We got bad news when we got back to Michigan.

One night a couple days after we left, Shorty Notwicki had been heading home after dropping a girl off when he stopped at a railroad crossing because a train was coming. There was some drunk behind him who obviously figured that they could beat the train through the crossing, so he laid his bumper up against Shorty’s car and pushed. The steam engine was moving right along and scattered both cars and their occupants over the next quarter mile. It was a closed casket funeral.

Everybody went to the funeral. Spud reported that everyone in town from the MMSA had gone, and he’d called up some guys who had run with them in the past but were working elsewhere. Herb and his wife went, too. Spud said he’d have called us but he had no idea where to call, but he had flowers sent in our names and made apologies for us at the service.

Shorty had been a good guy. He hadn’t won as much as some of us but he managed to win some and get in the money some. He’d been in that bad accident back in Independence, but had soldiered right along while racing with a cast and had only missed a couple races. He’d joked that it beat the hell out of cutting meat in his old man’s butcher shop. He’d been a good, reliable guy you could run with and know he wasn’t going to do something stupid, and he always held up his end of the work load and then some, even when recovering from the accident. We were all going to miss him.

Frank liked to get his hands dirty with us when he didn’t have something else to do. A couple days after we got back we were all in the shop working on stuff when Hoss walked in to drop off some sheet metal for the cars. Seeing that both Frank and Spud were there, he got them off to the side, and they talked quietly for a while. The rest of us noticed and got the feeling that this was going to be more bad news.

It was, in a way: Hoss was going to get married. All summer long he’d talked about the good times he planned on having with his girl when he got back to Livonia. Since we hadn’t seen Hoss much all winter, just a few minutes now and then at the body shop, we hadn’t had much chance to keep up on the details, but from what we knew it had been going pretty good. Hoss’s girl, Helen, had been at Shorty’s funeral and apparently it had given her some problems, even though his death had nothing to do with racing. The upshot of it was that Helen didn’t want Hoss taking off for the summer again. It had come down to fish or cut bait; Hoss decided to fish – the two of them were going to get married the first part of June and Hoss wasn’t going to be with us this year, either.

Hoss did tell Frank and Spud that he’d help out where he could in getting things going, and he’d drive for us weekends or something if we happened to be in the area and needed help, but that was going to be about all.

All of us were happy for Hoss if he was happy, and he was. He told us that he was inviting all of us to the wedding if we could make it, and that we’d have a ball since it was going to be a full-out Greek wedding with all the party it involved. There was a chance that we could – we had several dates around Memorial Day weekend in the area, places where the MMSA had been in the past. Frank checked his notebook, and then called Vivian to double check, and as luck would have it Hoss and Helen’d managed to set a date for an open Sunday.

There was no doubt that we were going to miss Hoss, and I was going to miss him more than most since I’d been his roommate all last summer. He was probably the best driver among us that summer, and his winning the so-called season championship proved it. I learned an awful lot about driving the midgets from him, and really, we all did. It just wasn’t going to be the same without him around.

"Well, shit," Frank said after Hoss went on his way. "Losing Shorty was bad enough, but now Hoss makes it even worse. I hope there’s nobody here planning on leaving, since you guys here are the only drivers I’m sure of for next year."

I hadn’t been paying attention to how Frank was doing with recruiting drivers, but that told me he was down to Rocky, Chick, Pepper, Woody and me. "I thought Dink was coming back," I commented.

"As far as I know he is," Frank shook his head. "But I don’t know for sure. You get right down to it and I won’t know for sure until he walks in the door in about two months. I’ll drop him a card, though, just to see if I can find out. I guess I can call around some more, but with all the auto plants going full tilt I don’t know how many people I’m going to find that want to go out and play racer for six or seven months. If any of you guys have any ideas, I’m listening."

I didn’t have any ideas, mostly because I didn’t know anyone in racing outside the MMSA, other than Goober Buford, of course. The other guys all had been local racers around southern Michigan, but it had been a year or two since they’d run and a lot of the people they could think of had already been asked or had something else going. "Maybe you could put an ad in the Free Press," Chick suggested.

"I don’t want to do that," Frank protested. "We really need to get racers, guys that know what it’s like to race, at least a little. We put an ad in the paper, all we’re going to get is guys with a heavy foot that think maybe they could be racers. That’s a sure way to tear up a bunch of cars."

" Well, maybe the National Speed Sport News," Spud suggested. "Although if we’re going to do that, we ought to be doing it before the season gets much closer."

"Well, maybe," Frank nodded. "But Spud, mostly we’ve recruited guys I know from around here. What would happen if you were to head back to Jersey for a few days and nose around the people you know there?"

"There’s a few people I might be able to ask," he said. "But it would be nice if I could get in and out of there without my ex-wives finding out about it."

"That’s the risk you take, I guess," Frank shook his head. "The rest of you guys, ask around. Remember, we don’t want wild men, we want guys that know how to put on a show without tearing up the equipment."

It was a few days before Spud took off to his old stomping grounds around New Jersey. When he got back he reported that he’d found two or three guys that probably would show up and work out. A few names had turned up in the Detroit area that sounded promising, but like Frank had said, it all depended on who walked in the door when the time came to go.

By then, it was March, and we’d pretty well finished up on the majority of the work on the race cars. There was still plenty of work to do on the other equipment, including the engine work on Chicks, Woody’s, and my cars. Along in there, Frank got a card from Dink, who said he’d be along when Frank wanted him, so that sounded pretty positive.

We had a warm spell in the first part of March that cleaned the snow up pretty good, and then it turned cold for a while. We hit a couple nice days along toward the end of the month, and Frank arranged with some guy he knew with a little bull ring of a track up by Pontiac to let us go up and use the place for a couple days for testing. So, the five of us drivers, along with Frank, Spud, Vivian, and Hattie headed up there one day to give the cars a workout.

It was a dirt track, of course. Sometimes in the spring a dirt track can get awful soupy and you don’t want to get on it because it will tear the place up. This one was solid enough, although still damp enough that dust wasn’t going to be a problem. The idea was to get a few miles on the cars, especially the new ones, and see if there was anything that needed to be done to them while we still had the shop to do it in.

As it turned out, all of the cars needed to be fiddled with, although nothing major really broke loose. I kept it a little sedate in the 66 car since I didn’t want to advertise my little extra engine work over the winter. I let her rip a couple times for half laps when no one else was close by me, and it seemed to run a little better than it had the year before. That might just have been because I hadn’t been in a real race car all winter, except Goober’s Nash in Daytona, and since it was only a stock car it didn’t count. I just knew it felt good to be out on the track again.

Not surprisingly, the two new cars needed a little more work than the others, just to shake the bugs out. For whatever reason, Frank had decided to keep the 72 car’s number even though only maybe ten percent of the car was from the old 72. The other new car, the one that replaced the old 47 that we had used for a spare car though as little as possible, got a new number: 4. I have no idea why Frank didn’t just use the 47 over, or chose the other number. For that matter, I didn’t know why he’d chosen any of them, although I found out years later that dice were involved for some of them. I suppose that was as good a method as any.

Each of us drivers tried out several of the cars, especially the new ones. Looking back on it, I find it just a little interesting that when Spud asked if any of us would like to change cars for the summer, all of us turned him down. I guess I didn’t think about it much at the time, but I realized later that all five of us had been doing a little extra work on our cars and I didn’t have the only cheater out there. What’s more, looking back on it I don’t think we fooled Spud much, except maybe in the details, but maybe he thought that we needed a little reward for sticking through the winter and coming back for another year.

We headed back to the shop and worked halfway through the night on the cars, trying to clean up all the items on the bitch lists and probably succeeding with most of them. The next day we hauled back up to the track at Pontiac and ran the cars some more. The track had dried out and firmed up some more, and there were ruts and bumps from where we’d run the day before. The track grader was locked in a shed, and it was just rougher than a cob out there, although in the course of the driving we were pretty well satisfied with the way the testing was going.

However, the testing came to a very quick halt when Hattie came up to Frank, who was working on a car or something. The next thing you know, Frank was out there waving a red flag at Chick. It was time for the baby to come, and in only a couple minutes Chick and Hattie were racing down to the hospital in Livonia.

Of course, the rest of us came into the infield when we saw the red flag, and we all knew right quick what had happened when we saw Chick and Hattie leave. We all sort of hemmed and hawed around until Frank finally said, "Well, hell. We’re not going to get anything else done today; we might as well load up, drop off the cars, and keep Chick from getting too bored."

These days, of course, it’s the common thing for a man to be with his wife in the delivery room, but back in those days that just didn’t happen. There used to be plenty of old jokes about the husband wearing a trench in the floor of the waiting room wondering what was going on, and like any good joke there was more truth to it than fiction. We took the time to load up, but it must have been a strange sight to anyone coming to the hospital for the rest of that day to see a semi loaded with race cars parked in the hospital parking lot.

It turned out that we really didn’t need to be in any hurry about it. Chick didn’t need to drive like he was on the last lap with Hoss on his tail, because we were there for hours, mostly telling the same old stories we’d told in motel rooms and bars and tracks throughout the Midwest over the course of last summer. It was way into the wee small hours of the morning before the doctor came out and told us that we had a new member of the MMSA family, a little girl. Chick and Hattie wound up naming her Carol.

We didn’t see a whole lot of Chick for the next few days. It was getting close to the first few races of the season, and there was stuff to do. Frank had only rented the warehouse for the winter, so we had to move all our stuff out of there. Everything we weren’t taking on the road with us was loaded in the box truck or the pickup. We hauled it out to an old barn that some relative of Frank’s owned; it included tools and equipment that we weren’t taking on the road. It also included extra parts, especially stuff that might be useful in building or repairing a car someday but was just too much to take on the road with us. This included what was left of the old 72 car, along with some body panels and chassis parts that were still good, even though they’d been replaced with new stuff on general principles. There was already a stack of stuff there from earlier years and while we raided on it quite a bit in building the new cars it was bigger when we left it than it had been when we began.

Along about that time Dink showed up. He was still a pretty quiet guy who didn’t say too much. We managed to get out of him the fact that he’d spent the winter pumping gas and fixing flats in some little town somewhere around Baraboo, and was aware of the fact that there was a bigger world than that out there. I read somewhere years later that in 1950 a quarter of the people in the country had never been farther than 250 miles from home, and I’d be willing to bet that Dink had been one of them until the MMSA came along. Now he was ready for more. We settled him down on the couch in the house that we’d rented, knowing that none of us were going to be there much longer.

Sometime in the next couple of days we had a meeting out at the shop, which was starting to look pretty empty since we’d moved most of our stuff out. The five of us drivers who had spent the winter in Livonia were there, along with Dink, Frank, and Spud. "I’m still working on getting together the rest of our crew," Frank reported. "Several guys have promised to show up in the next few days, so we’re just going to have to see if they actually show up or not."

"Ain’t we been hearing that all winter?" Rocky piped up.

"Yeah," Frank admitted. "But it’s still true. If everybody shows up that’s promised to show up, we’ll have a couple extras. If it turns out we do, we’ll put the new guys on rotation through the six cars that don’t have rides yet until somebody falls out along the way. We’ll just have to see what happens. If it works out that we’re going to have more drivers than we have cars, I’m going to figure on the six of you driving all the time, unless you get sick or something. You guys are the lead crew, you know what it’s like and what we have to do. I’m depending on you to set a good example for the new guys and get them used to the program."

"If we have a couple spare guys, it’s going to pack the cars pretty tight," Woody observed.

"That’s true," Frank nodded. "We’ll just have to triple up in the trucks a little. I’m figuring that Chick, Hattie and Carol will pretty well make up a car load by themselves, and three guys in the front of Mel’s coupe gets a little tight after a while. We should be able to make it work out, though. While I’m thinking about it, with the exception of Chick and Hattie, I’d like you guys to pair up with one of the new guys for rooms, rather than just stay with the group you’ve got. That’ll help the new guys fit into the program a little better. Make sure that they understand that the idea is to put on a show without tearing the cars up. I’m trusting you guys to keep an eye on the new guys, and if someone does something out of line that you can’t handle, bring it to Spud or me. Don’t put up with a jerk just because you think that I think we may need them. With a few exceptions we had a pretty good crew last summer, and the exceptions didn’t last long. We can make do with a crew smaller than twelve drivers if we have to. We did it a lot last summer and we’ll do it again before I’d put up with a joker that thinks he has to tear up the car to win. Any questions?"

"Yeah," Pepper said. "About the same schedule as last year?"

"Roughly," Frank said. "We’ll pretty much be going to the same general places. We’ve got shows at Pontiac Friday night and Owosso Saturday night. We’ll be off Sunday. That’s our last chance to pack up and do anything last minute on the cars. We’ll be out of here, but Herb will let us use the shop at the dealership if we need it. Then, Garrett, Indiana Monday night, and Kokomo Tuesday night, Effingham, Illinois on Wednesday, and so on like that. We’ve got stuff scheduled from Kentucky to Texas, then we’ll work our way back here for the tail end of May and the first of June, so we’ll be back in the area for Hoss’s wedding. Then, we’ve got another swing through the west, getting back here about the tail end of July. It’ll be pretty much fair season after that, with a few dates in the Deep South as that winds down. Those are pretty much nailed down, not take ’em when we can get ’em like we did last year."

"That’s a lot of racing," I commented.

"Darn right, Mel," Frank grinned. "We’ve got about 130 solid dates at this point. There’s a few holes, but Carnie and Vivian are working on getting them filled. I know you guys think that Carnie and Vivian and I have been slacking off all winter, but we’ve been plugging right along. Now, if we get some decent weather and nothing screws up too badly, we should have a pretty decent season. Any questions?"

"Yeah," Chick said. "Are we coming back here after the races Friday and Saturday, or are we staying on the road some place?"

"We’ll come back here," Frank said. "Like I said, we’ve got Sunday we can do the final loading and move you guys out of the house. It’ll be back to the tourist courts after that until the snow is flying around here again."

"How about giving the keys back to the landlord?" Chick asked. "We’ve got that kind of thing to deal with."

"Vivian will take care of it," Frank assured him. "Figure out what needs to get figured out, and I’ll make sure Vivian gets with you. She’ll probably be around to see us take off on Monday. Anything else?"

"How about if we head up to Pontiac early on Friday?" I suggested. "That’ll give us a little more chance to knock the rust off, and maybe a little chance to break in the new guys before we race in the evening."

"Not a bad idea, Mel," Frank said. "I’ll have to call up there and see if they’ll open up a little early for us, but that shouldn’t be a big problem. If I can get it worked out, what do you guys say if we roll out of here about eight Friday morning and get us some breakfast somewhere along the way?"

The rest of the week went by quickly. We got the rest of the shop cleared out and everything loaded up, and even had the cars loaded onto the hauler. All the trucks and trailers were loaded, hooked up and ready to go by the time Thursday night rolled around, so it looked like spring had come at last. We’d been waiting months for it, and were ready to go racing again.

Twice that week, Spud took off to the train station to pick up new drivers coming in from New Jersey. He’d been expecting three, but one of them never showed up, except for a post card he got some weeks later. Frank had promises for eight racers to show up over the course of that week. As luck would have it, just six showed up, and one of those we all pretty well figured wouldn’t be with us long. It turned out we were right; he didn’t even make it to the loading out Friday morning, so we started out one short.

To get us through the weekend, Frank called down to Korodan Body Shop and got Hoss to come out and fill in. He showed up after work, bringing Helen along with him – apparently she didn’t want to take the risk of him deciding to go out on the road with us at the last minute. We spent the day at the track with the new drivers, running with them and trying to get them used to the way we did things. For the most part they seemed pretty decent. Some of them had at least a little experience in midgets, and most of them had run a season or two in jalopies or hot rods, so they seemed to have some idea of what to do when we got out on the track.

I got the season off to a good start for me by winning the feature on Friday night, although I had a close battle with Pepper to do it. A little to our surprise, considering all the cheating the more senior of the guys of us had done to our cars when we thought no one else was looking, one of the New Jersey guys, Squirt Chenowith, wound up taking third in the new 72 car. It turned out he had a couple seasons of running midgets in the bull rings around New Jersey, and the rest of us figured we were going to have our hands full with him.

I actually ran pretty good the next night on the old dirt track at Owosso, but the run of the race just didn’t go well for me and I wound up in fifth after a long battle with Squirt, who I managed to edge at the last second. Nobody really had a chance to complain much, since Hoss took first only about a hundred yards ahead of us – it turned out to be the last MMSA race he would win.

I was standing around shooting the bull with Frank while Hoss was talking with the crowd, when Skimp Winkleman, of all people, came up to us. He was one of the guys we’d picked up in Livonia the middle of the summer the previous year, and had run all fall with us. He was an older guy, older than Frank, even, and he’d been racing for a long time, if not real successfully. But, he sure loved it, and was a good guy to have around. "Hey, Frank," he said. "You looking for a driver, by any chance?"

"Yeah," Frank admitted. "This is Hoss’s last night."

"You up to having me to come along?"

"Sure thing," Frank smiled. "I thought you were all set up with that construction job for the summer."

"Aw, the foreman is an asshole I can’t stand," he shrugged. "And I got me a little wife trouble, too. I figure that if I’m not around she won’t be yelling at me."

"We’re hitting the road at eight Monday morning from Livonia," Frank said. "If you’re there, you can come with us."

"Hell, I can be there first thing in the morning," Skimp grinned. "Maybe tonight if the wife is staying at her sister’s again. You mind if I bring a car?"

"Fine with me," Frank nodded. "We’ve got as many people and one fewer vehicles than last year, so we can stand an extra."

"Good enough," Skimp nodded. "Where in Livonia do I meet up with you guys?"

"At least some of us will be around Herb Kralick Ford in the morning," Frank told him. "Someone will know where the rest of us are. Glad to have you with us, Skimp." Frank turned to me and grinned, "See, Mel, I knew we’d have enough drivers come in the door."

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