Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

by Brock Yates

  By then most of the establishment press, the big-city reporters, and a few Associated Press and UPI staffers and magazine writers had adjourned to the press box, a long row of seats hung high under the eaves of the grandstand from which pit action could be observed. Standings were unknown during the race, save for the teletyped bulletins passed around every ten laps by Eagle Scouts selected for the honor. Rather than sit there in splendid isolation, I chose to stay trackside, standing directly behind the Vukovich pits, where I could observe Coon and Travers as the race unfolded a few feet away.

  One more pace lap and the Chevrolet scurried into pit lane. Bill Vandewater, the starter standing at the edge of the track, whipped out a giant green flag and began waving it at the wildly hued clot of mechanical bulls charging toward him. Accelerating hard, they rumbled past, briefly enveloping him in a cloud of dust that had lain dormant in the grout of the bricks.

  Distant thunder. The backstretch. "Jack's got the lead. Vuke's in second, right on his ass," yelled Travers over the din, somehow in receipt of information unseen by others. It was the beginning of a long, desperate, raggedly insane battle for the lead between McGrath and Vukovich. The others were left behind to fight for the pickings as the pair dueled wheel to wheel, passing and re-passing, sometimes two and three times a lap. Never in the history of the Speedway had two men struggled with such mechanical intensity. Generally, such tiffs lasted no more than a lap or two before one driver or the other established supremacy, through either sheer will or superior horsepower. But this time, McGrath and Vukovich each refused to give, slicing into the corners abreast and wailing down the long back straight side by side. The crowd was on its feet, its cheers faint and squeaky against the din of the engines.

  The war went on for forty laps before smoke began to ooze from McGrath's exhaust pipe. I walked to Travers, who was holding a pit board that said, "P1 137." It signaled Vukovich that he was first, running a record-setting 137 mph, a phenomenal speed considering his heavy fuel load and the gusting wind. Travers shouted, "McGrath's gonna blow. Just like I told Vuke. That pop is death on an engine." He turned and held up the pit board as Vukovich passed.

  A yellow flag was waved by Vandewater. Agabashian had spun, gyrating into the infield grass without injury. I thought of the helmet.

  A slit in the clouds produced a suggestion of sunlight. Perhaps the weather was clearing. Things were back in order. Vukovich was leading. McGrath was faltering. The rest of the field was straggling, far behind. I began to compose the lead for my story. On the fifty-third lap, McGrath coasted into the pits and climbed out. He opened the hood of the Hinkle as he was handed a spark plug wrench. After extracting the plug, he examined it and shrugged his shoulders. Clearly the plug had told his trained eye that the engine was mortally wounded. Yanking off his helmet, he turned and stalked toward the garage area.

  Back at the Vukovich pit, Travers and Coon were preparing for their driver's first stop for fuel and tires. Four fresh Firestones were laid at the pit wall while Travers checked the valve on the immense tank of methanol fuel mounted at the back of the pit. The movements were routine, measured, almost laconic by the perfectly trained crew.

  Another yellow flag. This time Vandewater was at the edge of the track, waving frantically. The cars slowed as they passed. Several drivers were gesturing toward the backstretch. Others were tapping the tops of their helmets, indicating that somebody was upside down. I looked for the blue Hopkins. It did not come by. Travers looked worried. He stared at the stopwatch in his hand. The pace car was out on the track, leading a pack of cars now lumbering by at 50 mph. The stands were silent. Someone gestured behind me. I spotted a pall of smoke rising in the distance, apparently near the exit of the second turn.

  A man in a suit with an AAA armband came up to Travers. He was obviously an official. He moved close to Travers and whispered in his ear. Travers reeled back, clearly disturbed. He moved to Coon and spoke softly. Coon dropped his head, then looked back at the rising smoke.

  A man came up and said, to no one in particular, "Four cars. Vuke's upside down, outside the track. Car's on fire. Looks bad." Bryan came by, ugly smoke pouring out of his exhaust. Clearly his car was in trouble, but at least it was still moving. Vandewater kept the yellow flag waving. I turned to see Travers and Coon leaving the pits. I followed them back to the garage area in silence. Several reporters came up, but they brushed them off and kept moving. They reached the garage. Before I could catch up, they went in and closed the door. I dared not follow.

  Tom Medley came up. I hadn't seen him in two years. There was no greeting. His face was dark, absent his usual joviality. "Real bad," he said grimly. "I heard Vuke's had it. Went out of the park trying to miss some other cars. Maybe Ward. Boyd. Keller, too."

  "Where?" I asked.

  "Out there on the back, right near the pedestrian bridge," he said. "A guard with a walkie-talkie told me Vuke got into a bunch of spinners. Couldn't get through. Boom. Flipped and landed upside down. He's still in the car."

  "Any chance he made it?" I asked.

  "Naw. He's a goner," said Tom, walking away.

  The rumble of cars on the track was subdued, meaning they were still running slowly, under caution. This meant the wreck was large and complex and would take a long time to clear up. Suddenly the whole insane world around me was repellent. More men walked past, heads down, mumbling about Vukovich. All confirmed he was dead. I looked again at the closed doors of the garage, filled with joviality and hope such a short time ago. My watch read a few minutes until noon. Medley came back. "They just announced it on the PA system. Vuke is dead. The three other guys, Ward, Boyd, and Keller, are OK, I guess. Looks like he won't win his third in a row."

  The entire Speedway was hushed, even the muffled growl of the cars running at low speeds. I thought of the Buick man and his speculation that bad accidents somehow stimulated and energized the crowd. Not on that blustery day at Indianapolis. The crowd was wounded-if not dead-as they watched the wispy smoke still rising from the backstretch.

  Enough of this, I thought. My story was ended. My subject was dead. I had to get out of the place. Elbowing through the silent masses, I made my way to the tunnel under the front straight, a narrow, dank tube leading to Sixteenth Street. Once there, I drifted for a moment, seeking my bearings. Then it came to me. It was two blocks away. Walking quickly, I made my way to the little malt shop where Vukovich had celebrated his first victory. It seemed right. I ordered a vanilla milk shake and sat down, silently toasting the Mad Russian, the Fresno Flash, Vukie, Vuke, or whoever, who had so dominated the bravest of the brave. In the distance I heard the thunder again. The cars were at full throttle. Racing had resumed. Speeds were up. The wreck was forgotten. A small radio on the counter carried the race. Sid Collins, "the voice of the 500," was chattering away as if nothing had happened. Sweikert was leading in the Zink Pink Kurtis. He seemed headed for victory, but I didn't care.

  Leaving half of the shake, I began the long walk down Georgetown Road to Newsome's place. The roar of the cars beyond the high barrier of the grandstands was menacing-and vaguely frightening. By the time I reached Ray's house, the yard was half empty. In place of the cars were empty beer bottles, rumpled newspapers, and other effluvia of a large, absent crowd. The big Roadmaster was gone. The Buick men had left, headed back to Philadelphia, where they would recount the moment when they had witnessed history and the demise of a legend.

  THE DAY AFTER THE RACE DAWNED SUNNY AND calm. The storm had passed. I ate breakfast with Eldon, who once again rattled on about the crashes in his backyard, as if to exorcise the demons that haunted the track beyond his juniper tree. Trying to salvage something for a story so that my whole trip wouldn't be wasted, I walked back to Gasoline Alley. It was deserted, save for the crews loading up the battered, grease-and-rubber-stained cars that had survived the race. They would head to Milwaukee, where next weekend it would all start again.

  The Vukovich garage was still closed, no doubt housing the
charred hulk of the Hopkins. I wondered what would be done with such a wreck, having been the vessel of death for such a man as Bill Vukovich. I later learned that the car was repaired, repainted, and revived to carry young Jim Rathmann to the second starting position the next year before falling out with engine trouble. The old warrior would appear twice more at the Speedway, its role in the horrific incident on the backstretch three years earlier long forgotten-or purposely ignored.

  As I'd expected, the primary subject among the men in Gasoline Alley was the Vukovich crash. It had apparently begun when Rodger Ward, driving the old Kuzma dirt-track car, caught a gust of wind while exiting the second turn. Before he could regain control, the car slapped the wall and tumbled in front of Al Keller, in his even older Kurtis, which was equipped with only a hand-brake hung on the outside of the cockpit. Keller apparently yanked too hard and locked up the wheels, sending his car into a slide in front of Johnny Boyd, a racing buddy of Vukovich's from Fresno. Boyd hit the spinning Keller as Vukovich-running perhaps 100 mph faster than all three-blazed off the turn and into the melee. With nowhere to go, he clipped Boyd's rear wheel, sending both cars tumbling. Vukovich's Hopkins slammed against the base of the footbridge crossing the track and sailed upside down over the retaining wall, landing on a security patrol Jeep. It then flipped crazily to end upside down, on fire.

  As Boyd's car tumbled down the track, he ducked deep into the cockpit-which saved him, other than some badly scuffed knuckles. In the middle of the madness, with his car bouncing like a berserk beach ball, he later recalled seeing his wristwatch coming loose in the impact. "Oh shit, I'm gonna lose my watch," he thought to himself. The car slid to a stop upside down, with Boyd trapped inside. He heard a voice yell, "Oh no, he's really had it!"

  "Bullshit," yelled Boyd from inside the wreck. "Get this son-ofa-bitch off me!"

  Two men helped him escape. Once clear of the wreck, he spotted Keller, one of his rescuers, but also, perhaps, partly of the cause. In a fit of rage, Boyd grabbed him and began cursing and pounding him on the chest. At that point Ward came up and grabbed them both. "Get off the track, you idiots, before some other dummy comes through here and gets all of us."

  The dazed, confused trio staggered into the infield as another race car slid to a halt. Out jumped Ed Elisian, a Northern Californian from an Armenian family whose admiration for Vukovich bordered on hero worship. Hysterical, he tried to cross the track until he was subdued by guards. Elisian was trying to reach the smoking wreck of his fallen idol, a futile and irrational act that, ironically, would win him a sportsmanship award following the race.

  It was later determined that Vukovich had died from a basal fracture of the skull, probably suffered in the first millisecond of the first flip. The gruesome photos carried the following day in newspapers around the world-of the burning car with Vukovich's gloved hand probing out of the bodywork-added a ghoulish touch to the accident.

  Old-timers at the Speedway talked endlessly about the coincidence of the 1939 crash, at the same spot, that had killed Floyd Roberts. Like Vukovich, Roberts had won the previous year. When exiting the second turn on the 107th lap, he had run into the spinning car of Bob Swanson and also crashed over the outside fence to die of a broken neck.

  Anger over who had caused the crash surged through Gasoline Alley like an evil wind. Much of the blame was directed at Ward, whose profligate lifestyle left him, in the minds of many, too physically debilitated to run the full distance without losing concentration. Whether or not this was the case, Ward was to use the incident to transform his life. Soon after, Ward married a staunch Baptist woman, stopped drinking and gambling, and would go on to win two 500-mile races and become a stellar spokesman for the sport. Others, like Boyd, laid the blame on Keller, a rookie in an ancient car who panicked and locked up his brakes. This in turn had left Boyd no room to maneuver, and blocked the way for the surging Vukovich. But while an automobile is traveling almost three miles a minute, decisions at close quarters are often beyond human capability. In the end, the crash was laid off on "racing luck," the catch-all repository for all such disasters, when the victim is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  While Sweikert was headed for his Indianapolis victory, the pain and misery had not ended. As the final laps unfolded, Cal Niday, a thirty-nine-year-old midget racing champion who had already lost a leg in a motorcycle crash, was riding in fourth place in his locally owned D.A. Lubricants Kurtis roadster when he lost control in the fourth turn. The car slammed the wall, then caromed across the track into an infield ditch. He was hauled off to the infield hospital, where chief doctor C. B. Bonner discovered a frontal skull fracture, a crushed chest, and third-degree burns on his right leg. Niday was taken to Methodist Hospital, where he started to recover. Nine days later, he suffered a hemorrhage of his pleural cavity, a collapse of his right lung, paralysis of his bowels, and severe jaundice possibly caused by a bad blood transfusion or a ruptured liver. A team of surgeons opened Niday's chest cavity to make repairs and miraculously, he survived. But like his cohorts, he could not stay away from fast cars. In his seventies, he was killed running in a race for vintage midgets in California.

  The nightmare of the 500 behind me, I drove back to Los Angeles in three hard days. Still hoping to salvage a story on Vukovich, I headed north to Fresno for his funeral. It was huge. Perhaps three thousand mourners appeared as the Mad Russian was laid to rest. The Fresno Junior Chamber of Commerce announced the establishment of a scholarship fund in the Manual Arts Department of Fresno State College, a fitting memorial to a man who lived and died with machinery of the highest form.

  A week later, in Milwaukee, a young charger from Massachusetts named Johnny Thomson won the 100-miler on the ancient oval, beating Sweikert in a close race. A new generation of drivers were ready to take the place of the dead king. Thomson was driving for Peter Schmidt, who only two weeks before had lost his driver, Manny Ayulo. But in the sport of AAA championship racing in the mid-1950s, fourteen days was ancient history.

  The Mad Russian ready for war. Bill Vukovich prepares for a 100-mile championship race protected only by a thin leather helmet, goggles, and a pair of driving gloves. Note the absence of a roll-bar or protective cage or insulation from the red-hot exhaust pipe within a few inches of his right elbow.

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  Two racing pals Manuel Ayulo (I) and Jack McGrath (r) share a victorious moment following the 1953 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 100-mile championship race. Both men grew up in Los Angeles and raced midgets and hot rods together before gaining success in the major leagues of AAA competition. Sadly, both men would die in the brutal 1955 season.

  Brave men at play. Sacramento, CA 1954 prior to a AAA 100-mile race. Left to right: Jerry Hoyt, Jimmy Bryan (with his omnipresent cigar), Bob Sweikert, Jimmy Reece, Rodger Ward, Johnny Boyd, and Edgar Elder. Standing behind Reece and Ward is Sam Hanks. The four men on the left would all die in racing accidents within six years. Bryan, Sweikert, and Hanks would be future Indianapolis 500 winners. Ward would win the big race twice. (Dick Wallen Productions)

  Bill Vukovich works to build hand strength prior to the 1955 Indianapolis 500. Crewman Frank Coon works on the Hopkins Special's Meyer-Drake engine.

  Bill Vukovich poses for a publicity shot at his Fresno home with his wife Esther and children Billy, Jr., and daughter Marlene. Billy, Jr. would go on to compete at Indianapolis from 1968-83 finishing 2nd in 1973 and 3rd in 1974. Vukovich's grandson, Billy III, ran at Indianapolis from 1988-1990.

  War at 120 miles an hour. Don Freeland (number 38 M.A. Walker Special) and Rodger Ward battle for position during the 1953 Milwaukee 100-mile championship race. Both men battle for control on the rutted, slippery dirt surface, struggling with their heavy machines without power steering or protection from the flying stones and dirt. Freeland is "rim-riding" against the outer rail, seeking better traction on the cushion of dirt flung outward by the spinning tires. The races were flat out, with no pit stops or relief, forcing the dri
vers to near exhaustion. Ward can be seen wearing a plastic visor and two pairs of goggles to help keep his vision clear. Note the absence of any rollover protection. The drivers sat in front of seventy gallons of volatile methanol fuel carried in easily punctured fuel tanks. (Dick Wallen Productions)

  Rodger Ward in the car that would trigger the Vukovich crash. A broken front axle and a gust of wind would send the car out of control. This is the same machine that Troy Ruttman had driven to victory in 1952-ironically after Vukovich's steering failed while in a dominant lead a mere eight laps from the finish. Coincidentally, this machine was involved in two Vukovich crashes at Indianapolis-the second one costing him his life.

  Two of northern California's finest race drivers confer prior to the 1955 Indianapolis 500. Johnny Boyd of Fresno (in car) would be involved in the Vukovich crash while his friend, Bob Sweikert (standing) would drive on to victory.

  Bill Vukovich celebrates after his incredible rain-soaked qualifying run prior to the 1953 Indianapolis 500. The windshield and bodywork of the car are water-spattered indicating the severity of the rainstorm that he somehow managed to navigate despite the fact that his Firestone tires were totally unsuited for running on anything but dry pavement.

  The cocky, brilliant Bob Sweikert often admitted, "I'll never live to grow old." He was right, dying at age 30 in early 1956 during a sprint car race at Salem, Indiana.

  The end of a champion. The shattered, burning Hopkins Special that Bill Vukovich rode to his death is hauled away from the crash site. The car would be repainted and run in two more 500-mile races.