Chris Birnie was a Cub Scout for only one year, when he was in second grade, but he vividly remembers his less-than-stellar performance in the pinewood derby. The derby has been a scouting tradition since a southern California troop organized the first one in 1953: boys construct cars from kits containing a seven-inch-long block of wood, four nails, and four wheels, then race them down four-lane tracks. “Mine kind of stopped halfway down the track, and it looked bad,” says Birnie, 34.
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Birnie hadn’t thought much about the race since then–until late last year, when he came up with the idea of putting together a derby for adults. He figured the idea would naturally appeal to ex-scouts–“people whose dads made the cars for them and didn’t get to build anything,” as well as “people like me who built their own and lost,” he says. But he wanted women to compete as well. One female participant, Birnie says, “had four brothers, and every year she had to go watch them do this thing in a church basement. So she’s in this just for sheer revenge.”
Many of them had never heard of the pinewood derby. “I had no clue,” says Robert Plogman, a photographer from Cincinnati. “I thought he was talking about the soapbox derby. I thought I was going to have to put this giant thing in my car and haul it to Chicago.” Amy Everett, an office manager at a local engineering firm, hadn’t heard of it either, but she designed a car shaped like a lipstick tube, coated in paint and nail polish. “I don’t think I’m going to win for the most tricked-out ride, so I thought I’d try for speed,” she says. “I’m kind of proud of it.”
When: Fri 6/24, 6:30 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jim Newberry.
