Chapter 21

I'll have to admit to having some mixed feelings about heading out on the road again. On the one hand, it felt like I had been tied down in one place long enough and it was time to get back to seeing new places and doing new things. On the other hand, having the regular job and dating Bonnie some awakened a little desire in me that hadn't been there before to settle down to a more normal existence. It wasn't a huge burning flame at that point, but I suspected that the time would come when I would be glad to settle down in one spot.

I didn't worry much about it right then, since my mind was mostly set on the new season. Mr. Kravitz had come back to school at just the right time. We had about a week to take care of the final items and it was a busy week, what with closing out the shop, and hauling all the extra little odds and ends out to Frank's uncle's. That included a test session down at the track in Flat Rock, a different place than we'd gone the year before, because the track we'd used up at Pontiac had been bulldozed for a housing development.

As we pretty well suspected, there was no word from Woody, and Frank wasn't planning on him going with us. Chick and Hattie weren't planning on going on the road either, not that it was any big surprise – he'd been working in the shop at the Ford agency since we got back, and seemed to like it there. The three of them were just going to stay in the house that we'd rented all winter, although both of them had made some sounds about looking around to buy a house. They didn't have any great deal of money stuck back, but Chick had his VA housing entitlement that meant that you could buy a house with no money down, so they were thinking about that real hard.

When it all settled out, the only drivers we had going with us that had been with us the year before were Rocky, Dink, Skimp, Pepper, and me. Right at the last minute we were joined by Buck Jacklin, who had run with the crew a little the year before I joined up. Buck was a tall, lanky hillbilly without many teeth – he'd lost them in a confrontation with a steering wheel in some wreck years before. Between that and a hillbilly accent so thick it would have taken a chainsaw to get through, it was hard to figure out what he was really talking about sometimes. He'd spent most of the last two years making the NASCAR circuit, not to any great success, but the guys that knew him said he was a competent driver.

All that meant that we needed a total of six new drivers. I'd been keeping up on the problem since it was talked about around the house a lot. Frank just hadn't been having a lot of luck coming up with people. He had been about ready to put an ad in the Free Press in desperation in spite of all the troubles he could expect with cars getting torn up, when Spud got the idea of calling Squirt and Runt Chenowith in New Jersey, to see if they knew anyone. The favor that we had done them back at the Indianapolis 500 the year before got paid back in full, because a few days later four guys showed up in a '49 Pontiac. They all had some experience racing in midgets and other stuff. More important, they all had good recommendations from the Chenowiths.

The New Jersey guys told us that Squirt and Runt had spent the winter working on that Kurtis Kraft Offy, trying to come up with ways to make it go faster. They were both going to Indy in a few weeks to spend more time working on it, and Squirt had a few lines out hoping to come up with a ride of his own for the race.

Over the course of the winter a redheaded kid by the name of Dewey Blodgett had been hanging around the shop every now and then. He was just out of high school, skinny and had a world class case of acne. He had a job pumping gas, but somehow he heard about the race cars being worked on and showed up when he was free to help out. He never asked for anything more than to hang around with us and maybe drive one of the cars on a track some time. He'd seen a few races but never had been in a race car or on a track. He was a nice kid and always ready to help out, especially with the dirty jobs, so on our first trip to Flat Rock Spud let him take the 98 car out for a bit. He wasn't real, real fast with it, but seemed solid. The kid was always careful and good natured; after Spud and Frank talked it over for a bit they decided that if they had to have a pure rookie they could do a lot worse, and asked him if he'd like to go with us. He jumped on it like it was the last boat out of China.

That got us up to eleven drivers, and that was enough to make do if we pulled the old game of having someone drive two cars in the heats. We couldn't do the deal of having Spud be the twelfth driver, since we didn't have Hattie to run the flag stand, but at least Chick promised to help out on weekends if we were within driving range. "We'll pick someone up somewhere along the way," Frank said, and that got us set for the start of the season.

We started the season the first Friday night of the year in Flat Rock, then went back to Livonia for the night. The next day we went to Owosso where we'd been the year before, then after spending the night in Livonia again we hit the road for real for a swing through the southern states while the weather up north was still on the iffy side.

The weather wasn't a lot less iffy to the south. We got rained out six times in the first month, and cold weather kept crowds down. Twice we were flooded out, with our planned tracks being well under water. One time we had to load up after a race, drive all night and most of the next day to make our next date because the flooding had caused a couple bridges to be closed. Frank was pretty down about the whole thing, griping about how he was losing money on all this, and if he'd had any sense we wouldn't have gotten started for another month, ignoring the fact that the early season southern swing had been a good deal the past two years.

When you get right down to it the rest of us were feeling pretty down, too. Right then we needed a few warm, blue-sky days to perk us up, and we all knew it. What made it worse was that we were down in the heart of the Bible Belt, so mostly it was pretty dry. For the most part we didn't even have the solace of a nice warm bar to hole up in and have a few to take the edge off of things.

Finally, just when we were getting to the point that we couldn't take much more of the cold gray skies, it turned warm – no less damp, but warm. For a couple days you could hardly move without breaking a sweat and those cold days in the recent past started to feel pretty good in memory. We at least had some sunshine, but every afternoon would build up into huge thunderstorms.

One evening we were at a track down at Marked Tree, Arkansas. It was a Saturday evening and we had a pretty good crowd. We'd gotten two heats in all right, but as we ran the third one the sky grew awful dark, and it was clear that we were going to get hit. Just as Spud was lining up the consolation race the wind and rain hit us, and it was a real blinger. There was no way we were going to run that race, so Spud just told us to get under cover. We got cockpit covers on the race cars and then just got into whatever vehicles were right around. Those of us that had been with the crew the previous year missed having Chick and Hattie's trailer, where we'd been in the habit of stringing a tarp, but at least in the vehicles we could stay dry. The crowd headed for their cars, too, and a lot of them took off for home.

The wind blew like mad, shaking the vehicles and blowing the rain around. Then, all of a sudden we were glad we were in the vehicles and not under a tarp, because it started to hail. Not just little pea-sized stuff, either, but lots bigger, getting up toward the size of golf balls, and it came down like it was being shoveled. It was one heck of a racket, and I wondered if the windows on the Ford would hold up to the beating. For whatever reason the side windows held, but the windshield was battered pretty bad from taking those hailstones head on, and finally it cracked and broke. Not all the way with big chunks of glass flying around – it was safety glass, so it stayed in place, but it was all beat up and you couldn't see through it. Dewey and Perk, one of the New Jersey guys, and I couldn't do much but sit in the Ford and hope for the best.

Then we heard a roaring like a big diesel freight train. Now, I grew up in Nebraska and knew what a tornado was. I'd even seen a couple when I'd been younger, so I guess I was just as glad that I didn't see this one coming. I have no idea of where we could have gone that would have been any safer than sitting in the car, which I knew wasn't real safe. At least we heard the roar moving off to one side so I could be pretty sure it would miss us.

Miss us it did, but not by much. We could still see out the sides of the car, and we could see out my side as the tornado went past, not a hundred yards off. What the tornado did hit was the grandstand, which had been filled with probably a couple thousand people a few minutes before. About all it had to do was touch that thing and there were planks flying all over the place, just scattered like matchsticks.

Then the wind quit and things died down. In five minutes, the rain had stopped and the sun was coming out. The three of us got out of the car, relieved that we'd missed a real close one. We looked around to see that where the grandstand had stood there was literally nothing. Even the cinder block risers that had held the planks of the bleachers had mostly been knocked down.

"Anybody hurt?" Frank spoke up.

We all pretty much agreed that except for most of us having the shit scared out of us, no one was hurt.

"I think maybe we'd better go check in the parking lot," Spud suggested. "There were people riding it out in their cars over there."

We all headed across the track and through where the bleachers had stood, and out into the parking lot behind them. There were still dozens of cars there, all of them beat up to one degree or another but most of them setting upright. One of the planks from the grandstand had gone right through a car end-on at window height, but fortunately the people inside had been ducked down, so other than being covered in flying glass they were all right.

Several cars were turned over, and there were a few people hurt. As far as we could tell nobody was hurt seriously, which was a huge relief. We spent from then until pretty close to dark doing what we could for people, helping them get out of there. We never saw an ambulance, but we were able to get some of the locals to take the injured people to a hospital in town, and help find rides for people whose cars were too busted up to drive.

The light was fading when we drifted back to our vehicles. The race cars all looked like they'd been pounded on by baseball bats. There was nothing serious, but they looked like sin. All of the road vehicles had been beaten up pretty badly too; most had some glass broken, and I wasn't the only one to lose a windshield. Frank looked around and said, "Let's get loaded up and get back to the tourist cabins. Fortunately we've got an off day tomorrow and maybe we can fix things up a little there."