Chapter 14

It still took us two long days to get back to Livonia, driving up US-27 to Cincinnati, then on up US-23. It was a slow trip, partly because it was through mountain country, and partly because the box truck was really acting wheezy. It needed a valve job and a few other things, and we had to stop along the road several places to fiddle with it to keep it going.

In Cincinnati, Frank put two guys who had filled in for the tail end of the season on a bus towards home; we'd already left one in Chattanooga to hitchhike back to Arkansas. When we got back to Livonia, Bud and Skimp took off for home; Dink hung around a couple days to help with the unloading, and then decided that he was going to go back to Wisconsin for the winter. Hoss already had a job lined up in his brother's body shop, and Shorty already had it set to go back to work for his dad as a meat cutter, so that thinned us out quite a bit more. Although Woody planned on working for us in the winter, he moved back in with some relatives not far away. Frank, Spud, and Carnie all moved into Frank's folks' house, which left five of us needing quarters for the winter: Chick and Hattie, Rocky, Pepper, and me.

Frank had already told Vivian what was coming, and she'd worked out a pretty good deal – she'd rented a whole house for us, only about a block away from the old warehouse where Frank kept the cars for the winter. The house was nothing much, old and fairly run down, but it had a good coal furnace so we could figure on staying warm. Since we'd known this was coming, back on the road we'd worked out a deal to split the rent five ways. Since Hattie didn't have a job, the other four of us kicked in her share, and in return she did the meals and the cleaning and the laundry and those kinds of things. The house had two fairly big bedrooms and one tiny one; it was clear that Chick and Hattie got one of the big bedrooms, and the other three of us flipped for the single bedroom. I won, or maybe lost – it really was a tiny bedroom. I barely had room to turn around, but it was the first time in a long time that I hadn't shared a room with someone.

The warehouse that we used for a shop really wasn't all that great. It was big enough to put all the cars in and have a little space left over, but when we got there it was unheated, which if you know Michigan means that it was going to be pretty uncomfortable in the winter. But there was one room that was separated off and the door into it was just big enough for one of the cars if we took the door off the hinges and were real careful with it. Frank scrounged around and came up with a big old barrel stove for that room, and we knocked a pane of glass out of a window to run the smoke vent outside. We burned whatever we could in that stove; wood, coal, used engine oil and what have you. If it wasn't too cold outside it heated the place up to where things were tolerable, and on the real cold days we got along.

We mostly had the tools we'd had out on the road, along with a few other things, and we made do. The one thing that made it work is that if we needed to work on some part and didn't have the tools we needed to do it with, Herb's Ford agency was about half a mile away and we made use of his shop a lot. We also made pretty good use of his parts bin, sometimes when the service manager was looking the other way. At that, Spud always had a list of stuff he needed to get from junk yards, and he was out and around looking for parts with the pickup truck at least part of most days.

There was a lot of work to do. The engines in the cars were all pretty much stock, but we used them hard and some of them were getting pretty wheezy in the last part of the season. In those days, if you got 20,000 highway miles on an engine before you needed a valve job you were doing good, and you were lucky to get 40,000 miles out of bearings. We really hadn't put anything like those many miles on the engines, but the ones they had were hard miles, so they were getting ready for a major overhaul. Along with the engine work there was plenty of other stuff on each car that needed a little to a lot of attention. We pulled the cars into the shop room one at a time and tore them apart, rebuilding them from one end to the other, tearing the engines down all the way, then did any machine work necessary and put them back together with new rings, bearings, and whatever else.

I suppose it's safe now to confess that when the 66 car was torn down later in the process, I happened to be the one to take the block and the heads over to the Ford agency to get some machine work done on them. Like a lot of the cars, the cylinder walls on the engine were scored a bit, and had to be honed out. The guy in the machine shop at the Ford agency knew I knew how to do the work, so he let me do it. He decided to head out for a couple hours, so rather than just hone the cylinders, I bored them out just a little. Now, after you've honed the cylinder walls a couple times the pistons won't fit any more, so the factory makes oversized pistons in a couple different sizes. While the parts manager had his back turned I swapped some regular pistons for the biggest oversized ones and bored the cylinders out to fit. Then, when I was grinding the valves, I opened the ports up just a little, so little that you'd hardly notice except if you had the right tools and knew what to look for. In all that I probably didn't gain much, maybe five horsepower, but when you're talking only hundred horsepower engines, five is a pretty fair amount. I figured that I just had to be careful Spud didn't drop me a sixteenth on the restrictor plate. I know the engine seemed to wind out a little better, especially on those mile fairground tracks the following fall, so I guess it was worth the effort.

We went through the rest of the cars pretty carefully, too. If anything looked like it needed attention, it got it. We pulled down the transmissions and rear ends on all the cars, and had to replace the guts of several of the transmissions, if not the whole thing. New clutches, new brakes – the list goes on and on. The only good thing to say about it was that with five and six of us working on each car, each one went pretty quickly. It took us about two weeks for each car in the beginning, but only a week and a half or so towards the end because we had rebuilding the cars down to a science.

Even though we'd tried to take care of the cars, they'd accumulated various dings, scratches and dents over the course of the season. When we started the teardowns, we stripped off all the sheet metal and ran it over to Korodan's Body Shop, where Hoss stripped the paint, rolled out the dents, and then repainted it. Several of the cars needed this and that new body panel, so Hoss and his brother would make it from scratch. They even had a sign painter come in to renew the numbers and such; the cars really looked sharp when we rolled them back out of the shop room onto the storage floor and went to get the next one.

I'm going to jump ahead of the story just a little bit here to get through with all of the shop work. The 47 car, which we'd used as a spare car a couple times over the season, was one of the old midgets that Frank had picked up to fill out the field in the '48 season. It was a regular midget, and still had the in and out box, rather than the clutch and transmission that we had with the other cars. We only had a couple of rear end gears for it, and they usually weren't the right ones for where we were running, so any race it was in, the 47 was usually stuck at the back of the field. On top of that, the 72 car had been wrecked pretty bad back there in Independence. We had rebuilt it the best we could in the field, but we didn't have the tools to do a real good job of it, and the car had been a little iffy. Frank had already made the decision to build a new car to replace the 47; he and Spud decided that the best way to fix the 72 was to just about jack up the radiator cap and drive a new car under it. For practical purposes that meant we had two new cars to build.

Peewee Svoboda wasn't working for Frank any more, but he came over on the weekends and built two new frames from Ford parts and did some sheet metal work. We stripped what parts we could off of the 72, including the engine, and stripped the engine out of the 47 so Frank could sell the body to some local racer as what we called a "roller" – without an engine. I remember Frank telling me some years later that the 47 had had a pretty good career as a midget with an Offy engine for two or three years before it got rolled into a ball and scrapped. Spud would never let us throw anything away unless it was pure, total junk, and we accumulated quite a pile of spare parts in a corner of the warehouse. He said it might come in handy sometime in the middle of the season when we needed some goofball thing in a hurry.

By the first part of March we had all the cars done, or nearly so. The weather was warming up a little, so we started in on the trucks. We'd all gotten a little exasperated with the box truck; it was pretty old and needed a lot of work to keep it running. Frank had a little more reason to be concerned with it, because it was a key to the operation and we didn't need it breaking down on us. He wound up trading it to Herb for a '49 with the big flathead V8 motor and a bigger box, which meant that there was room for the stuff we'd had to haul in a separate equipment trailer. The flatbed that usually towed the water trailer wasn't in much better condition and could barely do the job, and the pickup that we'd used to tow the equipment trailer needed its engine rebuilt, too. The pickup made a pretty good vehicle to run and go get stuff, so we didn't want to be without it.