Chapter 6

"Frank! Damn! Good to see you," I said in surprise. "You still racing?"

"Some," he admitted. "I somehow didn't expect to find you pumping gas."

"Just temporary," I told him. "I just graduated from Milwaukee State, going to be teaching down in Chicago in the fall."

"College? You! Damn, I never expected that either. You been racing any?"

"Been to a few races," I told him. "I wouldn't have minded the chance to do some driving but college had to come first."

Frank looked at me for a moment and smiled, "How would you like to drive a midget for me tonight?"

I sure wasn't expecting this. Yeah, I'd enjoyed going to those races now and then, and I often wondered what it would be like to drive one of those little open wheelers. "Frank, I have to tell you that in spite of that Jeep race, I'm really not a racer," I told him. "But yeah, I wouldn't mind giving it a try. You have a spare car or something?"

"It's a little more complicated than that," he said. "See, after I got out of the Army I went back to racing, but I discovered I'd lost some of the edge. So I got involved in promotion, and I only race now if we're real shorthanded, which we are tonight. Worse comes to worst you can just make the start and stay out of the way. But it ain't gonna happen. I learned back on Okinawa that you've got the touch for it."

"You don't have to keep talking me into it, you've managed that already," I told him. "Where and when do you want me to meet up with you?"

"You know where the fairgrounds in Oconomowoc are?" he asked.

"I know where Oconomowoc is but I've never been there."

He said the fairgrounds weren't hard to find, and gave me directions. Oconomowoc was only about twenty miles from where I was, and I had plenty of time after I knocked off at the gas station to change clothes and stop at a little greasy spoon restaurant for a burger and fries. For some reason, I remember that restaurant even though I stopped there only the once – they had those big, fat crinkle-cut fries that you don't find much anymore, and I thought it was one of the best hamburgers I ever had. I got back in the Ford and drove on out to the fairgrounds, which proved easy to find.

I drove into the infield and parked the Ford where the racers were being worked on, got out and looked for Frank. I didn't see any sign of him, but I caught sight of another familiar face I hadn't seen since Okinawa: Spud McElroy. That seemed a little strange because I remembered that Spud was mostly an East Coast guy.

"Hey, Mel!" he called as I was still recognizing him. "How the hell are ya? Frank said you'd be along."

"Yeah, he talked me into it this afternoon," I told him. "What you been doing with yourself?"

"Working with Frank the last couple years," he said. "It's a long story but we've been doing all right."

We stood there for a minute or two just getting caught up a little before Spud asked if I wanted to check out the car. I'd been wondering about it a little, so Spud took me over to a little white racer, with an orange Phillips 66 shield on it, with the number "66" in the center. The car was small, like any midget, smaller than the midgets they run today. It was a front-engine job like they all were, a little less than four feet wide and not eight feet long, but it had a V8-60 for an engine, and in just one look you could tell that thing could fly. I took one look and smiled, "Sure isn't a Kurtis Kraft, is it?"

"Are you kidding?" Spud snorted. "Those things are going to kill midget racing. No, this is a Midwest Midget Sportsman; it's not like any other midgets. That's what Frank and I intended when we built it. I thought Frank said that you hadn't done no racing since Okinawa."

"No, but I go to the races every now and then, and I know what a Kurtis Kraft is. Why do you think it's going to kill midgets?"

"Midgets were supposed to be cheap cars that guys could build out of junk yards and stand a chance of winning," Spud shook his head. "But you can't build a car out of a junk yard that can compete with them, so the guys that want to race cheap are going to go elsewhere, to jalopies or something."

In the long run, Spud nailed it right between the eyeballs. Midgets were originally supposed to be cheap cars, like he said – but right after the war a guy by the name of Frank Kurtis was building midget racers that were more than a cut above the cars that had been around before the war. Rather than the rail frame that were on those cars – and the Midwest Midget Sportsman – these had a tube frame welded up like a fabric-covered airplane – it was a lot lighter and stiffer at the same time. The Kurtis Kraft midgets also had a specially built Offenhauser racing engine with twin overhead cams that put out power like nobody's business. The whole thing sold for about $4,500 at the time, which sounds good until you stop and think that you could buy a pretty good street car new at the time for a thousand dollars. But enough people wanted to be competitive that Kurtis was selling all he could build. Occasionally someone in an older car with a V8-60 might beat one, but it was becoming relatively rare.

Spud was right in that the Kurtis Krafts killed midgets as they had been known up to that time – and he was right that the bottom-end racers were going to go to jalopies, which we hadn't learned to call "stock cars" yet. These days the stockers have just about killed open-wheel cars, although they aren't dead yet.

Anyway, I took a closer look at the car, and yeah, it wasn't a Kurtis Kraft, and there were several things different from all the other midgets I'd ever seen. First off, there was a clutch and transmission, which I saw was the standard Ford V8-60, and a standard Ford rear end, with just a universal joint connecting the two. Most regular midgets anymore had what they called an "in-out" gearbox, which was really kind of a clutch, and a quick change rear end so you could mount gears in it that were appropriate for the track. "Don't look too bad in the cockpit for fit," I commented.

"You shouldn't have any problem fitting in there," Spud said. "Giff didn't have any problem with it."

"Who's Giff?"

"Giff Elliott, the guy that's been driving it, he's a few inches taller than you are and a hundred pounds bigger. A guy wants him to try out driving a sprint car for him; I think he'll wind up doing it regular."

"Well, all right, let's give it a try," I said. It wasn't a bad fit once I was inside, although I figured Giff must have been packed in there pretty good. There were only three gauges – oil pressure and water temperature, along with a tach.

"Master switch is that toggle under the tach," Spud said. "Starter is that black button next to it."

"What, no push start?"

"I told you these cars weren't your regular midgets. You might want to use first to get going, but run this track in second; you won't get much chance to stick it into high, anyway."

I started the engine; it caught right away. I gunned it a couple times, then let it back off. I was surprised to discover that it idled pretty well, which a regular race engine wouldn't, at least in those days. It was loud; there was an exhaust pipe that ran past each side of the cockpit. "Run a few laps to feel it out," Spud yelled over the noise. "Then let her go and see what she does."

So, I let in the clutch and goosed the engine a little and headed out onto the track, which was an old quarter-mile horse track. I did like Spud said, took the first couple laps slowly, just getting the feel of the car, then put the pedal down fairly hard, getting a feel for how it handled in the corners, and tried to push it a little harder every lap. I was going pretty good and the car felt comfortable, even pushing fairly hard in the turns. It felt like it could stand more power – and there's hardly ever been a race car that couldn't – but all in all it seemed like an honest car.

After a few laps I was feeling more comfortable with the car and started leaning on it in the corners more, hanging the tail out so it felt like I was pushing it about as hard as it wanted to be pushed. I wasn't keeping track of the laps, but I guess I got in twenty or so before I pulled it back into the infield and stopped about where I had started. I shut it off, and looked around to see Spud heading over to me. "Gettin' into it a little, I see," he called.

"Yeah, a hell of a lot more stable in the corners than the Jeeps on Okinawa," I told him.

"If you want to practice a little more we'd better get some gas in that thing. I figured that you were getting close to running out."

"Not much gas left in it?"

He shook his head. "It only has a two-gallon gas tank. That's enough for maybe thirty laps on a track like this. That doesn't get rid of the fire danger, but it cuts it down a touch. Don't try to go more than two heats or more than the feature on a tank or you're gonna run out. You have to do your own gas fills since we don't have a pit crew."

Spud showed me where the fuel trailer was – it was a standard Army five-hundred-gallon fuel tank trailer like we'd often used on Okinawa, so it didn't take any time to learn to use it. "We buy gas wholesale, and since we're not using it on the road we don't have to pay highway taxes on it," he explained with a wink of the eye that told me that it was used for more than that.

It didn't take long to fill the tank, even with the undersized nozzle on the fuel hose. When we were done Spud asked if I'd like to have him go out with another car so we could run together. I wasn't about to turn him down since I figured I could learn something. He hopped in another car and we got out on the track.

We started out with me running right behind him trying to get around him. I tried getting under him several times and it didn't work until I got up on the high line and was finally able to put him away. He got on my ass right after that and I had a heck of a time trying to beat him off. We diced it up three or four laps with me mostly running high and him trying to dive under me in the corners until he finally made it by. I saw how he'd changed his line to make the pass and decided to try the same move on him. We went back and forth for quite a while, until he finally gave his arm a wave and we headed for the infield. I noticed that several guys had been standing around watching.

"You ought to do all right tonight," Spud told me after we got out of the cars. "'Course, I figured clear back on Okinawa that you had the touch."

By now several of the other guys had gathered around where Spud and I were standing by the cars talking. "Guys, this is Mel Austin," Spud told them. "He's an old friend of Frank's and mine. He's going to be driving the 66 car tonight, filling in for Giff." Spud introduced me around, but I only caught a couple of the names. We stood around shooting the bull for a couple minutes, then Spud offered to buy me a pop.

We headed over to a nearby pickup truck that had an ice chest in the back, and Spud pulled out a couple colas. "So what have you been doing with yourself?" he asked. "Frank said you'd been in college."

I spent about two minutes talking about going to college and expecting to teach high school in the fall, then asked Spud what he'd been up to.

"You're looking at it, mostly," he replied. "This is the third summer that Frank and I have been on the road with this show. We came up with the idea together, but he was the one that came up with the front money. He and I built most of the cars."

"You doing all right with it?"

"Making a living, which is better than I did running a V8-60 against the Kurtis Kraft Offys in the bull rings back east."

"You don't have a problem with that here?"

"No, no way," he said. "I don't know if you've figured it out yet, but the cars here are all one design. The bodies are a little different for the sake of looks, but underneath they're as alike as Frank and I could make 'em, except for a couple cars that are on their last season. We can do it that way because we own all the cars."

"That's different," I said. "So you can set up who you want to win?"

"We could, but we don't. Well, not much. We like to see real racing, but everybody understands not to bang the cars up much or they can get sat down. Me and Frank were on Giff's ass about it, which is why he went looking for a sprint car ride, and I hope he gets it. Everybody also knows that if someone starts winning too much or outrunning the rest of the field, we'll diddle the car a little to slow it down, so that helps to keep things close, too."

"That's a different approach," I said again. "So the Midwest Midget Sportsman Association is you guys, too, right?"

"You got it, Mel," Spud laughed. "It's a long story and it took a fair amount of beer for Frank and me to work it out, but so far it's worked pretty well."

"Where is Frank, anyway? I haven't seen him since this afternoon when he asked me out here."

"Oh, he's around somewhere, probably arguing with the fairgrounds manager or something, I guess the manager is a pain in the ass. I don't get into that part of it, my part of the job is to keep the cars running along with all the other shit we've got. Frank takes care of the business side, along with Carnie."

"Carnie, from Okinawa? He's here, too?"

"Well, he's with us, we don't actually see him a lot since he's our advance man," Spud smiled. "You would have been asked to join us when we started this thing if we could have tracked you down, but nobody in your home town had any idea where you was."