became more of a business and less of a sport. Big-dollar sponsors were pushing speeds and dropping elapsed times pre­cipitously. By the end of 1981, Armstrong says, “We could see the writing on the wall. Kase and I were supporting our car off the winnings alone, and we weren’t winning all the time. We didn’t want to be also-rans, either.” Armstrong decided to go back to his race shop to build engines for other teams. And then, the phone rang.

We are Engine Wizards and…WE BUILD ENGINES–ANY ENGINE you want.

Whether you need an engine for a 1961 Impala Engine or a 2010 Corvette, we can build it.

Every customer is more than satisfied and we build and deliver within 30 days!

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day.

If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles [simple boat]. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very real. That is why there are night-lights.

Occasionally in her travels through her children’s minds Mrs. Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and yet he was here and there in John and Michael’s minds, while Wendy’s began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had an oddly cocky appearance.