Chapter 17

Squirt Chenowith proved to be well named. He was just a tiny little guy; if he was over five feet tall it couldn't have been by much, and I doubt he would have gone a hundred pounds. It turned out that he'd been drafted and was looking a two-year vacation in colorful Korea in the face when someone in the processing station decided he was too small to be a soldier. I guess he didn't mind all that much, even though most of us were veterans and not sorry about it.

But I want to tell you, that young man could handle a race car! He won his first feature in the first week we were on the road, I think in Kokomo, but I don't remember for sure now, and he won at least once a week after that as we worked our way south and west through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. He was almost always in the money, unless something goofy happened along the way. I know Spud dropped his restrictor plate a sixteenth of an inch sometime in the first couple weeks, but it didn't slow him down a whole lot, so Spud dropped him another sixteenth. That got him to the point where we could sometimes keep a handle on him, but not always, and he still won an awful lot.

I think it was Squirt who pretty much taught me that while I might be a competent race car driver, I was never going to be a great one. The little guy had something, I don't know what it was, but something that made him just a little faster than everyone else and he got faster with practice. Part of it was the fact that he was hauling around less weight in the car than any one else of us – Skimp was at least a hundred pounds heavier, for example. The fact that Squirt was so good was a little surprising, since in those days most people figured that you had to have some muscle to be a race car driver. That may have been true in some cars, before the days of power steering, but it really wasn't the case in a MMSA midget. They responded well to finesse, not to being bullied; Squirt had all the finesse he needed and then some.

In those first weeks on the road, I roomed with Squirt. He was a nice guy, always bright and chipper but without that chip on the shoulder you often see little guys having. Of course, I was pretty easy going and not much of a one to tease people, so that may have helped.

Over the course of those weeks I learned a little bit about him. It turned out that Spud had raced with Squirt's dad back in the thirties, in some of those bull rings in north Jersey that he had so many stories about. Squirt had been racing for four years, almost all in midgets. Some of it had been a little illegal, in that he was racing on a fake birth certificate at the age of fifteen. Only the draft board, a bad crash and lack of a sponsor had kept him from running the North Jersey circuit again this year. With his talent and his reputation, I didn't think he'd be with us long – sooner or later somebody on the east coast was going to be looking for a fast driver, and he'd likely be heading out.

Sure enough, we were in Muskogee, Oklahoma when Frank picked up the mail package from Vivian and brought it to us in the restaurant where we were having breakfast. I never paid much attention to the mail package, since there was hardly ever anything for me and if I did get something it probably was something I didn't really want. But there was a card for Squirt, asking him to call home immediately. Long distance phone calls were rare and expensive in those days; if you made a long distance call from a pay phone you'd better have a pocket full of change. He cashed a five-spot into quarters and headed for a pay phone.

"Mel, are you thinking that's what I'm thinking it is?" Frank asked.

"Odds are that young man has a Kurtis Kraft somewhere in his immediate future," I agreed. "Like about as soon as he can get his butt to New Jersey."

"Spud said we'd be lucky to keep him for the season," Frank shrugged. "He sure has made life interesting for us, though."

A few minutes later Squirt hung up the phone and came back over to us. He seemed a little bit dazed, like he couldn't believe his ears. "Frank," he said. "I've got to take off for a few weeks."

"I kinda figured," Frank smiled. "You get a ride some place?"

"No," Squirt shook his head, as if he still couldn't believe what had happened. "My brother needs me to wrench for him."

We all knew Squirt was a pretty good mechanic – his fine tuning skills on the 72 car had probably as much to do with him winning as his driving did. "You sure?" I asked. "Seems like kind of a waste for you to be wrenching for someone else."

"This is different," Squirt shook his head. "This is at Indianapolis."

"Indianapolis?" Frank said with surprise. "I didn't know you knew someone running the 500."

"I didn't either," Squirt replied, a big grin breaking out across his face. "My brother Runt heard through the grapevine about someone down in Philly that had a Kurtis Kraft Offy Indy Car for sale cheap, so he went down to check it out. It seems this rich babe's son bought it with the idea of racing it, then wrecked himself up real bad in a sports car race somewhere. She wanted to get it out of the garage so she wouldn't have to park her Rolls Royce outside anymore. My brother agreed to buy it then shook down everybody he knew in north Jersey for the money to pay for it. A cousin of ours was going to wrench for him but his wife got sick. So, now Runt is in Indy with no one to wrench for him."

"Shit, you've got to go," Frank shook his head. "Hell, I've only been to Indy once, that was in '40 when Wilbur Shaw won it with that Maserati. Them spaghetti-guzzlers sure built one fast car."

"I've never been there," Squirt shook his head. "Man, I don't believe this."

"You know, I wouldn't mind going some time," I said. "I mean, just to sit in the stands and watch. It's got to be a lot different from our screwing around on little bull ring race tracks, rodeo rings and the like."

"Maybe we'll have to," Frank smiled. "We're going to be in that neighborhood, and unless Carnie or Vivian have come up with something I haven't heard about we've got an off night that day. I mean, no one within two hundred miles of the place wants to schedule us against the Indy 500. Anyway, Squirt, I think you're going to play hell getting anywhere out of this one horse town, but we're going to be heading through Tulsa today, we could drop you off at the train station. You get up to Kansas City and you shouldn't have any problem getting to St. Louis. There's bound to be a train to Indy from there."

All of us were with Squirt in the train station in Tulsa, wishing him the best of luck over the next month or so. There wasn't a one of us that just plain didn't envy the hell out of him. We were all racers, of course, and back then the Indy 500 was the biggest big deal there was around for us. This was before the days of flag to flag coverage of the race on the radio, but every single one of us, me included, had kept our ears on Mutual Radio to listen to Bill Hurst give us live updates on the race from the track. Every one of us had dreamed of being there. Nothing else compared, nothing else was in its league. We all knew we were at best kind of half-assed carnies showing off for the local yokels and most of us would never be anything but that. Squirt was going to at least get a taste of it and in a way he represented all of us.

Finally, the train pulled in, Squirt got on and waved goodbye to us. We all stood waving goodbye to him, then got back in our cars and trucks and headed on to wherever it was that we were headed on to. I know I felt a little down about it, partly envying Squirt, but partly because I was being honest with myself. I knew that while I might stay with the MMSA for a while, it likely would be about as far as I would ever go in racing. Or, at least something on that level. When you're a young man you think you can conquer the world, but the older you get the more you have to accept your limitations.

We went on about our business. Now, we were short a driver again, but that didn't last too long. Frank went to the Western Union office there in the train station and sent a telegram to Sonny Ochsenlaager up in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Sonny had run with us for several months the summer before, and Frank knew that Sonny was going to college on the GI bill. He would be out for the summer soon, so Frank asked him if he'd like to run with us again, and gave our schedule for the next couple days. The next morning Frank went to the Western Union office in whatever town we were in, and found a telegram from Sonny: "ON MY WAY." He caught up with us a couple days later, driving a rather beat-up looking '39 Chevy.

Since Squirt leaving had left the 72 car without a driver, Sonny wound up taking it over. The first day he was with us, he ran way the hell back in back of the heat, and then ran in the back of the consolation. Spud was a little surprised at that. "Shit," he said to me as we stood there watching the race. "I figured he was rusty after laying off over the winter, but I didn't think he was that rusty."

"Uh, Spud," I said. "Did you think to change the restrictor plate on that car back to normal?"

"Shit," he said again. "No wonder he can't get out of his own way, he's three sixteenths down to everyone else."

"Three sixteenths?" I said. "Boy, that little shit could really drive that thing, couldn't he?"

"Damn straight," Spud shook his head. "I'd even been thinking about dropping him another sixteenth. You know, whatever happens I think we're going to hear from that kid again. I'm a little surprised he came along with us at all, but I guess he wanted to see the country some. Something besides New Jersey, anyway."

Spud changed the restrictor plate just as soon as the consolation was over with. Sonny ran third the next night, and was right in the thick of things after that. That's how much better a driver that Squirt was over the rest of us: three sixteenths better.

In the shuffle around after Squirt left, I wound up with Sonny as a roommate. That was pretty good in its way, since Sonny was a liberal arts major at the University of Wisconsin, and we could have the occasional discussion about something other than beer, baseball, racing and honeys. But there was a down side to it, too – Sonny farted. I mean, he farted a lot. Now, there are not many men among us that won't admit to a nice healthy fart occasionally bringing a grin to our faces, but Sonny was way over that. I don't know what was wrong with his intestinal system. He ate pretty much the same food as the rest of us, but with him it was just priming the pump for another series of explosions. Fortunately the weather was getting warm enough that I could sleep with the windows open, so that may have been all that saved my life.

We swung down into Texas, worked back east a ways, then zigzagged our way back to the north. We were in Cape Girardeau when Frank got a note to call a number in Indianapolis early in the morning, but as soon as possible. He set his alarm to go off real early, and we all kind of wondered what it was all about.