​The prospect seemed gargantuan, enlisting twenty five participants and eighy four clue sites and took two contests to satisfactorily complete. The clues were as unique and diverse as could be imagined, from the sacrosanct halls of a Hindu temple sprouting in the Malibu wilderness to the art deco cathedral ceilings of L.A.’s Grand Central Train Station.

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Keeping with tradition, the planners, Andrea Thompson and myself, bit off more than we could chew, and in spite of countless hours of preparation and sleepless nights, began the Rally too late on Saturday morning to give teams the chance to properly cover the ground we had allotted them. Some clues were inaccessible when teams arrived because installations had closed, and no one was home to man the hotline when teams encountered difficulty. It was before the era of cell phones, and the preceding week of last minute planting had found a new appellation: Hell Week.  The lessons learned caused the rally to evolve into a science of timing and deadlines, with planting schedules and clue boards with posy-it notes that could be moved at will to better balance the difficulty of the runs.  

      

The rally was repeated in June, two weeks later, at no extra charge, with the addition of “The Murder Detectives” as a clue run, and the shifting and simplification of certain clues, Finally beginning on time, the organizers were fairly able to complete what they had begun, and included a new set of contestants.

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 The teams reflected the personalities and issues of the times. The Amnesiacs, who won the first rally, were the impersonation of Ronald Reagan, who was in search of his own identity, which along with his involvement in dubious public scandals, he simply could not recall. The second place Soldiers of Fortune trekked through West L.A. and the Wilshire District, exposing terrorist plots engineered by the American military and industrial complex, which had fallen on hard economic times as the result of relative world peace. The specter of Nazi rebirth was the dilemma of the third place Freedom Fighters, whose underground efforts exposed Germany Nazi reunification as the horrific blueprint of a Fourth Reich, replete with Hitler’s lost grandchild as the would-be dictator. The Oscar Nominees pitted a famous film director and his crew in a no-holds-barred fight to the finish against an unscrupulous Michael Cimino for the Academy Awards, with the elusive statuettes always one step ahead of them. A sordid trail of bullet casings, blood, severed hands and jail visits led the Murder Detectives on the scent  of a vigilante district attorney bent on avenging victims’ rights by personally imposing the death sentence on whomever she saw fit. Then, of course, there were the Time Travelers, whose mischievous meddling at a top security crime lab sent them back in time to Prince William Sound (the Malibu Pier) just in time to avert the Alaskan oil spill, only to have the unwittingly trigger a set of disasters that kept them busy solving the problems of the world, yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s. Their mischief would land them at the feet of a very unhappy Time Wizard, who for penance sent them traipsing on Good Samaritan missions through the course of history. One was the clever stealing of an American President’s theater tickets to the Ford Theater on April 14, 1965. They were made to sing them sing “The Time Warp” to an antiquarian. If adventure meant anything, it was the mission of the Crusaders for the Curse, a team of modern day Indiana Joneses on the quest for a magical talisman stolen from a Pompeiian tomb by devil worshippers with the worst of intentions. Clues were secreted on a putt-putt golf course’s windmill blades and in the moving boxcars of a model electric train.

 To our good fortune, no priceless artistic masterpieces succumbed, nor were famous people exhumed from their resting places, nor Rodeo drive Burglar Alarms set off in the single-minded zeal of rally teams. At last count, the high points of the 1990 Road Rally included 13 stores, 3 libraries, 2 cemeteries, 7 hotels, 4 parks, 8 restaurants, 4 shrines, 7 museums, 4 schools and one gaudy Beverly Hills mansion whose ornate inlaid fish mouths doubled as drainage.  The rally ended at my penthouse apartment which had a view of the Santa Monica Bay.

The rally weekend-long bash began with a dinner of the traditional Chomel pasta and Bolognese meat sauce, followed by rally reminiscence and drunken reverie, and concluded by the flying of kites, courtesy of Pam Hathaway and Linda Collins. The typical atmospherics of a rally weekend were enough to satisfy the hardiest of ralliers.