A few hours before Good Times Cruise-In gets underway, Jim McGregor will get up around 5:30 a.m. and drive himself there in his customized yellow 1949 Ford pickup truck, which happens to be the same age as the retired fire chief.
"I enjoy getting out there early in the morning and watching the vehicles as they come in," McGregor said. "Usually by the time they start letting them in, we've got the stage and everything set up, and so then it's kind of a car show for me, to watch them all come in there."
McGregor has been emceeing the annual event "pretty much from the beginning."
"I think there's only about three years that I've missed since it started," McGregor estimated.
"One time I was away on holidays, and another time I was sick, and another time was during the pandemic."
He will be on his feet for the whole event.
"It's up and down off the stage," he said.
"My job is just to let people know what's going on in the different stages, and what's going on at this time, and what's going on at that time 鈥� and where the souvenir booth is."
And for all the years that he's been the man at the mike at Cruise-In 鈥� and many, many other charitable fundraisers 鈥� McGregor can still get a little nervous.
"You've got some little jokes lined up and everything else, and you just think, oh, man, that's not really going to be funny, or maybe that's going to bomb or something like that. So I just usually kind of ground myself a few minutes before I go on and get out there."
It's a tip he learned from a more experienced emcee years ago.
"He said, you know, you've got to go ground yourself. Five minutes before you go on the stage, find a place where there's nobody around, nobody there, and just sit there and blank out your mind and go back to your roots and go down through the surface of the earth and find the roots of your ancestors and ask them for help and then go out there."
The question he gets asked the most?
"Where's the In-N-Out Burger trailer?"
And then, there are the helpful critics.
"Sometimes they'll come to me, and they think I'm the organizer of the car show, and they'll give me advice on how to do it better next year. I just say, yeah, 'you know what, the Cruise-In office is down there at 272nd and they would love to hear from you. Go on down there.' But they usually don't."
Over years of sharing the main stage with perennial Cruise-In attraction Steve "Elvis Elite" Elliott, McGregor said the pair have developed a routine.
"I say [to the audience to introduce him], okay, I want you to go back to 1958, September 1958, and your mom and dad will let you stay up late. It's Sunday night, and you're watching your black and white TV. Then I do an imitation of Ed Sullivan, and I introduce him as his first time on Ed Sullivan. The last show is usually his Las Vegas show, so I get everybody to imagine themselves at a Las Vegas nightclub, and the lights have come down. So, we just kind of set the scene for his performances."
"Steve always tries to get me to sing a duet with him, and I always back out because I speak, I don't sing."
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