Chapter 9

Over the years I've often wondered what happened to Slab. For all I know, he's still there. I never heard from him again, and I never thought to ask Frank about it. All I know is that when Frank stopped by the hospital to drop off his stuff the next morning he hadn't regained consciousness but was otherwise doing all right. I also don't know if the cops ever caught up with the guys that beat him up, but I doubt it. We were the outsiders, carnies of a sort, and if something bad happened to us it wasn't going to cost the local power structure any votes, so there was no reason to try and treat us fair.

About all I do know is that a little after eight the next morning we were in a convoy, being led by Hoss, who was driving the semi with the race cars loaded on the back. The rest of us followed along behind, headed for Prairie du Chien and the next race that evening. About half an hour out we pulled into some roadside truck stop, partly to have breakfast and partly to wait for Frank and Spud to catch up with us after stopping off at the hospital. They weren't far behind us, and we just about had time for a second cup of coffee while they ate before we were on the road again.

Southwestern Wisconsin is rolling and rugged, although awful pretty at that time of the year. The roads were twisty and hilly, so it meant for slow going, especially since the semi was no powerhouse, despite being fairly lightly loaded with the race cars. I recall that Pepper was riding with me, and that made the trip go a little faster. He was a solid guy with blonde hair, shorter than I was although pretty good looking. I couldn't figure why it was Chick that was picking up all the women instead of him, as good as he looked, although I don't recall making any comment to him about it.

It turned out that he hadn't been any great buddies with Slab, although they'd been roomies since the start of the season about six weeks before. Pepper realized that Slab had gotten him into trouble in the past and seemed just as glad that he wouldn't have to put up with that any more. According to him Slab had been a drinker and had been knocking them back pretty good after we left, and had been all belligerent and boasting about how he'd kicked that townie's ass. "I kind of figured that something like that was going to happen sooner or later," he said.

It was after noon when we pulled into Prairie du Chien. We found the place where we were going to stay – another set of tourist cabins that were obviously about the cheapest thing in town. I'd already come to expect that and learned that Carnie was the one that made the reservations when he'd been in town to set things up a few days before. I can't recall if they were better or worse than the ones in Baraboo but we saw an awful lot of cruddy ones over the years so they all sort of run together in my mind unless there was something special to make them stick out. After we sorted out rooms – Rocky was still stuck with Chick, but Frank promised him he'd be roomed with the next new guy – we headed on out to the track. This was another real race track, and a little more banked than the one in Baraboo.

We were getting hungry by now; several of the guys chipped in to buy lunch. Since I had a car I volunteered to make the run to a little grocery store and gas station up the road, where I got a loaf of bread, a package or two of lunch meat and some chips. This turned out to be nothing special and that's how we did it most days – only if it were rainy or we had a long jump did we eat lunch in a restaurant. After we ate, I took the 27 car out for a bit to see if I could figure why it was still so goosy. I fiddled with the suspension a little but didn't really solve anything. Most of the other guys were fiddling with their cars a little, getting in a little practice, then cleaning them up before the crowd arrived.

I don't recall how I finished that night, but it probably wasn't in the money. At least we didn't have another incident at the bar following the race, and we left the next morning bringing another local racer with us, Sonny Ochsenlaager. Sonny was a carpenter between jobs and offered to run with us for a week or two just for the sake of a break – he wound up running most of the summer, as it turned out.

From there on where we went gets a little fuzzy, since so much of it was pretty much the same thing, day after day. I know I won my first MMSA feature race at Maquoketa, Iowa, so that sticks in my mind, at least partly because I remember having a pretty good battle with Rocky for most of the race. It felt real good to get out of the 66 car in the middle of the track, have the guy from the local paper take my picture, and even get a kiss from the race queen, which was something that we rarely had. She was a cute one, too, but it was clear that the official kiss was all that I was going to get.

I also remember Maquoketa, Iowa because it was a Sunday, and the first day off we had. Now, don't get me wrong, every one of us would rather have been racing, but back in those days the Blue Laws were a lot stricter in some places than they are today. If Vivian, Carnie, or Frank couldn't find us some place to race that day about all we could do was sit around on our butts. Some places the Blue Laws were so strict that you could barely do anything but go to church on Sunday, and as I recall that town was stricter than most. I had at least thought to pick up a paperback book to give me something to do – in those days, a cheap pulp paperback was a quarter, sometimes even less, and they were something a little new on the market. But, I really wasn't in the mood to read, so while Dink headed off to the nearest church and a couple other guys decided to sleep in, I headed off with a couple carloads of us to a restaurant in town, at least figuring on having a long breakfast and several cups of coffee.

For lack of anything better to do, some of us got up a friendly little gin rummy game, just something to pass the time. I guess that must have yanked the chain of the old gal that ran the restaurant, because she told us we'd have to knock it off or she'd call the cops – playing cards wasn't allowed in town on Sunday. I have to say that yanked our chains pretty good, and we paid our bill and left. We couldn't think of anything much else to do but go back to the tourist cabins and find a shady spot to lay around, shoot the bull and wish we were racing, and hope to hell that the next time a Sunday rolled around that we'd have a place to race, or at least a long jump to make. I know we were darn glad to be back on the road the next morning.

Thinking about the Blue Laws back in those days makes me think about the dry laws. Prohibition had been over with for nearly twenty years by that point, but you'd never have known it in some of those little towns we were in. There were all sorts of local laws about drinking, from one town, county, or state to the next, and you hardly ever knew what you were going to be dealing with until you got there. Sometimes we'd go days between places where we could stop off for a beer or two after the evening's race. Sometimes, if we knew we were going to be heading off into dry country we'd load up a few cases of beer in one of the cars or the parts truck, and ice it down to have wherever we were staying after the race. We couldn't always do that and didn't always know if we were going to be hitting a dry stretch. Sometimes you'd be driving around, and come up on a state line, where there'd be a bunch of bars to one side of the line. If they were on the side we were coming from we'd often stop and stock up a little since it was pretty clear there was going to be some dry country ahead.

We still have some weird blue laws about drinking and buying on Sunday around the country, but it's nothing like as bad as it was back in those days. I don't want to say that none of us were drunks, because it seemed like we always had at least one or two of us who would knock it back pretty good. But it bothered us to no end to not be able to have a beer or two to clean the dust out of our throats after some dirty night on a track some place.

While we did have some guys that drank, it was a pretty firm rule that you didn't race drunk or drive on the highway drunk, and over the years I was with the MMSA Frank or Spud bounced a few guys right out on their ass for breaking that rule. That pretty well kept the drinking to after the racing, which was a pretty good place for it.

We worked our way west and south from there. Again, after all these years I'm not clear on the details. I seem to recall that we had a two night stand at Independence, Missouri, which was then-President Truman's home town. Staying in a place two nights in a row was pretty rare, but we had good crowds both nights and I won the feature on one of them.

Somewhere along the way we'd picked up another driver, so we had a full crew, but that evening, the first night, whoever the other driver was tangled with Shorty Notwicki in the 2 car. Shorty was banged up pretty good and the other driver even worse. It was a dumb move on the other driver's part, and Frank said he would have fired him for it if he hadn't had to be left behind in the hospital, anyway. Both the 2 car and the 72 car were beat up pretty bad. There was a spare car, the 47, sitting in the parts truck, so we got that out and got it running, and all of us pitched in to rebuild the 2 car so it could be run the next night. Frank was able to find a couple local drivers to fill in for a few days; Shorty went along with us, his leg in a cast. After a week or so he was back in the 2, cast and all, when one of the local drivers had to head home. The 47 car was a dog, but we did a mix and match with parts from the 72 and got it to the point where it wasn't too bad to drive. Over the course of the summer, when we hit a flat spot with nothing else to do we'd work on the 72, and we had it racing in the fall.

Shorty was a good guy for a little squirt. Always happy, always ready with a joke – especially Polack jokes, which seems a little strange to think about it looking back on those days, because Shorty was a Polack from the word go and wasn't ashamed to admit it. He'd actually been born in Poland, and his real name was Stanislaus. He was well liked, and we all helped him get through the couple months his leg was in a cast. It was darn near impossible for him to get in his car by himself with that cast on, so a couple guys had to lift him into it. Then, he couldn't use the clutch with his leg in a cast, so we rigged him up a broomstick so he could shove it in to start and pull off. Fortunately although we had three speed transmissions we always ran in just one gear, so he didn't have to worry about shifting on the fly. He actually won some features like that.

Independence was about the biggest town we saw, except to drive through. We mostly stayed away from bigger towns where there were regular tracks and midget circuits, partly because Frank had figured out that we'd be less of a draw in places like that, and partly because we didn't want locals running their midgets against us. The simple fact of the matter was that the MMSA midgets were slower than most regular midgets in those days. The MMSA cars weren't as powerful, and were designed to last, which is what we needed for the MMSA show. All that meant that we hit some pretty little towns, and sometimes we were about the only outside entertainment that had come to town in a long time.