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We were short a driver when we left Livonia. This one guy, Blackie I think his name was, hadn’t been running very well and wasn’t happy about being on the road; it turned out that he stayed with us only so he could have the free ride back home. It wasn’t a big deal, since we often were short a guy or two. Usually when that happened we had a guy double up on a car in the heats and dog it in one so he wouldn’t make the feature in it, and it worked out pretty good.
But this time, Spud decided he wanted to do something different. It turned out that he was a little more serious than we had thought about wanting to get back into driving, or at least keeping his hand in, so he wrote himself into the 2 car.
What usually happened was that Frank did the business stuff with the local promoter or whoever, and during the race he turned into the track announcer. He had the gift of gab and was pretty darn good about it, and he could add a real level of excitement over the PA system. That was important; it added a lot to the race and made it a better show, but it meant that he spent most of the race at the top of the grandstand, wherever it was.
Spud was in charge on the other side of the track, organizing the race, lining us up, and running the flag stand. On the shorter tracks we’d usually just have the one flagman, who was stationed at the start-finish line, but on the longer tracks we’d have a second flagman on the back stretch just to warn of yellow flags or trouble. When I first started with the MMSA, the back stretch flagging was done by a driver that wasn’t in the heat. Along in the middle of that first summer Hattie volunteered to do it, along with her program of making herself useful. So, she knew her way around the flags and was good with them, so Spud got the idea of putting her on the flagstand at the start-finish line. He could pretty well set the starting grids for the heats at the driver’s meeting before the race, and he and Hattie could get their heads together before the feature to work out things there.
Now, I mentioned earlier about how they didn’t allow women in the pits at Indianapolis, but that was the case at a lot of places. Race drivers were a superstitious lot then, and still are to some extent today. There were a lot of superstitions, starting with women in the pits being bad luck. Green cars were bad luck. Peanuts were bad luck. Cars with a number that you could read upside down, like 11, 69 or 88 were bad luck. We’d had a 69 car with a lot of green on it since the beginning, but since Chick was driving it, I think most of us figured that having Hattie around sort of balanced things off. By now, she was one of us anyway, so nobody put up much of a bitch about having her handle the flags.
Frank raised the concern about what Hattie was going to do with Carol while a race was on, but she wasn’t too concerned about it. Carol was a sweet baby and all of us were always willing to help out with her; the first diaper I ever changed was Carol’s, for example. Carol literally grew up with the sound of a V8-60 racing engine as a lullaby; the cars usually put her to sleep, which maybe says something about what kind of racers we really were. Frank kicked it around for a minute or two, and finally said Spud could give it a try with Hattie on the flags, but if Carol became a problem we’d have to figure out some other way to do it.
I might as well say right now that Carol never proved to be a problem that way. There wasn’t often that she kicked up a fuss during a race and there was almost always someone around who could help out while Hattie was involved with the race. Sometimes it was one of us drivers who took care of her; sometimes Hattie would pick out a likely looking kid from the crowd to come and baby sit while the race was on, and that was always a thrill for them. I only recall one time that Hattie had to throw a yellow because the kid needed to be changed, and that was during a consolation when it didn’t matter anyway. Carol proved to be a real trouper, and she was part of the crew at the age of three months.
Looking back on it now, I think I have to say that having Hattie and Carol with us settled us all down a lot. Having the two of them with us reminded us that there were such things as real lives and families out there. The two of them added a touch of domesticity that I think all of us appreciated.
For example, during the year before those of us with cars had just shared out making a daily run to some little grocery store to get bread and lunch meat and chips for lunch at the track. Right from the beginning this year, though, it was different; Hattie offered to make us all lunches in their little trailer; we just kicked in so much per week and that was that. It wasn’t just lunch meat and chips, though; in the cold days in the spring she made soup or chili to go with our meals; sometimes she made hot dogs or something like that, but something different every day. She almost always had a pot of coffee on, and it was always appreciated.
On rainy days, we’d rig a tarp between the trailer and one of the trucks so we could crowd in under it and get out of the rain. We were driving along one day and found a bunch of folding chairs that had been put out for the garbage. Most of them were in pretty bad shape, but a little work with the welder in the box truck and a little mix and match went a long way toward having seats for most of us. There was many an hour we spent under that tarp, watching the rain fall and wondering whether we were going to be racing that night or just heading back to the tourist court. Sometimes we’d pull a car in under the tarp and work on it for the sake of something to do – like any race car, there was always something that needed to be done.
I think we had a closer group that summer than we had any other time. Having Hattie there was a big part of it, although the fact that we didn’t have anything like as many driver changes as we’d had the year before had something to do with it, too.
That trailer was very tiny and very primitive, even for those days and especially compared to even the smallest travel trailers on the market today. There really wasn’t very much room for the three of them; there was a narrow bed that was supposedly a double bed but kept the two of them nice and close; Carol was usually in a basket sitting on the table in the front of the trailer. The trailer didn’t even have electric lights, not that it was ever parked any place where they could have been hooked up. Everything ran on a twenty-five-pound propane tank that Chick had to have filled every few days. There was no ice box, and finding ice was always a problem, especially in the heat of the summer when things had to be iced down every day. There were no bathroom facilities in it; sometimes we’d be at a place like a track where the facilities could be used, and sometimes they had to resort to a bucket that had a rudimentary toilet seat attached. It didn’t have a water tank, but the water tank trailer was never far away, and they had to run over there with a bucket to get any. Every few days they’d borrow one of our motel rooms to get a shower, but mostly Chick had to clean the dust of a race off at the water trailer.
But damned if they weren’t happy with it. It may not have been much, but it was home. After a long string of fleabag motel rooms and tourist cabins, I think most of us envied them that. I know I did; it had been a long time since I’d had anything that resembled a home, the spring of ’44 before I’d left to go to the Army, and there wasn’t any prospect of one coming along for me any time soon. I suppose I could have left the show along about that time and gone looking for a place to teach school, but I wasn’t ready to leave my friends, which were such family as I had, and it never really crossed my mind to do it.
Having Spud actually racing with us changed things a little. We’d always heard stories about how good he’d been, but we figured that there was a pretty good bullshit factor involved. The truth was that he was pretty good – I don’t think as good as Squirt had been, but pretty good. The 2 car had never been one of the better ones, but when Spud got in it and started working on it the car started to sit up and take notice. After a while he had it running with the best of us, and even better than that. To our amazement, one day he opened up the engine right in front of us and dropped a sixteenth off the restrictor plate, just for the sake of being fair and trying to put on a good show. After that, he was right in the thick of things, but only rarely won, or finished in the money – he wouldn’t take the winnings for himself, and just passed it down the line if he did, which also amazed us.
After we left Livonia in the first part of June, we did our big western swing. We got as far south as Kansas, where we’d been earlier in the year, but mostly we were north of there. I don’t remember all the places, of course, but I do remember being in North Platte, Nebraska, where I had a couple of pleasant memories.
From there we headed on up into the Dakotas, then back down through Minnesota into Iowa, then north through the forest country of Wisconsin and upper Michigan.
One day, we were running in a little town called Spearfish Lake, way up in the woods country. Spud and I were in the first heat along with a couple other cars, and we fought it out all through the heat before he nosed me out for the win right at the finish line. This was one of those ball diamond tracks, and it was pretty small, so we’d been running in first gear. That made for a quick and exciting race. I tried my old trick of getting by Spud on the high line, but that’s a trick that doesn’t work very well when the start-finish line is on a curve, so I blew it and had to take second.
I don’t know why, but my dander was up that day, and I felt like Spud had pulled a fast one on me. We went through the next two heats and the consol before we lined up for the feature. Since we inverted the field for the feature, I was in mid pack and Spud was on the back row, so I thought if I was lucky I could stay ahead of him. We ran around the field a few times to get the cars warmed up, and then Hattie dropped the green flag.
I wasn’t the only one running well that day. About halfway through the race, Rocky and Dink were running right ahead of me, but Spud had worked his way up through the field to run on my tail, and he was doing his damnedest to get around me. I had realized by now that running the high line wasn’t going to work real well at this track, so I just tried to keep it tight in the corners and protect my line. Rocky and Dink were going at it hard, and although I was almost right there, what with trying to fight off Spud I didn’t feel that much like getting involved in their little fracas. That probably wasn’t such a good idea, because Spud got way up high and shot right past me, and that just warmed me up even more.
There wasn’t much I could do but try and worry his tail the next few laps. I tried him up high, I tried him down low, but there just wasn’t anything I could do to get past him. Then, just to make life interesting, Rocky and Dink were battling it out so close that they tangled in what passed for the back stretch. They banged wheels, and both of them spun out, which meant that Hattie had to throw the yellow. Rocky and Dink had to line up at the back of the field, with me in second and Spud out in front.
When Hattie threw the green again, I tried to get under Spud right at the start-finish line, but it just didn’t work since he figured that I’d try to get the jump on him. We had a heck of a battle there for the next few laps, mostly with me being able to get under him about once a lap but never quite being able to put him away. Finally, Hattie waved the white flag, signaling one lap to go, and I figured it was now or never. We were coming into the final turn when I got under Spud again, but he squeezed down on me, not giving me any place to go. Well, I’d had enough of that for one day, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, so I banged wheels with him right while I was heading for this big truck tire that marked the inside of the course. Well, I hit that thing dead on and it sent me flying way up in the air. Spud saw me go and he stood on the brake because it was dead sure there was going to be an accident. As it turned out, I was in the air when I crossed the start-finish line, with him behind me.
Of course, my car was totally out of control, and when it hit the ground, it hit hard, and bent the hell out of the front end. There wasn’t any way I was going to be able to do a victory lap, but at least I’d won the race. "Mel," Spud said afterward, "If I’d known you wanted the line that bad I’d have let you have it." That was bullshit and he knew it; he’d squeezed me into the damn tire in the first place.
The 66 car was bent up enough from its hard landing that we couldn’t get it onto the trailer. We had to manhandle the 27 car out of the box truck where it had ridden all season without being touched, and put the 66 in there in its place. I wound up having to drive the 27 for a week or so while we worked on the 66 car in the spare time. It was the only time I was with the MMSA that I bent up a car so bad it couldn’t run the next day. Having to drive the 27 was a punishment, in a way – it was still a fast car, but it was still goosey and unstable no matter what we did to it. I was darn glad to be back in the 66 again a few days later.
As July drew to a close we were back in Livonia, where we pulled the rig into Herb’s Ford agency and spent a couple days in the shop, going over the cars to get them ready for fair season, putting in the big gas tanks and stuff like that. In fact, we’d already run a few fair dates coming back down through Wisconsin, but like the year before, most of the dates we’d run for the next few months were at county fairs. I’d been looking forward to it, since the fair dates were always fun, we always had good crowds, and, well, it was at fairs, after all. Candy floss, carnies, Grange food tents, good crowds, and all of that.
While we were in Livonia, we picked up Bud Gaborski, who had run with us the previous fall. Since we still had Sonny with us for a few more weeks, Spud put Bud in the 2 car and went back to flagging races. We pretty well had to have a full field since we ran those long features with all the cars on those fast mile tracks. That was something to look forward to after running some of the penny ante stuff we ran like that ball diamond where I piled up the 66.
As before, Carnie was with us through most of the fair season. He’d had to be running out in front of us for most of the summer, and we hadn’t seen a lot of him, but he was always fun to be around during the fair times.
One of the nice things about the fair season is that we stayed a little closer to Livonia; several times Vivian caught up with us for a weekend, and Herb even came a couple times. Along in the middle of August we were back in southern Wisconsin, and it was a good place for Sonny to say goodbye. He had a few days to get ready to go back to school. He was going to be a senior that year, so he told Frank and me that it was unlikely that he’d be available to run another year as it seemed likely that he was going to have a real job next year. I had mixed feelings about seeing him go – Sonny was a heck of a nice guy and we had some real good discussions about things over the course of the summer. He paid more attention to the news than the rest of us, and was always ranting about something – President Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Korea, or Joe McCarthy, who he’d met personally and thought was a world class asshole. I think I learned more about politics and how it worked from listening to him than I picked up any other time. On the other hand, while he was a friend, with the way he farted all the time he was best at being a friend if he was downwind from you, which wasn’t always the case. There were times that nights in a motel room could get awful long with him around.
In the shuffle around after Sonny left I wound up rooming with Rocky Turnupseed. Rocky was a nice guy, but he was more typical of us MMSA racers in that his main topics of discussion were baseball, cars, and pussy – and not necessarily in that order. In fact, I’d have to say that in that period Rocky was probably the MMSA’s main pussy hound – never as bad as pre-Hattie Chick, but he was always on the prowl and he scored quite a bit. That’s not to say that I minded if something came along, but I was never as enthusiastic about going out and looking for it. I’ll have to admit that I was starting to get a little tired of roommates in general, and having to sleep in the car while Rocky was getting it on as often as he did cooled me off considerably after that.
When Sonny left, Spud didn’t bother to replace him, but just took over driving the 72 car in his place. "It saves money," he said at one point. I don’t know how much we all believed that, because a number of times that season we’d hear him talking about the Indianapolis 500 and how he intended to drive it one day, probably not the next year but somewhere up the road a piece. Spud sure liked driving those long dirt horse tracks. I never knew just how fast we got going, but I’d imagine we hit three digits on a lot of them, which was really flying for those cars in those days.
Slowly the days got shorter and the nights got cooler as we wandered from fairground to fairground all over the upper Midwest. We got as far west as Iowa again, up into Minnesota and down into Missouri, but for the most part we were in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Sometimes we ran two nights in the same place, but not all that often.
It was at one of those two night stands, down somewhere in central Illinois, I think, that Chick and Hattie announced that she was pregnant again. Obviously they’d been doing something besides sleeping in that little trailer of theirs, but the two of them were just about as happy as bugs in a rug about it – they were just positively glowing with the news.
I was smoking a cigarette with Frank, the next day, I think, when he said, "I wouldn’t be surprised if Chick and Hattie aren’t with us next year."
"Me either," I said. "It’s got to be a handful having one little one in that trailer, but two, one of which will be running around by then? That strikes me as being a little ridiculous."
"Me, too," he nodded. "I really had my doubts about this year, but it’s worked out better than I hoped all around. Chick has been a lot more solid this year than he was last year, and Hattie has been a big help with everything. I’m going to miss them, even though I think it would be stupid for them to go with us another year."
"I wonder what they think about it," I commented.
"I don’t know," Frank admitted. "I don’t even know if they’ve talked about it or thought about it. It would be handy if someone brought up the notion of them making this their last season, but because of some things I’ve said in the past, it really shouldn’t be me."
I got his point right away. "I’ll try to work the discussion around to it some time when you’re not around," I told him. "But he’s about going to have to have some place to land."
"I know," Frank sighed. "I think the next time I see Herb I’ll put the bug in his ear, maybe grease the skids a little. Chick is a pretty good mechanic, and Herb is always complaining about how he doesn’t have enough of them. So, how about you? Are you going to be with me another year?"
"I think so," I told him. "I know I said I was going to look for a teaching job, but I never got around to it. I figure you’re going to want me working on cars again this winter, but I was thinking that maybe I’d try and do a little substitute teaching like I planned on doing last winter and never got around to doing."
"Might not be a bad idea," he said slowly. "Spud and I have been talking it over, and we just aren’t going to have as much work this winter as last year. The cars haven’t taken as bad a beating, and we’ve pretty well decided that we’re not going to build any new ones this winter. We’ll have to go through all of them and do engine jobs on all of them, but it shouldn’t be anything like as bad as last year."
"Is Vivian going to line us up a house like we had last winter?"
"Don’t know, yet," he shrugged. "I really ought to talk to her about that, too. A lot depends on what happens with Chick and Hattie. If they decide they’re not going with us this winter, they may want to set up someplace on their own. On the other hand, if they want to share out a house like last winter, it might make the transition a little easier on them. I don’t know if we’ll be able to work out what we’re going to need until we know that."
"We’re still going to have several guys staying the winter, right? I mean, if I’m teaching or not? You might want to think about having Vivian look for a big enough house that we can go either way. That place we had last winter was all right, but it was on the small side for all of us being there. It’d have been all right with a couple fewer people."
"Well, I’ll run it by Vivian," he said. "It might depend on what’s available. At least it’s not like it was a few years ago when you couldn’t rent a house for love nor money. Hell, if we got a big enough place I might even move in with you guys. I’m getting a little tired of staying with my folks. At my age, it cramps my life style a little."
I decided to push him a little bit on a topic we didn’t talk about much. "Maybe you ought to think about getting a place of your own," I said. "It’d simplify things with Vivian a little."
"That it would," he smiled. "But there are some other angles to it, too. We kind of have to watch where we put our feet, if you know what I mean."
I didn’t really know what he meant, but got the impression that there was more going on between the two than just an occasional roll in the hay – but at the same time, there were probably some touchy issues involving Vivian’s parents. I knew that Herb had more than just a casual interest in the MMSA, but didn’t know the details – just that there was more there than met the eye.
Frank and I didn’t talk about it much more than that, and I felt that maybe he thought he’d said a little more than he ought to have said.
A few days later, I got to talking with Chick and Hattie about whether they wanted to try to get along in their little trailer with two little kids, and both of them admitted that they had their doubts and were kicking around the idea of not doing another season. It was clear that Chick would have to find something else to do, and I suggested that maybe he ought to approach Herb about a job when we got back to Livonia. He admitted that it might be something to think about, but that was about as far as we got. I told Frank about it later, and he said that was about what he expected.
It was starting to be pretty cold when we wound up with the fair season. We still had a handful of dates to run, the ones that Carnie had set up the year before, and by then I think most of us were ready for the season to be over with. Still, we managed to draw pretty good crowds, and the weather was nicer to us than it had been the year before, so when we ran our last date in Waycross, Georgia, we felt that the post-fair season had gone a lot better than the year before.
We loaded up the next morning and headed north, making a night stop in Chattanooga, the same place we’d stayed the year before. After we got settled in the motel, Frank took us up the street to the same place we’d been the year before for our annual post-season steak dinner, on him. It was a good meal, following a good season.
I’ll be honest, I really hadn’t been keeping track of it, so I was a little surprised when Frank did his little speech about the season again, and announced that Rocky had finished third in winnings for the season, with Chick in second. I wound up winning it, and by a pretty good margin, so I guess I didn’t have much room to complain. I got the trophy that the winner of each feature had been awarded all season, and as I look back I guess I’m a little proud of it. It’s sitting up on the mantle next to that piston trophy I won at the Jeep race in Okinawa, and it still gives me warm feelings to look up at it and remember those days.