Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  When it came to politics, Billy was convinced that America needed to have more influence in Europe, and that Europeans “treated her like a weak child with lots of toys to be taken away from her.” He had a peculiar notion that the United States should “develop Spain as a buffer state in Europe,” something he felt “could be done in 12 years or so by clever capitalisation.” He would often talk stocks and shares with his father, who hoped that his son would come to work with him at Dillon, Read & Co. But Billy had other ideas. Three years of study left him hungry for adventure.

  Not that it had all been early mornings, exams, and lectures. He’d spent a lot of time whizzing about the country lanes in that Bentley of his. Students were meant to be in bed by midnight. Anyone out later than that, as Billy often was, had to sneak around the college constables, the “bulldogs,” as the students still call them. The trouble was, one luxury that Billy’s Bentley didn’t exactly allow him was inconspicuousness. There was one bulldog in particular who used to wait in the little village of Melbourn, at a tiny bottleneck on the road to London, to ambush anyone returning to the city after hours. And he knew there was only one man in town driving a supercharged Bentley. After he had been caught once too often, Billy hatched a plan. He popped along to the pub, where, he had been told, the bulldog could usually be found on his free afternoons. He bought him a couple of “dog’s noses”—a cocktail of gin and beer so potent it made Billy’s nose wrinkle—and after some polite small talk mentioned, in passing, the subject both men knew to be the only one that had prompted this casual meeting in the bar. They soon came to a happy arrangement. Whenever Billy was out late in his car from then on, the next day he would stop by that same bar for a round of “dog’s noses,” bringing with him a couple of gramophone records as a gift for his new friend. After that, he wasn’t busted again.

  Allowed to come and go as he pleased, Billy spent what free days he had at Royal Worlington golf course in Mildenhall. He was a good golfer, with a handicap down around four, but golfing didn’t come as naturally to him as racing did. The tempo was wrong. The thing with Billy, his friend Henry Longhurst reckoned, was that “having driven us there in his monster at an average speed of something like 65 mph for 20 minutes, he could never understand why he found it so difficult to hole out from five feet.” He had too much adrenaline in his veins. He toyed with the idea of entering the British Amateur Championship but never felt his game was quite good enough. At other times, he was out on the horse-racing circuit. He loved to gamble and reckoned himself “an excellent judge of horse rump.” In the evenings, as often as not, he was in London. “Bill was a superb dancer,” said his sister, Peggy. During his holidays he would travel over to France to stay with his family, and the two siblings “would spend hours whirling around the dance floors of Paris nightclubs, doing the Charleston and all the other dances to the sounds of big bands and small combos.”

  Peggy was now married, to Jennison Heaton, but Billy was still single. And while he still didn’t much care for drink or tobacco—“everything in moderation,” Billy wrote in his diary; “balance is the essence of good living”—he was, as his friend Harry Hays Morgan put it, “quite the ladies’ man.” Which was, in itself, quite the understatement. The only rule he had was that he didn’t care to date anyone who was too much taller than him. He became an expert, he said, “at measuring a girl’s height before asking her to dance.”

  By the time Billy got to New York, his two old friends Jay and Clifford were already up in Lake Placid, along with their new recruit, Eddie Eagan. When it came to people, Billy was a great believer in gut feelings. “I find one’s first opinions of a person based entirely on appearances are usually correct,” he wrote, “and a clever person should have the vision to keep these in mind and not let them be warped by a stronger relationship.” He took to Eddie from the first moment they met. The two of them couldn’t have had more different childhoods, but there was a keen kinship between them—both were educated in England, both were Olympic champions.

  Eddie was a bull of a man, as brave as any. He had fought Jack Dempsey and stalked big game. But that first run down Mount Van Hoevenberg with Billy scared him more than anything he had ever known. “That run,” Eddie said later, “will always be vivid in my memory. It took only about two minutes to make, but to me it seemed like an eon. I remember the snow-covered ground flashing by like a motion-picture out of focus, speeding a few inches away while I hung on to the straps without any sense of security. My hands seemed to be slipping. But still I clung. We hit a turn. My head snapped first to the right, then to the left. FINALLY we neared the bottom.”

  He had so much nervous energy in him that he couldn’t stand still after the run was over. He and the other three were supposed to sit in the sled while it was tied to the back of a tractor and hauled up the mountain to the start of the run. The driver was a local farmer by the name of B. J. Cook. “I was pulling back their sled to the starting line,” Cook remembered, “and I noticed one of their fellows standing up in the sled, shadow-boxing. I stopped the tractor, went back, and told him to sit down. He said he wasn’t going to. So I told him a second time, and I said I was going to knock him down if I had to. A little smile came over his face, and he sat down. The rest of the fellows on the sled looked pretty amused.” A little later, Cook learned he’d just threatened a former Olympic boxing champion. He was pretty embarrassed about it, so he made a point of apologizing. Eddie just smiled and called him “one tough little hombre.” It cracked Billy up. He didn’t quit kidding Eddie about it for a fortnight.

  Godfrey Dewey, on the other hand, was a man Billy never warmed to. He had met him before, of course, back in St. Moritz, though their paths had barely crossed because they kept very different hours. But in 1932 Billy and the other bobbers were staying at the Lake Placid Club, Godfrey’s fiefdom. And while they were there, they had to abide by his rules: no drinking, smoking, or gambling, and no noise after 10:30 p.m. That was a rough-enough start. Things got worse when Billy quickly picked Dewey as “a snob.” Plus—a silly thing, this: Dewey had a strange high-pitched laugh that set Billy on edge. And besides, more than any of that, something in his gut told him that Godfrey Dewey couldn’t be trusted. And he was right. The truth was, Dewey didn’t want Billy Fiske at his Olympics, and he didn’t want Jay O’Brien or Clifford Gray there either. In his mind, Jay, Billy, and the others were arrogant out-of-towners who had come to steal the locals’ glory. For the past two years, he had been plotting how to stop them.

  —

  It had all started back in 1930, when he first fell out with Jay O’Brien.

  Dewey had staked so much on the Mount Van Hoevenberg bob run because he wanted to “establish a broad base of support” for the sport. He wanted the run to become the central attraction of the Lake Placid tourism business. He had fought Roosevelt to secure the money for it, the environmental lobby for the right to build it, and the Jewish lobby for the right to run it. It had cost, in the end, more than four times the amount he had quoted to the community, making it the single greatest expense of the Games—and all that, every single dollar spent, was on his head. He had poured still more resources into publicizing the run. He’d hired a firm for the purpose and given them a budget of fifty thousand dollars. They sent fifteen hundred posters, two hundred thousand booklets, and a quarter of a million stamps out around Europe, all of them advertising the new bob run. They gave out ninety thousand stickers to passengers on the New York Central Railroad. They sent salesmen out to department stores in New York, Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia, and Montreal to install themed window displays. And around the Adirondacks they put up blue-and-white billboards reading, “This way for the thrills of a lifetime!” Even after all that, Dewey had one more ace up his sleeve. He had it planned that a local team was going to win the four-man bobsledding contest, the blue riband event of the Olympics. He wanted four hometown heroes, as payback for the community’s investment and a promotional too
l for his new winter sports resort.

  The problem was, of course, that in the late 1920s there wasn’t anyone in Lake Placid who had any real experience as a bobsledder. A few men had taken runs over the slopes in open fields, in the old American style. But no one, apart from Dewey himself, had ever ridden anything like the track at St. Moritz. Dewey had a solution. In 1929, when the architect Stanislaus Zentzytzki was over making his first survey of the land around Lake Placid, Dewey had him draw up designs for a simple, half-mile-long bobsled run at a site called Intervales, just outside the town.

  Intervales was little more than a practice track, with seven curves built from sand and wood, but Dewey christened it the “first bobsled run in America.” It served three purposes. The first was to whip up a little publicity and enthusiasm for the new sport—and right from the time the first sled set off down it, crowds came out to watch and ride. Second, it enabled Dewey to test-drive the new sleds he was designing. The third and most important purpose was that it would be the training ground for the local teams who wanted to compete in 1932.

  Dewey soon found a few likely contenders. There were the Stevens brothers, all four of them, Paul, Hubert, Raymond, and Curtis. They were from an old Lake Placid family: their grandparents had been among the very first settlers in the town, back in the 1850s. They lived in their family’s hotel, on a hill up on the other side of Mirror Lake from the club. They were all sportsmen, a little wild for Dewey’s taste; and their mother was so scared about the risks they were taking in the sleds that she refused to let them all ride in the same one, just in case she lost all four in a single crash. So they couldn’t make up a team together. Dewey had higher hopes for Henry “Hank” Homburger, from the neighboring town of Saranac Lake. He and Dewey were good friends. Dewey had even pulled a few strings on Hank’s behalf to help secure an academic scholarship for a young friend of the Homburger family. Hank wasn’t exactly blue-collar, but he was closer to it than any of the other bobsledders on the circuit. He had been practicing with a couple of other locals, Percy Bryant and Ed Horton, the town florist. They often took the eldest Stevens brother, Paul, along with them to make up a foursome. They called themselves the “Saranac Lake Red Devils.”

  Homburger was a good pilot. In February 1930, the Intervales run hosted its very first international bobsled race in North America when a team representing the United States took on another from Canada. On that occasion, Homburger was riding in the No. 4 spot, but he soon worked his way up to become a driver. When the Mount Van Hoevenberg course was up and running late in December 1930, he proved himself to be the best in the area. But then, he enjoyed one major advantage over everyone else: he had built the run. Homburger was an engineer by trade, and Dewey had hired him to supervise construction. At first he worked underneath Zentzytzki, but when the architect returned to Germany, Homburger took charge. While work was under way he was up on the mountain every day, and in the evenings he studied Zentzytzki’s blueprints. By the time the job was done, he knew that course better than anyone else in the world, even the man who had designed it. He was familiar with every inch of every curve. If anyone knew the “perfect line” down the run, it was Hank Homburger.

  Jay O’Brien wasn’t impressed with the idea that an engineer who’d had twelve months’ practice on a tin-pot slide could provide any real competition for the well-drilled team from St. Moritz. In November 1930, as the work at Mount Van Hoevenberg was being finished, Jay called in at the offices of the Amateur Athletic Union in New York. The AAU was, along with the United States Olympic Committee, in charge of Olympic selection. AAU secretary Dan Ferris told Jay about Dewey’s plans. And as Ferris then told Dewey, Jay’s response was to say that “he doubts we will be able to develop a team here fast enough to make any showing against foreign competition. He believes it will be necessary to bring over from St. Moritz two steerers and two brakes who have experience in racing.” Dewey bit his lip and replied, tartly, “We know of at least two or three Americans who are planning to train bob teams here this winter in anticipation of the Olympics.” He added, in another note, “we are much less dependant [sic] on the St. Moritz group than Jay O’Brien seems to think.”

  A month later, Dewey had hardened his attitude. He wrote to Ferris again, to complain once more about O’Brien’s position as the American representative at the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation. He reminded Ferris of Jay’s “gross discourtesy,” his “deliberate disregard” and “defiance of explicit instructions” given him by Dewey for the International Federation congress in February 1930. He told Ferris to “make it unmistakably clear” to Jay that “if his St. Moritz teams expect to represent the United States in the III Olympic Winter Games, they will have to qualify by showing superiority here on the Olympic run.” In other words, just because Billy Fiske won the gold in 1928, it didn’t mean he would make the team in 1932. Conditions in St. Moritz, Dewey thought, were so “altogether different from the modern type of run” at Mount Van Hoevenberg that past performances there didn’t reckon in selection.

  He had a point. Mount Van Hoevenberg was different. Zentzytzki had designed a new type of run. The curves had a steeper gradient than the rest of the track, so the sleds were still plummeting downward even as they came round the turns. In Europe until that point, bob runs had been built with flat corners. The change meant that Mount Van Hoevenberg had undoubtedly the quickest bob run that had ever been built.

  On February 7, 1931, it was finally ready for its grand opening. The occasion would be the very first North American national bobsled championship. Dewey organized a special train up from New York to carry a posse of forty politicians who had helped him drive the bill appropriating state funds through the legislature. Dewey planned to ride in the two-man competition himself. He still imagined he could make a good pilot. He actually crashed in a practice run, tipping over coming round a corner. He fractured his ankle and spent the rest of the championship hobbling around in a plaster cast. To his credit, he still managed to compete the following week. No doubt he was brave enough; it was just his driving that wasn’t up to much. Homburger, though, was an ace. The Red Devils, dressed in blue and scarlet, led through every single one of the four heats. They finished their final run in 1:52. It wasn’t just a track record, carving four seconds off a mark they had set earlier that same day; it was a new world speed record. No one, at St. Moritz or anywhere else, had ever traveled as fast in a bobsled as Homburger did down Mount Van Hoevenberg that day. They clocked a top speed of just under 70 mph. The nearest competition was eight and a half seconds back—a long gap in any sport, and an age in bobsledding. Godfrey Dewey had found his hero. Hank Homburger, he decided, would be the face of the Games, the man whose image they put in the booklets and up on the billboards.

  —

  That December, two months out from the start of the Olympics, Billy Fiske booked his ticket to travel over on the SS Europa. He was coming with his old friend Jack Heaton. Jay had even arranged for their bobsleds to be sent up from St. Moritz so that Billy and Jack could bring them over in the hold. Many of the competitors decided, as Billy and the current world champion Werner Zahn both did, to bring their own sleds with them, despite the fact that Dewey had promised they could use the new sleds specially designed for the Mount Van Hoevenberg course. A couple of years earlier, he had arranged to have Zahn send over several sleds from Germany, which Dewey tested on the run at Intervales. He found that they kept breaking because they couldn’t handle the steep drops on the corners. So he drew up plans for a “fundamentally different” bob, one that, he said, “clings to the run more closely, steers with a minimum of skidding, and rides and controls much more smoothly than any bob I have ever driven.” Zahn was distinctly unimpressed. The sleds, he said, didn’t matter so much; it was the drivers who won the races.

  When Dewey learned that Billy and Jack Heaton were on their way, he sent another round of letters to the AAU’s Olympic bobsled committee. Jay
O’Brien, of course, was chairman of that committee. He was the one member Dewey didn’t write to. The others—Gustavus Kirby, Dan Ferris, and Major Philip Fleming—all heard from him. “I have no doubt that O’Brien has virtually promist them both places on the American team, regardless of their showing in the try-outs,” Dewey wrote. “If so, this will have to be handled somewhat tactfully. Don’t lose sight of the fact that while three teams may be chosen, only two teams may actually compete.”

  Jay came to Lake Placid in early January 1932. The Olympic publicity department welcomed him with a press release announcing the arrival of the “internationally known polo player and sportsman.” Godfrey Dewey sent out yet another round of letters. This time he targeted Gus Kirby, who had been the United States Olympic Committee’s delegate at St. Moritz in 1928; he was on the bobsled committee for 1932 too. “It appears,” Dewey wrote, “that Jay O’Brien is to be himself a member of one of the bob teams competing for the American Olympic team . . . Naturally, and I think properly, this situation is vigorously questioned by the other contenders. It seems to me a decided danger and impropriety, even if the chairman in question were more suitable.” Again, he had a point. Jay would be both picking the team and competing on it. But then, he had been in the same position in St. Moritz in 1928, when he had managed the squad that won both the gold and the silver. And Dewey had often done the same thing during the National Championship competitions at Mount Van Hoevenberg. Still, he suggested that Kirby should arrange to have Jay replaced as chairman of the selection committee to “guarantee for greater fairness.” Jay’s conflict of interests was, Dewey said, “an urgent and serious situation for both the quality and still more the morale of one of the most important American Olympic teams.”