I didn’t actually make it into Herb Kralick Ford on that first swing through Livonia, since we were pretty busy, but both Herb and Vivian came to several of the races within range, and I finally got to meet the people that I’d been hearing about for so long. Herb was a fairly big guy with a few pounds on him, and he was always happy and laughing and full of shit. Of course, he was an auto dealer and you wanted to be sure to count your fingers when you got done shaking hands with him, but he was a racing nut and could be talked into quite a bit if it involved racing cars.

Vivian, on the other hand, didn’t strike me as a car dealer person. First off, she was beautiful. I mean, she was downright gorgeous, in a classy sense. She sort of put me in mind of a young Katharine Hepburn without the accent and with dark hair, if you know what I mean. But while she was very good looking she didn’t exactly strike me as a sex bomb. If anything, she was a harder-nosed business person than her dad, and that was clear right from the beginning. I was a little surprised to strike it off pretty good with her right from the start. I think it was mostly because out of the whole damn show I was the only college graduate. I think I may have been the only person with the show except Sonny Ochsenlaager who had ever been on a college campus when it didn’t involve a wrong turn some place. I never took a survey, but I would imagine at the time even high school graduates were a minority on the crew.

Still, I never thought for a minute that I stood any sort of a chance with Vivian. She was a class act of a businesswoman with her eye on the ball; let’s face it, I was just a farm boy and never would have gone to college myself if Mr. Vogt hadn’t gotten to me at just the right time back there in Hartford. I pretty well understood that I wasn’t headed for the big bucks in business and would be happy to have a decent job as a teacher at a decent high school, so Vivian was way the hell out of my league.

Now, I don’t want to imply that Vivian was snooty or condescending. She understood that she was the daughter of a car dealer, and she knew where the money came from. She had a common touch that everyone appreciated, and everyone on the crew who knew her liked her. I know that Frank especially liked her, and she seemed to especially like Frank, even though he was a good ten years older than her, at least. I don’t even think they were what you would call dating at that point, although I wasn’t around them enough to really know on that first visit to Livonia. I do know that for a few days there if you went looking for Frank you were likely to find the both of them. I also know that Frank had a lot of business details to go over with Vivian over that short visit, and he spent a fair amount of time in her office at the Ford agency.

We didn’t take any time off at that first stop in Livonia, mostly because we were even busier than we’d been before. We stocked up a lot of parts, worked on the cars some, fixed some things up on the trucks, and generally got ready to do the last part of the season, all while running races somewhere around the area every day.

One important thing did happen in Livonia that time, though. Since we were racing fairly locally, we stayed at the same tourist court for several days, and we’d always head back there after we were done racing, before we headed out for a beer or two after the race. One night the second or third day there Frank came up to me as I was getting set to head out with the guys and said, "Mel, would you go have a beer with just me and Vivian?"

Of course, I didn’t turn him down, and we drove to a neighborhood bar not far away, just a different one from where the rest of the gang was going. It was a quiet little place, and we sat around shooting the bull for a while, just talking about the race earlier that evening. We were on our second round before Frank got down to business. "Mel," he said. "I know when you came aboard that the plan was that you were going to leave around the end of August and go teach school someplace in Chicago. Is that still what’s happening?"

"Jeez, Frank," I replied, a little surprised by the question. "I don’t know. I really haven’t thought about it very much since I joined the show back in Wisconsin, if you know what I mean."

"I kind of had that impression," he said. "I mean, I haven’t heard you talk about it that much since you came aboard. But you know, most of the more or less permanent guys are guys that I know from around here, and if I have to pick up a replacement for you I’d like to do it before we head back out again."

"Well, to tell you the truth," I told him, "I never was very anxious to go teach school down at that place. The place has a reputation as a dump with a lot of tough kids, and I’d hoped I could come up with something better before fall came. But I sent out a lot of letters back before I joined the show last spring, and I’ve got a lot of nothing back in the mail. I mean, I’ve got a few letters back that say thanks but no thanks, but that’s about it."

"As far as I know there are still some teaching positions available," Vivian said. "But I suspect you’re going to have to go find them, rather than wait for them to come to you. That’s not something you’re going to be able to do very well when you get back on the road."

"I think you’re right," I told her. "It’s a bird in the hand, two in the bush situation, except that the bird in the hand is no eagle, but a nasty little starling. I frankly enjoy the traveling with the show and don’t really want to quit now. But the problem is that along about November we’ll shut down for the winter. I’ve been able to stick a few bucks back but not enough to hold me till spring."

"If you want to stay with the show we may be able to find something to tide you over the winter," Vivian said, which sort of let me understand who was really running the show in the first place. "I’m not sure what. The schools often need subs. It doesn’t pay all that well, but at least the schools around here are pretty decent. I know Frank said you’re a mechanic, so Dad may be able to find you something in the shop, at least part time."

"On top of that," Frank added. "We need to tear down all the cars and go through them thoroughly over the winter. The 47 is the last of the old cars we had to buy to fill out the field two years ago, and I’d like to retire it. That means building at least one new car, maybe two if we decide the 72 won’t do as a spare. I’m probably going to have some of the guys working with Spud and Peewee on that. It’s not going to be a lot of money, but it could keep you going if you’re careful."

It didn’t take me a lot of thinking. "If you think you can find some cheap place for me to stay over the winter, a boarding house or something, I guess I’ll stick it out." I said. "Maybe I’ll go part of next summer then quit and look for a teaching job or something. I’ll have to wait till we get that far and see."

"Hard to say," Frank said. "Other than Spud, you’re the first guy I’ve asked to stay the winter. But several of the guys I’m thinking about asking have family around here, you might be able to stay with them. We’ll just have to see."

"All right," I told them. "I’m with you, unless of course someone comes racing out of some grandstand somewhere and says, ‘Come teach school for me.’"

Looking back at it, I think it’s pretty safe to say that it was at that moment I quit being a schoolteacher racing cars for the summer and became a racer. Even as I said it I was pretty sure I was sucking wind when I told Frank that I might quit the middle of next summer and look for work as a teacher. I mean, if I was going to do it at all, why not do it right now?

But I realized that I’d come to like the racing, and I’d gotten fairly good at it. What’s more, I liked the chance to get out and travel around, to see new sights, to find the adventure that lay over the next hill even if it was just another tank town with a grubby, dusty something for a race track. What’s more, I’m pretty sure that Frank knew that I liked all that, too, and whatever happened I was probably in for the long haul, but at least he was nice enough to not do a victory dance or something.

Frank did caution me to not say anything to anyone just yet. He said he wasn’t sure just who all he was going to invite to stay over the winter but that it wouldn’t be everybody. Some of the guys we already knew wouldn’t be back, and some of them had some other irons in the fire in the Livonia area, like I knew that Hoss already planned to spend the winter working in his brother’s body shop. When the roads got slippery in the winter in Michigan there was always plenty of work for the body shops, and it wouldn’t be the first winter he was going to be doing it.

We were on the road again in a few days. We left a couple guys behind in Livonia, one of them Sonny Ochsenlaager, who had joined us "for a few days" back in Prairie du Chien back in the middle of May. We had a couple new guys with us to replace them, Detroit area racers Frank knew, Skimp Winkelman and Bud Gaborski. Both of them worked in construction, but had run with the show the year before in the fall, so we didn’t have to break them in.

Late summer and early fall is fair season in the upper Midwest. We’d already run a few fair dates, but now we got into them seriously. Almost every county with any kind of an agricultural base has them; most of them had horse tracks, and most of them had horse races for some, but not all of the nights that the fairs went on. In almost every case, there was a separate admission to the grandstand, and the fair organizers were always on the prowl for something besides horse racing that would fill the grandstand. It was something that was just absolutely made to order for the MMSA. In fact, the truth is the other way around: the MMSA had been pretty much made to order to fill those grandstands; all our messing around out west had mostly been to kill time till fair season came around. It was a good deal for the fair people; it was a single flat fee with no other payouts or cut on the gate even though we drew pretty good crowds. We had a reputation for putting on a good show, and the fair people didn’t have to deal with the hassles of promoting and organizing local racers by themselves, or competing with the local race tracks.

Something like the MMSA wouldn’t work at fairs today, mostly because of the need for crowd barriers and catch fences and the like; the insurance hassles are just too big a deal and not too many fair boards will go to the trouble for a one night show. While there are still horse races and the like, a lot of those grandstand shows are country music singers any more, or occasionally over-the-hill rock groups. The midgets winding out their V8-60s have mostly been replaced by demolition derbies, which are cheap for the fair boards to put on, don’t take much organization and still draw crowds.

But I’ll tell you what – those fair tracks were fun to run! For the most part they were pretty wide and smooth, with well-packed dirt because the horse racers wouldn’t put up with any horse shit about uneven surfaces. What’s more, it was rare that we saw a track as short as a quarter mile, and even half miles weren’t all that common. Often it was a mile, on a track with a little banking, and I want to tell you, one of those old MMSA midgets in high gear would flat fly around big horse track! It was a huge change from racing in first gear in a rodeo ring, and was the main reason Frank and Spud had left transmissions in the cars in the first place – we didn’t have to change rear end gears every new place we ran.

Because the four and six car heats we’d run on the little tracks seemed awful thin on one of those big tracks, we usually ran two heats with the full field to set the starting order for the feature, and then features of as much as fifty laps. In our stop in Livonia we’d replaced the two-gallon gas tanks we’d been running so far with eight-gallon tanks, and sometimes it was iffy if that was going to be enough to go the distance. One time I went from fifth to winning on the last lap because I had enough gas to make it to the finish line when the four guys ahead of me didn’t.

The other thing that was neat about playing fair dates was that they were always at the fair. We quit eating lunch meat sandwiches for lunch and replaced it with good home cooking from some Grange’s cook tent, and that was always first-rate down-home food. Add to that a dinner at another Grange tent or something from the midway, and after a while there were some cases where the cockpits on the cars seemed to be getting a little tight.

Fairs always meant midways. The old fashioned carnival mostly exists today because of the fair dates they play, providing rides and games for the midways; like us, the time they spent on the road in the spring was mostly to kill time until fair season started. In fact, today a lot of carnivals don’t even bother to play dates that aren’t fair dates or in conjunction with some other event, although that wasn’t necessarily true back in 1950.

The thing that made it fun being around carnivals, although usually a different one every day, was that for the most part we had Carnie with us. Now, he grew up around carnivals; not only did he know all the tricks, he knew a lot of the people. Every place we went he’d walk around the midway and run across someone he knew from years ago; it was just an ongoing old-home week for him. Walking the midway with that man was always an education; not only did he know that virtually every game was rigged, he knew how it was rigged and usually knew how to beat the rig if it was worth the effort. Carnie was the only guy I ever saw take on a three-card Monte dealer and clean him out, because he knew just as much if not more about counting the cards than the dealer did.

For the most part, what Carnie taught us was to stay the hell away from most of the games that we couldn’t win, unless we were just doing it for fun and were prepared to lose. The rides were a different story, and most of us liked to give one a try once in a while, but not often; we had our own thrill rides on the track every night, and most of the time that was enough for us.

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