Chapter 11

Neither Frank or Spud ever told me all of it at once, but over the years I heard enough bits and pieces to be able to put together a pretty good story of how the Midwest Midget Sportsman Association came to be.

By the time that Frank got home from Okinawa what there had been of the 1945 racing season was over with, so he settled down working for Herb in his garage. Herb let him put his race cars in the back of the shop, and when Frank wasn't working he went over the cars with a fine tooth comb to get ready for the 1946 racing season.

I never heard a lot of details but I guess the '46 season went pretty much all right. Frank won a few and ran well in some other races. Over the course of the summer Frank noticed that while he won more in the sprint car he made more money running the midget, because the field was larger and there was a lot more interest in the midget racing. He'd seen a couple of the Kurtis Kraft midgets and had been able to run with them.

After thinking it over a bit he decided to pretty much park the sprint car in '47, or at least only run it in a few events, and concentrate on the midget that he'd built for Herb almost ten years before. It was no longer way ahead of everyone else in its class, so that winter he gave it a major rebuild to try and find some more speed.

Frank said one time that he probably would have been money ahead to just buy a Kurtis Kraft midget, or at least just the chassis to hang a hot V8-60 engine in it, but he didn't realize that at the time. Unfortunately, some other people did, and the 1947 season mostly consisted of Frank trying to hang on to money finishes with his fingernails. After everything was counted up, he figured that he didn't do as well money wise in 1947 as he had done the year before. On top of that, he started to suspect that he wasn't quite as fast as he'd been ten years before, and that maybe the years were starting to catch up with him.

As the 1947 season began to wind down, Frank could feel the dissatisfaction and the need to do something different but really hadn't thought it out much further than that. Along in October there was a big season-ender race in Pittsburgh, which was about as far east as Frank had ever run, and he decided to make the haul over to it. He unloaded the midget and started to check things out, and discovered that the guy in the next spot in the infield was Spud McElroy.

Like Frank, Spud got back to the states too late for what was left of the 1945 racing season, although there were a couple places in and around New York that ran midgets inside and Spud got involved with them. Much like Frank, Spud had a pretty decent '46 season, but '47 wasn't quite as good, since there were a lot more people running and the Kurtis Kraft Offys were starting to make their appearance. Spud managed to finish in the money enough to keep going although things were a little thin at times. By the time he made it to that big race in Pittsburgh, it was clear that he was going to have to either jump on the Kurtis Kraft bandwagon with no idea what he was going to use for money, or go do something else.

The race in Pittsburgh was a big enough deal that it ran multiple days. Since Frank and Spud knew each other pretty well from the Okinawa days, they had some catching up to do, and they wound up in some nearby local bar knocking back Iron City beer, telling lies and bitching about the Kurtis Krafts. Frank and Spud always argued over who said, "If I had my own racing circuit I'd ban the damn things," but maybe both of them said it.

With the help of some more Iron City, they got to talking about what kind of cars they would have if they had their own racing circuit. The main idea was to have the cars pretty cheap, and as much alike as possible, but agreed that keeping the cars equal would be pretty hard since everyone was going to hop them up and the next thing you knew you were back at the Kurtis Kraft problem.

Both Frank and Spud agreed that it was Frank who said that there was one way around it – if they owned all the cars, they could set 'em up any way they damn well pleased.

Now, that was a new idea, and it was obviously just the opposite of the way things had always been done. Frank used to say that racing started when someone built the second car, but always the driver or owner showed up as an independent and raced what they brung, assuming it could pass the tech inspections. But, if Frank and Spud owned the cars, they could make sure they were all pretty well equal and there would be none of the expensive hopping up needed to keep them pretty equal.

The problem was that if they owned the cars like that they'd pretty much have to run them on their own circuit to keep someone from showing up with a hot car and blowing everybody away. But, Frank said that maybe running their own outlaw circuit wouldn't be that big a deal under the circumstances.

Like I said, racing had never been done that way before. There used to be some thrill shows like Joie Chittwood's that did it that way, and it was done in other ways, like pro "wrestling" and roller derby and like that, where everyone was working for the promoter, so it wasn't totally unplowed ground.

At that point it was all pretty much beered-up bullshitting, but there must have been something in that Iron City brew, because it set the both of them to thinking after they headed off for the evening. The next day it still made sense and they picked up where they left off. Spud was pretty much thinking about the cars, while Frank was thinking about the promotion side of things. His opinion was that if you had ten or twelve cars, finding a place to race them was no big deal, but it would take a little more work to find a crowd to pay the expenses.

I don't know how they did racing that day. I guess not too good because their minds were on other things. That evening they went back to that same bar, got into the Iron City again and started throwing numbers around. By the time they got done they'd worked out the basics of the whole operation – it was clear that it could be done, but it was also clear that it was going to take some front money, which neither of them had any to speak of.

After the race was over with, Frank loaded his midget back on the trailer and headed back toward Livonia, thinking a lot about what he and Spud had talked about. When he got back home, he parked the rig, bought a kid's pad of school paper and started throwing numbers around. He spent some time talking to various people like track owners and fairground managers about what would be involved, and once he got the whole thing together he headed over to Herb's Ford agency and laid the whole thing out.

Herb had always been a big racing nut, and it really didn't take Frank a whole lot of talking to sell him on the idea. I'm not totally sure about the arrangement, but I guess that Herb took a part of the business so long as Frank and Spud put up some cash of their own.

Frank had a couple cars he could sell to put up his share of the money, the midget and the sprinter. He wrote a letter to Spud saying the deal was on and explaining a few things, about it, and in a few days Spud showed up at Frank's door. It seems that Spud had sort of gotten into trouble with his wife about a few little things, like a blonde honey who liked to hang around the pits, and he figured that it might be best to not be around New Jersey for a while. He'd had a good offer on his cars and had the money in his pocket.

Frank was still living with his folks, and Spud moved in with them. Herb found them a little old warehouse in Livonia, and Frank set Spud to work building cars, with the help of a kid by the name of Peewee Svoboda, who was a high school dropout but a hell of a welder. They found some tools here and there, and the two of them started to get familiar with all the junkyards within about a forty mile radius.

The car was mostly Spud's design, although Frank and Peewee had some in it, too. It was mostly based on mid- to late-thirties Ford parts. If there was special stuff, it was intentionally designed to be pieces that could be built quickly. Not only was this an aid to building the cars in the first place, but race cars do get wrecked, and as long as there were Fords of that era in the junk yards there would be a source of parts readily available. Even the car bodies had various Ford body parts involved although by the time Peewee got done welding on them it would be hard to tell.

They would get a wrecked Ford, a '37 to '40 coupe with a V8-60 if possible and strip it right down to the frame. The frame was both too wide and too long for the midget, but that was something that Peewee could cure in a jiffy with his cutting torch. Because they wanted to use the transmission and rear end to avoid the cost of an in-out clutch and the need to push the car to get it started, the car came out a little longer than a regular midget to be able to couple the transmission to the rear end. That was good, because regular midget cockpits were awful damn tight for anyone that was even average size.