The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  Atlanta, Georgia’s largest city and the state capital, was home to 90,000 residents,17 as well as Coca-Cola, which was sold nationwide. Champion considered the Dixie Flyer his only worthy American rival and had agreed with Prince to climb aboard a train and travel 1,100 miles to Atlanta to race against him in the season finale. Prince knew Bobby was fast, and that he would force Albert to ride his best. They would compete in Bobby’s home town.

  A week before the match, Champion boarded a train from Boston with a sleeping car for the thirty-hour trip to Atlanta. He joined Jack Prince and Jed Newkirk, whom Champion had hired to drive his Orient pacing motorcycle around the Piedmont Coliseum. Newkirk, a twenty-year-old of medium height, clean-shaven, with dark hair, had showed potential as a sprinter but had switched to driving the motors for more money. Albert christened his motorcycle “Fleur de Lis.”18 The machine had long handlebars sweeping back so Newkirk could hunker down over the rear wheel to shield Albert.

  The Atlanta Journal’s sports writer, Grantland Rice, announced Champion’s arrival in the newspaper and called him the “Demon Devil” for his recent motorcycle records.19 Rice had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Greek and Latin.20 He coined immortal designations that contributed to his ascending to the dean of America’s sportswriters. He would nickname Notre Dame’s football backfield the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse21 and refer to the sensational University of Illinois running back Harold “Red” Grange as the Galloping Ghost of the Gridiron.22 Rice captured the excitement he felt watching Champion take risks at speed behind motor-pacers by calling the Frenchman a “Dare-Devil.”

  Walthour’s former pacing motorcycle, Candy, had burned up in a crash on the Revere track in Boston, after gasoline spilled and caught fire from sparks flickering out the exhaust pipe. The Dixie Flyer had purchased a replacement, which he named “Candy Junior.” Driving it was Gussie Lawson, an eighteen-year-old Swedish immigrant out of Chicago. Lawson’s deft handling of the hulking machines, with their noisy, temperamental engines, around triple-pivot banked turns while sheltering his cyclist put him in demand as a master motorman.23 Attired in a leather jacket, pants, football helmet, and boots, he proved an original advocate of motorcycle leathers.24

  The new pacing machines were equipped with special roller bars fastened to a bracket hanging over the back of the rear tire.25 When the cyclist’s front tire touched the roller bar, the roller turned to serve as a light brake for the bicycle. This simple device could have prevented Champion’s tragic accident on Memorial Day 1900 in Waltham.

  Every day leading up to the Thursday evening race, Grantland Rice wrote stories promoting the match. Champion had departed Boston with a new portrait photo by Elmer Chickering. The Frenchman’s photo showed him in a suit, tattersall vest, and tie like a society figure. On the day before the match race, Rice splashed Champion’s visage across the Atlanta Journal’s sports page. The headline proclaimed: “Cycle Kings to Settle Title.”26

  The sports writer told readers that “in Albert Champion there could not possibly be a better rider to meet Bobby Walthour.” He added:

  It is Champion who has proven the hard nut for the cracks to go against last year, and this season he seems to have at times speed and endurance beyond conception, and when it looks as if he has been ridden off his feet he comes back so strong that he wins. As a pace follower he is the equal of any rider in this country, and in Champion Walthour meets the only rider in the game he really fears. It is a well known fact that Walthour is more afraid of Champion than he was of Harry Elkes or any other rider who follows pace.27

  Ticket sales were brisk for the Piedmont Coliseum, within sight of Atlanta’s skyline. On the evening of the race, Champion pulled on his white jersey, the maillot blanc of the Paris city champion, a beau geste lost on Rice, who complained he looked plain. “Walthour, on the contrary, was decked out with the American flag like a Labor Day float.”28

  More than four thousand men, women, and children filled the Piedmont Coliseum to capacity. The building had poor ventilation and right away filled with a gray tobacco cloud. Smoky halos glowed from incandescent light bulbs hanging from the curved ceiling. Yet nothing distracted the raucous audience, excited to cheer its hometown hero in his battle against the Frenchman.

  Jack Prince stood in the infield near the band and the cyclists and their motorcycle drivers. At seven o’clock sharp, he waved both arms to get everyone’s attention and the band stopped playing “Dixie.” He raised the megaphone—nearly as long as he was tall—to his lips. His Queen’s English sounded quaint to the audience accustomed to a Southern drawl as he boomed out Albert Champion’s introduction.

  Without delay, Albert spun onto the track. The audience gave him a standing ovation for his lap of honor. He waved and flashed his showboater smile. When he stopped on the start/finish line, a woman handed him a wreath of flowers.29 He looked bashful and took the wreath into the sawdust arena and set it on his bicycle crate.

  Prince’s attempt to introduce Bobby was drowned out by the mass of admirers. Bobby rolled onto the track, an arm wrapped in bandages from a recent spill.30 The partisan audience rocked the building with applause.

  Next the pace drivers, Jed Newkirk and Gussie Lawson, thrilled the audience on their lap by revving their noisy engines, unrestrained by mufflers.

  Only when the two teams lined up at the start/finish line did the spectators hush. Prince hoisted his megaphone to announce that Champion had insisted on following the National Cycling Association rules. That meant that after the riders had completed the first mile, no accident or mechanical failure could suspend the race, unlike the coliseum’s house rule that an accident at any time meant a restart.

  Then Prince, his bowler askew, fired the starting gun. The throng yelled and stomped. Near the end of the first mile, Champion’s front tire tore away from the wheel and threw him onto the track at 40 mph.31 He slid down into sawdust. He hopped back up, slapped sawdust off, ignored a bleeding cut on his forearm, and got back on his bike for the restart.

  When they set off again, Walthour dashed ahead and gained one-third of a lap. For a mile, Champion held him even, then closed the gap to catch Walthour in the fourth mile.

  “It was an anxious moment for the thousands of Walthourites on the seats, although the performance of the game foreigner was applauded,” Rice reported. “Perhaps Walthour took the applause to himself. At any rate, he let out a kink in his legs and slowly took the lead again, getting in forty yards to the good in a last mile that made the pacing machines grunt like razor-back hogs with the hounds after them.”32

  To the foot stamping and yelling that made the coliseum walls vibrate, Walthour won the first match, in 7 minutes and 25 seconds, an average of 40 mph.

  In the second match, Albert and Bobby rode shoulder to shoulder for two miles, their backs low, shoulders steady, legs spinning in a fluid motion so close to the roller bars of their motorcycle pacers they looked attached. Both teams swooped up and down the banking to get an advantage. The Frenchman yelled at his driver to speed up. Newkirk obliged and Champion followed Fleur de Lis as they pulled ahead.

  “At the end of the third mile, Jed Newkirk’s chariot of fire was close upon Bobby’s hind wheel and it looked surely as if Bobby was going to be lapped,” recounted Grantland Rice.33

  Gussie Lawson gave Candy Junior more gas. The audience leaped up in unison as Walthour pedaled smoothly to circle around behind Champion and make the race even.

  “But the lilies of France were destined to whither,” wrote Rice. “Bobby ruthlessly mowed them down, winning by a much narrower margin than the first heat.”34

  Bobby won by fifty yards. He crossed the line in 7 minutes 17 seconds, breaking his own coliseum record by three seconds and clocking 41 mph. He captured the match in two straight victories to win his second national motor-pace title and once again fend off the foreigner.

  Over the line, Bobby slowed down and Albert pulled alongside. “The Frenchman rea
ched out and gave the American a hearty handshake, congratulating him on his victory,” a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution observed.35 “The act did not escape the spectators. Immediately Champion was greeted with a hearty round of applause. He had shown by his action that he was a true sportsman and the crowd showed its appreciation.”

  Jack Prince took in the boisterous scene—everyone standing and yelling, men throwing hats in the air, women waving white handkerchiefs, people hugging one another. Putting on more matches would be like printing money. He moved his show to the Savannah Coliseum for another race.

  The act could have lasted longer. However, Albert, seeking a new route to glory, chose to debut as a car racer up north in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

  Champion ventured by train in late October to Brooklyn, at the southwest end of Long Island, and its Brighton Beach resort on Sheepshead Bay. The resort boasted of a lavish hotel and a horse track with a mammoth stadium. The Long Island Automobile Club was holding its second annual racing program, which drew American drivers and cars like Packard and Cadillac as well as a French contingent including Renault, De Dion, and Darracq.

  Champion had been invited to Brighton Beach by officials of the Packard Motor Car Company, who had wooed him to drive their first-of-its-kind racecar, the Packard Gray Wolf.36 The company’s general manager, Henry Bourne Joy, sought Champion for his star power, the cachet of his name, and his audacity to drive a motorcycle faster than the mark of Barney Oldfield with 999. Oldfield now was employed by Alexander Winton to drive Bullet II.37 Henry Joy wanted a standout name associated with the Gray Wolf, and he picked Champion.

  Albert strolled to the track’s stadium and mingled among mechanics, with grease to their elbows, who were working on parked racecars, preening owners, swanning drivers, and loitering reporters. Everyone was eager to shake his hand and praise his motorcycle record. He had the opportunity to speak French with youthful compatriot Marius G. Bernin, a wiry athlete who would drive a Renault to three victories on race day and turn into the star. A photographer for Automobile posed Champion, looking pensive in a tie and bulky sweater, his cap pulled snug to keep offshore gusts from blowing it away.

  Champion easily found the Packard Gray Wolf, on display for public inspection under the grandstand. The Gray Wolf, having been cited in trade journals, was causing a stir. Most auto chiefs marshaled their limited resources to build passenger roadsters with lackluster names for the consumer market. Only a small number felt obliged to turn out a singular racing car that broadcast blazing swiftness. Alexander Winton produced Bullets. Henry Ford had his 999. Ransom Olds called his racecar “the Pirate.” Walter C. Baker created the electric Torpedo Kid. James Ward Packard wanted a fast car to grab attention for his Ohio Automobile Company of Warren, Ohio. It produced a limited number of pricey Packard models named methodically from the alphabet.

  The Gray Wolf was the first car built by the company for the sole purpose of speed. Trade journals had introduced it in photos taken back on September 5 at the Cleveland race meet. Its designer, Frenchman Charles Schmidt, sat on the bucket seat. He gripped the steering wheel and peered over the body, crouching like the vehicle was impatient to spring.

  Schmidt was small and trim like a gymnast, with a clipped mustache and intense dark eyes. He had graduated from the École des Arts et Métiers in Angers and had worked in the late 1890s for Mors automobiles in Paris.38 He had a hand in designing Mors cars, which he drove in races. In 1901 he had immigrated to the United States to apply his talents at the Mors factory in Brooklyn. He was a supervisor and came to the attention of Henry Joy,39 then shopping for talent.

  Henry Bourne Joy had bought a Packard Model C in 1901 on a visit to the New York auto show. Impressed with the car’s reliability, he took a train to Warren, in northeast Ohio, near Youngstown, and suggested that James Ward Packard make more of his luxury cars. While popular Oldsmobile Runabouts cost $650, Packard autos started at $2,600. They had gained a following among the wealthy. Packard told Henry Joy that boosting output required greater capital. Joy, a slim, aristocratic Yale man, looked through his pince-nez and saw his future.

  Henry Joy, thirty-eight, a year younger than Packard, had come prepared to deal. He was born into one of Detroit’s wealthiest and most socially-connected families, the son of a railroad magnate.40 In early 1902 Joy formed a group of investors. The investment group pumped money into the Ohio Automobile Company and took over majority ownership. One of the first things Joy did was recruit Schmidt in April 1902 as his handpicked chief engineer to design a fast car for James Ward Packard. In October the investors renamed the business the Packard Motor Company.41 The eponymous James Ward Packard continued with the title of president while Joy, as general manager, called all the shots and planned to move everything to Detroit.

  Manufacturing racing autos was in its infancy. That original generation was all about speed. Racing tested designs and materials, and pushing the limits of man and machine made for good advertising. Like Ford’s 999, early racing cars allowed the driver to step into the side or rear, drop onto the bucket seat, and stretch his legs out—like sitting in a kayak—to set a foot on the gas or brake pedals. Drivers were on their own to make the vehicle hold the turns around fairground tracks and reach the finish line. Nobody considered the advantage of a windshield, a roll bar to protect the driver in case the car flipped over, or a seat belt. Safety protections came much later, always in response to deaths from horrific accidents.

  In 1903 Schmidt, a fanatic about saving weight, built the Gray Wolf’s frame with light pressed steel instead of the standard steel-plate-and-wood construction.42 He deployed the minimum of aluminum required for the chassis and the hood, painted gray, to cover the engine like a skin. Its wheels were weight-saving wire rather than wooden-artillery wheels.43 The rear wheels were equipped with drum brakes. The Gray Wolf’s four-cylinder 25-hp engine and transmission, with two forward speeds and one for reverse, unleashed a ripping top end of 75 mph.

  This machine cost $10,000—double Schmidt’s salary.44 The vehicle, loaded with a full six-gallon gas tank, water, and oil, tipped the scales at 1,310 pounds.45 That saved almost a thousand pounds compared with a similar passenger car, the four-cylinder open Model K roadster, which Schmidt also designed in 1903. However, Henry Joy despised the Model K, one of the most expensive vehicles in America, as too complex. Almost immediately, Schmidt simplified it with the Model L, which was also pricey, but it proved a commercial success. Model L introduced a new design for the front water-cooled radiator, a headstone shape that became Packard’s signature and endured for the rest of the company’s life.46

  Only Schmidt drove his Gray Wolf. At the early September meet in Cleveland when he had posed for photos in his car on the track, he drove practice laps. He had been going at least 40 mph when he veered into the bordering white picket fence,47 tearing out twenty feet of pickets and a half-dozen posts before he was flipped out like a rag doll onto the grassy infield. He scrambled back up to his feet but complained of acute chest pain. Three ribs were cracked and the car’s radiator was wrecked. The Gray Wolf failed to get to the start line that day. It was an ominous introduction.

  Damages were soon repaired. However, sales manager Sidney Waldon realized Schmidt was too valuable a designer to lose in an accident and looked around for a contract driver. Waldon heard about Harry L. Cunningham, a Detroiter gaining a reputation as an expert racecar driver. Cunningham had schooled himself in techniques by listening to experienced veterans dispensing advice.48 Slim with a thin face and a strong jaw line, he was suited for the Gray Wolf. Waldon tempted him away from driving 999 to take the wheel of the Gray Wolf for a meet three days later at the Grosse Pointe track. There Cunningham was driving the Gray Wolf on the inside lane alongside Oldfield, steering Winton’s Bullet II, when Oldfield followed his custom of swinging wide on the outside bank and then attempted to crowd back onto the inside lane. Cunningham held his place and kept ahead of hard-charging Oldfield.49 Cunningham earned glowin
g press for fending off the intimidating Oldfield.

  However, in another event that day, the Gray Wolf blew a tire coming out of a turn. The car crashed through the inside fence, breaking off a front wheel. Cunningham came through unscathed. He estimated the car’s weight was balanced on the right side,50 the driver’s side.

  When Schmidt first learned Cunningham was contracted to drive, he declared his ribs had improved and took the Gray Wolf to a program at Narragansett, Rhode Island. Schmidt placed in the money in a couple races and won the five-mile time trial.

  At the following meet on the Empire City Race Track in Yonkers, sales manager Waldon showed up with Cunningham. Waldon tactfully suggested to Schmidt that with the company moving all the factory machinery and office furniture from Warren, Ohio, to a much bigger, modern factory on East Grand Boulevard in Detroit, the chief engineer might want to leave the racing to Cunningham. Schmidt acquiesced to relinquish the Gray Wolf only after Waldon reminded him that his office furniture was waiting for him that Saturday to unpack.51

  When Schmidt at last had departed for Detroit, Waldon and Cunningham took the Gray Wolf with a couple mechanics to the concluding star event of the racing season, at Brighton Beach.

  At the Brighton Beach stadium, amid the car-talk hubbub, Champion met Waldon, Cunningham, Packard mechanic Jack Lavin, and another mechanic called Densmore. Cunningham agreed to let Champion drive the car for practice as an emergency man in case Cunningham could not run it or if anything happened to him.52

  “So on Thursday and Friday last we went down to Brighton Beach, and Champion drove the car, I should say, between forty and fifty miles, which is quite as much as I ever did with the same car,” Cunningham said.53 Such was typical training for the racing fraternity, accustomed to on-the-job learning.