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The winter dragged slowly onward. The days weren’t too bad, and I could get through some evenings by reading some book or other, but that got old after a while too. However, Rocky and Pepper weren’t the kind of guys to curl up with a book, and they spent a lot of evenings hanging around a neighborhood bar that had a television set. I used to go with them once in a while, almost always on Friday nights when they had the Gillette Friday Night Fights on. Those were pretty good, but sitting in a bar with a beer in my hand watching a fuzzy black and white picture of two guys battering each other got old after a while too.
I think it was Rocky that summed it up best one night: "You know what’s missing this year?" he asked out of nowhere.
"What?" I said.
"Hattie," he replied flatly.
There wasn’t anything intelligent that I could reply to that, other than to say, "Yep." He was dead right and I knew it. Hattie was Chick’s wife, of course, but it took her to make a family out of us. We all pulled together like a family should and she treated the rest of us like we were her brothers or something. Without her around it was just the three of us guys doing a bad job of batching it for the winter.
I worked the odd day at the shop with the guys, but mostly it was substitute teaching. Unlike last year, I didn’t have a long-term position this year, so I might be teaching phys ed in one school one day and algebra in another school across town the next, although God help any kid who ever learned any algebra from me. Mostly it was just babysitting, except on the odd days that I taught social studies or auto shop, where I could actually contribute something. That got old pretty quickly, too, and I was getting itchy to get back out on the road.
Eventually it got to be February. It was Pepper’s turn to be the fourth person on the annual Daytona expedition with Carnie, Frank and Vivian. They were gone pretty close to two weeks, and came back with nice tans. Pepper reported that Buck had a car in the race, but had only finished in the middle of the field. He and Frank saw Dewey while they were down there. Dewey told them he’d be back to run with us in the spring, but that it was a hell of a lot warmer to spend the winter down south than it was to freeze his butt in Michigan, and most of us agreed with that.
About the time that Frank got back, he had to get serious about the driver situation, which had gotten worse while he’d been gone.
Things in the shop had slowed down a bit while Frank and Pepper had been gone, and along in there Dink took a few days off. We hardly ever saw Dink outside of work because he was spending his time with the two fat cousins he’d been living with. We teased him about it a little, but he was getting a good deal of feminine companionship, which is more than the rest of us were managing, so we weren’t in a position to tease him too hard. I was teaching that day, but he really surprised Spud when he came in one morning, announced that he was taking a job at the Buick dealership across town, and they wanted him there as soon as he could be there. He’d decided to make the arrangement with his two girls a little more permanent. He said he liked them both but they hadn’t worked out among the three of them which one he was going to marry, so he thought maybe he’d just continue shacking up with the both of them. None of us could figure out how the three of them could manage to sleep in a double bed, so we figured he had to switch off between them some way, but he never explained what it was.
In any case, that took Dink off of the driver’s list for the next summer. A few days later, Skimp came into the shop and told Spud that he’d taken a job on the line at Ford’s Rawsonville plant, which paid a lot better money than what he could make with the MMSA. He’d been dating some gal off and on over the winter, so that may have had something to do with it, too. Skimp had been the oldest of our whole crew, and toward the end of the last season it had seemed to have been wearing him down.
So, when Frank got back he discovered that our tight little crew from the summer before had done a lot of scattering. Only Pepper and Rocky had been driving for the MMSA longer than I had, and Pepper by only a month or so. Of the rest, the only one working with us was John Adorney, and he said he’d be back. Dewey had told Frank he intended to be back, but Frank wasn’t about to believe him until he showed up. Frank was pretty sure that two of the New Jersey guys from last year didn’t plan on being back but thought that Perk and Scotty might show. So, that was four, and maybe as many as seven drivers, when we needed to have ten or eleven, and preferably twelve.
Fortunately, Frank had done a little more around Daytona than just hole up with Vivian, although according to Pepper he’d done quite a bit of that. Frank had a notebook with several addresses of guys that he’d met down at the race that might be possible drivers, so he got letters off to them, and called Runt and Squirt out in New Jersey, hoping they’d have some leads for him.
I won’t go through all the stuff that Frank went through because I didn’t know all of it myself – since I was teaching school instead of spending a lot of time around the shop, I wasn’t always aware of everything that was going on. Along toward the end of March Dewey rolled in ready to go racing, and Scotty called to say that he and Perk would be along in a few days and would be bringing another driver with them they thought would fit in. Frank put out the word around the local driver’s gossip circuit and managed to come up with a guy by the name of Dutch Kindleberger.
Just a couple days before the season was set to open Frank was still working his contacts, trying to come up with another couple bodies, when the most decrepit-looking ’37 Plymouth you ever saw rolled in with three hillbilly friends of Buck on board. They were two brothers named Hap and Junie, and some distant cousin of theirs called Buckshot. That Plymouth didn’t look like it could last another ten miles, it was that beat out. It had enough left in it to make it out to Frank’s uncle’s barn, where they left it to sit out the summer. Frank wasn’t too sure what to make of the three of them, at least partly because Buck hadn’t been the world’s greatest driver or the world’s smartest, but right about then he was ready to try anything.
Some of the rest of us had already taken the cars out to Flat Rock to give them their spring test, but we went out the day before our first race to break in the guys who hadn’t run with us before. For the first of April, it was a warm spring day for Michigan; things were greening up a little, although the trees were still winter bare. The sun beat down on us pretty good, warming things up nicely and holding promise for a good summer to come.
Red, the third New Jersey guy took right to the way we were trying to do things, but I guess he’d already had a pretty good briefing from Perk and Scotty, and from what they said he’d been around midgets for a while. Dutch and the three hillbillies were a different story; we had a hell of a time trying to get through their thick skulls that the idea was to look like we were racing, not try to knock everyone else off the track so they could go on and win. Frank laid down the law right away that somebody messing up a car punting someone else for position was going to be out on his ass so quick it wouldn’t be funny. Dutch seemed to get the message after that, but those three North Carolina hillbillies could have given dumb lessons to fence posts.
We wrapped up our testing during the daylight so we wouldn’t have to pay to have the lights turned on, and headed back to Livonia. When we got back, Rocky, Pepper, and I got cleaned up, and decided to head over to the bar to have one of their fat bar burgers, some fries, and catch the fights on the TV.
The fights were popular and the place filled up early for them, but we were lucky enough to get there early and get a table with a good view of the TV set. We each ordered drafts and settled in to wait. "I’ll tell you one damn thing," Rocky said. "It sure ain’t going to be the crew we had last year, that’s for sure."
"Damn straight," Pepper agreed. "I’ll bet damn good money that we won’t go all through the season with the same drivers we started with, like last year."
"Hell," Rocky snorted. "I’d be surprised if we make it a month. I think I remember that Dutch guy from when I used to run jalopies around here, except we called him ‘Crash’ then. Would you like to guess why we called him that?"
"I get the picture," I shook my head.
"I think he totaled something like five cars in two months," Rocky said. "They were just junkers, but still. We spend all winter spiffing up those cars and then we get assholes like that that’ll tear ’em up in minutes. That don’t set too well with me, if you know what I mean."
"Yeah, I was thinking the 27 car was going to get run some this year," Pepper agreed. "Actually, we ought to talk to Spud and have him have one of those guys run it right from the beginning while we keep a good car in reserve in the box truck."
"You could do that," I shook my head. "But what do you want to bet it’s the only one that wouldn’t get piled up?"
"That’s the way things work, that’s for sure," Rocky nodded. "And Lord! I thought Buck was dumb but somehow them three inbred hillbillies have got to learn that you can’t bang fenders on an open wheel car ’cause there ain’t no fenders to bang."
"Yeah," Pepper laughed. "You know why a hillbilly goes to a family reunion? To meet women."
Rocky and I laughed at that, then Rocky shook his head and commented, "Unfortunately, there’s more truth to that than there is fiction."
"I don’t see where there’s a hell of a lot we can do about it," I shook my head. "About all we can do is hope that Frank bounces their ass if they get too crazy and that nothing gets too torn up in the process."
"Yeah, actually you’re probably right," Rocky shook his head. "And you ought to add to that the hope that none of us gets too messed up in the process, either."
We sat there and batted around those general thoughts for a while, adding that we all thought that Red seemed to be getting the idea of what we were doing pretty well, and that was at least something. We had a few more drafts, and then the fights came on, so we sat there and watched them for a while before we headed back to the apartment for the night. I couldn’t help but feel that the season was getting off on the wrong foot and that there wasn’t much good that could come of it. While I was looking forward to being back out on the road, right at that moment the idea of a classroom didn’t seem all that bad.
We spent part of the next morning using the pickup to haul what furniture we had out to Frank’s uncle’s, since we’d probably be wanting it the next winter even if it was pretty much junk. Along in the afternoon we headed back out to the track, where we’d left the cars overnight, with Spud staying in the travel trailer to keep an eye on them. Since we’d all had a fair amount of practice laps out there the day before there wasn’t much to do besides gas up the cars and clean them up. It was actually kind of enjoyable to do that, to help us get ourselves back in the swing of things.
Our opening race of the season was run in conjunction with a local jalopy event. In those days the jalopy races were really rough and tumble things in beat up old cars that sort of put me in mind of the hillbilly’s Plymouth, except that the race cars actually looked a little better. About the time the junkers started showing up, either on trailers or on their own wheels, Frank and Spud called us together for our opening driver’s meeting of the season. Together, they went over things in a lot more detail than they normally did, for the benefit of the new guys. They reminded us not just once, but several times, that we were out there to look good and put on a show, and to take care of the equipment.
Along toward the end of the meeting Spud said, "Now, the guys that were with us last year know that we usually set up the heats and the starting order based on the finish of the previous race. But since we’re just starting out this year and we’ve got a bunch of new guys, I’m just going to line you up like I want. The new guys will be at the back of the fields, so if you’re not running with the veterans you can be out of the way a little bit. Once I’ve got an idea of how you’re going to run, we’ll mix it up like normal."
That wasn’t anything particularly new; unless there was some special reason Spud always started a new guy at the back of the field to give them a chance to get used to the driving and the cars before they got into a wheel-to-wheel battle with somebody.
I started on the pole of the first four-car heat, at least partly on the strength of my season championship the year before. Dewey was next to me, John was in back of me, and Hap was on the outside. As usual, we did a few laps to warm up, got the one to go flag, and then came out of the first corner and got on the gas. I had the inside line on Dewey and proposed to make use of it, while he got right up on the fence to try and high-line me, while John was right on my tail, looking for a chance to get under me. In the process, the lead changed hands several times. We hadn’t got the halfway signal yet when we came up on Hap, who was running by himself and a lot slower than the rest of us. Well, new guy, I thought, it’s going to take him a while to get used to this. Fortunately I came up on him in a place where I could blow right by him, and worked up a little bit of a lead which I managed to hold until the checker, when I was coming up on Hap again. John and Dewey had a heckuva battle for second maybe forty yards behind me, and John finally nipped Rocky for the second. That meant that Dewey was going to have to run the consolation with Hap.
We pulled into the infield and up to the gas trailer. I felt just a little satisfied that I’d started the season with a heat win; maybe it was going to get off on the right foot after all. "Man," Hap said as we hung around watching the next heat get warmed up. "Them fuckin’ cars of yourn are fuckin’ fast. I couldn’t hold ya’ll outa the corners for love nor money."
"There’s some tricks to it," I told him. "You gotta keep your revs up, you get a little behind and slow in the corners and you can’t make it up on the straights. The cars are too equal to each other."
"Cain’t rightly understand it," he shook his head. "I could hold ya’ll a lot better yesterday."
"It’ll get better when you get some seat time under you," I smiled. "Like I said, there’s some tricks to driving these little bugs, you don’t learn them all overnight."
The next heat featured Rocky, Perk, Scotty and Junie. There were some similarities to the first heat; Rocky, Perk and Scotty were basically at each other’s throats all the way through the heat, while Junie lagged well behind, getting lapped around the halfway point and just barely keeping from being lapped again. The four of them headed into the pits for gas like we’d done, while the third heat lined up: Pepper, Red, Dutch and Buckshot.
This race was quite a little different. Pepper was on the pole, and got to the lead right away, with Red not far behind him, while Dutch and Buckshot were fading fast. Pepper was never far ahead of Red, but Red couldn’t quite get close enough to put a move on him, except when the two of them came up on Dutch and Buckshot, who were running pretty hard against each other, but considerably slower than the first two. Pepper didn’t do quite as good a job of passing the two of them, and had to take them one at a time, while Red managed to blow around both of them to almost catch up with Pepper in the 86 car. From that point on, Pepper slowly managed to pull out a little lead on Red, maybe a third of the front straight at the finish.
About the time the checkered flag flew, Rocky came over to where I was sitting on a tire of the 66 car watching the proceedings. "You know what?" he smiled in a voice low enough that we couldn’t be overheard. "That goddamn Spud ain’t as dumb as he looks."
"I never thought that," I grinned. "I figure he did a little diddling with the restrictor plates last night."
"I know goddamn well he did," Rocky laughed. "I got a little curious about what he did with the plates, so back last winter I put a tiny little dab of paint on the one on my car. It was there last night, but it ain’t there today. He sure didn’t drop it down any."
"I sort of figured that," I smiled. "My only question is whether he dropped the plates on Dutch and the hillbillies."
"Wouldn’t be surprised," he snickered. "Unfortunately, I didn’t think to mark those plates to know for sure. Anyway, that ought to keep those jokers out of the worst of the action until they either learn what they’re supposed to be doing or else get pissed off and go home."
"I suspect you’re right," I told him. "My only question is whether Frank knows that Spud did it."
"Wouldn’t be surprised," Rocky smiled. "Frank is smart enough to figure out something like that."
"We better not let on that we’re onto him," I suggested. "I gave Hap a couple bullshit tips on how to run faster, maybe we’d better go over and give them a little more benefit of our experience and make it look like we’re trying to be helpful."
"Yeah, might not be a bad idea at that," he nodded. "I’m pretty sure those guys know about the restrictor plates but I don’t know if they’ve figured out what happened. If one of the new guys asks about it we need to say that we usually start off the season with everybody the same. You look like you’re being helpful, and I’ll get with the rest of last year’s vets and tell them to keep their mouths shut."
I went over and barbered with the new guys a bit. They were just standing around looking glum, wondering just how the hell they could have been outrun so badly. I really tried to give them some good advice, especially about putting on a good show for the audience, about taking care of their vehicles, and how they were a little trickier than they looked. They couldn’t just hop in one and expect to run right with the bunch of us who had been running midgets, some of us for years, but once they got the feel of the cars they could expect to run better. Some of the other guys came over and added to my tips, and I’m pretty sure all of them had been tipped off by Rocky before they joined us.
The jalopies ran another couple of their heats with their usual amount of crashes and confusion. Then it was time for our consolation – the top two finishers would go into the feature, like always. This time, the consolation consisted of Dewey, Perk, and the four new guys. If ever there was a race that I would have liked to have had a bet down, that would have been the one. Unless something broke on the cars, Dewey and Perk were going to lap the field at least once, and probably twice. Unfortunately, by then the rest of the veteran drivers had either figured out what was going on or had been tipped off by Rocky, so there wasn’t a soul there that would have been willing to bet with me on that one.
And, with good reason. As it turned out I was half right. Dewey and Perk had a pretty good battle for the lead, with Perk winning. In the process, they lapped everybody once, and got by Dutch and Buckshot a second time; one more lap and they’d have gotten by the other two.
I’ve said before that while we may have been barnstormers putting on a show, and that our races weren’t fixed. Well, usually they weren’t, but there were times that they leaned in that direction a little.
The jalopies ran off their feature race with only four or five yellow flags for crashes or cars that just plain crapped out without enough steam or position to get off the track. That meant that it took a while before we finally got on the track for the big event of the evening, our feature. This time Spud lined everybody up in inverse order, so I was right at the tail end of the field. I don’t remember all the details, but we had a real classic MMSA race, where you could just about throw a blanket over the whole field. Really, only Red was lagging behind after a few laps, and not that far; he was still more or less in contact with the rest of us.
We went around that track two and three wide, with racing all over the place and positions changing on every lap. I slowly managed to work my way up towards the front of the field, with Pepper, Scotty and me three wide at the finish line. I wound up winning it by inches, and as far as I could tell the whole crowd was on their feet with excitement.
That was how it was supposed to be done, and at least us old-timers still knew how to do it. Maybe this season was going to go better than I had been expecting.