The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  With that race and Oldfield’s record, Fisher’s Indianapolis starred on the map as a motor city.

  Champion continued practicing laps on his Gladiator in Charles River Park until he could follow the pole line at 60 mph all the way around and hold it, lap after lap. At last, he arranged for an exhibition. He engaged the requisite official timers and alerted Boston’s Newspaper Row, along Washington Street, that he would drive the mile in under a minute.270

  John J. Donovan of the Globe assigned a photographer to stage the Frenchman on his Gladiator in Charles River Park.

  When the Charles River Park held the matinee races, Elise sat among the unusually small crowd in the searing heat (multitudes had escaped for the cool Atlantic beach). Albert, a chauvinist, as a rule prohibited her from watching him race, concerned that he might get entangled in a horrific crash, an occupational hazard. He was more lenient when his solo effort gave him more control. “When running against time, I always feel safer—perhaps because I am an experienced mechanician and have confidence in my skill as a driver,” he explained.271

  Such a severe heat wave gripped the Northeast on Sunday, July 12, that the Globe would run the headline, “Many Died from Fearful Heat.”272

  Thus, Elise joined the audience witnessing a closely contested fifteen-mile motor-pace race in which national champion Bobby Walthour of Atlanta fought off challenges from Basil De Guichard and two Americans. Twenty-five amateurs battled in a ten-mile open. Between the events, Albert roared onto the boards.

  On July 12, 1903, Albert Champion drove a mile on the Clément Gladiator motorcycle he had imported from Paris in 58-4/5 seconds—the first-ever mile in less than a minute on a motorcycle—around a board cycling track in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on what is now part of the MIT campus. Photo by Elmer Chickering. Courtesy of Cherie Champion.

  Contrary to the staged photo published on page one in the next day’s Globe, he wore a leather winter hat with earflaps. Only those fanning themselves for relief under the slanting stadium roof and in the exposed cheap bleacher seats in the blazing sun saw that Albert was attired in heavy corduroy trousers. He had pulled on so many wool sweaters that he looked like the Michelin man.

  Hundreds of faces swiveled as one to watch Champion zoom around the velodrome to build speed, wheels tight on the black pole line for one lap. Two laps. The next time around, he nodded to the starter, standing like a sentry by the start/finish line in front of the grandstand.273 A pistol fired. Champion set off on his wild ride.

  Boston society photographer Elmer Chickering sensed history in the making and had set up his tripod and camera on the infield of the finishing straight to capture Champion at full speed.

  Donovan wrote in the Globe:

  Lying flat on the long racing machine, as not to offer any resistance to the wind as he cut through the air, he was a picture of dare-devil nerve. He shot down the stretch and hit the first turn. True to his training as a motorcyclist, and the good lines of the track, he shot over so far that his body was in a horizontal position as he whizzed around the steep bank.

  Spectators held their breath and many persons on the front row drew back and did not lean over the edge of the railing as they have in the past at races. With a master touch he steered the machine, which was moving like a projectile. He followed the pole line as if he was glued to it, and even on the steep banks did not deviate more than a few inches from it. His control was magnificent, and experts saw that he was out to get a record.

  Lap after lap he shot around the track while women turned their heads away and more than one man got nervous. It was all over very quickly, for the gun was fired for the finish and the chronograph club, the timers’ organization, announced that the Gaul had covered the distance in 58-4/5 s.274

  Champion, first in America to drive a motorcycle under a minute for the mile, now boasted that he would beat Oldfield’s world record.275

  Days later, Champion was in Washington, DC, guiding his Gladiator to pace George Leander, a strapping six-foot rookie pro from Chicago, in a sunrise workout on the boards of the Coliseum on Capitol Hill.276 They peeled off five fast miles and left the track to allow three other teams to prep for that evening’s race. Champion leaned his motorcycle against a line of boxes on the south side of the track and went with Leander to the training quarters for their rubdown.277

  Next to practice on the track was national champion Bobby Walthour. His pace driver had not arrived, so, alone, he pedaled some laps, then stopped to sit on a box next to Champion’s motorcycle. Waiting for his pacer, Walthour grew impatient. Bored, he jumped on Champion’s motorcycle, turned the speed lever, and zoomed away at a swift clip.

  Champion heard the choooo-ing of his motorcycle tires on the boards and hurried, half dressed, from the training quarters.278 As Walthour flew by, Champion shouted at him to stop.279

  “Walthour laughed at the fiery Frenchman and, believing that he was the master of the machine, he turned on more speed, and the big single went around the bowl at a gait that made Walthour look like a squirrel in a cage,” reported Bicycling World.280

  Others joined Champion in yelling at Walthour. Everyone realized the star from Atlanta was going too fast. Walthour became conscious that he had no idea how to slow or stop the machine. The lever he thought controlled the speed failed to respond to his touch. Laps flew by before Champion and bystanders comprehended that Walthour was hanging on for his life.

  “Hold on tight!” Champion hollered as Walthour went by, blond hair flying in the wind.281

  Champion ran back to the training quarters and grabbed a pacing motorcycle that was ready. He was bare-chested as he hurried that machine onto the track and chased. His Gladiator had gas to keep going until Walthour became dizzy and fell. Champion wanted to prevent him from getting hurt, and he also wanted to protect his motorcycle.

  Around went Walthour, gone pale with fear, followed by Champion, grim and determined as he gauged the speed of both motorcycles. Champion accelerated to close the gap separating him from Walthour. After circling the velodrome, Albert pulled up alongside Bobby. They rode side by side for some laps282 before Albert dared to get close enough down a straight to lean over and press the correct lever of the motorcycle Bobby rode.283 At once the roar of the motor quieted, grew more and more subdued, and after a half-dozen laps the Gladiator coasted to a safe stop.284 Walthour was helped off. He declared he was finished driving motorcycles.

  Witnesses congratulated Champion for averting disaster and demonstrating presence of mind and courage.285 Bobby admitted he was nervous, on the verge of being rattled, until Albert pulled up to rescue him.

  Champion, quick-tempered as usual, grew disgusted with motor-pacer colleagues he saw riding with caution rather than daring. He returned to the Eastern Seaboard circuit with his resolute confidence and paced in the slip-stream behind George Leander driving an Orient Motorcycle. There, Champion won six out of eight events.286 Three times he defeated the ginger-haired Bobby Walthour,287 distinguished by the national champion’s stars and stripes tied around his waist. Albert admired Bobby as America’s greatest talent. He told Bobby, “I will race you any time for fun, money, or marbles but I am going to beat you and beat you badly.”288

  He may have stayed longer on the circuit to race Walthour more, but something else changed his mind. On July 26 Barney Oldfield created national news on the Empire City Race Track. Oldfield opened an afternoon program early with a one-mile time trial in 999 to take advantage of the day’s smoothest turf surface. “He cut the corners so closely that at each turn his rear wheels skidded across the track, throwing up great clouds of dust, and it looked from the stand as if he surely would overturn,” observed the New York Times.289 “But no accident occurred and he came down the home stretch with such a burst of speed that a cry of ‘Record! Record!’ went up from the spectators.”290

  Oldfield scored a new record: 55-4/5 seconds, a new hallmark speed of 65 mph. The New York Times called him America’s automobile racing champ
ion.291 Champion felt the compulsion to drive his motorcycle faster than Oldfield’s record.

  Some Charles River Park programs were fundraisers to raise money for the purchase of a gravestone for Harry Elkes. For the September 3 Harry Elkes Memorial Meet, several marquee names had signed contracts to compete but cancelled to take better offers. Albert Champion purchased new batteries for his Gladiator and skipped a couple of meals while he tuned up his engine and readied his motorcycle.292

  John J. Donovan of the Globe informed him that many of the fifteen thousand spectators attending that Thursday afternoon program were saying that on his own Albert could not do anything remarkable.293 That galvanized the Frenchman. He stood on the start-finish line and spoke through a megaphone: “I am going to try, and try hard. I am here for business, and I intend to do as I always do, whether in a race or not—do the best I can and risk my neck to the limit in order to get the best results.”294

  The audience watched him swing a leg over his Gladiator. Fifteen thousand heads turned as one to follow his preliminary laps before he turned the machine loose. Only his percussive engine broke the silence. Everyone saw him whirl around the banks, entering and leaving each turn at the same angle, to shoot down the straights.

  He felt his tires slip on the pole line as the Back Bay mist made the boards damp.295 But he kept in control and whizzed through five laps.

  When his time was announced, the crowd cheered so loud that voices echoed.

  Fifty-six seconds flat.296

  “Albert Champion Cuts His Record on a Motor Cycle,” declared the Globe.297

  The meet receipts totaled $772.298 The summer-long fund raising bought a headstone carved with Harry D. Elkes’s name arcing over a winged wheel for his grave in Syracuse.299

  On Monday, September 7, Champion participated in the Charles River Park motorpacing season finale. Despite a damp, chilly afternoon, all the seats and the infield were filled. Champion dominated a twenty-mile motor-paced race against two adversaries.300 Then everyone watched him dismount his Orient bicycle and hop onto the Gladiator to drive an exhibition.

  Moisture in the air interfered with the carburetor’s vaporized fuel-air mixture for combustion, causing his engine to misfire.301 Nevertheless, he managed fifty-six seconds flat.

  Champion adjusted the carburetor.302 It was late afternoon. The slanting sun cast long, exaggerated shadows for his last chance for the season to beat Oldfield’s record.

  “Like a meteor, he dashed around the track, the motor throwing out sparks, and with the lights and shadows playing on the ‘speed demon’ it was a picture spectacular enough to hold the most blasé case of ‘speeditis’ enthralled,” John J. Donovan told Globe readers. “A mighty cheer greeted Champion at the finish, the vast crowd finding a vent for its pent-up feelings.”303

  Champion leaned low and aerodynamic as he steered his motorcycle to lower his world-record time for the mile to fifty-six seconds flat, again on the board track in Cambridge, witnessed by fifteen thousand spectators. From the Boston Globe, 1903.

  Champion drove the mile in 55-2/5 seconds.304

  He had eclipsed Oldfield’s latest mark by two-fifths of a second. The Frenchman was now the fastest driver in America around a circular track, on two wheels or four.

  The automobile trade press buzzed about a French engineer at the Packard Motor Company in Warren, Ohio, renowned for high-priced luxury cars. The engineer had designed a one-off racecar, the Gray Wolf.305 It was so sleek and close to the ground that it looked fast even when it was parked. The front tapered to a slim nose like its furry four-legged namesake. Packard’s new general manager, Henry Joy, a Detroit businessman, was shaking things up. He had formed a group of investors that purchased the company from the founder, James Ward Packard. Henry Joy hired the French designer and commissioned the Gray Wolf as a gift to the eponymous Packard before moving the enterprise into a modern factory in Detroit.

  Champion received a cable inviting him to meet Packard sales manager Sidney Waldon, contract driver Harry Cunningham, and a couple of mechanics a few days before auto races on the mile-long Brighton Beach horse track in Brooklyn.306 Waldon and Cunningham wanted to discuss his possible role as Cunningham’s backup for the Gray Wolf.307 But first Champion was to face off with Walthour in Atlanta for the US national motorpace championship.

  RACING OBVIOUSLY IS MADNESS.

  —GRIFFITH BORGESON,

  THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE

  AMERICAN RACING CAR1

  Bobby Walthour, winner of thirty-seven motorpace races over the 1903 season, ranked at the top of some twenty-five professional motor-pacers.2 The northeastern press gushed about the Georgian and had dubbed him the “Dixie Flier.” By early September, he had claimed his second national pace title and returned home to Atlanta. Champion had competed in only eight races, with six wins. He claimed that by defeating Walthour three times, he considered himself to be national champion. Nevertheless, the governing body and a promoter in Atlanta decreed that Champion and Walthour must battle on Thursday, September 17, in a best-of-three series of five-mile matches to settle the American national paced title.3

  This Atlanta event was to be held at the Piedmont Coliseum, built by Jack Prince,4 a bantam-sized English expat with a squeaky yet loud voice that could cut through the din of any crowd like a saber.5 Forty-two-year-old Prince at all times presented himself freshly barbered, in a suit with a diamond pin winking in his cravat, the ends of his bushy mustache waxed, and he donned a bowler before he stepped outside. He was known for courtly Victorian manners,6 and answered to Jack. He had been England’s national champion in the 1880s on high-wheelers with hard-rubber tires.7 When safety bicycles became available with pneumatics in the early 1890s, he was racing in Boston. Prince valued the new tires, inflated to high pressure, for their easy rolling along a hardwood surface, like bowling balls down an alley. This motivated him to launch a new career constructing board-cycling tracks that were banked and lightning fast.8

  A self-taught engineer, Jack Prince built his tracks without a blueprint to safeguard anyone usurping his franchise. Instead, he carried in his head the exact number of ten-penny nails and two-inch-wide boards needed to construct his ovals,9 complete with seating for thirty-five hundred to twelve thousand spectators, depending on the local population. He hired carpenters by the dozens and directed them early in the week to complete the tracks in just five days so he could fire the start gun for races on Saturdays. He kept on the move through the 1890s, erecting coliseums, as he called them,10 from Havana to Omaha, and from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Atlanta’s Piedmont Coliseum, ten laps to the mile, provided triple-pivot banking through the curved turns, forty-eight degrees at the top and sloping down to fifteen degrees on the straights. Prince drummed up press coverage by handing out bottles of four-star brandy or boxes of cigars to reporters to get their attention before selling them on the entertainment value of his upcoming program.

  Prince hustled across Atlanta to sign Bobby Walthour to a contract. Bobby was a dream star—his name sold tickets and filled the stands. Walthour was born on New Year’s Day of 1878, four months Champion’s senior. The Walthour family had been well off, but lost everything in the Civil War, a predicament common across the South. Bobby’s grandfather, George Washington Walthour, had owned a sprawling cotton plantation and slaves.11 The plantation lent its name to Walthourville, near Savannah. Bobby’s father, William Walthour, was a lawyer in 1861 when Georgia and ten other states withdrew from the Union over the issue of slavery and formed the Confederate States of America.12 William joined the Confederate Army as an officer. He suffered a serious neck wound during a battle and bore permanent scars.13 His house was burned to the ground by Union general William Sherman’s troops on their march to destroy everything in their path from Atlanta to Savannah. After the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, the state government seized the Walthour property for back taxes.14

  Bobby and twin brother James were the ninth and tenth sons of William Walthour, wh
o died when the twins were twelve. Four years afterward, the boys moved to Atlanta to work full-time as couriers for an older brother’s bicycle shop. Bobby started racing at seventeen.

  The sport’s fervent expansion had taken Bobby around Georgia. At eighteen he was five feet ten and 155 pounds with striking blue eyes.15 He had turned pro and joined the Southern Circuit on coliseums built by Jack Prince in Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Montgomery. Racing also had taken Bobby north to Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, then east. Experience with packs of riders bumping shoulders and throwing elbows and knees for better position had toughened him and taught him tactics. Every time he had crashed, which was often, he got up and charged right back into the action. What kept him going was pocketing decent prize money. The amounts grew bigger after he won the 1901 Madison Square Garden six-day partnered with Canadian Archie MacEachern. The next year he took up motorpace races, and he eventually dethroned the formidable Harry Elkes.

  Wherever Bobby traveled, he still called Atlanta his home. He was Georgia’s first national-class sports hero. Fellow Georgian Ty Cobb was eight years younger and just entering baseball, and Bobby Jones was too young yet to swing a golf club. Walthour’s triumphs raised the morale of Georgians, recovering from what they referred to as the “War against Northern Aggression.”

  Yet another incentive kept Bobby racing to win. At nineteen in 1897, he had eloped with his fifteen-year-old fiancée, Blanche Cooledge.16 They had pedaled a tandem to a justice of the peace in suburban Decatur. Now Bobby and his wife had two daughters and a son.

  Prince also considered Albert Champion a big star. Prince climbed aboard a train to Boston to sign up the Frenchman. The $1,000 purse meant the winner would have a $600 payday and a new American flag to tie around his waist for the next season’s races. Like the previous year, when Albert and Bobby contested the championship, controversy swirled over whether a foreign rider could claim the American title. That heightened the pressure on Bobby.