Five-decade Funny Car veteran Gary Densham remembers the time when race promoter Bill Doner had a heavy hand in Funny Car racing. 

"You had to race for Bill Doner; at one time he owned the entire west coast," Densham recalled in an episode of Legends: The Series. "If you wanted to race Orange County, Fremont, Portland and Seattle. If you didn't race with Doner, you didn't race. It's just that simple."

Doner rose to legendary status with his famous, and sometimes off the wall promotions, which made him quite the cult hero starting in the Seattle drag racing scene before he headed to Southern California.

Then Doner, in a moment of not well thought out haste, left drag racing to pursue a career in fishing at the height of his career. 

In what could be considered in some circles to be a gathering of the cosmic forces, Doner has come home to do what he once knew as well as the back of his hand. 

Doner, 78, will return to the former Seattle International Raceway, now renamed Pacific Raceways, to promote a Nostalgia Funny Car race. 

"I’m cautiously optimistic, and at the same time, I’m a bit nervous about it," Doner admitted. "Have I got a lot of memories here? Yeah."

The return to Seattle is not Doner's first race back into the promotions world, but it's his first bonafide return to Seattle since the 1970s.  

"I guess I forgot how iffy the weather can be in the Pacific Northwest until I went over and we ran that race in Spokane last month," Doner admitted. "I worried about it all the way up there, all the time I was there, and it rained all around us. We got the race in, we were able to run it, but it rained all around us."

Doner, who often ended up on Mother Nature's bad side in the early days, has apparently learned time heals all wounds and for both days of Friday and Saturday's UNFC Invitational event the forecast looks picture perfect. 

Doner, who promotes the United Nostalgia Funny Car group, has a group of 12 classic Funny Cars ready to rock the house. 

Still, until the event is in the books, Doner's not keen on raising his hands in celebration. 

"I guess as old as I am I haven’t shaken those old fears that were there, and everything about it worries me," Doner said. "It’s been a while since I’ve been like that."

Back in the day, even if the skies opened up and everything in the universe fell through it, Doner could still count on three-mile long lines, double lanes, waiting to get inside the track.  

Doner is quick to point out those days for which his legend was built on didn't come easy, and not without a bit of wrangling and flip-flopping cash flow and credit lines. 

"In the beginning, I opened up that racetrack using my MasterCard to get the starting change because we didn’t have any money," Doner explained. "If the rain had not let up, I don’t know what I would have done."

Doner, the architect of the popular 32 and then 64 Funny Car events, as well as the Fox Hunts, said the times weren't always glamorous. 

"Can I remember those days? Of course," Doner said of the rough moments. "Can I remember the time when it was so dark and dreary and rainy that when I left the office, I couldn’t find my car, I just shut the light off and bumped into trees outside, it’s so dark and remote out there."

Given a time machine, there's a part of Doner which would love to return to those events to see it from a different angle. 

"Those big races up in Seattle, the 64 Funny Cars, they were right on the cusp of riot conditions," Doner admitted. "You wouldn’t want to go back and do that. I was wrung out when they were over, just wrung out. I had nothing left in me. I mean they’d smash the fences down, they were all over the racetrack, so many people. 

"We probably should not have let that many people go in there. But in those days I didn’t think like that. I wouldn’t want to go back and be in that same spot again. It would be fun if I could sit up in a helicopter and look down at it and not have to run it. Having to run it, you know, you’ve got to deal with all the racers, do the commercials, announce the race, be in the tower. When it was over, I didn’t even get home until the next day. I was still out there, and there was no getting in and out. And yeah there wasn’t anything left of me. I couldn’t do that again."

And come Friday evening at Pacific Raceway, he's going to try it all again.