|
Hot Rods
Originally written
July 3, 2001
(This
story is based mostly on memory; even some of the photos are not
from Richwood. Please forgive any errors of fact.)
Eleven
years before I was born, my father saw the USA in his Chevrolet.
Vernon
Thomas graduated from business school in 1929 and became the
bookkeeper at Short Shoemaker's Chevrolet dealership in the town of
Falmouth, Kentucky, about 35 miles south of Cincinnati in racehorse country.
In 1936,
he bought a yellow Chevrolet coupe and set out with a buddy to drive
to California. He arranged to sell the car in Los Angeles and
return home by train. |
|
|
Before
leaving Southern California, he drove the car up to the Mt. Wilson
Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, where the
100-inch telescope was the world's largest.
Driving
back down the mountain, he started to regret having found a buyer for
the car. It was running so smoothly that he couldn't even hear
the engine. Then he discovered that his ears were stopped up
from the change in altitude! |
Nowadays,
those of us who travel on airplanes or tall elevators have learned
that when our surroundings get quieter, we should swallow and clear
our ears. But this was 1936.
Six
years after I was born, cars of that era came back into our lives in
the form of hot rods.
As new
arrivals in Richwood, Ohio, in 1953, we discovered that not far
behind our house on South Franklin Street was the Richwood
Fairgrounds, and at those fairgrounds, starting that summer, there
was auto racing. Since my father was the new Chevrolet dealer
in town and his service manager Red Connolly was active
at the track, it seemed like a good idea to get involved. He
became the public-address announcer and continued at least through
the 1956 season.
The
Richwood Fairgrounds has a half-mile oval for racing harness
horses. On the west side is a grandstand, with a stage between
it and the finish line. In the infield, set back from the
finish line, there used to be a square building that provided an
elevated view for the harness-racing judges. Painted on the
side of this judges' tower which faced the grandstand was an
advertisement for Vernon M. Thomas Chevrolet.
In the
1950s, the infield of the harness track contained another track, a quarter-mile
oval for hot rods. I've added a reconstruction of that smaller
oval and the judge's tower to this 2012 Google Earth view of the
fairgrounds. Like the harness track, the hot rod track had a
dirt surface, but it was banked about 10° in the turns and had
light poles at various points around its inner edge so that races
could be held on Friday nights.
At the red
dot above, in the few feet between the finish lines of the two
tracks, flagman Art Stainer from Marion set up his little platform
with a rack of different-colored flags to signal the cars. He
also had pushbutton switches for a set of three light bulbs:
red, yellow, and green. Art's wife was the official scorer; she
sat farther back, on the rectangular concrete stage between the
harness track and the grandstand. Also on that stage was the
public-address system, with my father at the microphone and me
sitting alongside to watch.
|
From
the bulletin of the First Methodist Church, March 29, 1953:
Compliments
to the Fair Board, which manages the Richwood Fair. All
Richwood churches are printing this note in their bulletins
today. The board has acted to prohibit all Sunday racing on the
new auto track to be installed at the Fairground. The insight
and prudence in this action is to be commended in the very heartiest terms.
|
|
As a
six-year-old in 1953, I loved watching the cars roar around the track
when Art waved his green flag. My father made me a plywood rack
about the size of a cigar box with a set of holes drilled in the
top. I colored paper flags and attached them to
dowels that fit in the holes, so that I had my own set of play
flags: green to go, yellow for caution, red to stop, blue with
a yellow stripe to allow the faster car to pass, black to get off the
track, white for the final lap, and of course the checkered flag for
the finish.
I played
at running around our yard, making vroom vroom sounds.
We moved in 1954 to a house that, like many in the area, sat on a
slight embankment. Suddenly my play track had a novel
feature: the western backstretch was higher than the eastern
frontstretch, so that I had to run uphill through Turns 1 and 2 and
downhill through 3 and 4.
But the
real track was better. There was the smell of coffee and hot
dogs on cool nights, mixed with the smoke from Mrs. Stainer's
cigarettes. During intermissions, there was rock and roll on
the PA system (my father was not the one who chose the music); I
remember songs like Little Darlin and some early Elvis.
The cars
were modified stock cars, mostly coupes from the late 1930s and early
1940s with lowered roofs, welded-shut doors, roll bars, and other
modifications including souped-up engines. They couldn't get up
a lot of speed on the tiny oval, but you could hear them a mile away
because they did make a lot of noise. (With one exception, a
plum-colored Studebaker with the number V painted on the side.
We called it Roman Five. Old V, whose muffler had
not been removed, cruised along smoothly but never was in contention.)
One night,
my father and I watched some of his mechanics doing backyard welding
on one car to modify it into a racer. "What number is it
going to be?" I asked. The guys replied,
B-40. (I wonder whether one of them, in the
previous decade, had serviced or flown on the World War II bomber
escort more properly known as the YB-40.)
As it
turned out, the hot rod B-40 went on to win a lot of races. I
assume it's the vehicle shown above, in a photo posted to a Facebook
group by Charles Lyn Barry.
He also
contributed these two photos. Jay Endsley is on the right of
the smaller one, and the one below is captioned Art Sullivan,
Monk Ross, Wimp Jordan & Jay Endsley, owners of cars 66 & 77. |
|
But then
Todd Gibson came along and dominated the field. He had married
Brenda Cramer, the daughter of our across-the-road neighbor Arby
Cramer. I remember his car as number 10, painted pink at first,
later silver, powered by an airplane engine that spit out blue flame
from the side-mounted exhaust pipes.
On a
Friday, the hot rodders would bring their machines into the
fairgrounds on trailers and unload them in the pits, which was just a
dimly-lighted grassy area outside Turn 3. The racing began with
time trials: laps against the stopwatch to determine starting
positions. Then there would be a series of ten-lap heats.
Sometimes there was also an Australian Pursuit Race, in
which the fastest cars started from the back of the pack instead of
the front. In this event, any driver who was passed had to drop
out of the race, until either ten laps were completed or the driver
who had started last managed to eliminate all the cars ahead of him.
Another
event with a lot of passing was the Winners' Handicap, featuring the
cars that had placed well in the heats, winners starting from the
back. The cars that had lost in the heats went into the
Consolation race.
And then the evening concluded with a 25-lap Feature. When it
was over, Art handed the winning driver the checkered flag.
Holding it out the window, he made a victory lap of the track while
the flash photographer in the infield snapped his picture.
I believe
that one time an endurance race was held, maybe 100 laps, on a
weekend or holiday afternoon, and I watched at least part of it from
the grandstand. That event was unusual in that the drivers
actually had to make pit stops. It seemed long and boring.
I was glad to see Art finally hold up the crossed flags that
indicated the halfway point in the race, but the drivers still had a
long way to go.
There were
crashes, of course, but I don't recall any serious injuries, even in
one spectacular end-over-end down the front straightaway. The
tumbling car chased Art from his flagman's stand and came to rest on
the harness track.
A more
typical tangle that I recall involved two cars. One liked to
take the low groove around the inside of the turns; the
other liked to swing wide to the top of the banking. The cars
were running fairly close together, with the low car
leading. But on one lap, the high car got a good
run off Turn 4 and, coming down the front straight, got inside the
low car to challenge him for position. This isn't
going to work, I thought, as they went into Turn 1 side by side.
Sure enough, the high car slid up the banking into the
low car and knocked it right over the top of the banking,
off the track and down to the grassy harness-track infield.
From
the Richwood
Gazette . . . |
April
28, 1955
The
Richwood Speedway will open on May 6 at the fairgrounds for stock
car racing. It is planned to have racing every Friday night as
long as the weather permits. Time trials begin at 7 p.m. with
races starting at 8 p.m. Leo Walker will be the judge.
This track will be running under supervision this year known as the
Richwood Auto Club, composed of Jay Endsley, Clarence Connolly,
Walter Hamilton and Arby Cramer. |
July
21, 1955
Jay
L. Jones of Richwood, in car 24, edged out Joe Erwin in car No. 1
and Chuck Wilcox in car 50 in the last lap to take top place in the
twenty-five lap feature at Richwood Speedway Friday night.
Jim
Hamilton of Richwood, in car 14, was leading the feature by half a
lap in the sixth lap when Jim Herriot in car WE2 rolled twice on the
north turn and cars 95 with Carlton Hecker driving and 88 with Floyd
Lamb collided while trying to avoid Herriot.
After
the restart, Hamilton continued to lead until late in the race when
Jones took over on the back stretch and finished first. On the
last lap, Hamilton took the north turn high, hit the fence and spun out.
Results
(first, second, third):
1st
Heat Race: Butch Joan, Ed Fridley, Jake Hines.
2nd
Heat Race: Floyd Lamb, Jack Heath, Jim Herriott.
3rd
Heat Race: Joe Erwin, Jay L. Jones, Chuck Wilcox.
Winner's
Hadicap: Jay L. Jones, Joe Erwin, Floyd Lamb.
Consolation:
Chet Johnson, Carlton Hecker, Jim Reece.
Feature:
Jay L. Jones, first; Joe Erwin, second; Chuck Wilcox, third; Chet
Johnson, fourth; Ed Hendrickson, fifth. |
After a
few years, I began to grow up, and the hot-rod track went away.
Todd Gibson and his family are still in racing, but the infield at
the local fairgrounds is now smoothly landscaped, with no sign of all
the iron that used to roar around there on Friday nights.
|