"Frank! Damn! Good to see you," I said in surprise. "You still racing?"

"Some," he admitted. "I somehow didn’t expect to find you pumping gas."

"Just temporary," I told him. "I just graduated from Milwaukee State, going to be teaching down in Chicago in the fall."

"College? You! Damn, I never expected that either. You been racing any?"

"Been to a few races," I told him. "I wouldn’t have minded the chance to do some driving but college had to come first."

Frank looked at me for a moment and smiled, "How would you like to drive a midget for me tonight?"

I sure wasn’t expecting this. Yeah, I’d enjoyed going to those races now and then, and I often wondered what it would be like to drive one of those little open wheelers. "Frank, I have to tell you that in spite of that Jeep race, I’m really not a racer," I told him. "But yeah, I wouldn’t mind giving it a try. You have a spare car or something?"

"It’s a little more complicated than that," he said. "See, after I got out of the Army I went back to racing, but I discovered I’d lost some of the edge. So I got involved in promotion, and I only race now if we’re real shorthanded, which we are tonight. Worse comes to worst you can just make the start and stay out of the way. But it ain’t gonna happen. I learned back on Okinawa that you’ve got the touch for it."

"You don’t have to keep talking me into it, you’ve managed that already," I told him. "Where and when do you want me to meet up with you?"

"You know where the fairgrounds in Oconomowoc are?" he asked.

"I know where Oconomowoc is but I’ve never been there."

He said the fairgrounds weren’t hard to find, and gave me directions. Oconomowoc was only about twenty miles from where I was, and I had plenty of time after I knocked off at the gas station to change clothes and stop at a little greasy spoon restaurant for a burger and fries. For some reason, I remember that restaurant even though I stopped there only the once – they had those big, fat crinkle-cut fries that you don’t find much anymore, and I thought it was one of the best hamburgers I ever had. I got back in the Ford and drove on out to the fairgrounds, which proved easy to find.

I drove into the infield and parked the Ford where the racers were being worked on, got out and looked for Frank. I didn’t see any sign of him, but I caught sight of another familiar face I hadn’t seen since Okinawa: Spud McElroy. That seemed a little strange because I remembered that Spud was mostly an East Coast guy.

"Hey, Mel!" he called as I was still recognizing him. "How the hell are ya? Frank said you’d be along."

"Yeah, he talked me into it this afternoon," I told him. "What you been doing with yourself?"

"Working with Frank the last couple years," he said. "It’s a long story but we’ve been doing all right."

We stood there for a minute or two just getting caught up a little before Spud asked if I wanted to check out the car. I’d been wondering about it a little, so Spud took me over to a little white racer, with an orange Phillips 66 shield on it, with the number "66" in the center. The car was small, like any midget, smaller than the midgets they run today. It was a front-engine job like they all were, a little less than four feet wide and not eight feet long, but it had a V8-60 for an engine, and in just one look you could tell that thing could fly. I took one look and smiled, "Sure isn’t a Kurtis Kraft, is it?"

"Are you kidding?" Spud snorted. "Those things are going to kill midget racing. No, this is a Midwest Midget Sportsman; it’s not like any other midgets. That’s what Frank and I intended when we built it. I thought Frank said that you hadn’t done no racing since Okinawa."

"No, but I go to the races every now and then, and I know what a Kurtis Kraft is. Why do you think it’s going to kill midgets?"

"Midgets were supposed to be cheap cars that guys could build out of junk yards and stand a chance of winning," Spud shook his head. "But you can’t build a car out of a junk yard that can compete with them, so the guys that want to race cheap are going to go elsewhere, to jalopies or something."

In the long run, Spud nailed it right between the eyeballs. Midgets were originally supposed to be cheap cars, like he said – but right after the war a guy by the name of Frank Kurtis was building midget racers that were more than a cut above the cars that had been around before the war. Rather than the rail frame that were on those cars – and the Midwest Midget Sportsman – these had a tube frame welded up like a fabric-covered airplane – it was a lot lighter and stiffer at the same time. The Kurtis Kraft midgets also had a specially built Offenhauser racing engine with twin overhead cams that put out power like nobody’s business. The whole thing sold for about $4,500 at the time, which sounds good until you stop and think that you could buy a pretty good street car new at the time for a thousand dollars. But enough people wanted to be competitive that Kurtis was selling all he could build. Occasionally someone in an older car with a V8-60 might beat one, but it was becoming relatively rare.

Spud was right in that the Kurtis Krafts killed midgets as they had been known up to that time – and he was right that the bottom-end racers were going to go to jalopies, which we hadn’t learned to call "stock cars" yet. These days the stockers have just about killed open-wheel cars, although they aren’t dead yet.

Anyway, I took a closer look at the car, and yeah, it wasn’t a Kurtis Kraft, and there were several things different from all the other midgets I’d ever seen. First off, there was a clutch and transmission, which I saw was the standard Ford V8-60, and a standard Ford rear end, with just a universal joint connecting the two. Most regular midgets anymore had what they called an "in-out" gearbox, which was really kind of a clutch, and a quick change rear end so you could mount gears in it that were appropriate for the track. "Don’t look too bad in the cockpit for fit," I commented.

"You shouldn’t have any problem fitting in there," Spud said. "Giff didn’t have any problem with it."

"Who’s Giff?"

"Giff Elliott, the guy that’s been driving it, he’s a few inches taller than you are and a hundred pounds bigger. A guy wants him to try out driving a sprint car for him; I think he’ll wind up doing it regular."

"Well, all right, let’s give it a try," I said. It wasn’t a bad fit once I was inside, although I figured Giff must have been packed in there pretty good. There were only three gauges – oil pressure and water temperature, along with a tach.

"Master switch is that toggle under the tach," Spud said. "Starter is that black button next to it."

"What, no push start?"

"I told you these cars weren’t your regular midgets. You might want to use first to get going, but run this track in second; you won’t get much chance to stick it into high, anyway."

I started the engine; it caught right away. I gunned it a couple times, then let it back off. I was surprised to discover that it idled pretty well, which a regular race engine wouldn’t, at least in those days. It was loud; there was an exhaust pipe that ran past each side of the cockpit. "Run a few laps to feel it out," Spud yelled over the noise. "Then let her go and see what she does."

So, I let in the clutch and goosed the engine a little and headed out onto the track, which was an old quarter-mile horse track. I did like Spud said, took the first couple laps slowly, just getting the feel of the car, then put the pedal down fairly hard, getting a feel for how it handled in the corners, and tried to push it a little harder every lap. I was going pretty good and the car felt comfortable, even pushing fairly hard in the turns. It felt like it could stand more power – and there’s hardly ever been a race car that couldn’t – but all in all it seemed like an honest car.

After a few laps I was feeling more comfortable with the car and started leaning on it in the corners more, hanging the tail out so it felt like I was pushing it about as hard as it wanted to be pushed. I wasn’t keeping track of the laps, but I guess I got in twenty or so before I pulled it back into the infield and stopped about where I had started. I shut it off, and looked around to see Spud heading over to me. "Gettin’ into it a little, I see," he called.

"Yeah, a hell of a lot more stable in the corners than the Jeeps on Okinawa," I told him.

"If you want to practice a little more we’d better get some gas in that thing. I figured that you were getting close to running out."

"Not much gas left in it?"

He shook his head. "It only has a two-gallon gas tank. That’s enough for maybe thirty laps on a track like this. That doesn’t get rid of the fire danger, but it cuts it down a touch. Don’t try to go more than two heats or more than the feature on a tank or you’re gonna run out. You have to do your own gas fills since we don’t have a pit crew."

Spud showed me where the fuel trailer was – it was a standard Army five-hundred-gallon fuel tank trailer like we’d often used on Okinawa, so it didn’t take any time to learn to use it. "We buy gas wholesale, and since we’re not using it on the road we don’t have to pay highway taxes on it," he explained with a wink of the eye that told me that it was used for more than that.

It didn’t take long to fill the tank, even with the undersized nozzle on the fuel hose. When we were done Spud asked if I’d like to have him go out with another car so we could run together. I wasn’t about to turn him down since I figured I could learn something. He hopped in another car and we got out on the track.

We started out with me running right behind him trying to get around him. I tried getting under him several times and it didn’t work until I got up on the high line and was finally able to put him away. He got on my ass right after that and I had a heck of a time trying to beat him off. We diced it up three or four laps with me mostly running high and him trying to dive under me in the corners until he finally made it by. I saw how he’d changed his line to make the pass and decided to try the same move on him. We went back and forth for quite a while, until he finally gave his arm a wave and we headed for the infield. I noticed that several guys had been standing around watching.

"You ought to do all right tonight," Spud told me after we got out of the cars. "’Course, I figured clear back on Okinawa that you had the touch."

By now several of the other guys had gathered around where Spud and I were standing by the cars talking. "Guys, this is Mel Austin," Spud told them. "He’s an old friend of Frank’s and mine. He’s going to be driving the 66 car tonight, filling in for Giff." Spud introduced me around, but I only caught a couple of the names. We stood around shooting the bull for a couple minutes, then Spud offered to buy me a pop.

We headed over to a nearby pickup truck that had an ice chest in the back, and Spud pulled out a couple colas. "So what have you been doing with yourself?" he asked. "Frank said you’d been in college."

I spent about two minutes talking about going to college and expecting to teach high school in the fall, then asked Spud what he’d been up to.

"You’re looking at it, mostly," he replied. "This is the third summer that Frank and I have been on the road with this show. We came up with the idea together, but he was the one that came up with the front money. He and I built most of the cars."

"You doing all right with it?"

"Making a living, which is better than I did running a V8-60 against the Kurtis Kraft Offys in the bull rings back east."

"You don’t have a problem with that here?"

"No, no way," he said. "I don’t know if you’ve figured it out yet, but the cars here are all one design. The bodies are a little different for the sake of looks, but underneath they’re as alike as Frank and I could make ’em, except for a couple cars that are on their last season. We can do it that way because we own all the cars."

"That’s different," I said. "So you can set up who you want to win?"

"We could, but we don’t. Well, not much. We like to see real racing, but everybody understands not to bang the cars up much or they can get sat down. Me and Frank were on Giff’s ass about it, which is why he went looking for a sprint car ride, and I hope he gets it. Everybody also knows that if someone starts winning too much or outrunning the rest of the field, we’ll diddle the car a little to slow it down, so that helps to keep things close, too."

"That’s a different approach," I said again. "So the Midwest Midget Sportsman Association is you guys, too, right?"

"You got it, Mel," Spud laughed. "It’s a long story and it took a fair amount of beer for Frank and me to work it out, but so far it’s worked pretty well."

"Where is Frank, anyway? I haven’t seen him since this afternoon when he asked me out here."

"Oh, he’s around somewhere, probably arguing with the fairgrounds manager or something, I guess the manager is a pain in the ass. I don’t get into that part of it, my part of the job is to keep the cars running along with all the other shit we’ve got. Frank takes care of the business side, along with Carnie."

"Carnie, from Okinawa? He’s here, too?"

"Well, he’s with us, we don’t actually see him a lot since he’s our advance man," Spud smiled. "You would have been asked to join us when we started this thing if we could have tracked you down, but nobody in your home town had any idea where you was."

"They still don’t," I told him. "And I’d just as soon keep it that way, too. Do you guys race a lot?"

"Most every night April through October, and into November a little this year, I guess. Frank’s talking a swing down through the deep south, don’t know how that’s going to work out. We miss a night every now and then for one reason or another."

"So how much does a driver get paid, anyway? Is it all winnings, or what?"

"It ain’t a lot of money, but if you’re a driver it’s pretty good since you don’t have to cover car expenses," Spud told me. "We got a base salary of twenty bucks a week, plus you win twenty bucks for winning a feature, ten for second and five for third. On top of that we give you some money toward expenses; it varies on account of what we have to pay for tourist cabins or whatever. What, you thinkin’ that you might like to do this?"

Up to that point I had mostly just been curious about the whole thing and not driving any more than that night, and then just for the hell of it. But as soon as Spud mentioned it I realized that I really had been thinking about it in the back of my head. After all, I didn’t really have anything to do that summer except pump gas for what would turn out to be less money, wearing a hot uniform and working for a bitchy owner, staying in another boardinghouse while I looked for a teaching job in a decent place, rather than a Chicago slum. This could be a lot different. "The thought had crossed my mind," I admitted.

"It’s more than just driving the race cars," Spud warned. "You got to help us with traveling from place to place, tearing down and setting up, and be a mechanic on top of it all. It’s a lot of travel and we ain’t hardly ever in one place two nights in a row. But we go all the hell over the place and see a lot of country, too."

It was sounding better and better. I could remember some of the tales that Carnie had told about carnival life back in the tent in Okinawa, and remembered how I thought it would be neat to be able to live like that for a while. "I’ve got a street car," I told him. "Nothing much but it’s gotten me around. Can I bring that along?"

"Sure thing, we usually got more butts than we got seats, it’d spread things out some," Spud smiled. "Tell you what, I ain’t gonna say yes until I’ve talked to Frank and we see how you run tonight."

We stood there and shot the bull for a while longer, mostly Spud telling me a bit about how they did things and some stories of the good times that they’d had, and all of it just made me want to spend some time racing with this crew.

As we stood there the gates opened and fans started filtering in. A little to my surprise, in an hour or so there was a pretty good crowd – not the mob that there would be for the midgets racing at a place like Soldier Field, but then this wasn’t Chicago, either.

As it got close to race time Spud led me over to a trailer and pulled out a set of white coveralls. "Here, these ought to fit," he told me. "We like to keep the drivers looking pretty sharp."

I piddled around a little gassing up the 66 car and like that while I was waiting. After a while there was a driver’s meeting that really wasn’t much. Spud introduced me to the group, and I shook hands around, but still didn’t get a lot of the names. "As far as the race goes, just the usual setup tonight, boys," he explained. "Fifteen-lap heats, thirty-lap feature. Mel and I did over thirty laps this afternoon so you ought to have plenty of gas."

Along with everything else, Spud was the starter and steward. He said that the normal way they did things was to run two preliminaries and a consolation – the top three cars from each of the heats would go into the main, along with the top two from the consol. It would have been perfectly feasible to run all twelve cars in the main, but Spud said that they didn’t always have twelve drivers and that allowed someone to do double duty in the heats.

Spud lined me up at the tail end of the first heat, on the outside of the third row. He said that was ass backwards to how they normally did it, since they usually lined up in reverse order to the last finish, but since I was new I might find myself lagging behind and it would keep me out of other people’s way. I also kind of suspected that Spud wanted to see if I could work my way through the field before he offered me the job, and that meant I had to race my way into it. I didn’t have any idea of how the other drivers drove, but figured that any one of them had more racing experience than I did.

We did a rolling start without a pace car, the guy on the pole position setting the pace. I hung back just a little in hopes of jumping the start a little like I had done back in the Jeep race in Okinawa, and before the flag dropped I stood on it. That got me past the guy on the inside of me, and the guy in front dove to the inside before I could get to him. Well, that was fine, I knew how to run the high line although it took me a couple laps to get past him. That had allowed the front three guys to open it up a little, but now I could use the full track and open my line up a bit, and in a couple more laps there was a three-way race for second going on while the guy in front was checking out.

I wasn’t keeping track of the laps, but we battled all the way around the track, changing position with every lap. I came by Spud in fourth when he waved the white flag, but I passed the 14 car for third on the low side in turn one and was going wheel to wheel for second against the 57 car in the high lane as we came down to the checker. I didn’t get him but didn’t miss by much, a foot or so, and that at least got me into the feature.

I felt pretty damn good as I pulled into the infield and got into the line for the gas trailer in the order that we finished. I could run with these guys and that proved it. I shut off the engine, took off my helmet and got out.

"You almost had me there," the guy from the 57 car said as he got out. "Spud said you were pretty green, but you sure didn’t let up none. You actually raced with him?"

"One time, and it wasn’t actually against him." I said. "I won, though. You drove that pretty good yourself. I’m afraid I’m not very good with names and Spud threw them out awful quick."

"Bernie Korodan, they call me Hoss," he said, sticking his hand out. "You going to be driving with us regular?"

"Maybe, Spud and Frank still have to make up their minds," I told him as we shook hands.

"Well, if you do, we manage to have some fun now and then. But buy some bug spray, we always seem to wind up in whatever tourist cabin or brownstone that has the most fleas."

"Pretty bad, huh?"

"There’s times we’re lucky to have them," he said. "We’ll hit some places where they never even heard of renting rooms, and we wind up sleeping on the ground, under the trucks or something."

"I can do it if I have to, I was in the Army," I told him.

"Yeah, Frank and Spud were in the Army too, and they were smart enough to buy a little travel trailer that they drag around," he snorted. "That sleeping on the ground shit gets old after a while."

The guy in front of us finished gassing the winning midget, and I helped Hoss push his car up to the gas hose. When he was done he helped me with mine, and we both drove over and parked along the fence just as the second heat got under way. We lit up cigarettes and stood leaning up against our cars watching the race, and it didn’t seem quite as frantic as the first heat had been, but then I wasn’t in it, either. There was a good PA system, and I could hear Frank calling the race.

"Damn," I said to Hoss as the consolation heat got under way. "I wish there were some way I could get over to the stands and grab something to eat. I had a hamburger earlier, but it hasn’t stuck with me too well."

"They got hot dogs over there, I think," he nodded. "They’re pretty expensive, though, twenty cents a pop. The popcorn might taste good, though. Oh, well, we’re not all that far from being done. Go get yourself a soda from the pickup. Take what you want; we each pitch in fifty cents or a buck when it’s time to get more."

"Naw, if I get one now I’ll have to piss about five laps into the feature," I told him. "I don’t think Frank or Spud would be too happy with me if I had to make a piss stop."

We stood there and shot the shit while the consolation was going on. It was a little bit funny; two cars, the 39 and the 86 were running nose to tail with about a quarter of a lap lead over the rest of the cars in the race, who were all clustered together, running pretty hard but not making a lot of attempts to pass. "Goddamn Pepper and Slab," Hoss shook his head. "That’s just a little bit too goddamn obvious. Spud’s gonna whomp ’em up the side of the head for that."

"For what?" I asked.

"Usually we run an inverted start for the feature," Hoss explained. "That means that the consolation winners start up front. It looks to me like Pepper, he’s in the 86, and Slab in the 39 sandbagged their way into the consolation. Now they’re running so fast it’s pretty obvious what they did. The other four know they ain’t got no chance so they’re dogging it. Guess we just have to wait and see how Spud lines us up."

In spite of the cars being supposedly equal, it looked to me like Spud had pretty close to a full time job keeping them that way, and shenanigans like that had to be a part of the game. There was just a little more to this than met the eye.

Sure enough, when the time rolled around for the feature, it proved that Spud had caught them, all right. He lined us up in inverse order, except that the consolation heat winners – the 39 and 86 cars – were in the back. I was at the outside of the front row, with the 2 car on the pole, and Hoss behind me.

The rest of us had fueled up, of course, so we waited on Pepper and Slab to fuel up. They didn’t act pissed off or anything, it just looked to me like they’d been caught and knew it. Still, I wondered just how hot their cars were and whether they’d be flying past us. Being on the outside of the front row gave me a good shot at the high line on the start, and I decided to not to try to jump the start quite as bad as I had the last time, because that was something that I figured Spud would catch me at sooner or later. The guy in the 2 – I didn’t know his name yet – brought us around what I thought was a little slow. I could have timed it a little better when the flag dropped because he had about half a car length on me when we went into turn one. I didn’t lose him much after that but I had Hoss nipping at my heels. I figured he wanted to get down low, but the 2 car had that pretty well blocked for the moment. I wasn’t sure what was going on behind me, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if it had been a traffic jam.

I guess there was, because on about lap five we came around fighting it out when I saw Spud waving the yellow, so we slowed down and fell into line behind the 2. As we came around the corner, I could see the 39 car up against the fence and the 14 car driving back onto the track from the infield so it looked to me like he’d spun. We found out later that Rocky Turnupseed in the 14 had been trying to get past another car when Slab decided he wanted to run in the same spot. I guess they banged wheels and both of them had spun. The 39 car didn’t look like it was beat up too bad but didn’t want to run for some reason, so four or five guys rushed out from the infield and shoved it away from the fence and back toward where the cars were sitting just off the inside edge of the track.

We ran another couple laps under the yellow, and then Spud waved the yellow with the white, signaling one to go. I didn’t think the 2 was any faster than I was, so I decided to try to get a jump on him on the restart and hold him off. I let him have about three car lengths and hit the loud pedal enough to get a little jump on him, and headed right for the outside line since he seemed to want to go inside. I didn’t know that Hoss had the same idea, except that he wanted to go under both of us, and we went three wide into the first turn without hardly enough room for any of us. I still don’t have any idea how it happened but Hoss came out of the corner in the lead, with me in second and the 2 car in third.

After that it got wild. I was trying to get around Hoss, and I guess there were several guys trying to get around the 2, so I didn’t have any company for a while, which was fine with me. I had my hands full with Hoss, anyway. I tried him high and I tried him low, but I just couldn’t quite get around him far enough to put him away. After another few laps the battle was with more than just Hoss, since a couple other cars had caught up with us. We managed to hold them off for a while, but late in the race the 69 car went way low and passed both of us, and after that I was busy racing my ass off to stay ahead of the 86 car.

But that’s how it was when the checkered flag fell. I’d finished in the money in my first Midwest Midget Sportsman race, and while it doesn’t sound like much, five bucks was worth a lot more than it is now. I know there are people that look back today and call us just barnstormers that ran fixed races, but I was there and I know that those people are full of shit. Yes, we were barnstormers in cars that were roughly equal, but we flat raced. I’d worked my butt off to get that third place and I was proud of it.

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