by Brock Yates
The Syracuse State Fairgrounds sprawled on the edge of little Lake Onondaga. The fair had been held each year since the early 1800s and many of its pavilions, horse barns, and arcades dated to the turn of the century, as did the one-mile horse track that served as a centerpiece for the vast acreage. Men had raced cars there since 1907, but like all the dirt miles it had been designed specifically as a horse track in 1880.
The state fair was in full swing when I arrived. I had to park miles away from the giant, arched grandstand that lined the front staightaway. I was late and had to rush through the jumble of midways to reach the gate. The carny barkers, food vendors, ride operators, and side-show shills were all barking their wares to the throngs. The heavy aroma of burgers and fries, sugar cones, and stale beer attacked my nose. Calliope music belched mechanically from the innards of the merry-go-rounds, thrill rides, and Ferris wheels that dotted the luridly colored casbahs.
I reached my seat in the upper rows of the grandstand, protected from the hot afternoon sun, to find the race cars already lined up on the track. There were eighteen tall, audacious machines with glistening paintwork and swooping tails. They bore the brands of industrial, hard-knuckled Americans: "Lutes Truck Parts," "Schaefer Gear Works," "Auto Shippers," "Federal Engineering," "Springfield Welding," and "Central Excavating" were painted on their long hoods-gritty businesses with links to the tough-guy segments of the American economy, segments that made things, hauled things, repaired things. All the cars were hand-built, for the most part in the Los Angeles shops of master craftsmen. They were working-class, self-taught artisans who could fabricate, through sheer inspiration and innate technical brilliance, an entire automobile from sheet aluminum, chrome-molybdenum steel, and magnesium bar stockwithin a matter of months. With a muscle-bound, 300-hp Meyer-Drake/Offenhauser engine packed in their innards, these beautiful but lethal machines were capable of speeds over 140 mph on the lumpy straights of tracks like Syracuse.
The drivers lounged against their cars, awaiting the call to action. They were all young, tanned, raw-boned men with flinty expressions of faint defiance earned by those who face death on a regular basis. The same look can be found on the faces of fighter pilots, bullfighters, high-steel workers-those who know they are tougher, braver, and bolder than normal men and are prepared to die to prove it.
They moved among the gaunt, bare-wheeled machines, occasion ally joking with one another as they checked tires and steering linkages in preparation for the ugly battle that lay ahead.
All were dressed in wrinkled khakis, short-sleeved pullovers, and T-shirts. They had names like Sweikert, McGrath, Bryan, Reece, Thompson, Boyd, and Parsons-Anglo-Saxons from the California suburbs and backwater middle America towns, where automobile racing served as a way out, like boxing for ghettoized big-city Irish, Italian, and black kids of the day.
Among them was a nail-hard ex-marine from Bellmore, Long Island, and a hero of Bougainville, named "Iron Mike" Nazaruk; and a pudgy Armenian kid from Oakland whom the other drivers gave extra room. Ed Elisian was known as "Illusion" and had a reputation for being unstable both on and off the racetrack.
At the back of the field, leaning against the battered blue number 81 Central Excavating Special, was another rebel. Rodger Ward was the ex-pilot known for his incendiary temper, his profiligate gambling, and his bad manners on the racetrack. Only five days earlier, during the latter stages of a similar 100-mile championship race at DuQuoin, Illinois, Ward had barreled off the fourth corner and lost control of the Central Excavating Special. It plowed into the pits and instantly killed Clay Smith, the much-liked and widely respected chief mechanic for the Agajanian team. Before the car tumbled to a stop, it had injured eight more bystanders-including two children.
But that was five days ago. Ancient history. The car had its dents pounded out and the blood wiped away, and the old warrior was ready for another battle. Like most of the cars at Syracuse, number 81 had been around for years. Built in 1951 by Ohio craftsman Floyd Trevis for Cleveland contractor Pete Salemi, the car had been Bill Vukovich's first ride in Indianapolis and had carried a number of drivers, both fast and slow, over its four-year career. Unlike modern racing cars, which are replaced after a few races, cars like the Central Excavating Special labored on for years-sometimes decades-until their innards fell apart and they were scrapped. Many would carry more than one driver to his death or shatter his bones, yet would return to the tracks.
For some, it was too much. Following the DuQuoin death of Clay Smith, his driver and friend, thirty-five-year-old Chuck Stevenson, quit racing on the spot. His car and Ward's had touched wheels, which is what caused the fatal spin into the pits. Shattered by the experience, the 1952 national AAA champion and two-time winner of the stock car class in the Mexican road race would not climb into a race car for another six years.
Syracuse, too, had taken its toll. In 1911 Lee Oldfield (no relation to the legendary Barney) lost control of his car and plunged into the crowd, killing eleven spectators. Nine years later, the track claimed the life of Indianapolis champion and French Grand Prix winner Jimmy Murphy. Scores of others would be badly injured, in part because the track funneled from a wide front straightaway into a back chute barely more than two cars wide. Yet, skating on the hard cinder surface-which became like polished black granite after 100 miles of scuffing by the racing tires-average speeds were climbing to 100 mph.
At the head of the pack was the cream-and-white Bob Estes Special, the entry of Inglewood, California, Lincoln-Mercury dealer Bob Estes. Its driver was a hard-eyed Angeleno named Don Freeland who had savaged the car around the evil old track to win the pole position. Next to him on the front row was the burly ex-sailor Andy Linden, who packed a reputation as a first-class bar fighter and something of a loner. Behind Freeland in the second row, driving the Lute's Truck Parts car, was handsome, cocky Bob Sweikert. Considered a major talent, the brash twenty-seven-year-old had often trenchantly remarked, "I'll never live to retire." Back in eighth, in the cream-and-red Hinkle, was McGrath, while near the back was Bryan, chewing a cigar and waving a hand still raw from his Indianapolis trial at a young woman in the stands.
It would have been hard to believe that among these eighteen young men, eleven faced early, grisly deaths in race cars. One other, Linden, would suffer debilitating injuries. Imagine a sport like football or hockey, both considered to be violent tests of courage, in which half of its participants would die while playing. The risks faced by those men on that sunny day in Syracuse seem, in retrospect, intolerable in a civilized society. They even equaled-or exceededthe toll taken in the man-on-man gladiatorial contests popularized during the Roman Empire.
The crowd crushed into the rickety grandstands were like the drivers-blue-collar mechanics, carpenters, farmers, welders, hoaryhanded workers of all kinds who understood the skills demanded of their heroes. As the giddy beat of a Sousa march pounded through the loudspeakers and mingled with the faint screams of riders on a Ferris wheel in the distant midway, the drivers flicked away their cigarettes and eased into their leather-upholstered seats. They pulled on leather crash helmets of the type long favored by motorcyclists, a feeble nod to safety they had resisted for years-much as hockey pros like Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull would sneer at protective headgear two decades later. When a local dignitary sounded the traditional call-"Gentlemen, start your engines"-the drivers snapped aircraftstyle seat belts around their waists, knowing full well they would be essentially useless in the event of a flip. Behind each of them was mounted a seventy-five-gallon tank of methanol capable of incinerating a man with its nearly invisible, iridescent flame.
Like Hemingway's bullfighters, they faced unspeakable danger, not from a raging one-ton animal, but from an equally savage machine twice that weight. The car could kill in the same abstract fashion that the face of a granite cliff might a misstepping mountain climber. Such were the penalties for men who chose the great writer's three sports over "children's" games. The engines, guttural, unmuffled, fie
rce, rattled through the grandstands as the cars rolled away, slowly at first, then gaining speed during the two pace laps to align the field, two by two, to take the green flag.
Then mayhem. Thunderous noise. A swirl of color as a wall of dust and the reek of methanol overwhelmed the crowd. Linden barged into the lead for a few laps, angling through the corners in wild slides before being overtaken by Freeland, then by Sweikert, who seized the lead in a fiercely executed pass at the exact spot where Jimmy Murphy had lost his life thirty years earlier.
Both Freeland and McGrath challenged Sweikert in the latter stages, swapping the lead before the gritty surface began to shred their tires. That left Sweikert unchallenged, thereby avoiding a repeat of his crash the year before, which had taken both him and McGrath into the fence. His payoff was $3,750, 60 percent of which would be shared with the car owner and crew.
Checkout completed at the Onondaga Hotel, where most of the teams stayed-often three and four to a room-and it was off to the next race the following weekend at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis. The Lutes Special, its nose scoured clean from the flying cinders, was loaded onto an open trailer and hooked to a road-worn Ford station wagon, then aimed west for the 500-mile trip to the Hoosier State. Five more races remained on the AAA championship schedule, which would ultimately take Sweikert and the Lutes across the country, to Las Vegas, Sacramento, and Phoenix before season ended that November.
On balance, 1954 would be a good year for the professionals. Just two men, both rookies in over their heads, had lost their lives. Bob Scott, an eager twenty-five-year-old from the West Coast hot-rod ranks, had died of head injuries when his car rolled onto him during the Darlington, South Carolina, 100-miler. Wally Campbell, a hotheaded kid from the eastern sprint car circuit, had burned to death when his car leapt the outside fence at Williams Grove, Pennsylvania. In a macabre scene, the car had continued to run in tight circles as its unconscious driver was consumed in flames. Considering the potential for death and injury on the championship trail, most of the young lions had dodged a bullet. So too for the professional European road racers, among whom only young Argentinian Onofre Marimon, a protege of the world champion, Juan Manuel Fangio, had died during practice on the notoriously twisty, up-and-down, fourteen-mile Nurburgring in Germany.
I took a week to laze around Geneva, staying at my fraternity on South Main Street, a tree-lined avenue bordering the western shore of Lake Seneca that E Scott Fitzgerald once called one of the most beautiful streets in America. I would rush to the front porch when I heard local sportsman George Harris running his incredible, thundering Cadillac-Allard J2X up South Main, no doubt headed to the local hills for a mad drive across the golden woodlands of early autumn.
The following weekend a friend and I drove his new Austin-Healy 100S to Watkins Glen, a tiny village at the southern end of Lake Seneca. The largest of the five Finger Lakes, which dented the central New York landscape like a giant handprint, Seneca was forty miles long, with cold, impenetrable depths reaching seven hundred feet. Route 14 meandered along a ridge hundreds of feet above the cleft of the lake, offering a spectacular vista of woodlands bright with the crimson and lurid oranges of turning leaves and a sweep of the vineyards that were springing up throughout the region. At roadside fruit stands, homegrown pumpkins, squash, gourds, late-season tomatoes, and jugs of cider were piled high and offered at bargain prices. Watkins Glen had subsisted for decades solely on its salt mine and on a modest tourist business based on a spectacular shale ravine carved out during the same ice age retreat that had formed the lakes.
In 1948 young Cameron Argetsinger, the son of a Youngstown, Ohio, steel executive whose family had a vacation home on the Seneca shore, convinced the village elders that if a European-style road race could be run through the streets and a network of nearby Schuyler County roadways, a giant tourism boom would ensue. His efforts, aided by the local Chamber of Commerce and other civic groups, resulted in the first "Grand Prix" being run on October 2 of that year. The eight-lap race around the 6.6-mile circuit was won by an alcoholic Philadelphia Main Line millionaire named Frank T. Griswold Jr. at the wheel of his own prewar supercharged Alfa Romeo coupe. Argetsinger finished ninth in the race he created. In coming decades, the best professional drivers in the world would compete at Watkins Glen, but in the early years the racing was strictly amateur and based on the English model of clubby, gentlemanly competition unsullied by filthy lucre.
The races were an immediate success, even following the death of Samuel Carnes Collier, the heir to a Manhattan advertising fortune, in a 1950 crash that received front-page coverage in the New York press. Unlike the majority of men dying on the nation's dirt tracks and at Indianapolis, Collier was well-born, a pure sportsman who engaged in a civilized expression of motor sports that rarely led to death.
The ruling body at Watkins Glen was the Sports Car Club of America. Like many WASP-based private organizations of the day, it did not admit Jews. This caused a major upset in 1951, when a wealthy Jewish businessman from New York named Erwin Goldschmidt broke the anti-Semitic barrier and won the Grand Prix with his Cadillac-Allard. Goldschmidt, who had endured Nazi persecution in his native Germany, won a victory that ultimately broke down the racial policy of the SCCA. Ironically, the Indianapolis 500 had already been won three times-in 1941, 1947, and 1948-by a Jewish engineer named Mauri Rose. But it was not until the 1960s that Jews and other minorities who had been excluded from many enclaves of American society were finally given proper admission.
Competition having been outlawed on state roads following the death of the young child in 1952, the Watkins Glen organizerscomposed of village businessmen and area enthusiasts-moved the races to a network of Town of Dix and Schuyler County roads on a hill above the village. The course was laid out on barren farmland in a rough rectangle of narrow, rudely paved roads totaling four miles in length. The paddock, such as it was, had been created out of a mown hayfield, topped by a crude timing stand on the edge of Townsend Corner Road. To the north lay the long, blue slit of Lake Seneca.
The paddock was full of rare and strange automobiles. All were European, with names like Lagonda, Aston-Martin, Hispano-Suiza, Mercedes-Benz, Frazier-Nash, Nash-Healy, Triumph, and Riley, in addition to the more popular marques like Jaguar, MG, and Porsche, all of which were appearing in increasing numbers in upscale suburbs from coast to coast.
A large contingent of New York socialites had made the drive upstate. They had become involved with the sport when the Bridgehampton road races had been started on eastern Long Island in 1949. Thanks to their exposure in the chic Hamptons, sports cars had become a fashion item in Manhattan. Former French star driver Rene Dreyfus and his brother had opened the Chanticlair Restaurant on East Forty-Ninth Street. The international racing crowd and major automobile executives used it as their regular watering hole. Henry Austin Clark, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune and a major car collector and historian, had started the Madison Avenue Sports Car and Chowder Society, which met monthly at amateur racer Vincent Sardi's famed restaurant on Forty-Fourth Street.
Mingling in the pits on that late summer weekend were such notables as CBS announcer Walter Cronkite, Today show host Dave Garroway, and former child star Jackie Cooper, who would compete enthusiastically-if not quickly-in his own Austin-Healy 100S sports car.
Unlike in Syracuse and Indianapolis, here women were everywhere. Some lounged by the cars, while others prepared tailgate lunches. Some helped their husbands, polishing wheels and checking tire pressures. A few even donned helmets and goggles and raced with the men. Sports car racing, with its social exclusivity and highminded sense of separating itself from the dirt-track rabble, was an example of sexual egalitarianism. To outsiders, the women lent an air of casual frivolity to the scene, as opposed to the hard-edged chauvinism of the professionals.
Most of the cars were marginally set up for racing, which meant that the headlights had been taped over and crude numbers pasted on the doors
. There were no special tires, rollover protection, or other safety considerations. Most, like Harris's Cadillac-Allard, which had ripped past us on Route 14 at 110 mph as we headed south from Geneva, had been driven to the race. And presuming there would be no accidents or mechanical failures, they would be driven home again at the end of the day.
Some of the more serious competitors had transported their cars on open trailers, hauled behind station wagons and standard American sedans. And then there was the Cunningham equipe, which had elevated the sport to a higher, more professional level.
Briggs Swift Cunningham, of Greens Farms, Connecticut, was the heir to a meat-packing fortune and had been smitten with fast cars for his entire life. Being relieved of such mundane chores as earning a living, he had grown up preoccupied with yachting (he later won the America's Cup) and motor sports. Several prewar trips to Europe had instilled in him the desire to win the great 24-hour race held each June at Le Mans, in France.
By 1951 he was building his own special Cunningham sports cars, powered by the newly developed Chrysler "hemi" engines. The cars, designed and fabricated in a new factory outside West Palm Beach, Florida, were the equal of any Ferrari or Mercedes-Benz sports car of the day, and with a team of closet professionals including John Fitch, Cunningham nearly won the great race on several occasions. His lead driver was a brilliant ex-World War II glider pilot named Phil Walters. Also well-born, Walters had returned to Manhassett, Long Island, from the war with a restlessness for action that attracted him to motor racing. His first involvement was in the rough-and-tumble midget racing circuit, which his socially active family felt was beneath his station. In deference to them, he raced under the non de plume of Ted Tappett until he joined the Cunningham team. This kind of racing was considered sufficiently civilized that he could use his given name.
Walters was the number-one Cunningham driver now that Fitch had moved to Europe, taking up residence in Switzerland to work as a double for Kirk Douglas in a 20th Century Fox production about Grand Prix racing called The Racers. His driving skills and gentlemanly demeanor had led to a place on the Mercedes-Benz team, which was competing in both the Grand Prix circuit and in worldclass sports car competition.
