Drag Illustrated Issue 139, December 2018 | Page 59

DIALED IN
Racing for the
Right Reasons
Racers raise donations for children’s
hospital at Lindsey Callaway Race for Kids
By Van Abernethy
F
ew people have ever touched the
hearts of racers quite the way Lindsey
Callaway did, as she spent many week-
ends at the racetrack during her early
teenage years. Lindsey and her sister,
Jessie, used to work the ET shack of Alien City
Dragway (then called Roswell Dragway in the
1990s), a drag strip in southeast New Mexico
then owned by their parents, Rick and Tracy
Callaway.
Each weekend, the Callaway sisters became
well-known fixtures at the drag strip, where Jessie
December 2018
would tear off time slips and Lindsey would walk
out and hand them to racers. It didn’t matter
if someone had just turned in the worst losing
package ever, Lindsey would walk out of the ET
shack with her beaming smile and say, “Thanks
for coming!” Lindsey had a vibrant personality
with an uncanny ability to make each and every
competitor feel as though she was personally
rooting for them, and everyone’s day was a little
brighter after seeing things from Lindsey’s per-
spective.
There was also the time she competed in a
street class race, while driving one of the track
pick-up trucks in eliminations shortly after she
got her driver’s license. The thing that people
remember most about that event was not the fact
that Lindsey won, but how she allowed a young
blind boy to ride along with her that day dur-
ing eliminations, thus racing to victory together.
The boy’s father was touched tremendously by
Lindsey’s thoughtfulness.
When Lindsey was diagnosed with a brain
tumor in 1998 at age 14, this racing community
in New Mexico was deeply troubled. She received
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