It still took us two long days to get back to Livonia, driving up US-27 to Cincinnati, then on up US-23. It was a slow trip, partly because it was through mountain country, and partly because the box truck was really acting wheezy. It needed a valve job and a few other things, and we had to stop along the road several places to fiddle with it to keep it going.

In Cincinnati, Frank put two guys who had filled in for the tail end of the season on a bus towards home; we’d already left one in Chattanooga to hitchhike back to Arkansas. When we got back to Livonia, Bud and Skimp took off for home; Dink hung around a couple days to help with the unloading, and then decided that he was going to go back to Wisconsin for the winter. Hoss already had a job lined up in his brother’s body shop, and Shorty already had it set to go back to work for his dad as a meat cutter, so that thinned us out quite a bit more. Although Woody planned on working for us in the winter, he moved back in with some relatives not far away. Frank, Spud, and Carnie all moved into Frank’s folks’ house, which left five of us needing quarters for the winter: Chick and Hattie, Rocky, Pepper, and me.

Frank had already told Vivian what was coming, and she’d worked out a pretty good deal – she’d rented a whole house for us, only about a block away from the old warehouse where Frank kept the cars for the winter. The house was nothing much, old and fairly run down, but it had a good coal furnace so we could figure on staying warm. Since we’d known this was coming, back on the road we’d worked out a deal to split the rent five ways. Since Hattie didn’t have a job, the other four of us kicked in her share, and in return she did the meals and the cleaning and the laundry and those kinds of things. The house had two fairly big bedrooms and one tiny one; it was clear that Chick and Hattie got one of the big bedrooms, and the other three of us flipped for the single bedroom. I won, or maybe lost – it really was a tiny bedroom. I barely had room to turn around, but it was the first time in a long time that I hadn’t shared a room with someone.

The warehouse that we used for a shop really wasn’t all that great. It was big enough to put all the cars in and have a little space left over, but when we got there it was unheated, which if you know Michigan means that it was going to be pretty uncomfortable in the winter. But there was one room that was separated off and the door into it was just big enough for one of the cars if we took the door off the hinges and were real careful with it. Frank scrounged around and came up with a big old barrel stove for that room, and we knocked a pane of glass out of a window to run the smoke vent outside. We burned whatever we could in that stove; wood, coal, used engine oil and what have you. If it wasn’t too cold outside it heated the place up to where things were tolerable, and on the real cold days we got along.

We mostly had the tools we’d had out on the road, along with a few other things, and we made do. The one thing that made it work is that if we needed to work on some part and didn’t have the tools we needed to do it with, Herb’s Ford agency was about half a mile away and we made use of his shop a lot. We also made pretty good use of his parts bin, sometimes when the service manager was looking the other way. At that, Spud always had a list of stuff he needed to get from junk yards, and he was out and around looking for parts with the pickup truck at least part of most days.

There was a lot of work to do. The engines in the cars were all pretty much stock, but we used them hard and some of them were getting pretty wheezy in the last part of the season. In those days, if you got 20,000 highway miles on an engine before you needed a valve job you were doing good, and you were lucky to get 40,000 miles out of bearings. We really hadn’t put anything like those many miles on the engines, but the ones they had were hard miles, so they were getting ready for a major overhaul. Along with the engine work there was plenty of other stuff on each car that needed a little to a lot of attention. We pulled the cars into the shop room one at a time and tore them apart, rebuilding them from one end to the other, tearing the engines down all the way, then did any machine work necessary and put them back together with new rings, bearings, and whatever else.

I suppose it’s safe now to confess that when the 66 car was torn down later in the process, I happened to be the one to take the block and the heads over to the Ford agency to get some machine work done on them. Like a lot of the cars, the cylinder walls on the engine were scored a bit, and had to be honed out. The guy in the machine shop at the Ford agency knew I knew how to do the work, so he let me do it. He decided to head out for a couple hours, so rather than just hone the cylinders, I bored them out just a little. Now, after you’ve honed the cylinder walls a couple times the pistons won’t fit any more, so the factory makes oversized pistons in a couple different sizes. While the parts manager had his back turned I swapped some regular pistons for the biggest oversized ones and bored the cylinders out to fit. Then, when I was grinding the valves, I opened the ports up just a little, so little that you’d hardly notice except if you had the right tools and knew what to look for. In all that I probably didn’t gain much, maybe five horsepower, but when you’re talking only hundred horsepower engines, five is a pretty fair amount. I figured that I just had to be careful Spud didn’t drop me a sixteenth on the restrictor plate. I know the engine seemed to wind out a little better, especially on those mile fairground tracks the following fall, so I guess it was worth the effort.

We went through the rest of the cars pretty carefully, too. If anything looked like it needed attention, it got it. We pulled down the transmissions and rear ends on all the cars, and had to replace the guts of several of the transmissions, if not the whole thing. New clutches, new brakes – the list goes on and on. The only good thing to say about it was that with five and six of us working on each car, each one went pretty quickly. It took us about two weeks for each car in the beginning, but only a week and a half or so towards the end because we had rebuilding the cars down to a science.

Even though we’d tried to take care of the cars, they’d accumulated various dings, scratches and dents over the course of the season. When we started the teardowns, we stripped off all the sheet metal and ran it over to Korodan’s Body Shop, where Hoss stripped the paint, rolled out the dents, and then repainted it. Several of the cars needed this and that new body panel, so Hoss and his brother would make it from scratch. They even had a sign painter come in to renew the numbers and such; the cars really looked sharp when we rolled them back out of the shop room onto the storage floor and went to get the next one.

I’m going to jump ahead of the story just a little bit here to get through with all of the shop work. The 47 car, which we’d used as a spare car a couple times over the season, was one of the old midgets that Frank had picked up to fill out the field in the ’48 season. It was a regular midget, and still had the in and out box, rather than the clutch and transmission that we had with the other cars. We only had a couple of rear end gears for it, and they usually weren’t the right ones for where we were running, so any race it was in, the 47 was usually stuck at the back of the field. On top of that, the 72 car had been wrecked pretty bad back there in Independence. We had rebuilt it the best we could in the field, but we didn’t have the tools to do a real good job of it, and the car had been a little iffy. Frank had already made the decision to build a new car to replace the 47; he and Spud decided that the best way to fix the 72 was to just about jack up the radiator cap and drive a new car under it. For practical purposes that meant we had two new cars to build.

Peewee Svoboda wasn’t working for Frank any more, but he came over on the weekends and built two new frames from Ford parts and did some sheet metal work. We stripped what parts we could off of the 72, including the engine, and stripped the engine out of the 47 so Frank could sell the body to some local racer as what we called a "roller" – without an engine. I remember Frank telling me some years later that the 47 had had a pretty good career as a midget with an Offy engine for two or three years before it got rolled into a ball and scrapped. Spud would never let us throw anything away unless it was pure, total junk, and we accumulated quite a pile of spare parts in a corner of the warehouse. He said it might come in handy sometime in the middle of the season when we needed some goofball thing in a hurry.

By the first part of March we had all the cars done, or nearly so. The weather was warming up a little, so we started in on the trucks. We’d all gotten a little exasperated with the box truck; it was pretty old and needed a lot of work to keep it running. Frank had a little more reason to be concerned with it, because it was a key to the operation and we didn’t need it breaking down on us. He wound up trading it to Herb for a ’49 with the big flathead V8 motor and a bigger box, which meant that there was room for the stuff we’d had to haul in a separate equipment trailer. The flatbed that usually towed the water trailer wasn’t in much better condition and could barely do the job, and the pickup that we’d used to tow the equipment trailer needed its engine rebuilt, too. The pickup made a pretty good vehicle to run and go get stuff, so we didn’t want to be without it.

Frank, Spud and the rest of us kicked around the idea of just using the pickup to tow the water trailer. That would save us a truck, but most of us felt that it didn’t quite have the guts, although most places we wouldn’t have to tow the trailer full of water very far. Finally, Spud found another one of those big truck flatheads in some junkyard or other, and we decided to do a little engine swapping. That turned into one powerful pickup truck – it wasn’t fast, but it sure could pull if you didn’t push it and spin the tires.

Since Chick’s, Woody’s, and my cars also contributed to hauling our people around and it would be worse the next year with one fewer truck, along in March Frank told us to go through all three cars and rebuild the engines while we were at it. I had driven that ’37 since I rebuilt it back in the winter of ’47, and it was getting ready for another rebuild. I thought about just buying a newer car from Herb and even talked to him about it, but he couldn’t give me much of anything for the old car. That was understandable, because I’d bought it for five bucks, after all, and ’37s back in those days were junkyard meat. Finally, Spud made me an interesting offer: the ’37 had a stock V8-60 in it, and he figured it probably wouldn’t hurt to have a spare engine with us. He knew where there was a wrecked ’51 Ford with only a few miles on it, and through some horse trading I never fully understood I wound up with an even swap for the ’51 engine installed in the car. That perked the old Ford up quite a bit and qualified it as a hot rod back in those days.

All of that kept us reasonably busy for the course of the winter. We really weren’t busting our asses, working twelve hour days or thereabouts, but we knew what had to be done and didn’t waste time doing it while making sure to do it right.

Having Hattie keep up the house changed things from a bunch of guys sharing the place into a home. While she was Chick’s wife, in a sense she mothered all of us even though she was younger than all of us. She wasn’t a bad cook, and we ate pretty good. The house’s coal furnace was central heat so the place stayed comfortable. We guys shared out the coal hauling and dealing with ashes and all the other crap you had to go through with a coal furnace in those days. All of us had frozen our butts trying to stay warm with wood stoves or space heaters before, and we appreciated the comfort. In the early part of the winter Hattie even handled a lot of the stoking of the furnace, but as the winter progressed and she became even more and more visibly pregnant, one or another of us would take off from the shop several times a day, head home and stoke up the fire.

On occasion some of us might head out for a beer or two after work, but not real often. We were content to head back home, clean up, have a decent dinner, and sit around afterwards just talking racing, playing cards, reading the papers or listening to the radio. In those days the radio still had a lot of the famous old shows like Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, and The Shadow, though they all disappeared not long afterwards. When Christmas rolled around we even had a little Christmas tree, all decorated with strung popcorn and tinfoil. We didn’t do much in the way of giving gifts, except that the rest of us guys gave Chick and Hattie some baby things. We didn’t buy them; none of us would have had any idea of what to buy, but I was smart enough to ask Vivian if she’d get something useful if we gave her the money. I’m pretty sure she spent more than we gave her, and wrapped the stuff for us, besides.

All in all, it was a quiet life and while we were reasonably content under the circumstances, all of us, including Hattie, were looking forward to spring coming so we could get back to racing again.

By the middle of the winter it was pretty clear that Hattie was going to have her baby before we got on the road again, but probably not long before. This was the first time I’d ever spent much time around a pregnant woman, and since we were all pretty much like family we all did what we could to help her out and make the best of it. Even though the baby hadn’t been planned or anything, she was happy about it, and never seemed to complain about it very much.

We all had some big concerns about whether she ought to be on the road with us with a newborn baby. It was obviously going to be a major pain in the butt to everyone, especially her and Chick, to be trying to deal with a baby and moving from tourist court to tourist court almost every day. She and Chick talked over the idea of not going on the road – there was no way she was going to be away from him, especially since she didn’t know anyone around Livonia. The racing was a pretty decent job and Chick didn’t want to give it up, but he was willing to stay back and maybe get a job as a mechanic for Herb, and settle down right where they were. As far as that went, Hattie wanted to see a little more of the world herself; until Chick came along the only part of the world she’d seen was Floydada, and that hadn’t been enough to hold her.

It wasn’t just the five of us that were concerned about Chick and Hattie being on the road with a new baby; Frank, Spud, Vivian and Herb were also questioning it as well, and we all talked it around six ways from Sunday. Frank wasn’t always around a whole lot; he and Carnie were on the road a fair amount, working out dates for the next season.

But it was Frank that finally came up with an idea. Through the ’48 and ’49 seasons, Frank and Spud had stayed in the motels and tourist cabins with the rest of the crew. That was a bigger pain in the butt for Frank than it was for the rest of us, since he needed to have some office space and be able to keep pay records and stuff at hand. After Carnie joined them, he told about how carnival folks often traveled around dragging little tourist travel trailers behind them. If you didn’t have a lot of stuff it wasn’t a bad way to live, and finally he talked Frank and Spud into buying one of the trailers. It was especially nice in the places where we couldn’t park the trucks where we were staying; having the little travel trailer meant that someone could stay with the equipment.

By the time I joined them in the spring of ’50, the two of them wouldn’t have it any other way, and there had been some talk of getting a couple bigger trailers to sort of serve as bunkhouses and get away from all those fleabag places entirely. Several of the guys weren’t all that crazy about it, since there was no shower in the travel trailers and the toilet facilities were primitive if they had them at all. When Frank or Spud wanted a shower they borrowed a room from some of the guys for a while, and on that basis it worked out pretty well.

So, Frank suggested that Chick and Hattie get one of those little travel trailers to drag behind Chick’s Ford. It would be a little more like a home to them, and they could set it up a little to take care of a baby and still sleep in their own bed every night. Chick and Hattie both admitted that they’d given some thought to that but weren’t real sure what they’d use for money to buy the thing, and Frank offered to ask around and see what he could do. He didn’t have to go far; Herb had taken one in on trade and cut a pretty good deal to boot, even offering to carry the financing if they needed it. Knowing how softheaded Herb was about racers and how much he’d showed concern about Chick and Hattie being out on the road with a baby, I’d be willing to bet that he took a pretty big loss on it.

The trailer was a prewar job but really a pretty decent one, if on the small side. I always thought it was pretty ugly – it looked sort of like someone had taken an old claw foot bathtub, turned it over and burned the legs off. There was some places where it used tarred canvas and Masonite where aluminum would have been used after the war. It had an ice chest for a refrigerator and a little propane stove and heater. It needed some work, but not a whole lot, and the bunch of us pulled it into the shop on a couple Saturdays and went through it pretty good, putting new tires on it and trying to fix it up the best we could. Like I said, we were family – especially those of us that stayed through the winter – and for the most part we tried to take care of each other.

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