For Those Who Dared, Dreams End In Triumph And In Tragedy
A car. A sport. An idea.
Two dreams happily fulfilled.
Another stained tragically with blood. Here are the amazing upshots from a few past columns on some people who dared to dream:
No two drivers had ever set two land-speed records with the same car on the same day at the famed Bonneville Salt Flats.
Until Terry Moreau and his partner, Don McBride, slid behind the wheel, that is. They are back from Utah, where they experienced an unprecedented day of driving the sleek emerald car called a streamliner. The straightaway racer was built over four years in the garage behind Moreau’s north Spokane home.
McBride, who owns Herb’s Body Shop in Ritzville, averaged slightly more than 215 mph for two full-throttle runs. The new record shatters the 199-mph mark Moreau set last year in the 22-foot racer that is 30 inches tall, 21 inches wide and powered by just a 1-liter motorcycle engine.
Enter Moreau. The former motorcycle drag racer then ran his torpedo on four wheels in a class that allows normal fuel to be combined with more explosive agents.
His two trips with nitrous averaged 224.82 mph, smashing the old record by an incredible 23 mph. Their performances put McBride and Moreau in Bonneville’s elite 200 MPH Club.
“The magnitude of where we have gone is just staggering,” says Moreau, who credits another partner, Dick Flynn, as the wizard behind much of the engine work.
Land-speed record-setters are normally backed by sponsors who provide money and materials. Not these guys. Moreau says the $50,000 machine was built entirely out of pocket.
Records aside, the best may still be ahead. Moreau plans to return soon to Bonneville to attempt 250 mph.
Think that’s fast? “My goal is to one day be in the 300 MPH Club,” says Moreau.
Cocky? Maybe. But only a fool would bet against him.
Had she focused all that tenacity and otherworldly eye-hand coordination on, say, tennis, Spokane’s Laurette Gunther would be in a much higher tax bracket.
All you get for being one of the two best professional women foosball players is a 4-foot trophy, a championship ring, a jacket and half of a $1,000 prize.
Not much for years of sweat, toil and untold smacking of little hard balls around a table-sized version of a soccer field.
Gunther’s not complaining. She captured the women’s world title with her fuchsia-haired partner, Moya Tielens of Canada. Playing in Dallas, the pair won seven straight matches.
“I’ve been living and breathing foosball for the last two or three months,” laughs Gunther, 37, who works at Washington Trust Bank.
Unlike Super Bowl victors who vow to go to Disneyland, Gunther has a more modest idea of a reward.
“I’m not going to touch a table for a month!”
Don’t bet on it.
Bill Hargrove dreamed of revolutionizing the way music is taught.
He and his sax-playing mentor, Bob Ratcliff, blew into Spokane last spring to promote their book, “The Garage Band Method.”
Hargrove saw a nation filled with amateur musicians playing their hearts out for sheer fun, not profit.
Learning to play sax late in life changed him and he wanted others to take the cure. “Garage bands are alive and well,” said Hargrove, who quit his job with the Idaho Board of Education to promote his slick, self-published book. “We just want to turn them into a growth industry.”
But Bill Hargrove chose not to see his dream through.
On Aug. 2, the Boise resident pedaled his bike to a semisecluded spot and ended his life with a gunshot to the head. He was 48.
Ratcliff, 32, says Hargrove suffered from depression in the past and, during a book tour, told him he felt another episode coming on. Hargrove left behind a detailed letter, encouraging his wife and friends to keep his book alive.
“I didn’t realize the stuff I was teaching was that big a deal until he put it down on paper,” says Ratcliff. “Bill was a great writer and a great friend.”
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