In the Beginning
Like most of you, I started my life very young. In fact, I don't remember much about it. Part of the year it was very cold in my southern Ohio Home. In about 1938 my dad had bought 70 acres, with a house and barn, a couple miles north of the Ohio River, some 30 miles east of Cincinnati. .
Doing a little reminiscing...
Dad was an oil painting Artist in the beginning of his adult life. That was the '30s at the beginning of the depression.
In the late '30's he got a job with the state doing art work for the various state buildings and he actually made some money. He was tired of the party artist life of his 20s so he took some money and bought a 120 year old red brick house along with the 100 acres that it sat on near Point Pleasant, the birthplace of General Grant. The house was a 2 story 4 room rectangle with the kitchen off to the side. 2 of the rooms were livable. That means glass panes in all the windows. The outhouse was 20 yards across the driveway.
My sister Tam and I grew up there in the hills of southern Ohio very near the Ohio River. For the first 10 years of my life we used an ice box that used a block of ice. We're talking '40s to '50s. Dad was the only one who was allowed to chip off ice for his glass of water. My sister and I would plague him with pleas for a drink of his ice water. To this day my preferred drink, if I'm thirsty, is ice water. We drank sweet well water that we got from our well by dropping a bucket on a rope some 15 ft into the water below. Well water with ice in it on a hot summer day was the bomb.
Side note.... When we kids were born, mom became a little concerned about the well water so she sent a sample off to the State board of health. Soon the report came back. The bottom line stated 'NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION'. I was told that we stopped drinking the well water for a couple months, but it was just too damn good tasting to let the state spoil a good thing for long.
Occasionally a dead frog would come up in our bucket. To be careful, we'd throw that bucket out, and get a fresh bucket of clean water. 🙂 Disclaimer: Porch and columns were added after we move to Ca in '53. A snowstorm in '50 that stranded us on the farm for 10 days ran us out of Ohio. There was only 10" of snow where we lived, but there was formidable Nanny Goat Hill to the south toward the river and the easier back way had a 1/4 mile long 10 foot deep snow drift starting at Noble Holton's farm to the north. https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/.../thanksgiving-1950-cle/
The house was a rundown, 6 room, red brick house that was built in the early 1800. Of course there was no plumbing or electricity....The house only had 2 rooms, with all the glass in the windows, which were considered livable. Mom cooked on a wood stove and that same stove did most of the heating in those early years. There were fireplaces in the four other rooms. There was no need to fire up those fireplaces as those rooms had no glass in the windows.
We had a functional out house for those sorts of needs. That made for the need of an inside pot for night time use during the winter. By morning after the fires had long gone out, it was damned cold at night. So was the steel rim of that pot. Hence my long time fascination with a Fur lined Shit pot.
One summer day Fred heard giggling coming from the outhouse. He wondered what that could possibly be. On approaching the outhouse he found my sister, 8 years old at the time, batting/swatting at the toilet seat hole. Seems as though she was swatting at the kitten, that she had thrown down the hole, as it was trying to jump back out. What a mess. My sister had her dark side. Heh he.
The Columns, front porch, and white paint were added after we sold out, and moved to Ca in 1953. The New owner bought the columns when a fabulous old river mansion, near Neville, was torn down in the late ‘50s. It really gave the old homestead some class.
Even without the upgrades the place had charm, and I remember it warmly. We were a mile from the nearest neighbor and 3 miles from the nearest small town of Moscow, Ohio, on the Ohio River. The point of all this is that I grew to 12 years old in solitude, relying mostly on my older sister, Tamsin, and mom……who was a Saint, of course.
My earliest childhood was known by my willingness to help anyone do anything. From age three my motto was, “all wyte, I will”…….till I learned how to say “right”.
mortifying embarrassment....
I showed you a picture of my Ohio home back in the '40s and early '50s. We left that home in '53 and put it on the market with a realtor it sold about 3 or 4 year later. The house, barn and a 100 acres went for 10000$ as I recall.
Those elegant white columns, front porch, and white house paint (was red brick when we lived there) done by the new owner were a grand touch to an old farm house. I heartily approved.
The Columns came from mansion owner, Bill Maynard's place, who was flooded out by the Ohio river. In those year before effective flood control locks and dams were put in, the mighty Ohio flooded every year in the spring.
We knew Bill from social circles somehow. We went to a couple shindigs' down there on the river. That was back when kids went along to parties. Being baby sat was rare. I'd usually find my way to the back seat of our car before dad and mom were ready to leave.
Bill had a beautiful wife named Betty. Probably be known as a trophy wife in today's vernacular. I didn't care, she was voluptuous and pretty as a calendar girl.
Do you remember when you were very young that your parent were always trying to get you to hug people, aunts and uncle that you hadn't seen for a while and you didn't want to.
My worst nightmare was going over to Noble Holten's place for baled hay or eggs or a gallon of milk, because his huge wife, Effie, would pick me up and give me a big squeeze.
I was 5 years old when this particular party took place down on the river. It wasn't when we first got to the party when hugs normally happened, but later after a few rounds of drinks were served, when someone started the huggee, kissie thing.
Someone suggest that I hug and kiss, yes, even kiss, Betty. Even at 5 yrs old I knew that I wanted to kiss Betty.....and better yet, I'd be able to do it and nobody would know I was hot for Betty.
So the hug and kiss was performed, but my body language must have given me away. The second that I kissed her on the lips, the crowd began to laugh.
I heard someone say, "Wow, he wanted to do that", and more laugher. Another said, "Look, how red he is"....and I was too.
I was mortified that I'd been found out. Even so, I never forgot Betty, and always considered the embarrassment worth that awesome split-second kiss when I was 5 years old.
Early adolesence
When I got to be about 10 years old, I was included, along with Tam, in hand, push mowing our 1/4 acre yard. During the growing season if we ever let the yard go for 2 weeks, hand mowing became pure agony to get it back under control. The barn was 50 yards from the house. We used that old barn as a Tobacco drying barn mostly, as well as a hay barn for our livestock. A tobacco barn is largely just an empty barn with a 12 foot frame where 3” logs span the gaps at about 4’ centers. The barn would be completely full of drying tobacco for 3 months of the year, and completely empty, or a huge jungle gym the rest of the year.
Today, letting a child in there would be child endangerment, but back then it was great fun climbing around on all those poles as they tried to roll out from under us while we played. Good fun.
There was also a hay loft that held hay for the animals. Before bailed hay there were just huge piles of loose hay. Picture giant mattress to jump on. Of course, kids jumping on hay degrades it, and was discouraged by all farmers......so all hay lofts had a, ‘pitchfork lost in the hay somewhere’, warning out to scare the kids away.
The point of all this is that I wasn’t curtailed much from doing things where I might get hurt. I was let loose to hunt squirrels with the family .22 from the age of 10 as long as I was alone. Nothing good happens when 2 boys are together. Ha.
Other free time was spent with our riding horses. A colt, Tennessee walking horse, raised me from age 9. He got me when he was 8 months old. It wasn’t easy for either of us to separate when dad sold the farm to get away from Ohio winters.
One lazy summer day I was sit on top of my horse out in the pasture. There was no saddle or bridel. I was just sitting up there wondering if the horse was asleep. I gave him a gentle kick to the ribs that meant giddyup. He grudgingly began to slowly walk next to the fence. He was still darned near asleep, it seemed to me. Hummm....I thought, "I wonder if I can stop him by grabbing onto this here fence post?"
There was only one way to settle that question, so I grabbed the fence post.....and for a split second it looked like the horse might stop. Then he regained his balnce and took another step or two. I slid off the back and landed in a V shape on my butt. All I remember about that fall was that the pain was excruciating, and it was made worse by the fact that dad saw the whole thing from the back porch, and he couldn't stop himself from laughing. I've often woundered if my later back problem wasn't caused that day.
During the summers we kids, often 4 or five of us, would coordinate our efforts over the old party telephone line and walk the 2 miles down to the swimming hole at the Big Indian Creek. More Child endangerment, but, wow, did that feel good on a hot, humid, summer day. Nobody had to actually learn to swim in those days, it just came naturally sooner or later.
Life could be tough out there on the farm. I don’t mean Afghanistan tough, but pretty tough none the less. Like the time we found our trusted family horse drowned in the well behind the barn. Or the multiple times that we’d get home after school and have to chase the escaped cows. Or feeding the livestock in a driving winter storm while it was still dark, before going to school.
We often played with sleds on the Lamar’s snow slope a mile and a half away, till our feet were so cold they were close to frost bite.....but we still had to walk home. Some of those trips home were pure agony.
I remember one winter Saturday I walked the 3 miles down to Moscow to play with the Murphy kids. There were 10 of them as I remember. Of course I played till I got tired and started home about 3pm, I’d guess. About half way home being tired and cold got to be too much for me. A wind had come up, and I went into a culvert under the road for shelter. I was 9 or 10 maybe. I didn’t really have a plan, and I wouldn’t have survived the night.
I can only imagine the scene at home as dark approached and I wasn’t home. Dad traveled with his job and was away at the time. Mom made the decision to get the old ’37 dodge out, It had snow tires, and come looking for me. Dang, I was happy to see her. I will never forget the sacrifices that she made for us kids. Bless her heart.
My First Experience with Competition
Dad had been a artist to make a living. After I came along he gave art up, and went to Cincinnati to work in the aero industry during the war, at GE in Cincinnati. It was a 30 mile drive to work each way. Every mile or so was a mile road that went north from the Ohio river. I remember 12 mile, 10 mile, and 9mile roads. There was a tavern at each of those roads that dad had to support. Fred said that he had a ‘bar room’ personality, and as I remember, he surely did. He was the life of the party most of the time.
Well ‘Lindy’s Riverfront Saloon’, in Point Pleasant (Grant’s birthplace), was his favorite, right next to the Big Indian Creek. He would go there most Friday and Saturday nights. He’d drink beer and BS with the boys. Orley, Podsy, Orville and the rest, they were good old boys.
I’d go in there with my dad during the daytime, while he’d have one for the road. Sometimes the boys would get into a shuffleboard game. That could go on for hours, or some days there’d be no game. On those days I’d get to kill time by practicing with the shuffleboard weights.
I started this when I was about 8 years old.
By the time I was 10, I’d go there with dad in the evening and often be his partner in the shuffleboard games. They all played for a beers, and I’d get 15 cents if we won. I was as good as they were plus I was sober, so we usually won. I could count on making a buck or more from those games. It was my first taste of competition, and I learned at an early age that winning was desirable. Child Protective Services would not have approved.
Dad and mom
When Dad threw parties out on the farm, he would go to the Package liquor store and buy a bottle or 2 of something. He would give one bottle to me and say laughingly, “Here carry this, and don’t drop it ….. I’d rather see a church burn”………
Let me go back a bit. In order to understand me, you must understand my Family first. I’ll start with Fred. Dad was an unusually charismatic man. For instance he was a pool player as a lad. He was the only under aged guy in Belleview Ohio who was allowed in the pool hall while he was in High school.
John Greenleaf Jr, The reigning pool Champion, came to Belleview. The pool hall chose my dad to play him in an exhibition match. Dad lost, but at 16, he was the best in town.
Fred was into Chrystal radio sets. You could get all the parts for the radios at the town dump. Also he found you could get scads of wire at the dump. He and a couple friends gathered about a half mile of wire. They hooked it all together and ran the wire to the school auditorium vent system somehow. From way across town he managed to dump a bunch of pepper into the ventilation system on graduation night. The pepper emptied the hall. He was thrown out of school for that prank.
His father had died when he was 8 yrs old, and he was raised as an only child by his seamstress mother. She managed to send him to art school at Ohio State. He was a top art talent...on his second year at art school he managed to lose all his tuition money in a poker game before he enrolled that year. By sleeping on couches and scrounging food, somehow he managed to scramble through art school that year.
And as a 25 year old he went to Cuba. He started a travel guide advisory periodical where he would charge restaurant/hotels for a good recommendation. That was going pretty well when Cuba had a revolution that put him out of business. It took him 6 months to get back to the states.
He was a great story teller, and I listened to his stories through the years, not knowing that it would have a large effect on me.
He switched from Art to the machine industry during the 2nd world war. Within about 5 year, and just after the war was over, he started an engineering firm with some 40 employees. His company lost its way by 1950, and that’s when he went to work for GE.
I guess I’m trying to say that my Dad was a remarkable guy, and the more I think about him, the more respect I have for him.
Mom, Martha, was as remarkable in her own way. She saw the best in everyone, and believed that if you let the kids go they would prevail.
At one point she went to a fortune teller, when she was pregnant with me. The teller told her that she was going to have either twins or a genius. It wasn’t twins so I must certainly be a genius. I heard this story so often over the years that I believed it.
As I went through school I was a 90+ percentile kid in almost every way, athletically and mentally. That sounds pretty good, but if you are in any kind of competition that means that out of a thousand people, 80 or 90 of them will beat you.
A peculiarity of my ability was that in Digital dexterity, I was in the 10 percentile realm. There was never anything that I couldn’t do, but I was painfully slow at some things.
So in retrospect I grew up thinking that I was a genius.....and if you are never really tested, it’s pretty easy to believe. I had my first clue that there were smarter folks when a Student in my composition English class delivered his compositions in sonnet form. What was up with that?? Another time was in my honors Physics class; I noticed that I was in the bottom half of my class.....Hummmm
I was 12 when the family sold the farm and loaded up the ’51 Plymouth with a 4’ X 6’ camping trailer, and a 3 month old raccoon, to camp for several weeks as we move to the west. Fred, dad, said that it never rains west of the Mississippi river so camping would be no problem. The first night out we camped just west of the river, and were awakened at about 4am with thunder and lighting. We barely got out on that long mud road from the campground. We laughed about that first night camping, where it never rains, for the next 50 years.
That was the first trip we’d made into the mountains of any kind. It was in the Little Big Horn Mtns where we learned that my mother was deathly afraid of heights. The old Plymouth pitched and bucked, as the engine was missing badly, through those hills with multi-thousand ft drop-offs. My Mom sat in the middle of the back seat holding on to both door handles, and kept her eyes tightly shut while she implored the good Lord to get us to Ca safely.
We finally arrived in Ca, near San Diego. I adapted slowly to the beach culture. School went well. I maintained a B+ average on a Math/Science college preparatory curriculum. I played basketball in HS on the first team. I managed to become ASB president in my senior year. I was on schedule to be a great success in life. The basketball thing was where I first noticed the dexterity problem. .....but there was something askew with my attitude. I was a shy, introspective lad. I wanted things to be fair, and I questioned them when they weren’t. I was slightly against the powers that were. In the long run that will cause trouble.
First Moto Experience...Back problem
Somewhere along in those years my older cousin came to the west coast for his naval service, and he soon bought a Motorcycle. That was one of the pivotal periods of my life. I was about 13, he was 21. He would ride me double up into the mtns behind San Diego. I loved that motorcycle. It was a 1956 BSA 650cc twin.
That started my moto days. My first bike was a Harley Davidson 125cc small bike. Within a year I had traded up to a Zundapp 250cc. I’d gotten an early license in order to ride to work, at age 15. Before I was sixteen I’d traded the Zundapp for a ’55, 650cc BSA just like my cousin’s. I rode that Beeser for my 10th and 11th year of HS. Although I switched to cars as a senior (Girls, don’t you know), I never forgot Motorcycles as a way of life.
A consequence of those first moto years resulted in a back injury. It wasn't an accident related injury. It was an injury resulting from lifting the motorcycle onto the center stand. Most motorcycles have a sidestand or kickstand. They also have a centerstand that requires a lift of half the bike to get up on that centerstand.
Usually a rhythm of motion can be achieved that makes the lifting fairly easy, but occasionally you get it wrong, and it becomes a pure back lift. That happened to me once and I 'threw my back out. It wasn't debilitating, but one vertebre move out of place from the vertebre above in a twisting motion. Turns out that the disk between those two vertebre was 30% shorter than a normal disk. It often caused bruising and swelling of the nerve cord that exits the spine at that joint.
My family had faith in doctors and no faith in Chiropractors. In fact mom work at a GP's office as the office manager. He looked me over and took x-rays. His conclusion was that I had curvature of the spine in 2 directions, but it wasn't out of the limits of normalcy.
That was at 15 yrs old. I spent the next 30 years dealing with a sore lower back, sometimes worse than others. I even limped thru basketball season every year. For instance I couldn't lean over to pick up a basketball. I had to stoop or kneel down to pick it up. I was even sent from Puerto Rico (when I was in the army) to Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco to have back surgery to relieve a particularly painful bout with this back problem. The layoff of all duty for the 10 days of transport allowed the nerve cord to unswell, and my pain free mobility returned. The exam at Letterman determined that I'd just get reassigned to normal duty, no surgery.
I struggled on with this back problem till I was 45 or so when I was having the worse pain associated with my back yet. I started to resort to chiropractor. My first wife had become a chiro. I went to her, she was inaffective. I went to 2 others who all wanted to adjust me twice a week for a 12 week program. That might have worked, but I was too cheap to go that route.
The thing that saved me was one of Dee's daughter was an office manager at a bone twisters office. She swore by him, so I went to see him. He took x-rays and physically examined me and determined that those vertebre were misaligned. He pushed them back to where they were supposed to be, and I was good again......but the rub was that after 30 years of the vertebres being wrong that they prefered that wrong position and would go back there in a day or so. I imagine he would have liked to realign me every day for 12 weeks like the others, but since I had the daughter connection, he put a couple marks on my back and showed Dee how to push on it.
She was to do that till the vertebre eventually prefered the new location. Ha, it took Dee a couple weeks to tire of pushing on my back once a day.....but in that time I worked out a way to lay on a shapped block of wood that would do her job.
In essence that was the end of any serious back problems from those Vertebre. All thru my racing career, I suffered from the sore back, and limped mildly much of the time, often right up till I got in the race car to start a race. The funny thing was that after a race, my back would feel the best that it ever felt.....but the back pain would come back soon enough.
In thinking back about it, my back problem was a simple problem, but the best bone specialist in the medical world didn't know what to do about it. The taboo of my educated parents against quacks, which included Chiropractors, kept me from seeing the folks that would have helped me back at the beginning of the problem.
In retrospect I learned that if you have a problem, Its up to you to take the problem in hand and understand it....then maybe you will be able to fix it. That includes all types of problems. There's very little chance that someone else is going to fix it for you.....no matter what their credentials are.
First trip to Baja and Jeep Thinking back......I remember my first camp trip to Baja with the family. Dad packed up the old Plymouth and Camp trailer with enough supplies for a long weekend. The destination was a remote Beach/point about 75 miles into Mexico.
Now we had dirt roads back in Ohio, but there was no culture to go far away on unfamiliar dirt roads, so an unfamiliar dirt road was a new idea to us. We had to leave Baja’s main hwy and travel a 10 mile dirt road out to the beach just south of Ensenada.
That road was horribly rocky. I can still remember scrapping the underside of the overloaded Plymouth along that one lane road. Then came the sand. We knew nothing about sand. When we came to the first sand the car immediately buried up to axles. Welcome to camping in the west. That’s where we camped till morning.
Fred found a guy with a Jeep that pulled us out the next day. Ah ha, Fred decided right then and there, that he needed a jeep. That was the beginning of a long romance with Baja California. .....and kind of my beginning in the off road world.
Fred soon came up with an old Jeep. He used it mostly to scavenge the beaches in southern Calif. Back then you could drive on the beach
I’d driven my ’51 ford for a year or so. I thought I was a good driver. Fred would occasionally let me take the Jeep out locally. One such Saturday, actually it was prom night, I had been out with dad’s Jeep four wheeling. I’d stopped at the top of a very steep hill to get out and see where I was headed. I left the Jeep running as it was sometimes a little temperamental about starting. I’d set the hand brake and gotten 20’ away from the Jeep, before the hand brake failed.
Oh, shit there it went, first slowly, then faster. I watched that thing becoming airborne as it flew from one bump over another. When I got down to the canyon bottom about 50 yards away, there it was purring away at an idle just waiting for me. There was some damage but I got it home and made it to the Dance. I didn’t have a very good time that night as I knew that I had to face Fred in the morning. I’d certainly earned a dumbass for that move.
Back to the story.........I went to the local Jr College, and flunked out the second semester. I wasn’t interested in school. The folks started pressing me to pay rent. I could see the hand writing on the wall. I was going to have to pay my own way. What a novel idea.
So I joined the army, and went off to see the world. Most of the guys went to Viet Nam and I went to Puerto Rico. That was some luck. Anyway I spent my 3 yrs there and then in Yuma Az, when I got reassigned from Letterman Army Hos. When I got out of the army in '62, I went back to college.
I spent 3 years at San Diego State. I didn’t finish collage. My dad had started a precision Sheet metal Machine shop. I went to work for him at age 24. I soon was making $2.50 per hour. I worked there about 10 years.
Dad worked hard. His flaw was that he also played hard. He made money to use, not to save or invest. Maybe that wasn’t a flaw....... He traveled around the west and Baja when the shop wasn’t busy. And there were always the stories from those trips. Did I say he was charismatic, and a great story teller.
I liked going to Baja with him. At one time Fred wanted to make the drive to La Paz. He knew he would not likely have the time to make the run all the way in one shot. He talked an engineer buddy of his into going in with him to prepare a ’40 Dodge 3 speed flatbed truck for a segmented trip to La Paz. They would take the truck down to various destinations, then leave the truck there, and fly out with the Munoz Baja charter service.
Francisco Munoz had a 6 place plane that he flew all over Baja at the request of clients like my dad. There were lots of dirt strips all over Baja for air travelers. They were mostly used by gringos who few their own planes into Sky Ranchos for vacations.
The first leg of the trip was to go to Bahia de Los Angeles about 400 miles south of the border. The players were Dad, 2 of his friends, and 19 year old me. The truck was a flatbed with cattle guards. All the camp gear would go in back along with 2 spare tires, and 2 of the 4 of us would stand in the back as well. Of course, we could sit down in back on the paved roads, But about 150 miles south of the border there were no more good roads. 'Less worse' has always been a popular description of Baja roads, as in, “Some of the roads are less worse”.
The engineer, Howard, had done extensive work on the old Dodge....it should have been ready to make the trip. But, the truck hadn’t been driven around much before we left. We were 200 miles down there when we realized that under certain conditions we had a bad miss. A number of cylinders would drop off under extreme load. Like crawling up the bank of a sand wash....or climbing a steep hill. We could keep going by coasting thru the bad spot if we got a run at it, but we didn’t know what was ahead.
The decision was made to stop at the Santa Maria Sky Ranch in San Quintin. They got one of their handymen/mechs to look at it. He fussed with it for an hour, and decided it was fixed, so we went on.
It was the next day that we got into some real mtns that the trouble began in earnest. Remember this road was the main supply route for the whole of Baja. Mex #1 if you will. So the road was slow in places from rocks and ruts, but where those rocks and ruts went up hill, it was a tough climb, and most vehicles in that country had a granny gear. We did not.
We got into the only real climbs of the trip between El Rosario and 100 miles on down to Dry Lake Chapala. Even at that, I only remember one long uphill where the truck just wouldn’t make the hill. We made several runs at it bouncing severely over rocks and thru ruts. The truck would lose RPM, and down about 1500 RPM it would just lose all power. What to do?
We decided to unload the gear and people, and try it empty. I was given the task to drive it up because I could do a double clutch down shift into the non syncro first gear. That way I could be going faster in second gear at the bottom and shift into low nearer the top. That may have been the first useful thing I had ever been asked to do.
I remember that truck bouncing and me hitting the ceiling of the cab, which was before seat belts were required, but as the RPM dropped I made that critical downshift at the right time. Hooray, that worked and got us over the top, and we carried all the gear up the hill and continued on to LA Bay. The dirt part of the trip was about 250 miles long. We averaged about 10mph on the dirt. 25 hrs of driving. That’d be about 4 hrs in a race car/moto.
Arrangements were made to leave the truck, and we flew home to continue with the rat race. We still didn’t know what was wrong with the truck....... Life is pretty boring after an adventure like that.
Dune buggies, the beginning
Back to the story......... I had started playing with dune Buggies. That tied into the Western lifestyle. I taught myself to weld. I learned aluminum welding for the Machine shop work, and learned to weld up wide wheels and make roll bars for the Jeep dealer in town for extra money.
I was 24 when I got married for the first time. My wife and I lived in a camper out back of the shop for a couple years. Social hour was spent in the shop at night building wheels, roll bars, and my own fun buggies.
As I stated before I didn’t make much money, but the roll bars and such was my money. My wife continued with her school. I learned that for more fun money that I could just cut out what most folks would consider the necessities of life. Over the years I have expanded on what I can do without. I’d probably make a good homeless person.
I’ve put a lot of time into telling you about me, my personal makeup and my youthful environment.
Maybe I should add that I played competitive pool in the army and my college years plus another 5 years in local bars. Which means in all I started competeing at age 9 with the shuffle board, and 6 years of High school with basket ball, and another 6 or eight year with the pool thing. I excelled at all that stuff, but in truth, I was probably only a 90 percentile competitor. But I always knew there was a genius inside there somewhere.
It’s peculiar to notice here that all that competition was affected by my poor digital dexterity. On the surface it wasn’t noticeable, but without extreme dexterity you can’t be really good at most physical competition.
As most go thru life they don’t compete at anything. There’s no reason to even think about competition on a world level. I don’t think that I did either at that age. I did learn that I really liked winning.....and I hated losing.
As the years went by, I worked at the Machine shop in the day, and worked another 3 hrs, on average on buggies or Wide wheels or roll bars. I was completely self taught in all this, which meant that I didn’t do things like other folks. Most likely when someone told me how it should be done, I had already done it a different way. From that I began to question the world’s wisdom. Sometimes they were right though, but not often.
We had a limited machine shop, and certainly not geared for anything automotive. But I could usually find a short cut way of doing what I had to accomplish.
For instance to cut rims apart to weld in a spacer, I rigged up a geared small motor to turn the wheel slowly on a front wheel spindle. A fixed cutting torch would cut the rim apart. I dreamed of a lathe to do the job.
To that end I bought a wrecked 6 cyl ’51 pickup truck. I cast the rear end in concrete and made a tool holder and an all thread slide feed for the cutting tool. I’d run the rim on the rear hub with the pickup engine, and turn the cutting tool into the metal of the rim to cut it.
What a failure that was. I almost laugh when I think of some of those early failures. It was early in my machine career, and I didn’t know near enough about lathes to pull that off, but that’s how I learned things....and believe me, if you learn something that way, you don’t forget it.
At age 70, I still catch myself thinking how I’d change that old pickup/lathe to make it work. Life went on....I was getting quite involve with my buggy hobby. Buggies were still pretty new in the early sixties. They had started out as an American car with the body removed and a roll bar installed.
They progressed to a shortened frame to get some engine weight to the rear wheels....then the engines were moved toward the rear for more rear traction.
In the late ’50s some guys had started making buggies out of VWs. The rear engine design almost immediately started the demise of the front engine buggies. VW were expensive so I began my buggies with rear engine Renaults. They worked for me for a couple years.
Then I built a rail buggy with a 36 hp VW engine and trans. That was quite cool. That’s the buggy that I turned over backwards on myself. If you live you learn..or luck beats good, works here.
From there I went to Corvair power in a VW belly pan. Things were getting more complicated by this time. I was learning how cars worked, but was by no means a good mechanic. I still hadn’t been into an engine or transmission, I didn’t know auto electronics. I was quite inexperience in the Automotive world to say the least....but I was learning.
1965 came along and the off road mags were bringing us stories of solo trips down the Baja Peninsula to La Paz in some kind of 4X4. A number of days and hours were always reported. Most folks in Socal always found those articles very interesting.
Baja's first Race
In fact I had made a trip to La Paz in 1964. That’s where I took my wife on our honeymoon. It took us 6 days to get there in our 1958 VW sedan. The only preparation was to put big tires on the rear. We could average 15 miles per hour on the 700 miles of dirt road between Ensenada and La Paz. Most of us that had been to Baja couldn’t imagine someone making that trip in half that time.
Then Bud Ekins would come out in a Magazine having nipped 4 or 5 hours off that time on a motorcycle. This went on for a couple years.
The method used to time these runs was that the Participant would send a telegram when they left Ensenada, and send another when they got to La Paz. The times on the telegram would tell the story.
I think a dune buggy also made a record run to La Paz. So bragging rights were in contention.
Along comes a guy named Ed Pearlman who decided to hold a full on race from Tijuana to LA Paz. The first race would be held in October of 1967. Probably no one outside of Ca and Az ever heard of the race before it happened. That all changed when the first race results were in the record books.
There were thousands of off road people in the southwest that knew that they could win a race like that. There turned out to be only about 60 entries the first year that rose to the challenge. There were Jeeps, Broncos, dune buggies, passenger cars, and motorcycles entered.
One of those that entered was 45 yr old Bud Wright. Bud lived a few miles from me, and he drove a VW belly pan race car that he had put a Volvo 4 cyl engine in. That just about doubled the HP of the original VW. Bud fell out of the race early when the transmission housing broke off its mts.
Bud became a big name in our town’s off road culture for even entering the Mexican 1000. I didn’t know him at the time, but as off road racing grew, he and I became very good friends. Bud is 90 years old now (in 2010) and he still enjoys a ride thru the southwestern desert or anywhere thru Baja.
So the first Mexican 1000 was in the books. I learned today that there were 68 entries. What a good time the boys must have had. Most of us buggiers fantasized that we could run that race.....
Lots of bar room BS ensued. 1968 came and the Mex 1000 was run again. Whoa, a lot more guys came to the plate. There were over 200 racers this year, and many more rally teams from other countries. The Dakar Rally was the most notable at the time. Other than that there was no other off road race. If you didn’t race the ‘1000’ you didn’t race.
My wife and I decided to go watch the Baja 1000 in ’69. We loaded up my 66 Chevy pickup with camp gear and drove half of the Route of the ’40 Dodge to get to Rancho Santa Inez. I had widened the rims on the truck and put 11.00 farm implement tires on the truck. I had HD 2 piece rims on the truck with tubes of course. Well, You run big wheels so that you can lower the pressure to get you through the sand.
Well if you lower the pressure in a tube tire, you will soon work a hole in the tube. I must have had 3 flats with that truck On the 100 miles from El Rosario. I was learning things every time I turned around.
So we watched the race go by at the Santa Inez check point. There were over 250 cars that year. Broken down cars were out of the race at all the check points. One pair of guys came in riding in the back of a Mexican non race truck riding on top of whatever they were hauling.
These guys got out of the truck. They were wearing driver’s suits.....only wanabes wore driver’s suits. It turned out that there small buggy had quit 20 or so miles back up the track. These guys were from Wisconsin....they’d never been to Baja. The most that they knew about Baja was on the AAA map of the peninsula.
The AAA maps of the time had a black dot and a name of a place every 30 miles or so. These guys thought those were towns, not abandoned ranches from the past. They had raced sprint cars in the past. They didn’t even carry their wallets with them. No money, no credit cards nothing.
We offered to drive my truck out and get their car. At least they could fix the car and drive it back to the states, maybe. So we gassed up my truck, and Bonnie and I plus the 2 drivers drove off into the night to get his Wampuskitty buggy.
We drove half my tank out without ever coming to the guy’s race car. I had to turn around and go back to Santa Ynez or be stranded out there without gas. To this day I don’t know whatever became of those guys or their car.
The next day all the race activity was dying down and spectators were leaving. A bike racer that had come in the evening before riding on a tireless front rim was still there. His name Was Gunner Nielsen.
He was a factory Husky rider. He had flown into San Diego on the prior Wednesday, he teched himself and his San Diego dealer supplied Husky into the race Later that Day. They gave him an AAA Baja map and sent him of the race starting line on Thursday morning.
He had no idea what Baja was all about. Anyway after he had destroyed his bikes front wheel, and was out of the race he got hold of me and asked for a ride back to San Diego if we were going there. We said we were and would be happy to give him a ride.
We took off on Friday, and we’re on track to get back to San Diego on Sunday afternoon. He spoke good English and entertained us with stories for a few hours.....but he could see we weren’t going to get him to his next race in time. We were doing about 10 miles per hour and weren’t going to drive straight through to SD. He needed to be in Texas for a Motocross race on Sunday morning.
We enjoyed his race stories for the half day he was with us, but he soon jumped ship to a Datsun pickup that was traveling faster than us. We got back to the Rat race for work on Monday and school for Bonnie. More of the die had been cast.
First Race
In early ’70 the local buggy area of Ocotillo Wells had a 50 mile race that I entered with my Corvair buggy. I wasn’t a racer then.....it was just something to do. The night before the race we were gassing up the car by Coleman lantern. The tank over filled and a splash hit the ground which was ignited by the lantern. Shit, shit, shit, we had a fire. Guys ran to their trucks for fire extinguishers. Three guys came back with extinguishers that were empty.
The fire went out when the gas was burned up. That is.... all but the fire that was burning out the fill spout. I put my hand over that and it went out. It did burn my hand though because the fill spout was hot.
I remember holding onto Ice cubes for the next few hours. The burn only caused a blister the size of a nickel. I was able to drive the next morning when the race started. None of that really mattered. I had let the race adrenaline get to me and within a mile or so, I had screwed up the cars frame, and was out of the race.
Oh, I thought, race cars must be a lot stronger than what I had thought before. Heh he. Seemed like for the next 20 years, win or lose, I was learning lessons like that after each race.
But the upshot of that weekend was that the race was on. In my mind, since I was a near genius, I would soon go to the top of off road racing. It’s hard to believe that a genius could be so stupid. LOL
At that time in the buggy business a few full roll cage cars were being built for desert use. These were looked at as the way to go if you wanted to win the Baja by the buggy crowd. The 4X4 crowd looked toward Jeeps and Broncos. Ford backed the Bronco effort out of Los Angeles. A couple Jeep dealers got in the mix. The truth was it was a free for all. Nobody knew what it took to go fast in desert racing.
Saab even had a factory rally car that raced the Baja for several years there in the beginning very successfully. Saab used a V4 engine in that rally car.
In Fact my first real race car, that I don’t even have one picture of, made Saab’s sales brochure in ’71. Under the picture of my car it said, “Our Saab’s beat these extreme purpose built Baja Race cars”. The SOBs had, too. That brochure was salt in the wound.
It is rare to be in at the beginning of a new kind of racing. There were no tried and true race parts available. There were only theories, and trying out a theory was a long and expensive process with no guarantees.
And there were no drivers either. There were off road drivers, but not many that ever tried to go fast on bumpy, rocky, sandy roads. I didn’t think that I could be a race driver. I’d had some driving incidents that convinced me that I couldn’t drive as fast as most. I was coming to terms with a couple of bad decisions, driving wise, that I’d made in the last few years.
But I figured that I could build a fast car. That was typical youth talking.....but over confidence is a must if you’re going to go racing.
I think the actual decision to go racing was liquor induced at the local Pub in May of ‘70. Jim Bourgeois, a drinking buddy who’s dad owned a construction welding outfit, and I were having a few toddies one night. I figured I needed a partner in this racing thing, and truthfully I welcomed his welding ability. We agreed that night to build a race car together.
Well Jim was smarter than I was, and backed out within the first month. We had laid down some tubing already, so the project was started, at Jim’s dad’s shop. So I moved the project to the haunted house that I was renting.....
I had since moved my camper to the back side of a 2 story house that I rented for $40 per month. Bonnie and I lived in the camper, and I rented the upstairs to 4 friends for $11 each. I used the bottom story that had no floor in it to make my roll bars and rims, and whatever other projects that I could do for money....and now I made space for the race car project.
I’d been friendly with the VW dealers' parts guy for a while. He was a sharp older guy who appreciated that I was trying to accomplish something. I had the run of his dumpster and took loads of old used engine case and pistons and barrel sets....camshaft, everything the VW mechanics threw out. I began to put old scrap motors together, and was building used VWs that I’d sell.
The upstairs crew was a worthless bunch of early 20 yr old guys guys, One of which was Bud Wright’s son John. Another was Butch Roland, a Dirt bike hot shoe, another Rich Half, actually had a job. Then there was Clemo. Clemo was a drug addict that introduced me to LSD......so maybe the whole household was a complete bunch of misfits.
All the upstairs crew were talented guys. I could use John and Butch to weld and grind my rims and roll bars if they didn’t have rent money. And if I owed them money, I wouldn’t pay them till they picked up all the beer bottles that they had thrown out the upstairs windows.
They accuse me, still today, of taking them out for a few beers and getting them to commit to jobs for little money. I don’t remember that part. John and I are still good friends today, but he’s still a tiny bit suspicious of my motives.
As you can see I was going in a lot of directions at once, still working for Fred at the Machine shop for not much pay, and doing a bunch on the side for play money, and now I needed more money for the race car that was forming in the lower house.
I had my wife rebuilding the cars that she was to drive to San Diego every day for school. So I was wheeling and dealing them if I could make some money. Then I'd get her another junk that she could drive.....and fix up. Thinking back, it’s no wonder that she dumped me.
The Baja race was in late Oct of each year, and I had started the car in May so I had about 6 months of evenings and weekend to get the car built, tested, and in the race. The car was to be a single seat mid-engined VW with the same size large tires on the front and back. I figured I’d need a race driver for the Baja 1000 as I could drive the first half and he could drive the second half. We’d have an advantage on all others because we would be rested for our halves of the race.
I was really in over my head. The things that I didn’t know about cars could fill volumes. But I started in like I knew what I was doing. I really thought about the race car almost every spare moment that I had. I could find myself stopped in the middle of my dad’s shop doing nothing if the race thought was deep enough.
Part #2
I had an engine, transmission, and tube frame to build, and I wasn’t an accomplished motor builder, I’d never had a transmission apart, and wasn’t a good all position stick welder. Why I ever thought I could do this racing thing was beyond me.
I don’t even remember building that first engine, but I did it. That required boring out the VW engine case for bigger cylinders. That made the engine an 1835cc unit. The mid engine part meant that the transmission would go backward unless I flipped the ring to the other side of the trans which I didn’t know how to do. Maybe the simplest part was building the frame. That was just cut the tubing close with a torch and grind it to fit then weld it in place.
I learned all those things on that first race car during long nights in the shop. I had lots of interest in this race car effort, including some VW mechanics that could give me advice or even help with some hands on instruction.
The car came along in the first couple months. I have the frame roughly built, and the tires and wheels mounted and sitting on the floor where they belonged next to the frame. Tires always make the project look good. Lots of the guys would stop by every evening as work was progressing.
Word got out all over north San Diego county about this mid engined single seat buggy being built to run in the next ‘Mexican 1000’. One such fellow who heard was Tom Miller. Tom owned a fence company some 15 miles away. He came to the shop one night to see what was going on.
He liked what he saw. I knew that I needed a driver.....one that could contribute to the effort. Tom’s money made mine look silly. He drove a spanking new 69 Vette with a 429 in it. He was a poser to the max. In spite of that, we hit it off well right from the beginning.
Tom was 42 and I was 29. All my crowd was my age and we teased Tom unmercifully about being the old guy. He took the ribbing well. Tom would simply riffle through the 100 dollar bills in his wallet, and smile saying, “I do all right”, and he did too.
Besides all that, Tom was a big help. I don’t know how much money he spent on the race car, but 3 or 4 nights a week he would show up with things that the race effort needed. I remember it being mostly paint and beautification projects, but he would do anything that was necessary.
Oh, and another thing, Tom owned a Piper 180 Cherokee 4 place airplane, and he also owned owned a dune buggy. Those were both useful things in Mexico if you wanted to race The ‘Baja’.
Another couple of months went by, and the car was taking shape. We had the engine in it and I’d made the headers/exhaust for it. The transaxle was in it. The Front end, out of a VW Squareback was installed. Brake lines, pedals, seat and belt, plus the gearshift had to be built.
We finished all that off with a month to spare, and took it to the desert to test it out. Things looked pretty good. I hadn’t used a VW rear suspension. I used a coil spring home built thing that I thought would be better. The suspension worked pretty well, of course, I had nothing to compare it to.
One problem did crop up with the transmission. When in gear with the clutch in, the engine wouldn’t completely released from the trans and the buggy wanted to creep. That wouldn’t hurt anything...unless it got worse.
Luckily the German Car Garage had a guy who raced a VW at the drag strip. He knew that if you increased the HP of a stock VW, that you had to weld 3rd and 4th gears to their syncro hubs. Huh, what you talking about?
So there we were about 2 weeks before the race pulling the trans apart and me learning how to Heli-Arc those gears together. I’m sure the German Car guys helped me with the trans work. We were still painting and such. Not to mention that we still had to Pre-run the 1000 mile course, and remember there was no paved road to La Paz to come back on in a hurry.
Bonnie took Tom and I to Ensenada with my Pickup and his sand rail in the back. So Tom and I took off in his sand buggy. He had a buggy made from an Renault R10. It was a nice little full case sand buggy. Back in those days no one had a full on pre-run vehicle that could run the course at race speeds like they do today.
I don’t remember much about that trip, but we over nighted at a small town about 500 miles down there. We were a big deal to the town folks. The mayor opened his house up to us and his whole family was there. We were having a good old time.
Things were going great till the mayor asked me the name of the race car. I remembered the movie ‘Viva Zapata’ from an old American movie where Zapata was a hero. I told them it was ‘Viva Zapata’ thinking that everyone loved Zapata. Nert...Zapata was a bandit down there. He was only a hero in the states. We spent the night there on someone’s porch, but we were never quite the heros that we had once been.
One of the cars peculiarities was that the Zenith NDIX32 carburetor, out of some model Porsche, was the carb to use on buggies because the floats didn’t bounce in the bumps and flood the carb. They were expensive, but I found one at that German Garage. They said that they could never make it run right and I could have it if I wanted.
So that is what I was running. I also knew why they had given up on it. Within a minute of idling it would start to foul out the spark plugs. I never did find out how to fix that. But my method of dealing with it was to change plugs on the starting line. It would run just fine while running hard.
Finally we were ready to go racing. In those days the race organizer supplied all the gas and oil for the racers. Gas was only 30 cents a gallon, but the real advantage was that we didn’t have to have pit crews with gas every 150 miles or so.
We showed up at race tech. No one had ever seen a single seater like mine....Big wheels in the front, and mid engine, wow. Folks were impressed....most didn’t think it would work. They didn’t think my welder’s goggles with prescription lenses were a good idea either. Do you see a pattern here? None of my stuff was mainstream. I did everything differently.
So the plan was that I would drive the car in the race half way. Tom would fly in and take the car on the second half to the finish line in La Paz. I’d fly on to La Paz with Tom’s plane and his pilot. Simple, huh.
When I think back at the things that were necessary to pull this race off, I just shake my head. What was I thinking?? I made it to the starting line and had my plugs changed at the last minute. I was actually racing the Mexican 1000. Wow.
So things went pretty well for a couple hours. The car could run wide open across 4' wide pot holes a foot deep. I was touching the ground so little that steering was like running an air boat. A little input to the steering wheel had some effect a second later. There was one 40 mile section of road down there that had been prepared by the American government during the Second World War in case we had to base planes on the Chapala Dry Lake in Baja. The Americans made a good dirt road through that 40 mile section.
After the war there had never been any maintenance on that road. It was nothing but 9 inch deep pot holes. The Mexicans drove along both sides of that road. We racers found that we could just skim along the tops of that road at however fast your car would go. Mine would go about 90mph. The visual message that your mind was getting was.....YOUR GOING TO DIE HERE.....but you were hardly feeling the bumps.
I could only take that mental pressure for about 20 minutes, then I cracked, and slowed down and ran along the side of that road. I made it to El Rosario (150 miles) with no problems. I gassed up there and was off to Santa Inez a 100 miles away.
Well 60 miles away I ran out of gas. The gas station at El Rosario hadn’t got my gas cap closed....and I hadn’t made sure that it was closed. So luckily I was in an area with a couple inhabitances. At Tres Enriques I got 5 gallons of gas and was back under way. That probably cost me 40 minutes.
My car was going like hell. Even with the 40 minute loss I was still near the front runners. I pulled in to get Gas at Santa Inez. My dad was there to help if I needed it. But there were lots of people spectating the race. All of them would help anyone if they could.
I was running a Chevy alternator that was mounted to the frame. The little alt pulley was being turned by a big VW pulley on the engine. It' probably added 30% to the rpm of the alternator. The little cooling blades on the alt pulley began to straighten out. They were begining to rub on the frame. We took care of that problem at Santa Inez. But that's typical of the kinds of problems that you can have on a custom car.
I had another 125 miles to get to the halfway point to give Tom the car. Well shit, I took a wrong turn that took me out to the beach, probably 30 miles out of the way. Darned if I didn’t run out of gas about 20 miles short of Toms locating at about n10PM.
I passed a campsite not long ago. I walked/ran back to that camp. It was farther than I thought, maybe 5 miles. The guy at that camp was waiting for a race car. He had 5 gallons of gas, but he wouldn’t let me have any till his car passed by, and didn’t need the gas.
I sat there with him, and tried to look pitiful, which was easy because I was pitiful. But after about a half hour he relented and took me to my car and put a couple gallons in it. I was going again.
I soon pulled into the halfway point at about 11PM. Tom was waiting restlessly. I‘d had maybe a couple hours of down time. Of course most everyone else had down time as well. We weren’t doing that bad judging by who had gone through this checkpoint already.
So Tom took off in the race car. He had 350 miles of dirt to run. Our plan now was to fly down to La Paz at first light. But first there was an enterprising guy there that had brought in hundreds of frozen Steaks and potatoes. I had a steak dinner before going to bed in the middle of the Baja. Wonders would never cease.
Now the problem was to get off the ground in the morning. There were 50 single engine planes parked along the side of the 2000 ft dirt runway. All with the same idea. We were ready to go, but we couldn’t pull out to taxi to the end of the runway since someone was taking off. Ok wait for that plane...zoooommmmm....much dust ensued. We couldn’t pull out now into that dust, there might be another plane taking off.
Finally we pulled out into that dust taking a chance, and were rewarded with an airplane free runway. We got off the ground, whew. Now we needed gas. We headed for Mulege to gas up. They didn’t have gas. We were on fumes. We had a calculated 12 minutes of gas left. They had gas 8 miles across the bay......maybe.
Later we heard that a helicopter landing in front of a, later, taking off airplane. The plane pulled back on the stick and stalled the plane, then it crashed on the plane next to where we were parked. We were lucky to get out of there, but now we needed some more luck. We crossed our fingers as we took off for the short flight across the bay.
We made it, and they had gas. Life was good again. We headed for La Paz but first we’d stop at The La Purisima airstrip where Tom would have gone thru last night getting checked in at the La Purisima check point. This was just a precaution what, after all, could go wrong.
Can you check again, sir? He must have gone through here already. Sorry, Kid, your car hasn’t come through here yet.
Damn, now what? We decided to fly back along the course at a couple hundred ft above ground level till we found him. We were a dejected group now. This was the seamy side of racing.
We found Tom about 60 miles away. Not anywhere we could land and tell him anything. He was at a pit stop for the Sears racing effort. There were plenty of tools so whatever stopped Tom was serious. He gave the hand across the throat signal that indicated a terminal problem. We threw a note out the window that said we would go get a truck to haul him back to town.....somehow.
Town was about 40 miles away, San Ignasio. Maybe 5000 people, certainly a place where the buggy could be jury rigged if it would still run. We got back to town and I made a deal at the general store for a flat bed truck to go get the car. It cost me $100 but it was worth it. It took the driver 5 hrs to get out there, and five hours to get back.
The whole front suspension beam had cracked loose from the frame. I’ll say it was terminal. We were happy to get Tom rescued. It was decided that Bonnie would fly out with Tom tomorrow, and I’d stay behind and fix the car and drive it the 500 miles back over the race course to home.
In the morning we found the local welding shop. It was Sunday, so the welder was gone. His name was Millar. He was from a European family that had come there with a mining effort in the past. The son was running the place now, and he was all Mexican by now. The language barrier was in full force......but when I pointed to the ruptured joint of the front axle and the frame, everyone understood that it needed welding.
It’s a little fuzzy now, but I seem to recall welding the thing back together with coat hangers and an oxy-acc torch. I don’t remember ever seeing Millar, but the race car got fixed well enough to make the return trip.
My support group had flown off, and I was left to drive myself home. Being alone in Baja was an unusual feeling. It wasn’t something that you would ever plan on doing, but racing ‘The Baja’ often called for special circumstances.
I had raced solo for 13 hours, run out of gas twice in the race car, nearly run out of gas in the plane over water, made a 10 hr rescue run, fixed the race car, and made the solo trip back to the border. In a single race I had extended myself far beyond my normal comfort level many times.
I had accomplished a lot considering everything, but then so did everyone who took on Baja. I’d built a competitive car, made it to the starting line, raced and got home alive.....and certainly learned enough to do much better next time. Also I’d built a network of support, from people that would volunteer pit support anywhere I needed it, and technical support at the VW dealer or the German Car garage.
In the ‘glass half full’ picture it was an exciting time. Sponsors were getting on board with off road racing. Ac-Delco got in touch with me and sponsored me for spark plugs, air cleaners, and light bulbs. Crap, I could see the big time up ahead.
Sears Racing Team
Let me take a moment and tell you a little story that unfolded around us during this Baja race with another team. Sears had started to market Die Hard Batteries and Steel belted Radial tire. They decided to build 6 mid engine Corvair powered buggies to advertize their products while racing this same race That Tom and I had just raced.
Their plan was to have a company in Texas build these 6 identical cars, get some professional motorcycle riders and win the Baja 1000. Simple enough. They built the cars and took everything to Ensenada a week before the race. Besides the cars they brought two 5 ton trucks full of pit supplies.
They intended to have a pit stop every 100 miles with everything craftsman that you could Imagine. They easily had $25000 worth of tools and camping supplies as these pits were going to be at the 100 mile marks rather than at town. They would be run by a volunteer team that wanted to be involved.
The team where Tom had broken down was run by a grandfather and his 16 yr old grandson. The week before the race was spent by these two trucks creeping down the peninsula and establishing these pit points. That took them at least 5 days. Then after the race the trucks would come back and pick everyone up. Simple enough, Huh?
Well even at the best that was going to take 10 day for the first pit dropped off to be picked back up. 2 weeks would be more like it. When Tom and I pre-ran we passed several of these pit point and never thought too much about it, but we did notice the huge production they were making of the race.
The pit guys that were at Tom’s breakdown place had been there for 4 days when he was there. When we were back at San Ignacio fixing my car, we heard that both trucks had limped into La Paz with sand destroyed motors and weren’t going anywhere for a long time. The grandfather team expected to be picked up in a couple of days. Yeah right!
We never learned what became of those Sears pits. The Sears race cars zoomed around Ensenada in a drunken party atmosphere for that week. Two of those cars wrecked running around town. Another wrecked out practicing on the course. Three cars started the race. One over heated the Engine not far from Ensenada. The 5th one crashed into a ditch about 150 miles out. That left one of them running. He eventually made it to La Paz well outside of the required finishing time. So none of the cars finished the race or was ever in contention.
.....but you should have seen the TV ad campaign that went on as soon as the race was over. They had a short clip of one of those buggies in the air flying over a bump on a dirt road somewhere. A loud voice was exclaiming that they had beaten ‘The Baja’ without a single tire or battery failure. Well, that was kind of true I suppose.
There had been 300 entries. Half the cars finished in under the 60 hr time limit. The winning time was about 20 hrs. There weren’t many race teams with a positive result, but no one was a loser from the experience. The real winner, though, was ‘The Baja’.
Bud Wright had become an official Co-driver along with Jim Loomis. They raced for the factory backed Ford Bronco team out of Bill Stroppe’s racing co in Los Angeles. It wasn’t Bud and Jim, but a Stroppe Bronco had won the race that year. A guy name Larry Minor of Drag Race fame had won it.
Life Returned to Normal
I attempted to resume my normal life, but that was hard. Life for me had changed permanently. I don’t mean that the world was treating me much differently. I mean that I was treating the world differently. I was totally absorbed with racing, mentally at least. I’d never been committed to this extent to anything before.
Where there had been only one race a year, there was now a couple more. They had announced a second Baja race that would take place in Baja each June. The Mint hotel, in Las Vegas, had announced that they would put on a 400 mile race in Nevada. It would consist of eight 50 mile laps just outside of Vegas. We decided to prepare the car and race the Mint 400 Race in May of ’71.
Although, I was very disappointed that we didn’t win the Baja race, I was encouraged by many of the positives....and I still had the genius thing going so success was eminent. There were just a few tweaks necessary for the next race.
Looking back on my life I see an unreasonable over confident young man who has no business in the racing world. I had no family with racing experience. I was operating on one thread of a shoestring. The only thing I did have was a ton of energy, and a stubborn commitment to showing how good I was. That isn’t often enough.
I wasn’t even an auto mechanic. I hadn’t even learned how to tighten a bolt. I had to learn how to tighten a bolt. For instance there are 3 ways to tighten a bolt. Either too tight, not tight enough, or just right.
If you torque everything you will spend too much time so you have to learn what size and grade bolt it is and learn the proper feel. If you don’t tighten it enough, parts will fall off so you have to learn to not forget bolts before they are tight. So soon you find that you need to do whatever it takes to get it right. Just this bolt tightening thing will take about 5 year of racing to learn.
Racing experience if you grow up with a racing background it just rubs off on you. There were so many things that I didn’t know about racing that had nothing to do with building a car. At that time I had no idea of the hundreds of things that I didn’t know. Something about ignorance is bliss........
There were lots of things going on that Spring.....fun trips to San Felipe for a long weekend, test runs out to the desert for weekends of buggy fun and to try out the latest ideas. Soon May and the ‘Mint 400’ came into view. The race drew 300 entries who were to make eight laps of a 50 mile course out in the desert near Vegas. We didn’t know it then but desert races are much harder physically on a car and a driver than Baja races. Tom was to be the driver. We never gave it a thought that one driver couldn’t do it.
One day while I was out on the course waiting for Tom and the race car to arrive at a check point on the course, Malcolm Smith had ridden his bike up and stopped to take a break. Malcolm was already a Baja/off road legend. There were only 3 of 4 people out there, and I was trying to get to talk with him. Malcolm is a very friendly guy and would talk to anyone.
About that time Tom came racing up as we all watched. Malcolm turned to me and said, “Wow, that’s the car that’s going to win this thing”. Of course I was thrilled. We must have had a pit group 30 strong. We got groups out along the course in case of the car having trouble. Our following was growing as were the expectations.
But in reality Malcolm didn’t know that along about the 6th lap the steering box would fall off the car. We had been running laps as fast as anyone, but it took us a couple hours to get the car to the pits and borrow a welder to weld the steering box to the car.
During the repair, we could see that Tom was beyond extended, but we hadn’t prepared for another driver so he had to drive on when the car was fixed. The course was ultra dusty from that many cars on just a 50 miles of trail. When Tom did get in, to make a point, he reached his forefinger into his mouth and scraped a gob of mud off the roof of his mouth. His eyes were blood red from dust that had got passed his goggles. You see, no one ever raced in the amount of dust that the off roaders had to endure. Dust tight goggles were some of the things that had to be developed for the off road world.
The mint only allowed 12 hours to finish the race. The winner finished in 10 hours, and the extra 2 hr+, of repair time, got us a finish in 12hr 5mins. We got a DNF by 5 minutes. Out of 300 cars only 21 cars finished in the 12 hr time limit.
We made it into Mickey Thompson’s Off Road Magazine with that race. They showed a picture of our car completely engulfed in poof dust. A corner of the roll cage and a driving light was all that could be seen. Only our team knew whose car that was.
So another race was in the books with another poor result. Of course we were devastated to come away with a DNF. We used the ‘racer’s luck’ rational. We would soon win, no doubt....but it was a lot tougher than I thought it would be.
If it was possible, I increased my dedication to off road racing. Did I mention that I wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun to be around, especially if you were married to me. Bonnie hung in there with me. We were married in ’66. She was 4 years younger, and I was the boss. It was my way or the highway. We didn’t argue about anything. I figured it took 2 people to argue. She may have disagreed on things, but that didn’t really matter to me.
I’d noticed that twin I-Beam Ford trucks were having success at the races. I figured their advantage was a lot of front wheel travel. That intrigued me. I’d begun to think about getting some additional wheel travel and lightening the car as well for this year’s Mexican 1000.
A New Car
One day in early June I was wandering around the scrap metal place about 20 miles away. There were lots of remnant bar stock, and Stainless steel and all sorts of iron. Hummmm.....what’s this? I had just looked in a barrel that was marked ‘titanium’.
There were two beautiful landing struts in there. These things were about 30 inches long with a 7/8 fine female thread in one end, and about a 1 ½” dia on the other end. It was hollow with about a ¼” of wall thickness. They wanted $10 each for them. I bought them on general principles, but I had in mind the Dual I-beam Ford front suspension. How I was going to apply that, I had no idea.
My mind was busy for the next week or so. I spent a lot of time in a fog, oblivious to any other purpose, but how to get those Landing struts to work for me.
I got a sketch pad out and made a rough drawing of an Aluminum full roll cage frame that utilized a pair of VW bus rear torsion bars and spring plates, along with those struts in the front as a twin O-beam suspension. The rear would have a Coil spring like the original car.
We worked a lot with aluminum but I didn’t weld it much. I knew that welded aluminum destroyed the heat treat at the weld joints. I hoped that I could overcome that problem. And I hoped that I had time to build it before the Baja race in Late October of ’71.
I ordered about $300 worth of Mil Spec 6061 T3 aluminum Tube and went to work. I could bore you with a few pages of the build specifics of this new aluminum car. Words wouldn’t explain it, and I don’t have enough pictures to illustrate the details so you’re safe.
A lot of late nights went into this build. I was completely obsessed with the design and trouble shooting the building process. I managed to upgrade the motor to 2180cc. All in all it was my finest work. It’s still the one thing that I’m most proud of.
We did indeed get the build done in time to run the Baja 1000 in ’71. I even lined up a borrowed setup of Hillborn VW fuel injection. I had more HP, a lighter car, and a few more inches of wheel travel. How could this go wrong? Excitement in the Springer camp was high.
Running the race became much more complicated. We lined up 8 voluntary pit crews willing to set up pit points at roughly 100 mile intervals. We weren’t going to carry a spare tire. We planned to run on a flat till we came to one of our pits. We used 6 hole Chevy PU mag wheels, consequently no other racer’s wheels would fit our car. Not being compatible with other cars was a negative side of having a different race car.
I hastily put a 40hp VW buggy together for a pre-runner. It was the most utilitarian and ugliest buggy ever built. That buggy became an Icon over the next few years. I would have racers stop me in Las Vegas that said, “hey, I saw that buggy in La Paz last year”. Sometimes there’s beauty in ugliness.
We had time to take the race car to Baja for a test weekend. We were south of El Rosario testing one day. Tom would drive the car a few miles and stop. We’d catch up to him with our Pre-runners. We were tinkering on the car for a while, and an old Mexican on a Burro passed us on his way somewhere. We did this a couple more times, and that old Mexican and his burro would pass us again. I think that old guy was trying to show us the real meaning of reliability. He had it and we didn’t. I never forgot that out guy.
Later that day a thunderstorm came along, and let a whole load of water down on us in an hour’s time. We holed up in a Mexican’s house that had Cafe painted on the side. There were four or five of us. The thunderstorm flooded the valley with about a foot of water stranding us in that cafe. To our surprise we got a good meal there, and he also had the coldest beer that I had ever seen on the Baja. We drank all his beer while the water drained away. The race course was much smoother after that. Beer will do that to a race course.
The race car was fast, but nothing is ever certain. We still had to run the race. We decided that Bonnie and I along with many of the pit crews and their machines would pre-run down to the halfway point. Tom would fly into there with his other pilot. He would pre-run south from there with my buggy and Bonnie. I’d fly home with Tom’s plane. Tom and Bonnie would end up with my buggy back at the halfway point. Tom would be there when I got there in the race car. Tom would race on To La Paz. The intent was that Tom’s pilot would fly south and pick him up in La Paz or somewhere else if necessary. If he didn’t finish, Bonnie and I would go get the race car in my prerunner, and get it home somehow......
If you’ve followed this so far, you realize that a lot of things had to work out perfectly for all this to come together. There could be no break downs along the way. That would be rare for a piece of shit buggy to make a complete run of the whole race course and not seriously breakdown.....but all that stuff came true.
I started the race and drove a hundred fifty miles to El Rosario with no problems. I remember being passed by one VW Buggy on the outside of a corner on the pavement. He was doing 20 mph faster than I was. That all changed once we got into the dirt. That was a definite result of me having no race driving experience....or not enough guts.... I was really a pretty conservative driver once the adrenaline wore off.
Just south of El Rosario one of those beautiful titanium axles broke in half, and I was out of the race just like that. Racing can be cruel. There is no reward for trying hard. But on the other hand........you’ll never win if you don’t play. Ha, there’s a proverb for every point of view.
To say that I was disappointed would be a colossal understatement..... ’But no use kicking or squawking, you pick up your cards and begin, To figure, and to plan, and to puzzle while fate looks on with a grin’.........
I had a pit contingent, of three pickups and at least 10 good friends, there to rescue me. I felt very guilty eating pounds of Mexican lobster and drinking tequila in my sorrow. Sheesh...what kind of sorrow is that?
It would be hours before my pits on south got word of my misfortune. First they all would calculate when I’d be to them. They’d even make bets on my arrival time. Then time would pass, and they would start to worry as they’d know I was late. They’d all hope that I’d only been delayed....
Eventually they’d all get the news, and suffer the same letdown that I had. Those close enough to La Paz would go south and take in the celebration of the finishers.....Others would start the trek north, and get ready to re-assimilate back to a life of reality. Arriving back at the real world was always tough.
Bonnie was in a tough situation. She had to drive the ‘Rusty Bucket’ (we so named the prerunner) alone back to Ensenada. The pit guy immediately to the north of her waited for her. The two of them drove north together. That lessoned the threat of her being down there alone.
Time heals all wounds. In time we made plans for the future races and forgot the recent failure. Well, you never really forget. We raced that car for another year or a little more. We broke another axle, and we had trouble with the steering gear for a couple races. All in all, the successes with that car were few.
Tom eventually grew disillusioned with our effort, and withdrew from our team. We remained good friends. I grew more determined than ever to continue with the off road racing. I actually was withdrawing from the normal world. My personally quit growing in the direction of normal society. I was only concerned with 2 things. My work, to make money for racing, and racing itself consumed my thoughts. I’m afraid that I wasn’t much fun at home.
Sometime in the early spring of the next year a local doctor came to see me. He wanted a Baja Bug built to race ‘The Baja’. I’d been thinking a lot about Baja Bugs in those days. I knew just what he needed.
So I built him a Baja Bug to race. I built him a 2233cc engine. I put a 3 inch square tube spacer under the body to raise it for additional wheel travel. I even put power steering on it so that he could steer the big wheels on the front. The price of racing had just gone up. Those were all new ideas and were followed by everyone eventually.
I had no sooner completed that car when a doctor friend of his came and had another Baja Bug built. I hired a mechanic friend to help me with that one. Actually he built most of it.....and at the same time he built a full on VW Bug to race in the Baja as well.
That year we fielded 4 cars in the Baja 1000. We had gotten sponsored by AC-Delco. They sent boxes of spark plugs, air filter, and landing lights. We were a big deal. Probably too big a deal. I was spread awfully thin.
I had 2 drivers, Tom and Jim Buckley, for the Aluminum Car, and I would co-drive one of the Baja Bugs with the second doctor. I think the first doctor used Bud Wright as a co-driver. And my friend, the mechanic, drove his VW Bug with a friend of his.
Tom, Jim, and I decided to pre-run the race course in Tom’s airplane. We didn’t know just how that would work. There are 2 reasons to pre-run. First is that you want to know about killer obsticles like a washout, of tight corner with a cliff on the outside. Or 2nd would be for slight short cuts and to not get lost. We figured we could do both those things at about 200 ft above ground level in the airplane.....and besides the airplane would be fun, and a whole bunch quicker.
I remember that flight well. We got an early start on Saturday morning. We cleared Mexican Customs by 10 am to start the actual Pre-run. It was a little nervous flying that close to the ground because if there was any sort of engine trouble, the ground would come up to meet us in a hurry.
Gas was going to be a problem. We decided to go with the theoretical MPG of the airplane. First you run one tank out of gas, or until the fuel pump pressure starts to drop. That way the engine won’t stop before the other tank takes over, and then we could calculate the hours per gallon that we would get on the other tank. It’s a pretty exact science.
We knew we could fly as far south as we wanted to go, and still make it back north to San Ignacio. There we would land on their dirt strip, running on fumes, and gas up for the return trip. We accomplished all that with about a half hrs fuel to spare. Well, not all that, San Ignacio had no airplane fuel for us.... and it could be several days before they would have any.
Oh dear, what to do now? We surely weren’t prepared for this situation. The smart thing to do would be to put 10 gallons of car gas in the empty tank, then do take offs with the av gas, and cruise at low power with the car gas.
Our situation was that we could fly 50 miles to the mining town of Santa Rosalia for gas. They had a company airport that we heard that we could buy emergency gas if we needed it. Or we could fly a 100 miles to LA Bay for gas. We knew that we might make Santa Rosalia. We’d never make it to LA Bay.
The stupid thing was even considering to ‘ We might make it’. In an airplane you don’t go anywhere with a ‘might make it’ mentality. Jim and I were advocating that we take off for Santa Rosalia. There was 24 mile of flight at 3000 ft, and then the next 15 miles was down a mountain to the airport at see level.
It was simple enough. If we didn’t have enough gas for the first 25 miles, we would simple land on the paved road. If we made it to the edge of the mtn, then we could glide to the airport. Worst case scenario, we could ditch in the water of the bay.
We actually talked Tom into that. It’s a wonder that I’m alive today to tell this story, with thinking like that. But isn’t everyone invincible at that age?
It was about 4pm when we took off. We were following the road. Tom told us to watch the fuel pressure gage. When it started to fluctuate we needed to get down on the hwy, post haste, while we still had some power.
We got out there about 20 miles before the pressure gage began to bounce around. It was time. There was a good straight, flat section of pavement down there with no traffic. Cool! We were losing altitude on final when we noticed that there was a cut in a 15 foot high hill on that piece of road. We had no idea if our wings would fit through that cut. Oh shit!
As soon as Tom touched down he was on the binders hard. We rolled to a stop in that cut before the wings hit anything. In fact Jim and I had to lift the wing tips to roll the plane on through the cut to a flat spot off the side of the road. We’d dodge a bullet that day. We were still a long way from home.
We secured the plane, and the first car that came along was a ’68 Ford station wagon. A man and his wife and 3 kids were in the seats. We got to ride in the back. We were happy to not be walking. Once into town we got a hotel room right on the corner of the town square. There was nothing that we could do that night. We had dinner and some beers and watched the girls parade around the park till we went to bed.
I was the only one of us that could speak any Spanish, and that wasn’t much. We found out the night before where the Company boss’s house was. It was a mansion up on the hill. Today was Sunday. We didn’t figure that that was going to help any. Somehow we made an appointment to talk with him. Any authorization to get Co Av gas would have to come from him.
We walked up to his house at the appointed time. It was very formal. We had to wait a short time. El Jefe was in his finest white suit. The butler escorted us in, and we were invited to have tea. All this was in Spanish. I can ask for direction, food, beer or most anything to do with traveling in Spanish, but I was pretty poor with small talk.
El Jefe was very polite. He kept us away from the subject that we wanted to talk about for about 15 minutes of very uncomfortable idle chatter. Finally we got on the subject of Av gas. I found it uncomfortable that we were dumb enough to let ourselves run out of gas.
After 20 minute, El Jefe let us off the hook and began speaking English to us. He’d been having a good time at our expense. I have to admit that we deserved it. Sure enough he authorized 10 gallon of gas for us out of the company warehouse. He even loaned us gas cans from the warehouse, and had a pickup run us up to the plane. We couldn’t have hope for more. We got off the ground , and made the trip home that Sunday, and to work on Monday just like nothing had happened.
Back to the Baja 1000........ The aluminum car had been left with the fuel petcock on overnight before the race. That had hydauliced a cylinder and broke a piston ring land. The whole side of the piston burned up in the first 50 miles. The car I was in burned a piston as well from too much compression. The first doctor broke an axle at the 175 mile mark. The 2 mechanics crashed their car at mile 300. The boys had done the best of any of us in their first race.
Another race experience that comes to mind was a baja 500. I don't remember a whole lot about the race/ It was with the Aluminum car. I had started the race and was approacing Chapala Dry Lake. It was before the paved road was put in and that dry lake was a caliche pocket, which with all the trucking thru there, made poof dust roads into and out of the lake. There must have been 50 roads on both sides of the lake and all the roads sported 12" deep dust.
There wasn't much of a chance of getting stuck, unless you high centered which was rare, but the dust would shoot up in front of you and ingulf your car. When I got to the lake the dust went over the car and I got a squirt of dust inside my goggles that came in a small air gap in the face to goggle fit. Shit....I stopped and blinked the dust clear. Ok....then more dust thru that hole. dust would hit you in the face like someone had thrown a bucket of it at you. There was no going on with a bit of impaired vision. Until you did something you were blind. The good part was that tears whashed the dust out in 15 seconds or so. But I was only making 20 or 30 ft between dusting, and I had a mile or more to go.
Another problem with the dust was that the dust would get in the distributor and hold the point open with it grains. That would allow the spark to practically be a constant arc when the point were together. You could go thru a set of point in one dusting.....so I had that to worry about as well.
I remember this Chapala crossing was being done at night, and after a dozen or so eye dustings in a 100 yrds, I was ready to give up. I wanted to just cry and throw in the towel. I might have done just that, but I'd have still been in the middle of that dust bowl in the middle of BFE....I went on. It's amazing how utterly defeated you can become in situations like that. I imagine I'd fold like a house of cards in a real life threatening situation.
I handed the car over to Tom at Gonzaga Bay. He had kind of an interesting ride himself. As he headed back to Ensenada there was a gas stop in San Felipe where he had to pull into the normal electric operated gas pumps for fuel. There were 2 pumps, and did I mention that Tom was a poser. Well anytime there were people to watch you it was the norm to try a little harder. I even suffered from this at times. We'll call it the racers phenomena.
Well, there was a crowd at the gas pumps, when he came roaring in with a little extra zest. In fact he slide right into a gas pump and knocked it over. He just moved to the next pump for his fill up just like nothing had happend. That was Tom alright
It's sad that I don't remember the outcome of that race....We finished I'm sure, but I'd have remembered if the result was anything to write home about.
While we campaigned the Aluminum car, Bill Sanders, the editor of ‘Four Wheeler Magazine, became interested in our team. He was always around covering the races, and would always come by and spend an evening by the campfire with us.
He’d been following us for a year or more. During that time he had made a deal with Toyota to do some projects with his advertisers on a ’72 Toyota Land Cruiser that Toyota of America contributed. One project was to convert it to propane. Another was to put a turbocharger on it. I forget what all, but Toyota didn’t know what to do with the Land cruiser when they had gotten all the free advertisement from ‘Four Wheeler’ that they could.
Bill suggested that they sell it to him for a dollar, to get them away from any liability, and let him race it in the Baja 1000 in ‘73. Bill got with me to see if I wanted in on the deal as a builder and co driver. He said that he would get his mag advertisers to do what he could, and Toyota would give me $300 to do the work.
I’d been spending a lot of Money on my own racing endeavor, and welcomed the chance to race a race on someone else’s buck.
I don’t think that I mentioned that in the past year, Bonnie saw that the future with me was dim, and she decided that the Pit fellow, that she had come back from Baja with, was a better bet.... I don’t blame her, although at the time I was a bit annoyed. Honestly, though, I was racing. If she didn’t want to race with me, then she needed another life. I hated losing that pit man though.
Bill went to work on his advertisers. Smittybuilt put a nice roll cage in the Land Cruiser, a Land Cruiser specialty shop put a stronger spring package under it. Head lights were donated by Daylighter, and all the shocks were donated by Gabrial Shocks.
All that I did was coordinate all that stuff and install parts. I also installed shock mts for 3 shocks on each wheel in the front, and 2 on each wheel in the rear. If there was something spectacular about this Toyota, it was that the whole project was completed in a little over a month of weekends and evenings.
I even managed to blow the head gasket on a test run. Turbo chargers have a tendency to do that, but I changed the head gasket with the help of Doug Bowen. Doug was living with me at the time as he had a bump in the road with his marriage at that time.
This year the Mexican powers had decided that they wanted to run The Mexican 1000 as they saw a lot of money going to gringos. That really messed things up. The Gringo promoter got pissed and threw a race in the states on the same weekend. Half the normal Baja Racers went with the stateside race, which cut the Baja field in half. Like in anything else, it was volume that produced a profit.
Bill and I made it to the starting line in Ensenada. I think there were only 6 racers in our stock 4X4 class, and maybe the same in the modified 4X4 class. The promoter had a meeting and suggested that we combine the classes. A vote was held and keeping the classes separate won the day. Ok that’s settled.
BTW, Bill as the 4 Wheeler editor had to get permission to run the turbo charger ok’ed on our LC. It was easy to get as no one was worried about a heavy 6 cyl Land Cruiser. He also had to line up Propane fueling trucks on the way to La Paz. I think we had a huge 80 gallon tank in the bed behind the seats so we only needed 2 fillups.
Bill and I started the race. Bill was driving. Up to that time we didn’t have much test driving in with the LC. We were surprised to see that our combination of springs and shocks was a good one. Anytime the Toyota would fly, it flew level. Miraculously so, in fact. We could hit a combination of bumps, as long as they were in a straight line, and not get out of shape. Problems were that it had no power steering and if you were going under 40 it was so stiff that it beat the crap out of the driver and rider.
Somewhere in the night, after the first fuel stop, we were driving along, and the racer began to miss and the lights went dim for 50 yards or so.....but then everything went back to normal. What the hell was that?? Oh well, it’s running now, keep going. We’d deal with it later if we had a problem.
Later that night we passed Carl Jackson who was driving a Stroppe prepared Bronco. He was the class of our field, and he had a broken steering box. That was good news. Later on that night we had a power loss. It seems we had an exhaust leak and were losing turbo power.
When we fueled up the last time with about 200 miles to go, we couldn’t start the LC. There was no starter. I guess we found out what that dim light action was earlier. We quickly got a push start and were gone into the night. There were only about 75 more miles of dirt to do, and then it was all pavement from there. Without the turbo we could only run about 70mph. We probably didn’t need to be going any faster as we were in the 23 hr range without any rest.
We pulled into the finish line in La Paz in just a few minutes over 25 hrs at around 11am. First over all had come in 7 hrs ago. There was no hoopla for anyone finishing now. Times were taken and we went to bed. Nothing would be official until the next day.
Somehow up on the time board, it seemed like all the 4X4s were in the same column. Bill investigated, and it seems that the powers had grouped both classes back together and in that grouping we were in 3rd place.
Because he was the editor of 4 Wheeler, at that time the biggest off road mag, he had enough power to get the classes separated again. That put us in second place. Then we found that the Bronco that was in first was not a stock Bronco. So we got him removed from our class and, voila, by the time the official results were published in the morning, we had won the race.
It wasn’t how we wanted to win the race, but you find that behind the scenes that most races are won and lost by peculiar circumstances. That day was our day. From the basement to the penthouse in just over a day.
Bill made a big deal out of the win in Four Wheeler. Hell, why not? Toyota was happy as well, the first gas crunch happened just around the corner in ’74. Toyota went no farther with the effort. Bill got Four Wheeler Mag to sponsor us for 3 or four more races, but we never did anything remarkable.
We had won a theoretical 1900 dollars from winning the Baja 1000. The Mexicans were bankrupt and didn’t pay anyone their prize money. It wasn’t till Mickey Thompson took the Baja race over the following year that we got paid due to a stipulation with the Mexican.
Speaking of peculiarities, one of the later races that Bill and I ran, out in Las Vegas, there were some prize moneys to be won by the fastest Toyota in the race. Turned out that Bill rolled the car and ruined the radiator in the first 100 miles. I never got in the car, but I won more money than I did in the Baja race because we were the only Toyota in the race. Life can be cruel, and then kind of forgiving at the same time.
The Toyota experience was an overall good one. We had run 5 races with the LC, only doing well in the first Baja race. Each race Bill would put a 5 or 6 page article in his Magazine. I was standing in a drivers meeting one time and I overheard a couple guys talking nearby, “Oh, I see that damned Toyota is running in this race also. The SOBs will probably write a book about it this time.” Bill wrote good detailed articles of our race experiences with great photographs. There weren’t many professionally done articles at the time. It was good for the sport and good for me personally.
As I look back, I had completed 5 years of intense racing. I’d worked an average of 30 hours extra each week on the effort. I’d learned a lot about all sorts of fabrication that I’d never have learned just being a machinist for dad. The racing forced me to experience much outside of my comfort zone. It had been an exceptional 5 years......even though racing successes were few and far between.
Someone once asked, “What would you do if you got a million dollars each morning, and you didn’t get to save the day's leftover money”? The answer is that you would spend as much of it as you could every day, after all you got a new million tomorrow. Not to spend it all would be a waste.
Well, the same thing can be said about energy. You get a new batch of energy every morning. Any of that energy that you don’t use is wasted, because you start out each morning with the same amount every day.
I could safely say that I hadn’t wasted any of my daily allotment of energy. I had converted it into knowledge and experience at a fairly large expense. But on the other hand, what kind of education doesn’t cost money. I would never have worked that hard on anything less compelling.
There were instances of brilliance and others that I’d be embarrassed to tell about. For instance on the front axles of the aluminum car I set the king pin angle completely backwards from what it should have been. Well hell, I’d never built a front suspension before. What did I know? But I learned most of what I needed to know from that front end.
I was also learning that in racing it wasn’t enough to make something that works and is unbreakable. It also had to do the job well. I also learned that it wasn’t enough to work hard. You had to work harder than the other guy.
When I was able to compare my best efforts with the event winner, I found that I was fairly consistently 5% to 10% slower.
My early successes were attributable to me having some real good/fresh ideas about off Road racing. Others were stuck in the old school of dune buggies.....but over the last few years the hundred of racers, basically all doing the same thing, had perfected their cars.
My new fresh designs were too hard to build. There were no spare parts, and there wasn’t time to work out the bugs to really be competitive any longer. I simply didn’t have the experience to do what I was trying to do. Of course I can see all this now, but at the time, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees
Doctor Holcolm
I mentioned that I was racing with one of the doctors. Dr Holcolm was a great owner. I’m a little embarrassed that I don’t remember his first name. The first day that we took his Baja Bug out to the desert to test it, we had worked all night to get the last minute things finished up. We drove the hundred miles to Ocotillo Off Road Park. That’s when he told us that he’d never driven a standard shift car. “Whoa, you got to be shitting me,” we said. We couldn’t believe that. Oh well, that would be something else that he’d have to learn.
He learned how to get the car moving with the clutch. I was sitting in the rider’s seat. The next thing he did was fly the car off the top of a 10ft hill and into the wash behind that hill. I’d never flown so far before. The car banged down front end first, and bent the steering tie rods. Testing was over for that weekend. Holy crap, I could see that I had my work cut out for me, if I was going to teach the Dr to drive that car.
Honestly, though, Dr Holcolm turned out to be a good student. The lack of clutch experience didn’t seem to be the setback that we imagined that it would be. We raced several races that year with respectable finishes.
But in the summer of ’73, the Doctor took his wife and 2 of his older kids to Baja in his Ford camper Van. His wife was driving. They were on the pavement about a 100 miles from La Paz, and for some reason, unbeknownst to anyone, the van crashed and burned. There were no survivors.
We were devastated, of course. We couldn’t believe the news of the accident. Dr Holcolm and his family had become friends by then. It was a horrible loss. Eventually I realized that I no longer had a Baja Bug ride.
Without a Ride
I found myself without a race program for the first time in 5 years. I was 34 by now. I’d been through another marriage. I’d found a crazy woman, and I lasted 3 years with her. Oh well. The dune buggy hobby was still intact. There was a demand to make Dune buggies street legal. I’d gone through that process once before I started racing. It was complicated what with also the Detroit governmental regulations.
The loophole was to get rid of one front wheel, and make our buggies 3 wheelers. That classified them as motorcycles and all those pesky regs were gone. Along in there somewhere a friend and I created this trike.
It was a very cool street oriented machine. A couple years later I designed a more buggy oriented trike. One that was at home on sand dunes, rough desert, or the highway. It would do it all. Eventually we built 7 of these. The trouble was that they were too hard to insure back in the mid ‘70s. Can you believe this is the only picture that I have of this vehicle?
During the trike phase of my life, I’d changed jobs from the Machine shop to a combo auto mechanic/ tow truck driver. The pay was about twice as good, but then it should have been. I’d mechanic all day and then be on tow call all night. The worst night I ever had I had to get out of bed for 7 different call during the night. That will take the zip out of you for the next day’s work.
I was getting out of the financial hole that racing kept me in. I was stacking up a little money when my big mouth and wild ideas got me back into racing. I’d met an engineer who was a ¼ midget race in his spare time. In fact he was national champion 2 years in a row. And he was a ¼ midget car builder.
We made a deal that he would build a car for us and I’d supply the design and parts. He’d be the primary driver, and I’d drive if he needed help. That suited me just fine as I wasn’t yet convinced that I could be a good driver. We bought an off road racing frame and went to work. That was the first time that we’d be racing a VW based suspension. We had some catching up to do in that department.
By now I was quite proficient at building racing engines and transmissions so I built and supplied those, and John Raye put the car together beautifully. I decided to use VW bus reduction gears from pre ’69 in the rear drives, and to lower the ratio I bought a set of aftermarket reduction gears produced by a prominent racer in San Diego Ca.
We show up at a 300 mile race out near Las Vegas. Our class was unlimited 2 seat Buggies. Our biggest competition at the time was a guy name Bob Gordon. He’s NASCAR racer Robby Gordon’s Dad. He’d been racing and winning in the 2 seat buggy class for a couple years.
It was a four lap race, and John handed over the race car to me at the end of his 2 laps. I completed my first lap with no troubles, and was told that we were about an hour out front of anyone in our class. That was great. Being that far in front just meant that no one else had run trouble free.
We were jubilant. A win would look very good for any reason. I continue on for another half a lap before one of those reduction gears spit off a couple gear teeth. Bob Gordon went on to win.
We sulked back home with our tails between our legs. That race was the closest success that we ever had with that car. After a year with that car, I sold it to one of our pit guys who’d had a big law suit collection. I became a second driver for that car, but even so we had lots of failures for one reason or another.
You see that big yellow rear shock on that car? Well that wasn’t a shock at all. Torsion bar suspensions on these cars were being stressed to their limits in those days with all the additional wheel travel that the racers were adding. That big shock was just an air ram that I built to assist the torsion bar springs for the car. Worked damn good, and would have been the direction I would have gone in the future if I had continued racing.
The above picture is late in my career as we raced that car into maybe ’85 on a limited schedule. One of the last races with that car, I had gotten in for the second half of the race. The power steering had gone tits up. That made it a bear to drive, but we were still in the race. About 50 miles into my race I blew a spark plug out. It took the threads out with it. I pulled into someone’s pits, and asked for help. They couldn’t get a plug to hold.....so a young Kid drove a small screw driver down alongside the plug. It forced the plugs threads to bite into the Al head, and it held for the rest of the race. I always appreciated the ingenuity of that kid.
Later in this same race, I had caught a buggy, and was looking for a spot to pass. I was very close to him. That way you can be in front of most of his dust. Of course being that close, you might hit him, but the cars were built with pretty heavy bumper for that purpose. As I remember I was a couple feet off to the right behind him......and a 2 ft rock came out of the dust and slammed into my right front wheel.
I can still remember that I only had enough time to think about moving the steering wheel, before that rock wadded up the frame on the right front. That was really my first crash.....and the first inkling that I had slowed down a step.
We got the frame repaied and faced a couple more races in the next year. I figured out how many mile we had raced with that car, and divided the number of car failures into those miles. The average was a failure every 75 miles....that wasn't good enough to keep the team together. I think the owner still has that car in a garage somewhere.
Karman Gorilla
So, you have never heard of the Karman Gorilla. Let me tell you about this car. I had been racing long races like the Baja races and such. Those races are terrible expensive for an independent like myself and thousands of others.....
so there was a movement afoot to promote short course races so that spectators could be charged, and also so we racers didn't have to travel so far. That would cut our costs, and the promoter could make money off the gate, instead of having to charge the racers high entry fees.
Mickey Thompson started short course racing with a couple of Stadium races at the LA Coliseum (One of which I won in that Karman Gorilla against Rick Mears, of all people). That is another story, but has a lot to do with my saying that 'luck beats good'.
Anyway most folks were running their heavy, well built, long course cars on a short course. I think I may have been the first guy to build a car that was intended to last only for 20 minute races....at least I was among the first. Kinda like cheating.
So a friend of mine had a junk Karman Ghia that he donated, and, while sitting in a bar one night, we dared each other to build this 'Karman Gorilla' thing. He would provide the engine, and I'd build the car (with a lot of help from my good buddies)
Baja Bugs of that period had 8 or 9 inches of wheel travel and were supposed to be on an unaltered VW belly pan (frame). My premise was to cut much more of the body away to save a 100 lbs or so, and make bumpers out of aluminum to save more weight.... after all I was only racing for an hour or so, not 24 hrs or so.
Also, I designed for 12 to 15 inches of wheel travel, and I cut the belly pan so that the weight would be about 5 inches lower. The car would actually hit the ground when it bottomed out. The car, being a Ghia, was so radical that no one figured out that I had altered the belly pan.....kinda like cheating.
Anyway the car was fast. If I didn't break down, I won. I broke about half the time, and won the other half during the next couple years. My investment was about 4000 bucks. As you can imagine my motto was,.... 'Make junk run'.........New parts were pretty much limited to shocks and tires and rims, and the car didn't get them very often.
I used other things on this car that are normal these days, such as, Bell cranks on the suspension so that I could lay the shocks down to keep the weight from being high. I added some spring power by putting air pressure in shock absorbers and taking out all the fluid. My thinking was that it was hard to put a permanent bend in air.
So even though the car was advanced it still had bugs to work out. Like the axles had half ton chevy u-joints. It turned out they aren't strong enough to use with out the 4 to 1 reduction of a differential. It also turned out that a u-joint won't deflect enough to give you 15 inches of wheel travel, either, with out an hour of clearancing with a die grinder. That was fun work.
The first race we ran was at a short course race at Firebird raceway, near Phoenix. We showed up there and no one could believe their eyes. "What had God wrought' was in their minds, and 'what the hell is that?' was on their lips.
We qualified for starting positions. They used the fastest starts last, system. I only ran one of my qualifying laps and was three second faster that the competition. Lucky I started last because as I jockeyed around to get lined up, I left the thing in reverse.
When the green flag dropped, I went backwards. Boy, was that embarrassing. but even so I passed every one in that first lap and was going away. Life was good, .....they had a jump in front of the grandstand where I broke a u-joint and didn't finish. The next day I was doing well, and was way out front, but this time a bolt that holds the inside end of a rear swing arm came out near the last lap. I limped for a whole lap, and only one car was able to catch me, and I finished second.
That race put me on the map. I wasn't smart enough to sand bag, and just barely beat these guys. No, I wanted to look good. Well that scared half the competition to not participate in a lot of the racing in the southwest. Of course there was another group that upped the money that they spent on their Baja bugs, and eventually smoked me a couple years later.
Stadium Racing in Colorado
After the success at the Coliseum We decide to take our big heads to Colorado to the Pike's peak oval track. They built an off road track in the infield. We got a group of us together and borrowed a motorhome and set off. There were about 10 cars to race. One of them was driven by Roger Mears. We two were the class of the race, and we raced wheel to wheel for about 6 laps. I passed him once, but I left the door open and he block passed me in a corner. Sonofabitch...stupid, stupid, stupid...But I had more laps, I would get him back...... I thought. It was not to be, as I lost a hot wire to the coil before that happened.
We had to race again the next day. We got into the starting line, and had to wait nearly an hour while they watered the track. I thought that I was about to go to sleep. I remember thinking I'll check my pulse...I bet it will be about 60....no way, with out doing anything, it was running 110.
The watering guys put way too much water on the track. It was impossibly slippery. At about half a lap I spun out and was cross ways in the track. Mears was out front. The rest of the field was a 100 yards back already. I thought, I can get started by the time they get here. I gunned it, and just spun the wheels and managed to move just far enough to get in the way of the next car who couldn't turn or stop.
Bam!!!.........Fuck, fuck, fuck. He hit me in my drivers corner post and front wheel. I could still run but had a crooked wheel. I was still faster than every one but Mears, but I needed to win to have any reason to continue. They tallied the two motos together.
I reasoned that it was useless since Mears was so far out front. So I pulled into the pits. As I recall, a couple laps later Mears broke a throttle cable, and the guy who hit me won the race. What a screwed result. I had pulled in to save the equipment for another day when I had a chance. Bad choice, on that occasion.
So anyway I campaigned that car at the local tracks. All the short course track had a high speed jump in front of the stands. If you could fly flat over that jump that would really help. That took a lot of rebound control in the rear shocks. So to that end I revalved the shocks with a whole big bunch of that control.
Wow, in practice that worked like a champ. I was flying and landing like a butterfly. Whoa Doggies!!! This was going to be something. Well the race came along and I was being pushed by some guy. I was going faster than I had in practice over two bumps in a row. I hit the first bump, which compressed the suspension, and then I hit the second bump with my rear end all sucked up by those shocks. There was no suspension left so the car did about 2 endos before it hit the ground again, and a few more before the world quite rotating.
That was all she wrote for that day, and the beginning of the end. Which brings us to the last race of its career when they got pictures of the car for that video out in a race at Las Vegas. A Picture can be seen at 2 miutes and 13 seconds of that video.
My boys that had helped me for the last few year deserved some reward, so I agreed to put the car back together, and let two of them drive the car for a 400 mile 'long course' race out near Las Vegas.
The first driver started the race and got about 2 miles before a distributor failed. I got to the guy, and put in another distributor, but he probably lost at least a half hour. After that he finished his first 125 mile lap. The second driver only went about 30 miles before a piece of the frame gave way that anchored one of the rear trailing arms. That failure was a direct result of that previous endo.
This poor bunch of scaliwag talliwackers worked long and hard to bring this old 'Karman Gorilla' to a place of respect.
The car was getting old. That was the ignominious end of a once proud race car. She had some good runs, but this was a poor way for the once proud 'Karman Gorilla' to go out.
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