Ron Lee: That's how we got the respect. We had fast cars, too, so we got the respect there, too.
The Incident
Tod Kaneko: I wasn't there at that event, but I heard about it. In fact, there were probably a few pretty big accidents during that time. That's one thing that's bad about street racing. After the event, the police really started cracking down. And that pretty much stopped everything. Those were the good ol' days.
Ron Lee: It wasn't at the Nisei. It was at another [carnival] in Orange County. It was these guys just riding motorcycles back and forth.
Scott Kanemura: There was a signal down at the end of the block. The church was in the middle of the block, I guess. And there were two motorcycles staged up, and there's two crowds staged at each end of the street. And [the motorcycles] are trying to race down the center of the street, and there was this Japanese couple. They had a baby girl, and the wife was pregnant. They were walking across the street when the bikes took off.
Ron Lee: One guy lost control. He went into the crowd.
Scott Kanemura: And the couple got all confused. They didn't know which way to go or whatever. I remember the kid flying in the air-like 10 feet in the air. The wife flew out and the whole family flew in the air-it was pretty crazy: The bikes sliding, the guy sliding, hitting his head on the curb.
Ron Lee: After that, the cops kind of cracked down on the cruises. That hurt the scene. Because it actually died out for a while-the import scene. Not too many people were fixing up the cars anymore, until actually Frank [Choi] came out with the Battle. And that kind of brought it back up again.
Scott Kanemura: Nowadays, the Nisei Carnival can't even keep its business because the main thing that was driving it was all the young people going out there to cruise. Since everybody stopped going, all the carnivals died. It's kind of sad, actually.
The Street and Its Legends
Ron Lee: Usually, after each carnival, people would go to the spot. The race spot. You had Stadium Way. You had Gardena-the Meiji Market, before it used to be Naugles. It was pretty crazy. I remember Stadium Way, that whole street would be packed.
Scott Kanemura: The thing that was different from Battle was that even if you had a slower car than the other person, you could still win-if you picked a certain street, the quarter-miles were shorter. Sometimes there's a small downgrade, it's sloped. If your car doesn't hook up as well, you'd pick that street. To us, it was kind of a science. That's why we would pick certain streets. It wasn't just how fast your car was. It was more like who was smarter.
Mike Quan: When we used to go street racing, everyone respected the fact that we were out there racing.
Ron Lee: A lot of the Asians didn't want to race for big money back then. The only people who wanted to race for big money back then were the black guys. And so they used to have a lot of fast cars. There was a guy called Beanie Boy. He had one of the fastest 510s around.
Frank Choi: When I was younger, there was this saying, Monterey Park/San Gabriel Valley was known as the East Side. And anything on the other side of the 91 [Freeway] was considered the West Side: Gardena, Torrance, Lomita, Carson. All the people from the East Side had the later-model cars or the hand-me-downs from their parents. So they would have the '85 and '86 Celicas and newer, whereas people from the West Side would have the '70s-model cars. They are the ones that like to wrench on their cars. If there was any type of tension, it would be the fact that the Gardena area actually worked their asses off to work on their car. Everything was hard-earned on their cars. Nothing was a gimme or hand-me-down.
Ron Lee: Back then, we didn't like any East Side guys. You know everything was given to them. And we had to work for everything.