Chapter 16

We got bad news when we got back to Michigan.

One night a couple days after we left, Shorty Notwicki had been heading home after dropping a girl off when he stopped at a railroad crossing because a train was coming. There was some drunk behind him who obviously figured that they could beat the train through the crossing, so he laid his bumper up against Shorty's car and pushed. The steam engine was moving right along and scattered both cars and their occupants over the next quarter mile. It was a closed casket funeral.

Everybody went to the funeral. Spud reported that everyone in town from the MMSA had gone, and he'd called up some guys who had run with them in the past but were working elsewhere. Herb and his wife went, too. Spud said he'd have called us but he had no idea where to call, but he had flowers sent in our names and made apologies for us at the service.

Shorty had been a good guy. He hadn't won as much as some of us but he managed to win some and get in the money some. He'd been in that bad accident back in Independence, but had soldiered right along while racing with a cast and had only missed a couple races. He'd joked that it beat the hell out of cutting meat in his old man's butcher shop. He'd been a good, reliable guy you could run with and know he wasn't going to do something stupid, and he always held up his end of the work load and then some, even when recovering from the accident. We were all going to miss him.

Frank liked to get his hands dirty with us when he didn't have something else to do. A couple days after we got back we were all in the shop working on stuff when Hoss walked in to drop off some sheet metal for the cars. Seeing that both Frank and Spud were there, he got them off to the side, and they talked quietly for a while. The rest of us noticed and got the feeling that this was going to be more bad news.

It was, in a way: Hoss was going to get married. All summer long he'd talked about the good times he planned on having with his girl when he got back to Livonia. Since we hadn't seen Hoss much all winter, just a few minutes now and then at the body shop, we hadn't had much chance to keep up on the details, but from what we knew it had been going pretty good. Hoss's girl, Helen, had been at Shorty's funeral and apparently it had given her some problems, even though his death had nothing to do with racing. The upshot of it was that Helen didn't want Hoss taking off for the summer again. It had come down to fish or cut bait; Hoss decided to fish – the two of them were going to get married the first part of June and Hoss wasn't going to be with us this year, either.

Hoss did tell Frank and Spud that he'd help out where he could in getting things going, and he'd drive for us weekends or something if we happened to be in the area and needed help, but that was going to be about all.

All of us were happy for Hoss if he was happy, and he was. He told us that he was inviting all of us to the wedding if we could make it, and that we'd have a ball since it was going to be a full-out Greek wedding with all the party it involved. There was a chance that we could – we had several dates around Memorial Day weekend in the area, places where the MMSA had been in the past. Frank checked his notebook, and then called Vivian to double check, and as luck would have it Hoss and Helen'd managed to set a date for an open Sunday.

There was no doubt that we were going to miss Hoss, and I was going to miss him more than most since I'd been his roommate all last summer. He was probably the best driver among us that summer, and his winning the so-called season championship proved it. I learned an awful lot about driving the midgets from him, and really, we all did. It just wasn't going to be the same without him around.

"Well, shit," Frank said after Hoss went on his way. "Losing Shorty was bad enough, but now Hoss makes it even worse. I hope there's nobody here planning on leaving, since you guys here are the only drivers I'm sure of for next year."

I hadn't been paying attention to how Frank was doing with recruiting drivers, but that told me he was down to Rocky, Chick, Pepper, Woody and me. "I thought Dink was coming back," I commented.

"As far as I know he is," Frank shook his head. "But I don't know for sure. You get right down to it and I won't know for sure until he walks in the door in about two months. I'll drop him a card, though, just to see if I can find out. I guess I can call around some more, but with all the auto plants going full tilt I don't know how many people I'm going to find that want to go out and play racer for six or seven months. If any of you guys have any ideas, I'm listening."

I didn't have any ideas, mostly because I didn't know anyone in racing outside the MMSA, other than Goober Buford, of course. The other guys all had been local racers around southern Michigan, but it had been a year or two since they'd run and a lot of the people they could think of had already been asked or had something else going. "Maybe you could put an ad in the Free Press," Chick suggested.

"I don't want to do that," Frank protested. "We really need to get racers, guys that know what it's like to race, at least a little. We put an ad in the paper, all we're going to get is guys with a heavy foot that think maybe they could be racers. That's a sure way to tear up a bunch of cars."

"Well, maybe the National Speed Sport News," Spud suggested. "Although if we're going to do that, we ought to be doing it before the season gets much closer."

"Well, maybe," Frank nodded. "But Spud, mostly we've recruited guys I know from around here. What would happen if you were to head back to Jersey for a few days and nose around the people you know there?"

"There's a few people I might be able to ask," he said. "But it would be nice if I could get in and out of there without my ex-wives finding out about it."

"That's the risk you take, I guess," Frank shook his head. "The rest of you guys, ask around. Remember, we don't want wild men, we want guys that know how to put on a show without tearing up the equipment."

It was a few days before Spud took off to his old stomping grounds around New Jersey. When he got back he reported that he'd found two or three guys that probably would show up and work out. A few names had turned up in the Detroit area that sounded promising, but like Frank had said, it all depended on who walked in the door when the time came to go.

By then, it was March, and we'd pretty well finished up on the majority of the work on the race cars. There was still plenty of work to do on the other equipment, including the engine work on Chicks, Woody's, and my cars. Along in there, Frank got a card from Dink, who said he'd be along when Frank wanted him, so that sounded pretty positive.

We had a warm spell in the first part of March that cleaned the snow up pretty good, and then it turned cold for a while. We hit a couple nice days along toward the end of the month, and Frank arranged with some guy he knew with a little bull ring of a track up by Pontiac to let us go up and use the place for a couple days for testing. So, the five of us drivers, along with Frank, Spud, Vivian, and Hattie headed up there one day to give the cars a workout.

It was a dirt track, of course. Sometimes in the spring a dirt track can get awful soupy and you don't want to get on it because it will tear the place up. This one was solid enough, although still damp enough that dust wasn't going to be a problem. The idea was to get a few miles on the cars, especially the new ones, and see if there was anything that needed to be done to them while we still had the shop to do it in.

As it turned out, all of the cars needed to be fiddled with, although nothing major really broke loose. I kept it a little sedate in the 66 car since I didn't want to advertise my little extra engine work over the winter. I let her rip a couple times for half laps when no one else was close by me, and it seemed to run a little better than it had the year before. That might just have been because I hadn't been in a real race car all winter, except Goober's Nash in Daytona, and since it was only a stock car it didn't count. I just knew it felt good to be out on the track again.

Not surprisingly, the two new cars needed a little more work than the others, just to shake the bugs out. For whatever reason, Frank had decided to keep the 72 car's number even though only maybe ten percent of the car was from the old 72. The other new car, the one that replaced the old 47 that we had used for a spare car though as little as possible, got a new number: 4. I have no idea why Frank didn't just use the 47 over, or chose the other number. For that matter, I didn't know why he'd chosen any of them, although I found out years later that dice were involved for some of them. I suppose that was as good a method as any.

Each of us drivers tried out several of the cars, especially the new ones. Looking back on it, I find it just a little interesting that when Spud asked if any of us would like to change cars for the summer, all of us turned him down. I guess I didn't think about it much at the time, but I realized later that all five of us had been doing a little extra work on our cars and I didn't have the only cheater out there. What's more, looking back on it I don't think we fooled Spud much, except maybe in the details, but maybe he thought that we needed a little reward for sticking through the winter and coming back for another year.

We headed back to the shop and worked halfway through the night on the cars, trying to clean up all the items on the bitch lists and probably succeeding with most of them. The next day we hauled back up to the track at Pontiac and ran the cars some more. The track had dried out and firmed up some more, and there were ruts and bumps from where we'd run the day before. The track grader was locked in a shed, and it was just rougher than a cob out there, although in the course of the driving we were pretty well satisfied with the way the testing was going.

However, the testing came to a very quick halt when Hattie came up to Frank, who was working on a car or something. The next thing you know, Frank was out there waving a red flag at Chick. It was time for the baby to come, and in only a couple minutes Chick and Hattie were racing down to the hospital in Livonia.

Of course, the rest of us came into the infield when we saw the red flag, and we all knew right quick what had happened when we saw Chick and Hattie leave. We all sort of hemmed and hawed around until Frank finally said, "Well, hell. We're not going to get anything else done today; we might as well load up, drop off the cars, and keep Chick from getting too bored."

These days, of course, it's the common thing for a man to be with his wife in the delivery room, but back in those days that just didn't happen. There used to be plenty of old jokes about the husband wearing a trench in the floor of the waiting room wondering what was going on, and like any good joke there was more truth to it than fiction. We took the time to load up, but it must have been a strange sight to anyone coming to the hospital for the rest of that day to see a semi loaded with race cars parked in the hospital parking lot.