The Fast Times of Albert Champion

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The Fast Times of Albert Champion Page 21

by Peter Joffre Nye


  The 1903 racing season’s last hurrah, on Saturday, October 31, was chilly and overcast. A field of thirty-five contestants turned out with their support crews. Most of the thirty-five hundred men and women spectators, in long wool overcoats as protection against the raw offshore winds, arrived by train. Some three hundred drove autos and parked them in the paddock between the judges’ stand and the grandstand. Automobile sniffed that “the football game between Columbia and Yale drew 30,000 people and kept thousands away from the automobile races without a doubt.”54

  Albert Champion at the wheel of the Packard Gray Wolf, shortly before his disastrous crash in a race that snapped his femur. Photo from Motor Age magazine, October 1901.

  The program opened with a five-miler. Cunningham drove the Gray Wolf and discovered the track’s back corners were mushy as oatmeal. Heavier cars navigated through the loose dirt, their tires sinking deeper to get a purchase on the hard surface beneath, but the lighter Gray Wolf slid.55 He reported to Waldon and the mechanics that he regarded the turns as treacherous for his car, too light and too powerful for the turf’s condition.

  Cunningham said the rear-wheel disk brakes—the vehicle’s only brakes—were dragging and asked the mechanics to loosen them. In the fifteen-mile free for all open to all weight classes, both brakes in the Gray Wolf failed by three miles.56 The stationary rods connecting the brakes to the frame’s rear end had dropped out and dangled under the car, making a noise that Cunningham heard over the unmuffled engine. For the next eleven miles, he drove defensively. He experimented with slowing the car around the back turns by shutting off the engine to coast through, then restarting the engine on the home straight. He still had a problem on the last turn’s slight incline to the left.

  Marius G. Bernin of France in his Renault lapped Cunningham twice en route to victory.

  At fourteen miles, Cunningham coasted to a halt on the home straight. The Packard mechanics jogged out to push the Gray Wolf back to the paddock by the stadium. Cunningham climbed out and declared that he refused to drive the car any more on a course he considered hazardous.57

  It was still early in the day. The Gray Wolf was registered for more events. Its race bib, a white cloth with the imperious number one painted broad and two feet tall, was tied to each side of the body for race officials, photographers, and spectators to spot. The Gray Wolf was still fueled up and ready to race.

  “Thereupon Champion was asked to take the car,” Cunningham said to Automobile Topics Illustrated. He cautioned: “‘If you take it, Albert, be careful. Mind you, it has no brakes and you must not forget how to shut off the engine before making the ugly turn.’ He answered me, as well as I can remember, ‘I won’t shut off the engine for any turns.’ I said, ‘All right. I have told you what to do. Jack Lavin and myself will go around to the turn to see you go through the fence.’”58

  Champion was primed to drive. A perennial publicity hound, he took advantage of a photographer from Motor Age who was on the scene. He looked through goggles at the camera, which was placed in front of the car, on the driver’s right side, capturing his white shirt and tie over the steering wheel, behind the number one.

  In his new career debut, the ten-mile open for cars under 1,800 pounds, Champion placed third out of three entrants, averaging 50 mph.59 The reporter for Automobile called him a clever and daring driver. “Given a heavier car he certainly would have starred in his first automobile race, as he was unafraid and sent the rakish little machine at the best speed its light weight would warrant, and he held the turns perfectly. Harry Cunningham, the regular driver of the same car, did not drive it nearly so fast.”60

  Next, in the five-mile open, awarding points toward the Manufacturers’ Challenge Cup, Champion scored second place among four starters.61

  Then he entered the unlimited Class A free-for-all pursuit race. It would change his life.

  Champion and two opponents began at different positions on the oval and chased each other—the first to catch his opponents would win. His compatriot, Marius Bernin, in a Renault with a body that slanted elegantly down between the front wheels to slice through the air, began on the start/finish line as scratch. Frederic A. LaRoche, in a blunt-nosed, boxy Darracq, started from the quarter pole. Champion had the three-quarter pole. At the dropping of the green flag, all three roared away in pursuit of each other.

  Champion flew through his first mile at 52 mph,62 based on lap time. He was into the third turn when it happened.

  The Gray Wolf turned sharply and plowed through the heavy timbers of the inside rail fence, demolishing them as though they were thin slats.63 Two fence posts were ripped out; the middle board, twenty feet long, vanished.64

  “Champion was moving at terrific speed,” reported the New York Times.65 “The wheels skidded and the car swerved and plunged through the fence on the inside of the track. Apparently Champion had his wits about him, for he ducked his head and threw up a protecting arm. The car cut through the fence, leaving the top rail intact. It turned over in the ditch next to the turf course, and Champion was thrown twenty feet.”66

  Later Champion told a New York Tribune reporter that he was still conscious when he landed on the infield grass but had no time to tuck into a ball to evade the onrushing Gray Wolf: “She roll over me and my legs go numb.”67

  He lost consciousness before Marius Bernin in his Renault blew past him and caught Frederic A. LaRoche in the Darracq on the home stretch to win. Bernin, unaware he had won, kept going and was forced to dodge the hundreds of spectators all of a sudden fleeing the grandstand, climbing over two fences, and running across the broad track toward the infield to reach Champion. An official waved the checkered flag at Bernin to signal the race was over. He drove straight to Champion’s accident.

  “It was with difficulty that the police could hold the crowd back while the doctors worked over the injured man,” the New York Tribune reported.68

  Cunningham and mechanic Jack Levin had watched on the back turns, the only eyewitnesses to the accident. They saw Champion struggle with the steering wheel to keep the car away from the fence, but the machine slid sideways through the fence into the infield.69 They looked at the Gray Wolf stranded on the grass—its hood knocked cockeyed, the front wheels torn from their axles.

  “Only the motor remained in perfect condition, and that was still working when Cunningham reached the car,” noted the Times.70

  Champion’s right arm was lacerated and almost torn from its socket. Blood poured from a head gash. Worst of all, his left femur—the longest bone, the heaviest and the strongest in the human skeleton—was snapped in a jagged-edged compound fracture.71 White broken bone shoved through bleeding flesh. Blood soaked his hip and both legs.72 Physicians from among the spectators stanched the bleeding of his head and mangled leg flesh and fastened makeshift emergency splints on the broken leg. According to Cunningham, Champion was unconscious for twenty minutes.73

  There was a delay getting a horse-drawn ambulance. “Finally one came from the Kings County Hospital, and before it arrived Champion had recovered consciousness, although he was in great agony,” said the Times.74

  While this drama unfolded, the next events were held. Automobile remarked: “Champion’s accident, speaking in a cold-blooded way, was what they looked for. In Mexico, the people cheer the men for killing the bull or the bull for killing the man, and Americans are just as cold-blooded.”75

  Frederic A. LaRoche leaped from his Darracq on the turf near the stadium. He operated a business in New York importing Darracqs from Paris. He had won sixteen loving cup trophies over the season and asserted in high dudgeon to reporters that drivers should be trained to handle their vehicles before being allowed to race.

  Automobile added, “Champion is king of the motorcycle riders with a record of :55 on a five-lap track to his credit, but there are yet many things for the great Champion to learn.”76

  Automobile Topics Illustrated took up Champion’s defense, calling the accident “hard luck
on poor Champion, holding himself in reserve all the season, when nervy racing men have been at a premium, and then at the eleventh hour to have his hopes and ambitions wrecked.”77

  Newspapers capitalized on his disaster for their Sunday editions, the week’s highest daily circulation.

  The New York World screamed, “Racing Autoist Nearly Killed at Brighton!”78 A photo across the broadsheet showed the crippled Gray Wolf, surrounded by a scrum of journalists and race officials.

  The New York Times declared, “Albert Champion Hurled from His Machine at Brighton Beach.”79

  The Boston Globe ran the Elmer Chickering society portrait of Champion on page one with a stack of staccato heads down the front: “Champion Hurt. Hurled from a Racing Motor Car. Going at Terrific Rate of Speed at Time. Vehicle Swerved, Going through Fence. Frenchman Seriously Injured on Arm, Head and Leg.”80

  The Boston Herald bellowed: “Champion in Smash.”81

  A furious Charles Schmidt ordered Waldon to return his Gray Wolf to Detroit for repair by Monday.82

  Unlike the car, restored in a workday, Champion was fighting for his life. As soon as the ambulance took him to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, doctors X-rayed his broken left leg and operated. Standard medical practice was for doctors to insert bare hands into the wound and feel along the bone to identify and set the fracture.83 A piece of crushed femur was sawed off to fit the broken ends together. The muscle wounds were closed with gut thread, which would dissolve on its own, and the skin opened from knee to hip was closed with silk thread. To reduce the shortening of the broken femur, his leg was put in traction—a weight attached to a rope and tied to the end of the foot for constant pulling tension. A typical traction weight was ten to twelve pounds, but with his highly developed quadriceps, shaped like wine casks, doctors doubled the weight to twenty-five pounds.

  It is unknown whether Champion was the first patient operated on that day or where he may have been in the surgical order. Doctors in this era wore the same raven-black smock for their entire shift, regardless of how much blood and other fluids splattered on them during the course of their rounds. The chance of infecting a patient soared over the course of a day spent treating other patients. Home births were safer than the 50 percent mortality rate of hospitals. Within days, Champion’s wounds became septic. He was threatened with blood poisoning. Doctors considered amputating the leg to save his life, an expeditious option for compound fractures. Period slang for doctors and surgeons was “sawbones.” With a sharp saw, a practiced doctor could completely sever a limb in just three minutes. As the Boston Globe remarked, “It didn’t look like he would survive anyway so he was left alone.”84

  In the era before penicillin or broad-spectrum antibiotics were available to fight infection, his septic wound was washed often with water and he was fed a diet heavy in meat for protein and potatoes or rice for carbohydrates. Doctors left broken bones to heal on their own.

  Early twentieth-century hospitals resembled warehouses. Beds were pushed against opposite walls along the length of the ward, and patients rested their heads on pillows near the wall. Beds were spaced for physicians and nurses on their rounds to have access to patients. For privacy, curtains were strung up between patient beds.

  Elise was rarely referred to in news accounts of Champion, but she was reported to be attending him in the hospital.85 With his usual itinerant life on hold, Albert was now all hers.

  Publications speculated whether Champion would be permanently maimed. Some opined that his cycling was over probably his automobile racing, too.

  He wrote a letter to Boston Globe reporter John J. Donovan to let the public know his condition and future plans. In a Globe story, “Albert Champion Still Undaunted,” he said, “I have been here for nine days, and I have not yet had a night’s sleep. I have never suffered so much in my life.”86 His back hurt the most. “Yet I must lie on it on account of my leg. When I struck the fence, the terrible shock threw me back against the back of the small racing seat, and I am a lucky fellow that I did not break my back.” He continued, “My leg has a twenty-five pound weight tied to it, so that it will not be short when I get up. It will be eight weeks anyway before I leave my bed.” He loathed staying in bed for so long. “When that thought comes to my mind, it makes me crazy, and I try to forget it.” Despite his pain and prolonged convalescence, he remained characteristically optimistic. He said that after he healed he planned to stay with the Packard Motor Company, either as a testing expert or racecar driver. He closed his letter with a colloquial fillip, asking Donovan to send his regards “to all the Boston boys.”87

  Elise’s care of Albert, the continual washing with water of his wound, the high-protein and carbohydrate diet, and his resilient constitution beat back the infection in two weeks. He was moved for better care from Kings County Hospital to the Flower Fifth-Avenue Hospital at 106th Street, near Fifth Avenue.88 Arrangements were made by Colonel K. C. Pardee, a local race official and the New York branch manager of the Packard Motor Company, which paid his medical expenses.89 Champion was packed, in traction with the twenty-five-pound weight, into a horse-drawn ambulance for the cross-town trip.

  The editor of the New York magazine Motor commissioned a first-person account from Champion for the December 1903 issue. He was tasked with describing his feelings about fast driving and its dangers. At twenty-five, he was recovering from a compound fracture in addition to a previous broken arm, fractured hand, broken fingers, and numerous deep bruises, cuts, and gashes. Yet he expected to keep putting his life at risk in the name of speed.

  The article, “Piloting Motor Driven Racers,” ran as a full page, illustrated with Elmer Chickering’s photo of Albert bent jockey-style over his Clément Gladiator on his first sub-minute mile in Charles River Park. Albert’s commentary offered rare introspection on his obsession for speed and its constant potential for disaster.

  Up till then, only a trifling number of people, chiefly urban, among the 75 million US population had ever ridden in any kind of automobile. Even fewer had been on a motorcycle. Only Champion, Oldfield, and a small group of others—so limited they could sit around a dining-room table—had felt the wind on their face driving 60 mph. Champion wrote that it was difficult to explain what it felt like to drive so fast to another person who may never have ridden on such a machine, even the privileged folks who experienced tolerable low speeds.

  I forget to be afraid of being killed, although I know it is very possible that I may be, and I am most conscious that my living—my reputation as a racing man—is at stake, so, though fully aware that death may reward my efforts, I always find myself thoroughly able, with a philosophy that is perhaps calloused by experience, to carry the performance through with every nerve alert to make it successful and avoid its dangers.

  There is no question but what my calling is dangerous. I recognize this to the extent of never having my wife witness a race in which I am entered.90

  Whether barreling at 40 mph or 60 mph, it felt the same to him:

  I crouch low and make myself as small as possible to lessen the wind resistance, the hum of the engine, and the air rushing past becomes a roar; and then it seems as if the machine stood in the same place and the track spun beneath it like an immense disk—its center away over in the infield and the grandstand on the outer edge, coming around at regular intervals; I feel as if the whole earth were spinning like a top and nothing but perfect coolness and attention on my part will keep it from ending in disaster.

  If the track is right, the movement, tremendously rapid, is smooth. The least unevenness, however, is felt, and even a smooth rise and a fall of an inch in a hundred feet passes under the machine with a sharp jar—for if the machine is lifted and lowered an inch in a hundred feet, it means that it jolts an inch up and down in a second.”91

  Eleven weeks and three more operations went by before Champion’s leg healed sufficiently so that doctors could remove it from traction.92 Out of bed on his own for the first time in nearly
three months, he depended on crutches to get around.93 He finally left the Flower Fifth-Avenue Hospital, accompanied by Elise, in mid-January, stabbing the ground with the end of the crutches and swinging his legs through. He was too weak to travel to south Florida for the speed carnival he’d planned to attend.

  Instead, he visited the New York Automobile Show in Madison Square Garden, which opened January 19, 1904.94 The Boston Traveler hired him as a correspondent, honoring him with a byline. Seeing friends must have served as welcome medicine.

  His dispatch, “All Kinds of Machines at the Auto Show,” offered a tour d’horizon of the exhibits. His former Paris employer Adolphe Clément had a booth offering autos and motorcycles for sale in New York. Several other French auto manufacturers attended. They joined the burgeoning number of American automakers and suppliers. The French presence reflected America’s growing demand for motor-powered vehicles in the growing trans-Atlantic auto industry.

  Making the rounds of daytime exhibit booths and evening restaurant dinners, Champion inspired a feature in the New York Sun, “Thrilling Accidents and Narrow Escapes.” The account ran a large illustration of him on his first racing bicycle and summarized his Brighton Beach brush with death. He said, “I do not care to come any closer to the Great Reaper than I did at Brighton.”95

  The article also featured a line drawing of Henri Fournier at the wheel of a Mors auto. “Escapes from death by a hair’s breadth are plentiful everywhere,” rationalized Fournier, popular with American audiences for his courage and the press corps for his fluency in English. “Only yesterday I read in a New York newspaper of a veritable hair-breadth escape on Broad Street—a brick from the top of a new skyscraper fell so close to the back of a man’s head that it made a red streak down the back of his coat, then crumbled in a puff of dust on the sidewalk. If that man had been one-twentieth of a second slower in his stride he would have been blotted out of life. It is as close as that many a time in automobiling. You come within a few millimeters or within an infinitesimal fraction of a second of a frightful death—and after a few quick breaths you are placidly wondering what you shall have for luncheon.”96

 

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