Squirt Chenowith proved to be well named. He was just a tiny little guy; if he was over five feet tall it couldn’t have been by much, and I doubt he would have gone a hundred pounds. It turned out that he’d been drafted and was looking a two-year vacation in colorful Korea in the face when someone in the processing station decided he was too small to be a soldier. I guess he didn’t mind all that much, even though most of us were veterans and not sorry about it.

But I want to tell you, that young man could handle a race car! He won his first feature in the first week we were on the road, I think in Kokomo, but I don’t remember for sure now, and he won at least once a week after that as we worked our way south and west through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. He was almost always in the money, unless something goofy happened along the way. I know Spud dropped his restrictor plate a sixteenth of an inch sometime in the first couple weeks, but it didn’t slow him down a whole lot, so Spud dropped him another sixteenth. That got him to the point where we could sometimes keep a handle on him, but not always, and he still won an awful lot.

I think it was Squirt who pretty much taught me that while I might be a competent race car driver, I was never going to be a great one. The little guy had something, I don’t know what it was, but something that made him just a little faster than everyone else and he got faster with practice. Part of it was the fact that he was hauling around less weight in the car than any one else of us – Skimp was at least a hundred pounds heavier, for example. The fact that Squirt was so good was a little surprising, since in those days most people figured that you had to have some muscle to be a race car driver. That may have been true in some cars, before the days of power steering, but it really wasn’t the case in a MMSA midget. They responded well to finesse, not to being bullied; Squirt had all the finesse he needed and then some.

In those first weeks on the road, I roomed with Squirt. He was a nice guy, always bright and chipper but without that chip on the shoulder you often see little guys having. Of course, I was pretty easy going and not much of a one to tease people, so that may have helped.

Over the course of those weeks I learned a little bit about him. It turned out that Spud had raced with Squirt’s dad back in the thirties, in some of those bull rings in north Jersey that he had so many stories about. Squirt had been racing for four years, almost all in midgets. Some of it had been a little illegal, in that he was racing on a fake birth certificate at the age of fifteen. Only the draft board, a bad crash and lack of a sponsor had kept him from running the North Jersey circuit again this year. With his talent and his reputation, I didn’t think he’d be with us long – sooner or later somebody on the east coast was going to be looking for a fast driver, and he’d likely be heading out.

Sure enough, we were in Muskogee, Oklahoma when Frank picked up the mail package from Vivian and brought it to us in the restaurant where we were having breakfast. I never paid much attention to the mail package, since there was hardly ever anything for me and if I did get something it probably was something I didn’t really want. But there was a card for Squirt, asking him to call home immediately. Long distance phone calls were rare and expensive in those days; if you made a long distance call from a pay phone you’d better have a pocket full of change. He cashed a five-spot into quarters and headed for a pay phone.

"Mel, are you thinking that’s what I’m thinking it is?" Frank asked.

"Odds are that young man has a Kurtis Kraft somewhere in his immediate future," I agreed. "Like about as soon as he can get his butt to New Jersey."

"Spud said we’d be lucky to keep him for the season," Frank shrugged. "He sure has made life interesting for us, though."

A few minutes later Squirt hung up the phone and came back over to us. He seemed a little bit dazed, like he couldn’t believe his ears. "Frank," he said. "I’ve got to take off for a few weeks."

"I kinda figured," Frank smiled. "You get a ride some place?"

"No," Squirt shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. "My brother needs me to wrench for him."

We all knew Squirt was a pretty good mechanic – his fine tuning skills on the 72 car had probably as much to do with him winning as his driving did. "You sure?" I asked. "Seems like kind of a waste for you to be wrenching for someone else."

"This is different," Squirt shook his head. "This is at Indianapolis."

"Indianapolis?" Frank said with surprise. "I didn’t know you knew someone running the 500."

"I didn’t either," Squirt replied, a big grin breaking out across his face. "My brother Runt heard through the grapevine about someone down in Philly that had a Kurtis Kraft Offy Indy Car for sale cheap, so he went down to check it out. It seems this rich babe’s son bought it with the idea of racing it, then wrecked himself up real bad in a sports car race somewhere. She wanted to get it out of the garage so she wouldn’t have to park her Rolls Royce outside anymore. My brother agreed to buy it then shook down everybody he knew in north Jersey for the money to pay for it. A cousin of ours was going to wrench for him but his wife got sick. So, now Runt is in Indy with no one to wrench for him."

"Shit, you’ve got to go," Frank shook his head. "Hell, I’ve only been to Indy once, that was in ’40 when Wilbur Shaw won it with that Maserati. Them spaghetti-guzzlers sure built one fast car."

"I’ve never been there," Squirt shook his head. "Man, I don’t believe this."

"You know, I wouldn’t mind going some time," I said. "I mean, just to sit in the stands and watch. It’s got to be a lot different from our screwing around on little bull ring race tracks, rodeo rings and the like."

"Maybe we’ll have to," Frank smiled. "We’re going to be in that neighborhood, and unless Carnie or Vivian have come up with something I haven’t heard about we’ve got an off night that day. I mean, no one within two hundred miles of the place wants to schedule us against the Indy 500. Anyway, Squirt, I think you’re going to play hell getting anywhere out of this one horse town, but we’re going to be heading through Tulsa today, we could drop you off at the train station. You get up to Kansas City and you shouldn’t have any problem getting to St. Louis. There’s bound to be a train to Indy from there."

All of us were with Squirt in the train station in Tulsa, wishing him the best of luck over the next month or so. There wasn’t a one of us that just plain didn’t envy the hell out of him. We were all racers, of course, and back then the Indy 500 was the biggest big deal there was around for us. This was before the days of flag to flag coverage of the race on the radio, but every single one of us, me included, had kept our ears on Mutual Radio to listen to Bill Hurst give us live updates on the race from the track. Every one of us had dreamed of being there. Nothing else compared, nothing else was in its league. We all knew we were at best kind of half-assed carnies showing off for the local yokels and most of us would never be anything but that. Squirt was going to at least get a taste of it and in a way he represented all of us.

Finally, the train pulled in, Squirt got on and waved goodbye to us. We all stood waving goodbye to him, then got back in our cars and trucks and headed on to wherever it was that we were headed on to. I know I felt a little down about it, partly envying Squirt, but partly because I was being honest with myself. I knew that while I might stay with the MMSA for a while, it likely would be about as far as I would ever go in racing. Or, at least something on that level. When you’re a young man you think you can conquer the world, but the older you get the more you have to accept your limitations.

We went on about our business. Now, we were short a driver again, but that didn’t last too long. Frank went to the Western Union office there in the train station and sent a telegram to Sonny Ochsenlaager up in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Sonny had run with us for several months the summer before, and Frank knew that Sonny was going to college on the GI bill. He would be out for the summer soon, so Frank asked him if he’d like to run with us again, and gave our schedule for the next couple days. The next morning Frank went to the Western Union office in whatever town we were in, and found a telegram from Sonny: "ON MY WAY." He caught up with us a couple days later, driving a rather beat-up looking ’39 Chevy.

Since Squirt leaving had left the 72 car without a driver, Sonny wound up taking it over. The first day he was with us, he ran way the hell back in back of the heat, and then ran in the back of the consolation. Spud was a little surprised at that. "Shit," he said to me as we stood there watching the race. "I figured he was rusty after laying off over the winter, but I didn’t think he was that rusty."

"Uh, Spud," I said. "Did you think to change the restrictor plate on that car back to normal?"

"Shit," he said again. "No wonder he can’t get out of his own way, he’s three sixteenths down to everyone else."

"Three sixteenths?" I said. "Boy, that little shit could really drive that thing, couldn’t he?"

"Damn straight," Spud shook his head. "I’d even been thinking about dropping him another sixteenth. You know, whatever happens I think we’re going to hear from that kid again. I’m a little surprised he came along with us at all, but I guess he wanted to see the country some. Something besides New Jersey, anyway."

Spud changed the restrictor plate just as soon as the consolation was over with. Sonny ran third the next night, and was right in the thick of things after that. That’s how much better a driver that Squirt was over the rest of us: three sixteenths better.

In the shuffle around after Squirt left, I wound up with Sonny as a roommate. That was pretty good in its way, since Sonny was a liberal arts major at the University of Wisconsin, and we could have the occasional discussion about something other than beer, baseball, racing and honeys. But there was a down side to it, too – Sonny farted. I mean, he farted a lot. Now, there are not many men among us that won’t admit to a nice healthy fart occasionally bringing a grin to our faces, but Sonny was way over that. I don’t know what was wrong with his intestinal system. He ate pretty much the same food as the rest of us, but with him it was just priming the pump for another series of explosions. Fortunately the weather was getting warm enough that I could sleep with the windows open, so that may have been all that saved my life.

We swung down into Texas, worked back east a ways, then zigzagged our way back to the north. We were in Cape Girardeau when Frank got a note to call a number in Indianapolis early in the morning, but as soon as possible. He set his alarm to go off real early, and we all kind of wondered what it was all about.

We found out over breakfast the next morning. "That number was the hotel where Squirt was staying," he said. "His brother qualified that thing in 19th. Now he needs a pit crew. The only people he can find don’t know jacks from shit, and he at least wants someone that knows what racing is about and can handle a wrench. We don’t get paid, but he can arrange for pit passes for us. Anybody want to go help Spud and me?"

I think the only one that didn’t put their hand up was Carol; she was more interested in her bottle.

It turned out that Hattie and Carol were the only ones that didn’t go to the race with us, and that was only because we found out that they didn’t allow women in the pits. That was fine with her; she figured that she’d have a handful managing Carol there anyway. We found a place to park the trucks not too far out of town, spent the night, and very early the next morning the rest of us piled into cars and headed for the track, leaving the two of them to keep an eye on things.

Even with the pit passes it was a hassle getting into the track, but it was worth the visit. After months of crummy dirt tracks, this was a different world. The buildings were old, but everything looked like a country club. It was all well painted, white trimmed with green; the grass was neatly cut and there were flowers here and there. Just from the look of the place, and a look at the crowd filling the stands, it was clear that we were in a different world than what we’d been used to.

We made it to the pits in plenty of time, and Squirt and his brother were glad to see us. I don’t know the details, but for some reason or other they were really hurting for a pit crew, so having over a dozen guys show up on race day turned their spirits around right there.

Squirt introduced us to his brother. His name on the entry blank was Richard, but everyone called him Runt. He was a little bigger than Squirt, but not much. "I’m several years older than Squirt," he explained. "My folks thought I was going to be the runt of the litter until he came along, so I got stuck with the name."

Runt was nervous, and understandably so. He was an Indianapolis rookie, and had never seen the race. Like us, the closest he’d even been to the place until the last month was listening to Bill Hurst on Mutual Radio. "I don’t expect to win this thing," he admitted, "But I’d like to run good and learn what I can." This was a real shoestring operation, even for those days – just Runt and Squirt, with one beat-up old Plymouth for a run and carry car and a flatbed trailer they’d used to haul to the race. They were sponsored by some company in New Jersey for nothing much, but the payouts were good and since they had the car in the race the chances of being able to get back to New Jersey without having to steal gas were pretty good.

Runt’s car was really something. It made it clear what kind of tiddlers the MMSA cars we drove really were. It was lower than the MMSA cars, but longer and wider. Most of us were at least a little familiar with the little Offenhauser engines in midgets, but the Offy in that thing was a lot bigger and a lot more powerful, although it was obvious that it was still part of the family. Runt told us that they hadn’t done any real major modifications to the car, and had just tried to tune it up and make it run decent. We couldn’t actually take the car out on the track to practice pit stops, but we made some dry runs there in the pits. This was before the days of air jacks on the cars, so everything had to be done by hand, but after a few tries we had a routine roughed in.

For the next several hours there wasn’t a lot to do other than stand around, try to help keep Runt from getting more nervous than he already was, and watch the crowd filling the stands and the infield. "You know," Frank commented quietly to me at one point, "Some of these guys only run one race a year, and I’ll bet they do it in front of more people than watch us all season. No damn wonder this thing is such a big deal."

Eventually the bands played, the balloons filled the air, and there came Tony Hulman’s words over the loudspeakers: "Gentlemen, start your engines."

I had the starter on Runt’s car – it plugged into the front of the car, and weighed 65 pounds. Somehow I got delegated to carrying it, but that meant that I got to throw the switch to turn the car over while Squirt stood by the intake with a squirt can of gas to help the engine get started. Those old Offy four cylinders were a bear to start, and it seemed like every year someone got left behind on the starting grid, but at least it wasn’t us. That thing came to life with a roar that shook the earth, except that the whole earth was already shaking from the noise of those thirty-three cars. Even starting they had a rumble that shook you down to your boots. And the smell! Oh, my word, what a smell – alcohol and nitromethane and castor oil. It was so thick it about wanted to make you cry, but you never smelled something so exciting in your life.

Squirt and Spud and I climbed back over the pit wall and watched the field pull out, thirty-three cars of all colors. This was back in the old front-engine roadster days, of course; it would be another decade before a rear engine car would run at Indy. The drivers were all sitting pretty much upright in the cars so you could see them, rather than laid down in the chassis like they are today. They all had helmets on, I’ll give them that, but there wasn’t a fire suit to be seen since they hadn’t been invented yet – mostly they were racing in slacks and shirts and street shoes. A lot of them weren’t even belted into the cars. Looking back on it I can barely imagine that they actually used to do it that way, but I was there and saw it for myself.

If I thought those cars were loud on the starting grid, that was nothing against when the pace car came in and they were actually racing. It was like we’d been hit with a wall of sound when they went by. How could we MMSA guys in our little midgets ever hope to compete with a spectacle like that? It was like night and day.

To tell the truth I don’t remember too much about how the whole race ran, mostly because I was concentrating on how Runt was doing, and he wasn’t doing too badly, running in midpack for a lot of the race. I do remember that there were a lot of cars that dropped out for whatever reason, engine trouble of one kind or another, mostly. Those old Offys may have been stump pullers, but in those days their reliability left something to be desired compared with the engines of today. Without going and looking it up, I’d guess that a good third of the field didn’t make it through the first forty laps.

That meant that there were several cautions through the first part of the race. Like today, a caution is a chance to make a pit stop, and Runt came in with the rest of the field. I wasn’t in the crew that was actually working on the car, but our practice must not have been too bad since we got him back out on the track only losing a couple of positions.

By the middle of the race Runt was running in the low teens, mostly because a lot of cars were behind the wall – engine breakdowns of one kind or another, and a few crashes. There were no radios in those days, only pit boards, and there wasn’t much chance for Squirt and Runt to discuss strategy, but they did manage to get a couple words in over the next several pit stops, which went pretty well. "I told him that if he can keep it running we’ll finish pretty good," Squirt reported after one pit stop.

As it turned out, he couldn’t keep it running – he made it to lap 183 when the car started running rough, then crapped out on him. He came rolling into the pits, and it was pretty clear that the magneto was dead. In theory it could have been changed, but it would have taken more than the rest of the race to do it. Still, it was late enough in the race that he finished twelfth, since there were only nine cars running at the end. Lee Wallach won it; I’d never heard of him before and not much since, but his name appears on the short list of the guys that have won the Indianapolis 500, and you can’t take that away from him.

All in all, Runt and Squirt were pretty happy with finishing twelfth. It had been a real stretch for them to even make the race without much cash, but they were going to come out well to the good out of it so there was no room to complain. We broke out the beer and had a few while we helped Runt load his car back up for the run to New Jersey.

"Well, Squirt," Frank asked as we were finishing up. "Are you going to go back on the road with us?"

"I’ve thought about it," he admitted. "It was an awful lot of fun and you guys are good to be with, but since you’ve got someone else in my car, I think maybe I’ll ride back home with Runt and look around a bit to see if there are any decent rides open. Can I let you know in a few days?"

"Sure," Frank told him. "Just call Vivian and let her know what’s going to happen."

The sun was getting low and the grandstands were getting pretty empty as we piled back in the cars to run back to our rig. We were going to spend the night where we were parked again, then in the morning head on over to some little town just into Ohio to make a race date on Thursday.

"You know," Spud said as we pulled out of the place. "That’s one thing I want to do someday."

"What’s that?" someone asked.

"I want to do that race," he said. "At least try to qualify for it. This is fine, but I don’t think I’m going to want to do it forever."

"Aren’t you getting a little old for that?" I asked. "I know Frank thinks he’s slowed down a little."

"Might be," Spud shrugged. "On the other hand, there’s some old farts there that only race once a year, and they seem to manage it. I think we’re going to rig it around so some one of you guys handles the flags once in a while so I can get into a car, just to keep my hand in."

"I don’t know," someone said from the back seat. "It sounds good, but man! Those guys are way out of our league."

"I don’t think so," Spud protested. "I know that Runt has to be a pretty decent driver since Squirt seems to think he’s not as good a driver as his brother. But I looked over some of those cars, and it was nothing special. I think if I had a decent car I might stand a shot at it."

"And you might get your butt kicked, too," I heard Pepper speak up. "I get the impression that those things are a major handful to drive."

"I do, too," Spud agreed. "But damn, a man has to have some dreams, doesn’t he?"

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