1969 CAN-AM MICHIGAN AGAPIOU BROS JACK BRABHAM FORD G7A 8 1/2\" X 11\" PHOTO PRINT
![1969 CAN-AM MICHIGAN AGAPIOU BROS JACK BRABHAM FORD G7A 8 1/2\](img-large/g/orsAAOSwU4FZ5mXU/s-l1600/1969-CAN-AM-MICHIGAN-AGAPIOU-BROS-JACK-BRABHAM-FOR.jpg "1969 CAN-AM MICHIGAN AGAPIOU BROS JACK BRABHAM FORD G7A 8 1/2\")
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1969 CAN-AM MICHIGAN AGAPIOU BROS JACK BRABHAM FORD G7A 8 1/2\" X 11\" PHOTO PRINT:
$4.99
EXCELLENT QUALITY COLOR PRINT FROM ORIGINAL 35MM SLIDE ON A CANON PIXMA 8 COLOR PRINTER ON GLOSS PHOTO PAPER. TYPICAL IMAGE IS 100MB-150MB. PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE IMAGES HAVE BEEN SCANNED LO-REZ ON PURPOSE AS PEOPLE WERE STEALING IMAGES, ACTUAL PRINT IS AWESOME!!!
Best of the Good Years – How it all beganWhen I graduated from Fremont High School, in Oakland, California the Korean War was in full swing and almost all he guys in our high school class, Class of ’51, were drafted as a unit into the Army. We were the first 18-year-olds ever to be drafted.Briefly, I wound up in Germany and not Korea, where, toward the end of my tour of duty I saw this “funny” little car at a dealership. I liked it better than what I had before I left home. A ’32 Ford. When I left the military and got home, I bought a ’53 MG-TD with a Judson Supercharger for $1,200.00. The car had belonged to a doctor who had the blower fitted to keep up with his friend’s Jaguar.When I got the MG I entered it in rallies and began to attend sports car road races in Northern California. I kept the MG for two years, and traded in for a Triumph getting $1,200.00 for it. That was a good deal, I literally had the car for two years for free.I decided to get rid of it as it started to smoke badly. I went to sports car specialist, George Naruo, in Berkeley, to see what he could do to fix it. “He said, it would need a complete overhaul, which I didn’t feel like doing, go I opted to trade it in.Dick Dye was the local TR dealer, so I took it to his dealership. For some reason that morning it quit smoking. We made the deal and I drove out with a new Triumph.The next day, Buzz Washburn, the mechanic working for Dye called me and said, “Man are you the lucky guy. I fired up your car to check it out this morning and the engine blew.”The reason it quit smoking? All the oil had blown out.Started going to races I got an assignment from a writer to take pictures of a new “special” being built by Jack Hageman, a sprint car builder in Hayward, California, called the Barneson Special for John Barneson a local SCCA racer.The story was sold to Road and Track. A short time later the managing editor of Road and Track called and asked me it I would cover the Pebble Beach road races.Wow, I thought… this could be great. So I went to Pebble and picked up a photo pass and was having the time of my life going up and down the pits taking pictures of everything and everyone.As I was shooting I heard my name being paged over the P.A. “Pete Biro, come to the office.”When I got there John Bond, the owner of Road and Track said, “You have to give me your pass, I have an important guest and I need it for him.”All of a sudden I found myself out in the general admission areas and literally unable to make any decent race photos.This really ticked me off. A short time later a group of us, John Kelly, Fred Amundrud and John O’Donnell thought if we started our own magazine we could assign ourselves to cover the races and no one could take our passes away.That was the beginning of Sports Car Pictorial, a magazine devoted to coverage of road racing, rallies and allied events with sports cars. We even got a deal with Road and Tracks’ European editor Henry N. Manney III to supply us with photos and stories from the Formula One races.The magazine was Reader’s Digest size, our reason for the size was, “It’ll fit in the pocket of a rally jacket.”One of the amazing features was the art that graced our pages. Since my day job was at an advertising art studio, a number of the artists said they would love to do drawings to illustrate our stories for free. One of the reasons was, we gave them a free hand, and this kind of work was eligible for entry in the annual illustrator’s competition. We had artists that were often featured in national publications like the Saturday Evening Post and for advertisers like Standard Oil and Chevrolet.We published Sports Car Pictorial for exactly five years. We had branched out, having gained experience with our own magazine and were now working for several of the Petersen publications, as well as Car & Driver and Road and Track, so decided we no longer really needed our own magazine, so we sold our mailing list to Autoweek, for one dollar. We didn’t tell anyone, but our bank account total, after five years, was Thirty Dollars.Later we wondered what would have happened if we had quit our day jobs, like Russ Goebel, Don Bice and Bill Finefrock, who built Autoweek into a huge, successful money maker.The Best of the GoodyearsThrough the lens of Pete BiroIf it wasn’t for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., I wouldn’t have had the amazing career in motor sports that I did.For over 40 years, I spent my life covering races from the Stockton, Calif. Sports car races, to the Indy 500 (33 times), Daytona, Sebring, LeMans, Monaco, the Baja 1000, and more. The number of drivers and car owners I can count as friends include winners of races and championships too extensive to try to list.It all started when Ralph Price, art director of Young and Rubicam Advertising, in San Francisco, yelled, “Biro, c’mere.”I was delivering an illustration to one of the other art directors and just happened to be walking past Price’s open door.When I got in his office he asked me, “Do you know anyone that shoots racing pictures?”Little did he know every weekend I was at a race of one kind or another shooting for magazines like Road & Track, Hot Rod, Motor Trend and Car & Driver.I told him, “I think I know someone. Let me see if I can get some of his work and show you tomorrow.”Well, I went home, put together a stack of my best stuff and the next morning tossed them onto his desk.He said, “This is just what I’m looking for… who took these?” When I told him, “I did.” He didn’t believe me.You see he know me from my job, I was working as a graphic designer (I used to design Del Monte food labels) and a rep, representing Logan and Carey, a well-known art and design studio in San Francisco.When he finally believed me he said, “Ok, pack your bags, you’re going to cover the 1964 Daytona Speed Weeks for Goodyear.”That was a historic event for me, and for Goodyear. It was Richard Petty’s first win at the Daytona 500, A.J. Foyt won the Continental and Phil Hill and Pedro Rodriguez won the 24 Hour race.”In 1971, Paul Sulof had just joined Goodyear’s advertising department and called me with a special request. He wanted to know if I could meet him at the Atlanta 500, photograph the race and make 200 prints before midnight? I said, yes, and then had to figure out how to do it. I packed all the gear, and chemicals to develop film, then bought a print processor and a small portable enlarger.A.J. Foyt won the race, then we raced back to the hotel and I processed the film in the bathroom, and started making the prints. Sulof would take them and lay them all out in the room. On the beds, chairs, the floor, everywhere waiting for them to dry. It really didn’t take too long; Kodak had just come out with a resin-coated paper that dried pretty fast. Sulof then put a print, along with a sheet of copy into a pre-addressed and stamped envelope and took off for the main post office, sending 200 press releases to 200 newspapers across the country.Today, with digital cameras and email…you can do that from the track in less than an hour.In 1973 A.J. Foyt showed up at the Atlanta NASCAR race wearing a toupee. Andy Granatelli, of STP fame, was first to notice it and gave A.J. a bad time. It wasn’t long before others started to kid him and shortly thereafter A.J. tossed his new hairpiece in the trash.When Jerry Grant became the first driver ever to break the 200 mph lap barrier during qualifying at the Ontario Motor Speedway in 1972, he had started wearing a toupee. But at the races he just rolled up his baklava and kept it on his head like a hat. It looked stupid.We were figuring he might have a great run so I told Jerry that if he did get the pole position, Goodyear wanted a photo of him and if he had that baklava on it wouldn’t look good.When Jerry broke the record and rolled back into the pits, and took off his helmet… he was wearing his rug and looked great.In 1974 at Indianapolis, John Kelly, Vice President in charge of advertising at Goodyear, called me directly, saying he didn’t like the ideas their advertising agency presented him. He asked me to go to the Speedway a few days early and shoot some “different” photos, and he’d fly in to see what I came up with.This I did, and with my assistant, Richard George we had a group of 16 x 20 prints made and got ready to show him. Richard and I had walkie-talkie radios (cell phones hadn’t been invented yet) and we were staying at the Airport Hilton. So Richard was over at the airport watching for Goodyear’s company plane. He contacted me as soon as they landed. This gave me time to order coffee and pastries to be brought to the room.When Kelly came in he had a couple of other people with him, including the account manager from the agency.I had planned a bit of a gag for the presentation by having a lousy, ordinary photo on top of the pile. The agency guy had this funny look on his face, but Kelly knew me well, we had often dined together and I was known to do funny things.Finally I showed them what I came up with, and they all agreed, this was just what they were looking for. They had their coffee and pastries, thanked me and flew back to Akron.Another time Goodyear’s ad people came up with a plan to photograph the winning driver of the Indy 500 in a pose holding his helmet. When the race ends and the driver goes to the winner’s circle to be photographed, it is chaos ten times over. Everybody wants a piece of the winner and often things get stolen and disappear. Goodyear’s ad folks were worried they wouldn’t be able to get his helmet for the photo. I told them, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.” When Rick Mears rolled into the winner’s circle I got his attention and said, “I need your helmet for a photo.” He recognized me and without hesitation gave it to me.I went into the little studio we had set up in a room under the grandstand where the Goodyear ad folks were waiting for Mears. I had the helmet and tossed it to Jim Neawedde, who was in charge of the project, and said, “Well, I hope you knew you had the right guy for this job.”David Letterman, originally from Indianapolis, and a big fan of the 500, showed up for practice one year, and having gotten to know him from a favor I did for him earlier in the year at Long Beach, asked me if there was some place we could get out of sight and take a break. I told him Goodyear had a small office under the grandstand and I used it all month to hang out and keep my equipment locked up. We went in and sat down to do a little bench racing. Soon a gentleman from Goodyear, who I didn’t know, came into the room and went to one of the closets. He took out a large box full of Goodyear racing hats. I said hello, and he said he had a group of sales people that were here to see the race, thanks to winning the trips an race tickets for their sales, and he was going to give each of them one of the hats.Letterman got up and said, “Can I help you?” So Letterman goes out the door with all the hats and hands them out to the contest winners.Later I got back to my hotel room and the message light was blinking. The call was from Goodyear ad manager, Jim Neawedde. I called him back and he said, “How did you get David Letterman to help our man there give out the hats? He was blown away”. I told Jim how it happened. He was blow away.
1969 CAN-AM MICHIGAN AGAPIOU BROS JACK BRABHAM FORD G7A 8 1/2\" X 11\" PHOTO PRINT:
$4.99