The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  Boston’s dailies covered a local Memorial Day auto race meet at the Read-ville Trotting Park, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Automobile Club. Twelve thousand attended. The main event was a one-miler. A car called the Red Bath Tub won in 1 minute and 2-4/5 seconds,183 two seconds ahead of the Aluminum Flyer.

  Other cities also held auto races. Oldfield led the automobile mile-a-minute chase for automobiles. Champion’s closest competitor in the motorcycle game lived in England.

  Also on Memorial Day, in Charles River Park, lanky Harry Elkes had a fresh approach to the new season. He had trained like a Spartan over the winter in an effort to overcome the hoodoo he had felt the holiday held for him. Now he was back at the top of his game, tucked over his handlebars behind his world-famous German motorcycle pacer Franz Hoffmann. Elkes pedaled behind Hoffmann on the fastest ride of his life in the featured event, the twenty-mile motorpace. “He had broken the world’s records behind motorpacing for five, ten, and fifteen miles at the new Charles River Park track,” reported the New York Times.184

  John J. Donovan wrote in the Globe, “More than 15,000 persons filled every available seat and inch of standing room for the record-breaking race.”185

  At sixteen miles, Elkes led Bobby Walthour and two more rivals hurling at more than 50 mph down the backstretch. The tires were choooo-ing crisply on the boards. The engines made regular popping noises.

  Then the chain of Elkes’s bicycle snapped apart and the sounds changed.186 Coasting, he slowed as his pacing motorcycle shot ahead. The broken chain tangled in the spokes of his rear wheel and flipped him high into the air. He somersaulted over the handlebars and landed on his back with a thud.187 His disabled bicycle clattered onto the boards. A motorcycle behind Elkes whammed into his prostrate body and cracked his skull open like a walnut.188 The motorcycle, its driver Frank “King” Gately, and the rider Gately was pacing, Will Stinson, whose motorpace driver and stoker had been killed on Memorial Day three years earlier at Waltham when they’d struck a telegraph pole, cannonballed into Elkes.

  Now came a moment of horrified silence.

  Elkes, King Gately, and Will Stinson were lying inert on the smooth board surface. Blood poured from the wounds of all three.

  Elkes’s clothing was torn to ribbons and he looked as though he had been struck by a locomotive.189

  Stinson pressed a hand to stanch the bleeding from a gash on his face,190 and to keep an eye from falling out of its socket.191

  “Women fainted and men acted like crazy beings, shouting and yelling,” reported John J. Donovan of the Globe.192 Hundreds of spectators jumped from the bleachers onto the back stretch and rushed across the track to give assistance to the casualties.

  Ambulance horses galloped the injured men to Massachusetts General Hospital. Elkes was dead on arrival.193 Surgeons struggled to save Stinson’s eye.194 Gately and Stinson were hospitalized for days before being released.195

  Someone at the hospital told Gately he’d been lucky to survive. He retorted: “Lucky nothing! Do you call it lucky when you see the money in sight to come down like I did? I may have escaped serious injury, but I cannot see where the luck comes in.”196

  Elkes’s body was returned to his hometown of Glens Falls,197 near Syracuse, New York. In Boston the Harry D. Elkes Memorial Fund was established to buy a headstone.198 Steel collection boxes were distributed at tracks and shops around New England and New York.

  Champion learned about the tragedy of Elkes from scruffy newsboys on street corners hawking their stacks of the latest editions. Elkes became the sixth US cycling fatality in three years.199 Champion packed his Gladiator and caught a train with Elise back to Cambridge. He rented Charles River Park velodrome to practice steering through the banked turns, getting the hang of changing his balance every six seconds in and out of each steep, curved turn. The turns exerted a gravity force three times his body weight—what jet pilots in coming decades would refer to as “3-Gs.” He upped his speed and concentrated on keeping his tires on the pole line, the black strip around the inside lane where distances are measured. The Cambridge oval served as his research facility.

  In addition to honing his technical agility, Champion needed to nudge up the Gladiator’s horsepower. He was an early advocate of boosting the capability of the engine—essentially an air pump—by increasing the air volume moved by the long, smooth pistons stroking up and down inside the cylinder holes. Boring out cylinder holes even a little enhanced engine displacement and bolstered the horsepower on stroke three, the power stroke in the four-stroke cycle. For this he had Waltham Manufacturing Company machine tools at his disposal.

  Champion was getting ready for his assault on the mile when news flashed from coast to coast that Oldfield had blazed into auto history on June 20 at the horse track at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis. Oldfield drove a mile in 59-3/5 seconds, a scorching 60 mph.200 Oldfield had achieved the holy grail of speed.

  Born Berna Eli Oldfield in a log cabin on a farm west of Toledo, Ohio,201 he left a one-room brick schoolhouse at fourteen to work full-time in the kitchen of a Toledo mental institution202 before crossing town for a job as hotel bellhop.203 One frantic afternoon in the hotel, the bell captain, an older teenager, called him Barney and dispatched him on an errand.204 Oldfield, in his wool uniform with shiny brass buttons and a pillbox hat, corrected the bell captain, saying his name was Berna.205 Oldfield’s father, Henry Clay Oldfield, had christened him after a fellow soldier the elder Oldfield had served with in the Union Army during the Civil War. The bell captain snapped that Berna was a sissy’s name and commanded him to get cracking.206 In the heartbeat it took to flinch from the insult to family honor, Oldfield had to weigh following an order or quitting on the spot. He acquiesced to Barney.207 Afterward he moved to another hotel to operate an elevator and his pay packet read Barney.208 When his parents and older sister,209 Bertha, learned about what had happened, even they called him Barney.

  By 1894 he’d purchased a bicycle and begun racing. In Ohio’s amateur state championship, he scored a silver medal,210 showing promise as a sixteen-year-old. After gaining more experience, Barney turned pro for the Stearns Bicycle Company of Syracuse. For the next six years he rubbed wheels and bumped shoulders in packs with cycling’s elite. Rude strength helped him win provincial races, but his legs lacked the snap to make it to the top tier. At the 1899 Montreal world championships in Queen’s Park, which attracted national champions from a dozen countries, he was eliminated in every first heat. He idolized the quicker Tom Cooper,211 a star to Oldfield’s supporting role. They buddied up and took trains together to tracks from Omaha to New York’s circus maximus, Madison Square Garden.

  Cooper’s clean-shaven face and pleasant waspy features coordinated with his tuxedo and silk top hat. At twenty-two in 1895, he had been a registered pharmacist,212 dapper in a striped bow tie and short-cropped hair parted precisely down the center, employed by the Michigan Drug Company in Detroit. That summer he won his first bicycle race, in Pontiac, and then more than a dozen more on ovals from Toronto to Washington, DC. His meteoric rise had earned him the nickname “the Phenomenon of ’95.”213 A Chicago bicycle company and a New York tire company put him under contract and took out ads promoting his name and image. The next year he chucked his day job for the lucrative pro circuit, from San Francisco to New York, and racked up a dozen national titles at various distances, including the coveted mile. “Cooper heads the list in the race for championship honors,”214 remarked the Chicago Tribune. It was not unusual for him to pocket $1,000 in prize money in one day. Cigarette packs carried cards with his visage, like the cards of musical-comedy stars and baseball heroes.215 He bought houses in Detroit for his parents and married sister.216 When the Detroit Telephone Company was forming, he became a prominent investor.217 He accepted the invitation from a Paris syndicate to compete for the 1901 season,218 and he returned to Detroit with a souvenir motor-tandem.219

  Tom Cooper retired as national professional
cycling champion and funded Henry Ford to design their racing car called 999. Cooper brought in Barney Oldfield to join them. Photo courtesy of Janet E. Brown and Roy H. Drinkwater.

  In October 1901 Tom suggested to Barney that they take the motor-tandem to the horse track in Grosse Pointe,220 a community of summer mansions on Lake Michigan outside Detroit, and ride an exhibition prior to a scheduled auto race. They expected the motor-tandem to enchant folks in the stands. Instead, the audience was enraptured by the contest between Alexander Winton, the grand old man of autos, and an unknown tinkerer from Detroit driving an auto he had made, Henry Ford.221

  Barney dismissed cars as a fad,222 a popular belief at the time. Tom said he was excited watching the spindly underdog Ford beat the celebrated Winton.223 He told Barney, five years younger, that he was quitting the cycling game. He wanted to do something different and had bought a coal mine in southern Colorado.224 He invited Oldfield along to dig for coal. After months of backbreaking labor through the winter in the Cow Creek Coal Mine, the two men netted about $1,000.225 Cooper told his friend to kick him for suggesting the mining idea.226 He insisted that Oldfield take all the money. Bicycling World estimated that Cooper’s worth exceeded $100,000 ($2.7 million in 2014).227 He had decided to go back to Detroit and have Ford build him a racecar for his next career.228

  Oldfield called for splitting their earnings.229 He asked to take Tom’s motor-tandem to compete in Salt Lake City, on the velodrome near the Salt Palace, with its glistening dome made of rock salt.230 Then they went their separate ways.

  By May 1902 Cooper and Ford had formed the Cooper-Ford Racing Team to build two racecars.231 Cooper put up most of the capital,232 and Ford designed the vehicles and selected the materials.233 They set up a shop at 81 Park Place,234 employing a chief mechanic, Edward “Spider” Huff, along with a draftsman. After a while, Cooper and Ford decided they needed another mechanic.235 Cooper suggested Oldfield as a man who lived for speed.236 He wrote a letter to invite his friend in Salt Lake City.

  In late September, Oldfield hired into the Cooper-Ford Racing Team.237 He found the racecars so stripped to save weight that he complained they looked like ugly bed frames on wheels. Cooper explained that they were built for function, not looks. Each auto had four cylinders with cast-iron cylinder walls. One, 999, was painted red.238 The other, dubbed “the Arrow,” was yellow and had a round steering wheel.239 Cooper and Ford entered 999 in the Grosse Pointe track’s five-mile Manufacturers’ Challenge Cup against Winton.240

  After Cooper drove practice laps at Grosse Pointe, Ford told Cooper, Spider Huff, and Oldfield that he was discouraged with 999’s engine, and he declined to have his name associated with what he saw as a probable failure.241 Ford, thirty-nine, may have been looking for an excuse to quit because his wife, Clara, detested Cooper’s prowling nightclubs and roadhouses accompanied by women. On October 13, Cooper bought out Ford’s interest in the business and both autos for $800.242

  The day before, Cooper and Spider Huff took turns doing practice laps and complained that 999’s steering bar was strenuous to handle. Cooper grumbled that at top speed 999 could be death on wheels.243 Oldfield asked for a turn—likely his first opportunity to drive a four-wheeler.244 Cooper warned that he could break his neck.245 Oldfield retorted, with characteristic bravado, that it would be his own neck and he had not come from Salt Lake City just to squirt an oilcan.246 He tore around the mile-long oval in the fastest time, 1 minute 6 seconds. Cooper was impressed with his friend’s skill at sliding through the turns without crashing into the stout wooden fence bordering the track.247 He and Huff agreed that Oldfield would drive.248

  On a cold and cloudy Saturday afternoon race day, October 25, 1902, Cooper had been registered to drive in the Manufacturers’ Challenge Cup race, but he gave up his seat for Oldfield.249 Barney Oldfield buttoned up his jacket, stepped into 999’s bucket seat, fastened goggles over his eyes, and gripped the steering bar.

  The contest, the fifth on a card of six, pitted 999 against three cars, all made in Cleveland. The event also tested gas-combustion engines against steam power. One entrant was a Geneva Steamer. With four black boilers and a tall exhaust stack, it resembled a small locomotive. Trackside wagers favored the Geneva Steamer to defeat the admired Alexander Winton, who was driving his Bullet.250 A second Bullet, dubbed “Pup,” was driven by Charles B. Shank of Cleveland. The fourth entry was Thomas White in his White Steamer.

  Rolling up the straight toward the grandstand, Oldfield joined them. His opponents may have disregarded him as a country rube. They were unaware he was a veteran of hundreds of starts. Oldfield focused on getting 999 to the first turn as though it were his final destination. The wheels of 999 skidded around the turn, throwing up a dirt shroud. He never let up on the gas and lapped the Geneva Steamer, then the White Steamer, and finally Shanks in the Winton “Pup.” In the last mile, Alexander Winton pulled out with engine trouble.

  As soon as Oldfield stopped in front of the grandstand, he “was carried from his machine to the judges’ stand on the shoulders of admirers who rushed on the track by hundreds,” reported the Cleveland Plain Dealer.251 It pronounced the contest “the most exciting event at the Grosse Pointe automobile races today.”

  Henry Ford watched from the grandstand.252 When Oldfield returned to 999, still parked on the horse track by the grandstand, Ford marched over and congratulated him and Cooper. Ford, bundled in an overcoat and a bowler, posed with Oldfield in his bucket seat for a photograph.253 Then Ford left to call on newspaper offices and claim credit as 999’s designer. This publicity helped secure him financial backing to found the present-day Ford Motor Company.

  Oldfield would comment in later interviews that he reaped more press for that victory than he did over his entire eight-year cycling career. He and Cooper bounced on trains around southern Michigan to drum up attention for five-mile auto races on horse tracks—Oldfield in 999 against Cooper at the wheel of the Arrow, repainted red and renamed Red Devil.254 These were some of the first auto races people in Michigan ever saw.

  Barney Oldfield, left, on 999, the racecar designed by Henry Ford, standing. Oldfield and Champion shared a friendly rivalry about driving the fastest mile around a track. From the collections of The Henry Ford.

  Oldfield’s Memorial Day triumph at the Empire City Race Track thrilled Carl Graham Fisher in Indianapolis. Since Fisher had purchased an Orient motor-trike at the 1900 auto show in Madison Square Garden, he had converted his downtown bicycle shop into an auto dealership,255 the city’s first. In addition, he had begun to organize races. On June 20, 1903, he held a program sanctioned by the AAA at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, near the state capitol.256 He served up three preliminaries and featured a five-mile match race, best of three, between Oldfield and Cooper.257 Fisher offered $1,000 to the winner plus a $250 bonus to break the minute for a mile.258 The sunny Saturday drew five thousand people. Society notables swanned in the box seats. Mayor Book-waiter officiated as a timer with two civic leaders lending gravitas to record authenticity.

  The occasion represented a career highlight for twenty-nine-year-old Fisher. As a child half-blind with an astigmatism,259 he had stumbled and fell so often that other kids called him “Crip,” for cripple.260 Unable to see writing on the chalkboard, he was the class dunce until one day at age twelve he stormed away from school for good. He took a job as a vendor on inter-city trains,261 walking the aisles brandishing a wooden tray—supported by a leather strap around his neck—to hawk peanuts, magazines, and books. The enterprise nurtured salesmanship. Eventually, he visited an eye doctor. The fuzzy world Fisher grew up in finally sharpened into focus with his prescription pince-nez. By seventeen in 1891 he opened a bicycle repair shop.262 He exerted considerable energy in building his business, and also to campaign for Indianapolis to become synonymous with auto racing.

  Now, on that June race day, Fisher ordered Cooper to drive slowly away from the grandstand, and after the car rounded turn two, Fisher barked to Old-fi
eld in his famous Ford to cruise to the line in front of the grandstand. Once the cars were a half-mile apart, Fisher waved the green flag.263

  Mayor Bookwaiter and other timers in the judges’ stand on the infield by the finish line gripped a stopwatch in each hand—one for each driver. For the next five minutes, spectators practically held their breath, expecting at any moment that a driver might crash into eternity.

  Cooper’s Red Devil clocked the faster first mile,264 at 1 minute 4 seconds. But Oldfield sped up and won by a tight seven-second margin.265

  The second match made motorsport history. “Oldfield’s machine was fairly flying through the air,” reported Automobile. “He rounded the turns with a recklessness which did not characterize the driving of Cooper.”266

  Oldfield’s 999 sprinted through the first mile in 59-3/5 seconds—clipping two seconds from his world record.267 The judges announced the news to the grandstand.

  “Every eye was on Oldfield, for the crowd felt that indescribable thrill of anticipation that another world’s record was to be broken before the race was ended,” noted Automobile.268

  He burst across the finish of the clay oval in a new five-mile world record, 5 minutes 4-3/5 seconds.

  “Hundreds of spectators left their places in the boxes and rushed to the track, where they surrounded Oldfield and overwhelmed him with congratulations,” said Automobile. “Then the champion, who had surpassed himself, was led to the judges’ stand and introduced to the crowd. Hats were thrown in the air and the fairgrounds echoed and re-echoed with cheers for Oldfield. Then Cooper was introduced and greeted warmly for his part in the race.”269

  Oldfield became America’s first man to drive a gas-powered auto a mile around an elliptical track faster than a minute. He had changed car racing forever.