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Neither Frank or Spud ever told me all of it at once, but over the years I heard enough bits and pieces to be able to put together a pretty good story of how the Midwest Midget Sportsman Association came to be.
By the time that Frank got home from Okinawa what there had been of the 1945 racing season was over with, so he settled down working for Herb in his garage. Herb let him put his race cars in the back of the shop, and when Frank wasn’t working he went over the cars with a fine tooth comb to get ready for the 1946 racing season.
I never heard a lot of details but I guess the ’46 season went pretty much all right. Frank won a few and ran well in some other races. Over the course of the summer Frank noticed that while he won more in the sprint car he made more money running the midget, because the field was larger and there was a lot more interest in the midget racing. He’d seen a couple of the Kurtis Kraft midgets and had been able to run with them.
After thinking it over a bit he decided to pretty much park the sprint car in ’47, or at least only run it in a few events, and concentrate on the midget that he’d built for Herb almost ten years before. It was no longer way ahead of everyone else in its class, so that winter he gave it a major rebuild to try and find some more speed.
Frank said one time that he probably would have been money ahead to just buy a Kurtis Kraft midget, or at least just the chassis to hang a hot V8-60 engine in it, but he didn’t realize that at the time. Unfortunately, some other people did, and the 1947 season mostly consisted of Frank trying to hang on to money finishes with his fingernails. After everything was counted up, he figured that he didn’t do as well money wise in 1947 as he had done the year before. On top of that, he started to suspect that he wasn’t quite as fast as he’d been ten years before, and that maybe the years were starting to catch up with him.
As the 1947 season began to wind down, Frank could feel the dissatisfaction and the need to do something different but really hadn’t thought it out much further than that. Along in October there was a big season-ender race in Pittsburgh, which was about as far east as Frank had ever run, and he decided to make the haul over to it. He unloaded the midget and started to check things out, and discovered that the guy in the next spot in the infield was Spud McElroy.
Like Frank, Spud got back to the states too late for what was left of the 1945 racing season, although there were a couple places in and around New York that ran midgets inside and Spud got involved with them. Much like Frank, Spud had a pretty decent ’46 season, but ’47 wasn’t quite as good, since there were a lot more people running and the Kurtis Kraft Offys were starting to make their appearance. Spud managed to finish in the money enough to keep going although things were a little thin at times. By the time he made it to that big race in Pittsburgh, it was clear that he was going to have to either jump on the Kurtis Kraft bandwagon with no idea what he was going to use for money, or go do something else.
The race in Pittsburgh was a big enough deal that it ran multiple days. Since Frank and Spud knew each other pretty well from the Okinawa days, they had some catching up to do, and they wound up in some nearby local bar knocking back Iron City beer, telling lies and bitching about the Kurtis Krafts. Frank and Spud always argued over who said, "If I had my own racing circuit I’d ban the damn things," but maybe both of them said it.
With the help of some more Iron City, they got to talking about what kind of cars they would have if they had their own racing circuit. The main idea was to have the cars pretty cheap, and as much alike as possible, but agreed that keeping the cars equal would be pretty hard since everyone was going to hop them up and the next thing you knew you were back at the Kurtis Kraft problem.
Both Frank and Spud agreed that it was Frank who said that there was one way around it – if they owned all the cars, they could set ’em up any way they damn well pleased.
Now, that was a new idea, and it was obviously just the opposite of the way things had always been done. Frank used to say that racing started when someone built the second car, but always the driver or owner showed up as an independent and raced what they brung, assuming it could pass the tech inspections. But, if Frank and Spud owned the cars, they could make sure they were all pretty well equal and there would be none of the expensive hopping up needed to keep them pretty equal.
The problem was that if they owned the cars like that they’d pretty much have to run them on their own circuit to keep someone from showing up with a hot car and blowing everybody away. But, Frank said that maybe running their own outlaw circuit wouldn’t be that big a deal under the circumstances.
Like I said, racing had never been done that way before. There used to be some thrill shows like Joie Chittwood’s that did it that way, and it was done in other ways, like pro "wrestling" and roller derby and like that, where everyone was working for the promoter, so it wasn’t totally unplowed ground.
At that point it was all pretty much beered-up bullshitting, but there must have been something in that Iron City brew, because it set the both of them to thinking after they headed off for the evening. The next day it still made sense and they picked up where they left off. Spud was pretty much thinking about the cars, while Frank was thinking about the promotion side of things. His opinion was that if you had ten or twelve cars, finding a place to race them was no big deal, but it would take a little more work to find a crowd to pay the expenses.
I don’t know how they did racing that day. I guess not too good because their minds were on other things. That evening they went back to that same bar, got into the Iron City again and started throwing numbers around. By the time they got done they’d worked out the basics of the whole operation – it was clear that it could be done, but it was also clear that it was going to take some front money, which neither of them had any to speak of.
After the race was over with, Frank loaded his midget back on the trailer and headed back toward Livonia, thinking a lot about what he and Spud had talked about. When he got back home, he parked the rig, bought a kid’s pad of school paper and started throwing numbers around. He spent some time talking to various people like track owners and fairground managers about what would be involved, and once he got the whole thing together he headed over to Herb’s Ford agency and laid the whole thing out.
Herb had always been a big racing nut, and it really didn’t take Frank a whole lot of talking to sell him on the idea. I’m not totally sure about the arrangement, but I guess that Herb took a part of the business so long as Frank and Spud put up some cash of their own.
Frank had a couple cars he could sell to put up his share of the money, the midget and the sprinter. He wrote a letter to Spud saying the deal was on and explaining a few things, about it, and in a few days Spud showed up at Frank’s door. It seems that Spud had sort of gotten into trouble with his wife about a few little things, like a blonde honey who liked to hang around the pits, and he figured that it might be best to not be around New Jersey for a while. He’d had a good offer on his cars and had the money in his pocket.
Frank was still living with his folks, and Spud moved in with them. Herb found them a little old warehouse in Livonia, and Frank set Spud to work building cars, with the help of a kid by the name of Peewee Svoboda, who was a high school dropout but a hell of a welder. They found some tools here and there, and the two of them started to get familiar with all the junkyards within about a forty mile radius.
The car was mostly Spud’s design, although Frank and Peewee had some in it, too. It was mostly based on mid- to late-thirties Ford parts. If there was special stuff, it was intentionally designed to be pieces that could be built quickly. Not only was this an aid to building the cars in the first place, but race cars do get wrecked, and as long as there were Fords of that era in the junk yards there would be a source of parts readily available. Even the car bodies had various Ford body parts involved although by the time Peewee got done welding on them it would be hard to tell.
They would get a wrecked Ford, a ’37 to ’40 coupe with a V8-60 if possible and strip it right down to the frame. The frame was both too wide and too long for the midget, but that was something that Peewee could cure in a jiffy with his cutting torch. Because they wanted to use the transmission and rear end to avoid the cost of an in-out clutch and the need to push the car to get it started, the car came out a little longer than a regular midget to be able to couple the transmission to the rear end. That was good, because regular midget cockpits were awful damn tight for anyone that was even average size.
While Peewee was working on the chassis, Spud would be working on the motor. He tore them down to the bare block, put in new rings and bearings, ground the valves and like that, and then put it back together. The motors were pretty darn close to stock, although Frank freed them up some with some homebrew exhaust headers and a homemade log manifold where he hung two regular Ford Stromberg 97s instead of the usual one. This was mostly to free up the breathing, and once put together it put out maybe ninety or a hundred horsepower, which doesn’t seem like a lot but was just fine when everyone else had about the same.
It took them about a month to build the first car, mostly because they had to stop and take some time to figure out what to do, but after that they kicked out a car about every two weeks. They had seven cars ready to go when the racing season started in early April. That wasn’t enough of a field, since they’d promised twelve cars minimum, so Frank went nosing around and bought a few old and outclassed midgets that were sitting in people’s barns and the like. Some of them were rougher than hell and looked it, but during the week over the summer Spud and Peewee cleaned them up some and installed the standard motors, although some of them still had to run the in-out gearboxes.
Frank helped Spud and Peewee with the cars when he could, but he had a lot of other irons in the fire. At first the idea was to make the MMSA a pretty much local thing that only ran on weekends. That meant there were about twenty-five weekends they could race, and Frank wanted to run at least fifty races, and more if he could get them. That meant both Friday and Saturday nights, along with maybe Saturday afternoons and Sundays where he could get them. In those days local blue laws kept most places from racing on Sunday so it was iffy setting dates on those days.
There were a lot of short tracks around in those days, and it was no great trick to arrange for race dates at some of them. Mostly those places ran hot rods and jalopies, so bringing in midgets for a race gave the track owner something different to promote, and I guess Frank managed to come up with twenty or so dates like that.
A lot of the others he was able to fill in with what the carnies called "still dates" at county fairs, especially later in the summer. Some of these were evening races along in the middle of the week, and that made for a special pain in the butt, what with most of the drivers working weekdays, so they had to be fairly close in to the home base in Livonia.
The final category of dates was local races. These were just about wherever they could be run, mostly fairgrounds horse tracks but not always. As a last resort Frank would promote a race himself, but he preferred to work through some local group, Kiwanis, Rotary, Jaycees, or some other kind of local group, usually on a split with the sponsoring organization or sometimes just for a flat fee with the sponsor taking the profits. I remember Carnie talking about carnivals setting up that way and I suppose that’s where Frank got the idea.
After spending all winter and most of the summer on it, Frank managed to schedule sixty-four dates for the MMSA, of which six were rained out, so he figured that part of it went all right. Frank said they made a profit but not much of one, and probably took a loss if you counted all the time he spent setting up the races.
There were a number of other problems that first summer that had to be solved, but that was part of why they wanted to run a mostly weekend schedule the first year so they could be solved before they expanded.
Frank really wanted another set of hands to help him with setting up the dates and getting things organized for them, and that kind of stuff wasn’t quite Spud’s cup of tea. That person had to be a promoter and an organizer; Frank thought of several people, but they just didn’t quite fit what he wanted. Then, one day the next winter, he happened to run across Carnie, of all people, who was involved with an outfit selling freezers full of food, a barely legal scam that was popular at the time. Carnie explained that it was something he was doing just for the winter, and that he was thinking about getting the hell out of town before he got lynched. Frank explained what he wanted, and hired Carnie on the spot.
The other thing that broke that logjam was Herb’s daughter, Vivian. Vivian was definitely a girl ahead of her time. She had just graduated from college and didn’t want to be a housewife.
Back in those days it was pretty rare to see a woman in business in anything other than the lowest levels, like being a waitress or something. When a woman went to college it was generally understood that she wanted to be a teacher, a housewife, or preferably both. Not Vivian; she wanted to be a business executive. In fact, what she really wanted to do was to be a car dealer and take over from her old man.
One of the things that hasn’t changed is that you can trust a car salesman about as much today as you could back then, which is to say not much. The case that Vivian made to her dad was that there are women who buy cars, and they could be intimidated by a fast talking salesman where a woman who knew cars might not be quite so scary to them. Herb wasn’t buying the argument much, but it was clear to him that Vivian wasn’t going to get married any time soon and didn’t plan on hanging around the house either. The only reason he finally took her into the dealership was that she was talking with a Chevy dealer across town about a job, and the guy was interested, if for no more reason than pissing Herb off. That pretty well meant that he had to hire her to get her off the market.
About that time – this was along in that first summer – Herb began to realize that Frank was running himself ragged trying to set the dates and do everything else for the MMSA. He needed a pair of hands to help out and at least be able to pick up the phone if someone called. Frank had been leaning on Herb’s staff pretty hard for all those kind of support things and stuff was getting lost. So, Herb got the bright idea of assigning Vivian to be Frank’s assistant and office manager, but working out of the dealership. That way, if a woman came in and wanted to talk to a woman salesperson, she’d be present, but the rest of the time she could handle the MMSA office. That turned out to be a stroke of genius in many ways – Vivian was out to prove a point and she threw herself into things.
What with having Vivian to support them and Carnie to do the advance work, they raised their sights considerably for the ’49 season. That first year they’d mostly stayed around Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, where there was already a lot of racing going on and a lot of midgets around. Frank suspected, and Carnie downright knew, that the show would play a lot better if you got away from the places where there was already racing, out where people didn’t have a lot of entertainment. Carnie had plenty of experience with how well that worked from working carnivals, mostly before the war. Before Carnie came on board Frank had already lined up a lot of fair dates in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, but there were a couple big blocks of time in the early part of the year either side of Memorial Day where there wasn’t much scheduled. It was decided early on to try an early swing down in the direction of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas just to see what would happen.
To make a long story short, they found just about what we found a year later, which is to say good crowds in some of those small towns, more than enough to make it worthwhile. They’d left late June and July a little open to see what would happen, but after the first couple weeks Frank, Spud, and Carnie got their heads together to see what they could do about scheduling another swing through the more northern Midwest states during that period. It all went pretty well, and from what I gathered they’d made the nut for the season and then some by the time they got done with the northern swing. The late summer and fall was taken up with fair dates, usually one night stands but occasionally two nights in the same place, all for a fixed fee from the fairgrounds. When they wrapped it up towards the end of October they’d raced something over 150 dates, which is a lot of racing any way you cut it.
The county fair dates were still a pretty good deal, and this year we were scheduled pretty solid with them up through the middle of October again, although spread a little wider than just the three states. When those dates started to dwindle down, Frank and Carnie had decided to try a swing down through the deep south without a lot of advance, just to see what would happen. Depending on what happened, along somewhere in November we’d wind back up in Livonia to sit out the winter.