Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

by Brock Yates

  The place was mobbed with reporters and bystanders jammed ten deep in front of the Fuel Injection Special. The car, smeared with rubber dust and oil, was parked outside. A large victory wreath hung on its cowling.

  I spotted Medley on the edge of the mob.

  "Let's get outta here," he said. "The heat's killing me. Vuke's not around. Must be with the VIPs or the big-time press. You know that ice cream parlor near the rooming house? Man, I'd die for a malt right now."

  With that, we fled the hellish scene.

  It took nearly an hour to poke our way through the glut of people trying to wedge their way out of the gates and onto Sixteenth Street. Cars were everywhere, jammed in honking masses. "The main highways for a hundred miles in every direction are in gridlock," said a Speedway City cop, soaked in sweat as he directed traffic.

  We trudged down a tree-lined street in silence. One driver was dead, and many were injured, albeit not seriously, while our rooming house-mate had won the biggest motor race in the world. Even in the shade, the heat was unrelenting. Our pace increased as we spotted the parlor ahead.

  Wheeling through the door, we spotted a couple sitting at a corner table. The woman, dark blonde, was wearing a white sleeveless summer dress. The man, swarthy and well-muscled, was in a filthy, sweatsoaked polo shirt and grimy white pants that appeared to have been worn in a grease pit.

  "Holy shit, that's Vuke!" exclaimed Medley.

  "What the hell is he doing here?"

  We approached the couple, who were drinking large milk shakes.

  "Jeez, Vuke. I thought you'd be over at the Speedway with the bigwigs, celebrating like a real hero driver," I said.

  "You can't believe how hot it was out there. Like driving a tractor in Fresno in July. For the last hundred miles all I could think of was a cold shake in this place. As soon as I could, I got Esther and we scrammed. I'll do that hero stuff when they give me my check."

  So there he was, the winner of the Indianapolis 500, sitting in an ice cream parlor, far from the screaming masses, from the press and the autograph hunters.

  Tomorrow his name would be plastered all over every newspaper in the world and a big payday awaited him at the victory banquet.

  By that time we had packed up and headed out on the long drive back to Los Angeles. Vuke's take was big: $89,496 in prize money, which he would split with the owner, Howard Keck, and his crew. But he would also get the Ford Sunliner convertible pace car, a special winner's wristwatch, a year of free meals from a local catering service, a tool set, and a cocker spaniel puppy with a case of Ideal dog food.

  And one very cold milk shake.

  FOLLOWING HIS DECISIVE VICTORY AT INDIANAPOLIS, Bill Vukovich was content to remain out of the public eye, refusing the corporate endorsements that came the way of an Indianapolis champion, and all offers for public appearances. One exception came when Firestone flew Vukovich and his crew of Jim Travers and Frank Coon, plus three-time Indy winner and track manager Wilbur Shaw, to the Big Apple. The occasion: a special appearance on the Voice of Firestone television show. Harvey Firestone, the scion of the great tire company family, hosted the trip. Prior to the show he ordered a cab to take Vukovich, Travers, and Coon on a tour of the city. Travers recalled, "We told the driver to take us to Broadway. When we rolled down the Great White Way, I turned to Vuke and said, `When Frank and I hired you, we promised we'd get you on Broadway. Well, here you are: Vukovich lifted up his right foot and said, `Cut the shit, Smokey'-that's what he called me-'this is what got us to Broadway."'

  When he quietly returned to his small ranch to help his wife, Esther, raise their two children, Vukovich's absence from the rest of the AAA national championship schedule was a disaster for race promoters across the country. They depended on the presence of the Indy 500 champion to boost the gates at the ten other races leading to the national title. All were held on fairground dirt tracks, ancient one-mile ovals that had been designed for horse racing. Most of them, like the Michigan State Fairgrounds in Detroit, the New York State Fairgrounds at Syracuse, the Indiana Fairgrounds at Indianapolis, and the Arizona State Fairgrounds at Phoenix, had been built between 1880 and 1910.

  The dirt miles were insanely dangerous. Lined with board fences or chain-link barriers, they offered no protection to the drivers. Shredded wood or jagged steel could easily kill a man on impact. The clay surfaces were either deeply rutted and layered in powdery, blinding dust or polished to an ice-rink sheen by the spinning tires. Flying clots of dirt and stones did terrible damage to the drivers, sitting upright and exposed in their cars. They wore nothing but light clothing, a thin leather helmet, and goggles. Broken noses and jaws, and shattered teeth were common during the running of the 100-mile endurance tests, during which the track surface could change radically based on the heat, sunshine, and humidity.

  The drivers made feeble attempts to protect themselves from the debris. Some wore bandannas over their mouths and noses to keep out the dust. Others wrapped cardboard around their midriffs and their right arms, which were most vulnerable during the broad slides that pitched the cars sideways. Some bit down on rags to keep their teeth from rattling loose. Others simply faced the raging dirt, knowing that by the end of the season their entire upper bodies would be a mass of welted, black-and-blue flesh.

  As brave as he was, Vukovich hated the mile tracks. "You get really tired out there over a hundred miles," he'd say. "Or else the car does. You make one slip and you're done. You couldn't pay me enough to get me on that circuit."

  Those words were spoken after his 500 victory, when his nearly $40,000 share of the winnings had given his family a sufficient cushion to restrict his race driving. Prior to winning the 500 he had run the lethal miles, driving with his usual relentless style and winning his share of races.

  Late in the year he did relent, at least theoretically. J. C. Agajanian, the Los Angeles promoter, staged a 100-mile championship race in late October at Sacramento's California State Fair and proudly announced that Vukovich had entered. This was a pure publicity stunt, since he had been paid a hefty sum merely to appear in a second-rate car and attempt to qualify. His time was over 3.5 seconds slower than the pole winner, Jimmy Bryan, and too slow to make the eighteen-car starting field. Having collected his "appearance" or "deal" money, Vukovich headed back home to Fresno no worse for the wear and indifferent to his slow time. Already he was in training for his next race, a defense of his Indianapolis 500 title. When a reporter asked him about his disappointing time at Sacramento, he shrugged and grumped, "Write whatever you want, you don't need me."

  By the summer of 1953, Los Angeles had gone crazy over cars. Since the population boom of the twenties, when the great western migrations reached full stride, the entire basin had become an automobile paradise. Perfect weather, vast open acreage, the nearby mountains with their miles of twisty roads, and the great dry lakes beyond the mountains had produced an environment in which automobiles of every size, shape, and design could thrive.

  The plutocrats of the movie colony had been ideal customers for the flashy Duesenbergs, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. The automobile industry had created a style revolution when the Fisher Body Division of General Motors hired young, brash Harley J. Earle, who was then customizing Cadillacs for members of the movie colony at the Don Lee Agency in Los Angeles. Earle was transforming drab, monochromatic roadsters and sedans into flashy, multicolored rolling stock that altered the entire consciousness of the industry. He would later become chief of the General Motors Art and Color Section, which grew into the giant, corporate styling department that created the incredible two- and three-tone, be-finned "insolent chariots" of the car-crazed 1950s. Earle would be but the first of many designers and stylists to rise out of Los Angeles, both from the hot-rod and custom-car movement and from the more formal precincts of the Art Center School in Pasadena.

  By the twenties, a fledgling hot-rod culture had formed, in the main by young men who took their modified Mode
l T roadsters to the mud-baked, high desert lake beds at Muroc, Russetta, and Rosamond for high-speed runs. Other race cars still ran at dangerous ovals like Ascot long after the multimillion-dollar, ultra-high-speed board tracks built in the 1920s had either burned down or rotted away.

  Following the end of World War II, thousands of veterans returned with fevered enthusiasm for fast sports cars like the British MGs and Jaguars they had discovered during their European tours of duty. The sports car craze joined hot-rodder madness to infest the streets of the entire basin, from the San Fernando Valley in the north to the eastern Los Angeles suburbs to the surfer beach towns in the south.

  In an effort to limit the outlaw world of street racing, the National Hot Rod Association was formed to organize the "drag races" so reviled and feared by the citizenry. The races slowly migrated onto airport runways and special drag stops and off the public streets.

  In a parallel movement, the California Sports Car Club organized races staged on closed public roads and on airport runways as far south as Torrey Pines outside San Diego and as far north as Pebble Beach on the Monterey peninsula.

  Thanks to the Southern California aircraft industry, which had boomed during the war, thousands of young men were now skilled in the arts of welding, lathe work, metal-crafting, tool-and-die-making, drafting, and other skills necessary to build, modify, and maintain high-powered automobiles.

  As a nascent high-performance industry rose out of gas stations, auto dealerships, and backyard garages, self-taught craftsmen began manufacturing exhaust systems, camshafts, cylinder heads, carburetors, fuel-injection systems, magnesium wheels, custom bodies, chassis, and even entire cars. By the end of the twentieth century, such pioneering names as Cragar, Bell, Edelbrock, Iskenderian, Halibrand, and others served as the cornerstone of a speed-equipment industry that generated over 30 billion dollars in annual revenues.

  Meanwhile, master metal men, working with little more than tinsnips, a bag of sand, and a hammer, were creating aluminum masterpieces. Artisans named Kurtis, Kuzma, Lesovsky, and Deidt were pounding out stunning race cars from sheet aluminum and chromemolybdenum steel tubing. Meyer-Drake manufactured powerful four-cylinder racing engines in Glendale that were first designed by Harry Miller and perfected by his shop foreman Fred Offenhauser in the early 1930s.

  In July of '53 the savagery of the Korean War finally ended, with an uneasy armistice. Stalin was dead and a new, smiling president named Ike promised a term of endless rounds of golf and evenings of television laughs with Uncle Miltie while the nation supped on Swanson's revolutionary frozen TV dinners. Reader's Digest scolded smokers with a breakthrough series titled "Cancer in a Carton." The tobacco industry and Liggett & Myers countered the blow with a new L&M brand marketed with the slogan "Just what the doctor ordered."

  The Dow Jones sat in the mid 250s-within striking distance of the pre-crash high of 1929. The Yankees dominated baseball and Hillary and Tenzing conquered Mount Everest. Hollywood was about to revolutionize the picture business with Cinemascope and 3-D. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, the world seemed to be back on its axis.

  Medley and I had returned to Los Angeles after the 1953 Vukovich victory at Indianapolis and drifted our separate ways. He continued his photography and his cartooning for Hot Rod magazine while my freelance writing career began to bear fruit. I sold a screenplay to Warner Brothers that was never produced, along with several stories to Colliers and Look, two of the largest and flashiest weeklies in the business. I soon had enough money to afford a small apartment in Studio City and a used MG TC roadster that I bought from Competition Motors, a hot dealership on Vine Street in North Hollywood owned by a wealthy Austrian emigre and race driver named Johnny Von Neumann.

  The sports car crowd gathered at places like "Hollywood" Bill White's Ascot Cafe on Slawson and the Coach & Horses on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to discuss racing exploits and nighttime adventures on the twisty Mulholland Drive in the hills above the Cahuenga Pass.

  The hot-rodders hung out at the area's drive-in restaurantswhich had become a Southern California fad-between their endless street races and stoplight shootouts. Favorites included the In-n-Out on Valley Boulevard in El Monte, Farmer Boys on Colorado, Bob's Big Boy in Glendale, and Henry's in Arcadia, all of which would form the basis twenty years later for George Lucas's classic movie about the hot-rod culture, American Graffiti.

  A flock of magazines were published to serve the various enthusiast groups. By far the largest was Medley's Hot Rod magazine and its sister, Motor Trend, published by the Petersen Group, which had taken up high-rise headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. Serving the sports car scene was Road & Track, where, from its Playa del Rey headquarters, it lavished praise on the European machinery pouring into the basin. Other, smaller publications concentrated their coverage on the oval-track racers who remained active in the region, although the famed Gilmore Stadium had been torn down in 1951, to be replaced by the CBS television studios. Built in 1934 on the corner of Fairfax and Beverly boulevards by oil baron Earl Gilmore, it was the first stadium dedicated to the booming sport of midget auto racing-the competition that spawned great stars like Vukovich.

  While automobile enthusiasm percolated, there was little crossover among the various subspecies. The hot-rodders laughed at the sports car set, with their English-style driving gloves and woolen caps, calling them "tea-baggers," "strokers and brokers," and "sporty car drivers," while the MG and Jaguar aficionados denounced professional Indy types as "circle burners" and "roundy-rounders."

  It was into this world of car nuts of all types that Detroit made its entrance in early 1953. Cadillac and Oldsmobile had been producing high-performance V-8 engines since the late 1940s but had been reluctant to abandon their giant, soft-spring sedans in order to compete with the sports cars pouring into the American market from Europe.

  But in January 1953, the Chevrolet division of General Motors entered the fray when new GM models were shown at the corporation's "Motorama," held annually at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Among the flashy machinery was a svelte two-door roadster called the Corvette. Its body was fiberglass and its power plant a modified six-cylinder-the "Blue Flame Six" used in the division's mundane passenger sedans. There had been little choice, in that Chevrolet's arch rivals within the corporation, Cadillac and Oldsmobile, refused to share their powerful V-8s with the struggling, entry-level brand. Chevrolet, under siege at the time from Fordwhich had a new V-8 of its own-was left with its own tepid sixcylinder tied to a two-speed "Powerglide" automatic transmission. This immediately handicapped the Corvette in the marketplace against rivals like Jaguar, which employed a high-performance, dou ble-overhead, camshaft six that produced 180 horsepower versus the Corvette's 150. Moreover, the Jaguar used a four-speed manual transmission of the type preferred by enthusiasts. Worse yet, the new XK 140s from Jaguar boasted a top speed easily 25 mph higher than the Detroit upstart. Despite high hopes that the Corvette would penetrate the import sports car market, only 183 were sold in 1953 and rumors drifted through the automobile industry that the project would be cancelled.

  The hard-core sports car crowd who gathered regularly at the Coach & Horses scoffed at the Corvette. Bar talk denounced the "fiberglass flyer" powered by a "shushbox automatic." It made no impact on the anointed, who understood the value of a "real" sports car. Ford then countered with plans for a two-seater called the Thunderbird to be introduced in 1955. It would be described not as a sports car, but as a "personal car," with emphasis on creature comforts and smoothness as opposed to the more elemental pleasures to be found in the Corvette.

  The great Detroit horsepower race was about to accelerate. It had begun in 1948-49, when Cadillac and Oldsmobile developed powerful overhead-valve V-8s that almost doubled the output of the aged in-line six- and eight-cylinder engines that had been the industry standards for decades. These revolutionary new units were quickly imitated throughout the industry, leaving only Chevrolet with their antiquated six. Yet rumors arose
that a revolutionary lightweight Chevrolet V-8 was in the works for 1955.

  Already, Chrysler and Lincoln had engines producing well over 200 horsepower, and both were major contenders in the violent, high-speed Carrera PanAmericana, a 1,500-mile open road race that ran the length of Mexico. Other manufacturers were hastily creating big, thirsty, high-compression V-8s that would easily surpass the 200 hp and soon would nudge past 300.

  Mounted as they were in giant, three-ton sedans and coupes equipped with smallish drum brakes, vague steering, and soft suspensions, these behemoths were far from sports cars. Much of their surplus horsepower was employed in such avante-garde gadgetry as power seats, steering, windows, and automatic transmissions. Still, 100-mph road speeds were common, and accident rates soared as drivers across the nation unleashed their newfound power.

  While the Indianapolis professionals were running a series of 100mile races sanctioned by the American Automobile Association for the national championship, the sports car set was competing on open roads and airport runways converted for racing, with hay bales and rubber cones to mark the corners. The oval-track pros were woolly, intense young men racing for a living. The sports car drivers were simon-pure amateurs competing on the English model, which strictly forbade prize money. Theirs was a "gentleman's" sport. It was believed that money would corrupt the atmosphere, although it was an open secret that many wealthy sportsmen hired drivers with under-the-table payments of hard cash.

  While the gentlemen who ran sports cars were in fact as fiercely competitive as the professionals in some respects, the generally lower speeds and lesser horsepower of their cars (excepting a few ultra-fast and exotic Maseratis and Ferraris that were reaching American shores) made the competition much safer. While the professionals labored on dusty, rutted dirt tracks and a few high-banked macadam speedways, the amateurs played on natural road courses lined with trees, telephone poles, ditches, and, in some cases, houses. Protection involved a few hay bales laid around significant hazards and flagmen to warn drivers of other cars. While off-road excursions were common, the low cornering speeds-generally in the 50-70 mph rangekept injuries to a minimum. This was in part God's grace, because the drivers were as vulnerable as the professionals-at least those driving open roadsters. Seat belts were required, but rollover protection was unknown. In fact, any suggestion of "roll bars" was rejected by all parties, based on the reasoning that the aesthetics of the car would be ruined by such appendages. "We don't race our cars upside down" was the standard response among the AAA professionals, and this mantra was repeated among the amateur ranks.