A Hurrying Kind of Guy on Land, Sea

I don’t know about you but I don’t want to get in any machine going 288 m.p.h. unless it’s got two or more stewardesses, a co-pilot and a frequent-flyer plan.

I don’t get in any machine that requires you to wear a parachute or that needs a parachute to stop it.

I’d rather get on the Titanic than something that goes across the water so fast it can climb 20 yards on shore to kill you. I’d take my chances with icebergs.

I wouldn’t get on a motorcycle to leave a forest fire.

So, I look at Eddie Hill and I wonder whether I’m chicken or he’s crazy.

Eddie has done all of the above. And he’s still doing it.

You look at the things Eddie Hill has done and right away you picture this wild-eyed, wild-haired young cretin in a black leather jacket and jackboots who drives around scaring chickens and old ladies, and he’s in a hurry to die.

Then you get a load of the real Eddie Hill, and he looks like an English lit professor at an Ivy League school. There’s the neatly cut gray beard, the gray eyes and the gray hair in the Prince Valiant cut. Everything but a pipe and tweed jacket. He’s 52 years old and you’d swear he read Chaucer at lunch. He does listen to Beethoven.

You’d never figure him for a guy who goes around looking for sound barriers to break and speed records. Yet, you’re looking at the guy who was the first to break the 6-second barrier in a drag boat and the first to break the 5-second barrier in a fuel dragster.

Plus, he spent the rest of his life on a motorcycle. He was a motocross, hare and hound-scrambles and cross-country leader and the Texas state champion.

Eddie has always been in an awful hurry. The earth is turning fast enough for most of us already but Eddie wants to stay ahead of it.

You get a pretty good fix on Eddie when you know that he went down to Austin, Tex., about 14 years ago and saw his first drag boat race. One of the hydroplanes got airborne and so did the driver. They both came down in sections, like something hit by anti-aircraft fire.

That would be enough for most people but within 28 days, Eddie had him a boat, too. He wanted to get in on fun like that.

Personally, I would think twice about getting into any sea-level vehicle that comes with a parachute, but Eddie was in his element--danger.

He set a world water-speed mark of 229 m.p.h. He also might have set altitude marks when he was once thrown 100 feet in the air when his boat flipped.

Another time, he set the water-skipping record when he left the boat like a pebble and, observers said, bounced 11 times before he came to a stop.

He broke so many bones in so many places in one crash that his arms looked like a box of dice. He got a concussion, his eyes turned red. His ears did, too. They bled. Besides, he can’t swim.

He got out of boat racing when it began to kill spectators. He had four national records and a cane.

He didn’t exactly go to a rocking chair. He went back to a drag strip. At least there, only the car needed a parachute.

Even after 20 years, it all came back to Eddie. In the ‘60s, when he was a kind of Gypsy driver with a homemade dragster, he couldn’t get a sponsor to buy him lunch. But when he ripped off a 285.98 at Texas in ‘87, Pennzoil came running. So did a chorus of automotive suppliers.

Eddie now travels everywhere in a $250,000 rig. He will be the favorite at the once-postponed Winternationals at the L.A. County Fairplex grounds this weekend as the National Hot Rod Assn.’s $17-million ’89 series kicks off.

Dragsters burn up and disintegrate, too. But at least they don’t have to drag a lake for you afterward. You wonder why he just can’t watch television like the rest of us. The trouble is, if you put Eddie Hill in a rocking chair, he’d probably go find the guy in the next room and have a race.

“I can’t explain it,” he says. “At first, it’s a rush. The wind blowing in your face, the sound, the people cheering. Then you start to figure how you can improve. Then, speed becomes your life.

“It’s an addiction. There’s no feeling like coming back after a record run, no feeling in the world, and having the stands cheering, ‘Ed -die! Ed- die!’ ”

Provided, of course, you can hear them.