Over the years I’ve often wondered what happened to Slab. For all I know, he’s still there. I never heard from him again, and I never thought to ask Frank about it. All I know is that when Frank stopped by the hospital to drop off his stuff the next morning he hadn’t regained consciousness but was otherwise doing all right. I also don’t know if the cops ever caught up with the guys that beat him up, but I doubt it. We were the outsiders, carnies of a sort, and if something bad happened to us it wasn’t going to cost the local power structure any votes, so there was no reason to try and treat us fair.

About all I do know is that a little after eight the next morning we were in a convoy, being led by Hoss, who was driving the semi with the race cars loaded on the back. The rest of us followed along behind, headed for Prairie du Chien and the next race that evening. About half an hour out we pulled into some roadside truck stop, partly to have breakfast and partly to wait for Frank and Spud to catch up with us after stopping off at the hospital. They weren’t far behind us, and we just about had time for a second cup of coffee while they ate before we were on the road again.

Southwestern Wisconsin is rolling and rugged, although awful pretty at that time of the year. The roads were twisty and hilly, so it meant for slow going, especially since the semi was no powerhouse, despite being fairly lightly loaded with the race cars. I recall that Pepper was riding with me, and that made the trip go a little faster. He was a solid guy with blonde hair, shorter than I was although pretty good looking. I couldn’t figure why it was Chick that was picking up all the women instead of him, as good as he looked, although I don’t recall making any comment to him about it.

It turned out that he hadn’t been any great buddies with Slab, although they’d been roomies since the start of the season about six weeks before. Pepper realized that Slab had gotten him into trouble in the past and seemed just as glad that he wouldn’t have to put up with that any more. According to him Slab had been a drinker and had been knocking them back pretty good after we left, and had been all belligerent and boasting about how he’d kicked that townie’s ass. "I kind of figured that something like that was going to happen sooner or later," he said.

It was after noon when we pulled into Prairie du Chien. We found the place where we were going to stay – another set of tourist cabins that were obviously about the cheapest thing in town. I’d already come to expect that and learned that Carnie was the one that made the reservations when he’d been in town to set things up a few days before. I can’t recall if they were better or worse than the ones in Baraboo but we saw an awful lot of cruddy ones over the years so they all sort of run together in my mind unless there was something special to make them stick out. After we sorted out rooms – Rocky was still stuck with Chick, but Frank promised him he’d be roomed with the next new guy – we headed on out to the track. This was another real race track, and a little more banked than the one in Baraboo.

We were getting hungry by now; several of the guys chipped in to buy lunch. Since I had a car I volunteered to make the run to a little grocery store and gas station up the road, where I got a loaf of bread, a package or two of lunch meat and some chips. This turned out to be nothing special and that’s how we did it most days – only if it were rainy or we had a long jump did we eat lunch in a restaurant. After we ate, I took the 27 car out for a bit to see if I could figure why it was still so goosy. I fiddled with the suspension a little but didn’t really solve anything. Most of the other guys were fiddling with their cars a little, getting in a little practice, then cleaning them up before the crowd arrived.

I don’t recall how I finished that night, but it probably wasn’t in the money. At least we didn’t have another incident at the bar following the race, and we left the next morning bringing another local racer with us, Sonny Ochsenlaager. Sonny was a carpenter between jobs and offered to run with us for a week or two just for the sake of a break – he wound up running most of the summer, as it turned out.

From there on where we went gets a little fuzzy, since so much of it was pretty much the same thing, day after day. I know I won my first MMSA feature race at Maquoketa, Iowa, so that sticks in my mind, at least partly because I remember having a pretty good battle with Rocky for most of the race. It felt real good to get out of the 66 car in the middle of the track, have the guy from the local paper take my picture, and even get a kiss from the race queen, which was something that we rarely had. She was a cute one, too, but it was clear that the official kiss was all that I was going to get.

I also remember Maquoketa, Iowa because it was a Sunday, and the first day off we had. Now, don’t get me wrong, every one of us would rather have been racing, but back in those days the Blue Laws were a lot stricter in some places than they are today. If Vivian, Carnie, or Frank couldn’t find us some place to race that day about all we could do was sit around on our butts. Some places the Blue Laws were so strict that you could barely do anything but go to church on Sunday, and as I recall that town was stricter than most. I had at least thought to pick up a paperback book to give me something to do – in those days, a cheap pulp paperback was a quarter, sometimes even less, and they were something a little new on the market. But, I really wasn’t in the mood to read, so while Dink headed off to the nearest church and a couple other guys decided to sleep in, I headed off with a couple carloads of us to a restaurant in town, at least figuring on having a long breakfast and several cups of coffee.

For lack of anything better to do, some of us got up a friendly little gin rummy game, just something to pass the time. I guess that must have yanked the chain of the old gal that ran the restaurant, because she told us we’d have to knock it off or she’d call the cops – playing cards wasn’t allowed in town on Sunday. I have to say that yanked our chains pretty good, and we paid our bill and left. We couldn’t think of anything much else to do but go back to the tourist cabins and find a shady spot to lay around, shoot the bull and wish we were racing, and hope to hell that the next time a Sunday rolled around that we’d have a place to race, or at least a long jump to make. I know we were darn glad to be back on the road the next morning.

Thinking about the Blue Laws back in those days makes me think about the dry laws. Prohibition had been over with for nearly twenty years by that point, but you’d never have known it in some of those little towns we were in. There were all sorts of local laws about drinking, from one town, county, or state to the next, and you hardly ever knew what you were going to be dealing with until you got there. Sometimes we’d go days between places where we could stop off for a beer or two after the evening’s race. Sometimes, if we knew we were going to be heading off into dry country we’d load up a few cases of beer in one of the cars or the parts truck, and ice it down to have wherever we were staying after the race. We couldn’t always do that and didn’t always know if we were going to be hitting a dry stretch. Sometimes you’d be driving around, and come up on a state line, where there’d be a bunch of bars to one side of the line. If they were on the side we were coming from we’d often stop and stock up a little since it was pretty clear there was going to be some dry country ahead.

We still have some weird blue laws about drinking and buying on Sunday around the country, but it’s nothing like as bad as it was back in those days. I don’t want to say that none of us were drunks, because it seemed like we always had at least one or two of us who would knock it back pretty good. But it bothered us to no end to not be able to have a beer or two to clean the dust out of our throats after some dirty night on a track some place.

While we did have some guys that drank, it was a pretty firm rule that you didn’t race drunk or drive on the highway drunk, and over the years I was with the MMSA Frank or Spud bounced a few guys right out on their ass for breaking that rule. That pretty well kept the drinking to after the racing, which was a pretty good place for it.

We worked our way west and south from there. Again, after all these years I’m not clear on the details. I seem to recall that we had a two night stand at Independence, Missouri, which was then-President Truman’s home town. Staying in a place two nights in a row was pretty rare, but we had good crowds both nights and I won the feature on one of them.

Somewhere along the way we’d picked up another driver, so we had a full crew, but that evening, the first night, whoever the other driver was tangled with Shorty Notwicki in the 2 car. Shorty was banged up pretty good and the other driver even worse. It was a dumb move on the other driver’s part, and Frank said he would have fired him for it if he hadn’t had to be left behind in the hospital, anyway. Both the 2 car and the 72 car were beat up pretty bad. There was a spare car, the 47, sitting in the parts truck, so we got that out and got it running, and all of us pitched in to rebuild the 2 car so it could be run the next night. Frank was able to find a couple local drivers to fill in for a few days; Shorty went along with us, his leg in a cast. After a week or so he was back in the 2, cast and all, when one of the local drivers had to head home. The 47 car was a dog, but we did a mix and match with parts from the 72 and got it to the point where it wasn’t too bad to drive. Over the course of the summer, when we hit a flat spot with nothing else to do we’d work on the 72, and we had it racing in the fall.

Shorty was a good guy for a little squirt. Always happy, always ready with a joke – especially Polack jokes, which seems a little strange to think about it looking back on those days, because Shorty was a Polack from the word go and wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He’d actually been born in Poland, and his real name was Stanislaus. He was well liked, and we all helped him get through the couple months his leg was in a cast. It was darn near impossible for him to get in his car by himself with that cast on, so a couple guys had to lift him into it. Then, he couldn’t use the clutch with his leg in a cast, so we rigged him up a broomstick so he could shove it in to start and pull off. Fortunately although we had three speed transmissions we always ran in just one gear, so he didn’t have to worry about shifting on the fly. He actually won some features like that.

Independence was about the biggest town we saw, except to drive through. We mostly stayed away from bigger towns where there were regular tracks and midget circuits, partly because Frank had figured out that we’d be less of a draw in places like that, and partly because we didn’t want locals running their midgets against us. The simple fact of the matter was that the MMSA midgets were slower than most regular midgets in those days. The MMSA cars weren’t as powerful, and were designed to last, which is what we needed for the MMSA show. All that meant that we hit some pretty little towns, and sometimes we were about the only outside entertainment that had come to town in a long time.

I think it was Pawhuska, Oklahoma where I ran on a ball diamond for the first time, since there wasn’t even a horse track to run on. The folks in that town were so glad of some entertainment that Carnie had set up for us to use the field, which was skin all over; there was no grass or anything even in the outfield. We laid out a course with old tires that must have been about an eighth of a mile; the start-finish line was between the pitcher’s mound and home plate, on a curve. All season long, we’d had another army surplus tanker trailer that we towed behind one of the trucks. Normally we just used it for wash water, but we had the tanker trailer since we occasionally hit horse tracks or other places that didn’t have a way to lay the dust. It worked pretty good for that; usually the local fire departments were pretty good about refilling the trailer for us, but occasionally we’d stop at a stream along the road and pump it full.

All in all, we were pretty self-sufficient as far as a show, and didn’t need much outside help. We didn’t have bleachers or lights or concessions, but we carried everything else we needed to put on a show with us, including stuff like a public address system and even a Kohler generator to run it from in case we didn’t have power.

Only a few days later we ran a show in a rodeo ring. You know you’re getting into the west when you drive through some small town and you see a rodeo ring on the outskirts, rather than a ball diamond. The track was on the small side and we had to run in first gear, but it actually was a pretty good show. You could never pull a stunt like that with a full sized car, but it worked just fine with the midgets.

I look back at it now and wonder just what the hell we were thinking of. There was nothing between the cars and the crowd but a board fence that sometimes was none too strong. It would have been no great trick for a car to get loose and go into the crowd, and a lot of people might have gotten killed, but it never happened to us. I suppose we were lucky, or at least we didn’t know any better. I never thought to ask Frank what kind of insurance he carried against something like that happening, but I suspect that he didn’t have any; things were different in those days.

To get away from the thread of the story for a minute, a few years later, in 1955, a French guy put a Mercedes into the crowd at the twenty-four hours of Le Mans and killed eighty-some people. Along about that time there were two or three bad accidents in this country, including Bill Vukovich getting killed while leading at Indy. The media raised hell about it, of course, and there was talk of an outright ban on auto racing. The American Automobile Association had been the biggest organization sanctioning races in those days, and it caused them to pull out of racing entirely. In the years to follow, having insurance became a lot more important. The insurance companies began to insist on barriers between the track and the crowd, along with high catch fences so that loose parts from a crash wouldn’t go into a crowd, but that was just about unheard of at most places we raced. Since we were trying to take care of the cars and not bend them up we never had a lot of accidents, at least not serious ones.

We did have some fake accidents though, almost every race. It was no great trick to spin one of those cars – just going through a corner you were pretty close to a spin anyway; all you had to do was to add a little throttle and crank the wheel a little harder in a corner and around you’d go. Spud used to remind us once in a while that if we were running toward the back in a race and didn’t have much hope of catching up, to go ahead and spin the car. This had the effect of giving the crowd something to look at while closing the field back up under the yellow. For a while there was talk of having a blue flag to signal for the guy in back to spin, but we never did it that way since we figured someone in the crowd might catch on.

Since Chick, Woody Vanderglessen, and I had cars with us, we traded off on making the lunch runs into town. One day we were in Floydada, Texas. It was Chick’s turn to make the lunch run, and he come back all full of stories about this girl he’d met in the little general store up the road. As usual, we didn’t think a whole lot about it since Chick was always full of stories about the beautiful honeys he’d met.

As I recall, I don’t think Chick won that night, but in the bull session with the crowd afterwards, we noticed that Chick was making his moves on a girl, like usual. What was unusual was that she was skinny, kind of flat chested, with short, straight hair, and rather plain looking – in other words, pretty good looking considering Chick’s usual standards. Sure enough, she was riding in Chick’s car when we headed back to the old ramshackle hotel in town where we were staying that night. Not surprisingly, she wound up spending the night with him. It must have been a pretty good night; the walls in that hotel were like paper and most of us could hear them getting it on. We could tell she enjoyed it because she was about as much a screamer as Bessie had been. I’m pretty sure that more than one of us wondered if there were any whores in that town that were still awake at that hour.

The next morning we were having breakfast across the street when Chick and this girl came in. In the light of day she wasn’t anything much to look at – not ugly or anything, but just plain, and maybe a little older than she’d looked the night before. I was sitting at a table with Frank, Spud and Hoss, which was the usual for us, when Chick came up to us. "So, Chick," Frank asked. "How are you this morning?"

"Tolerable," Chick smiled realizing that there was a limit to how much he could boast about his honey of the night with her standing right next to us. Of course, all of us knew what kind of a night they’d had but it wasn’t polite to comment about it with her there, either. "Uh, Frank," Chick continued, "Would it be all right with you if I took Hattie along with me? I know we’ve got an odd number of guys right now, but when we pick up someone I’ll pick up the extra room cost."

"Hattie, is it?" Frank smiled, checking out the girl a little more thoroughly. "Just so you know, we sometimes live a little rough, and we’re always moving from place to place. Is that all right with you?"

"Just about anything is all right with me so long at it gets me out of this nowhere darn town," she said in a nasal Texas accent.

"It’s all right with me, then, I guess," Frank shrugged. "Chick, you and Hattie might as well go get her stuff. You can catch up with us in Clovis, New Mexico this afternoon."

"Don’t need to get my stuff," Hattie said, sounding a little sour. "I got all I need right now. I just want out of this place."

"I think maybe we’re going to head on up the road and get breakfast some place," Chick said. "We’ll see you in Clovis."

"Fine with me," Frank said. The two of them were gone just about like that, and we could see them head for Chick’s car, which was parked across the street.

Spud shook his head. "Now you tell me that there’s not a pissed off husband somewhere in that story."

"Maybe not," Frank smiled. "She wasn’t wearing a ring that I could see. Pissed off parents maybe."

"Damn," Hoss commented. "It’s not like Chick to take one of his honeys with us. You mean we’re going to have to listen to those two go on like that every night?"

"That could make for some long nights," I agreed. "I know I was thinking that I need to work a little harder to pick up some honey some one of these days."

"Me, too," Hoss agreed. "Listening to them made me think that I wouldn’t mind finding some friendly hooker some one of these nights."

"Sounds like an idea," I told Hoss. "But just how the hell do you find one in a little nowhere town like this?"

"Easiest way is to ask a cop," Hoss grinned. "The town clowns usually know who’ll put out for a price, even if it’s only a part-time thing. Sometimes they even get a kickback. Of course, the odds are that whoever it is would make even one of Chick’s regular honeys look pretty good."

"There is that," I agreed. "But after last night I wonder if I really care."

It was just talk, breakfast table bullshit. Up to that point I hadn’t picked up a honey after a race, mostly because I hadn’t worked real hard at it. There had been a few women in the years since I’d been with Bessie, mostly ones where Herm had been involved back when we were at Milwaukee State, and to be honest, while all of them looked better than Bessie, none of them measured up to her in bed. I guess I’d gotten spoiled and it was still sticking with me. While I wouldn’t mind some action, I didn’t think I was quite to the point where I wanted to pay for it unless I knew ahead of time that it was going to be something pretty special.

Rocky and Pepper rode with me as we drove across the plains of the Texas panhandle to Clovis. We usually switched around riders, so we got to know everybody pretty well that way. Of course, in a little group like ours Chick taking a honey with him was big news, and we talked it around every which way we could, and most of us agreed that if a halfway decent honey came along we were ready for some action. Finally, we talked it to death and then some before we got to talking about important things, like cars and racing.

It was a slow trip; gas was real cheap in Texas back then, and Frank had made a deal in Floydada to top off at a farm rate price or something, so that 500 gallon tanker trailer was filled to the top. The box truck that usually pulled it wasn’t all that strong, so it was a slow trip staying together and it would have been worse if the roads weren’t so flat in that area. We weren’t very far ahead of Chick and Hattie when we pulled into where we were going to run, a quarter horse track or something. The place didn’t have lights, so we had to hustle to get stuff unloaded, rig up the PA system and all the other chores that had to be done before we could race. Dink was driving the flatbed with the water trailer, and he headed off someplace to fill it up since we were going to have to wet the track down ourselves.

I guessed that Chick and Hattie must have stopped somewhere along the way, probably in Plainwell, which was the only halfway decent sized town we’d gone through, because she was wearing new blue jeans and a tight T-shirt. That made her look a bit more attractive than the dowdy ankle length dress she’d worn in the morning. While Woody made the lunch meat run, Chick and I turned to setting up the PA system, which really wasn’t a big deal, and Hattie pitched in to help, which I thought was nice of her. After Woody made it back, we stood around eating sandwiches and drinking sodas for a bit, and I couldn’t help but notice that Hattie seemed a little happier than she’d been in the morning – apparently the distance from Floydada had a positive effect on her. She was clinging onto Chick something fierce, and I know I thought it would be nice to have a girl clinging on to me like that once in a while.

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