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Lost Tracks and Found Stories: Unearthing the Forgotten Glory of Bay Area Midget Racing · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  Brake Fix's History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part
• 0:04
  by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
• 0:07
  Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
• 0:11
  Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
• 0:16
  Midget and big car racing in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1945 to 1951.
• 0:22
  Learnings from the Lapuchette Archive by Jonathan Summers.
• 0:26
  John Summers is a teaching assistant and guest lecturer at Stanford University.
• 0:30
  He's an independent automotive historian, podcaster, and Pebble Beach docent.
• 0:34
  The chance gift of a small magazine archive to the SAH led Summers
• 0:38
  to research midget and sprint car racing during the immediate post
• 0:41
  war period around his adopted home of the San Francisco Bay Area.
• 0:45
  This grassroots history charts the rise of great names in racing
• 0:48
  such as Curtis and Volkovich, and yet was over in under a decade.
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  Less than a century later, no trace of the tracks remain.
• 0:55
  And John's presentation offers a glimpse into this already lost world.
• 1:00
  Jonathan Sommer, he's going to talk about midget and big car racing in the
• 1:04
  San Francisco Bay Area, 1945 to 51.
• 1:07
  It's learning from some archives that he came across.
• 1:11
  Jonathan, whenever you're ready.
• 1:13
  The Society of Automotive Historians was gifted a remarkable archive
• 1:16
  of magazines collected by a San Francisco Bay Area based racing fan.
• 1:20
  I picked them up on behalf of the Society and I asked Bob Barr, S.
• 1:24
  A.
• 1:24
  A.
• 1:24
  's predecedent, What should I do with these?
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  Tell us what's in them, he replied.
• 1:29
  The archive is a snapshot into post war racing in those few years
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  before there was a TV in every home.
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  It primarily covers midget and big car racing in the Bay Area.
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  There are national titles too, early editions of Hot Rod Magazine
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  and Motorsport, where in fact the first article in their very
• 1:45
  first edition is a report on the 1950 Watkins Glen Grand Prix.
• 1:50
  In these early editions of Hot Rod, the customs, which are built for
• 1:53
  looks, mingle with the lake races, which are built only for speed.
• 1:57
  There's an assumption of the reader as a skilled or aspiring artisan.
• 2:02
  To draw value, careful reading and the time, inclination, and skill to be
• 2:07
  fixing or fiddling with cars is required.
• 2:10
  This was an era when hot rodding was perhaps a little like drift
• 2:13
  culture is today, with a younger anti authoritarian demographic and sideshow
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  like street takeovers for racing.
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  This archive is the lens through which a car enthusiast in the late 40s and early
• 2:25
  50s appreciated cars and auto racing.
• 2:29
  Dr.
• 2:29
  David Lusko and others have examined the early history of hot rodding.
• 2:33
  Instead, my focus will be on the bulk of our archive here.
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  The Bay Area Racing Journal Speed and the annual yearbooks put
• 2:41
  together by the same publishing team.
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  These magazines aren't just repositories of information,
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  they're artifacts in themselves.
• 2:47
  The programs show that Mr.
• 2:49
  Lapichet was actually at the event and he's even filled in the results.
• 2:54
  There's one magazine that's got a pit pass stuck on the cover of
• 2:57
  it that I've got a picture of.
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  So I'm not a Sprint or Midget historian, and so for me the research has
• 3:02
  been a pretty steep learning curve.
• 3:04
  I've lived in the Bay Area for 18 years, although I'm not a Bay Area native, I'm
• 3:08
  English, if my accent was hard to place.
• 3:11
  The notion that a place like San Carlos, with its four, five, six
• 3:15
  million dollar houses now, should be somewhere Where you could race
• 3:19
  seems really quite strange, certainly race in a dirt oval kind of a way.
• 3:23
  I'd heard a lot of the names before because I did a project 10, 15 years
• 3:27
  ago about the Carrera Panamericana and Lincoln's team for the Carrera
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  included Bill Vukovich, Johnny Mann, Chuck Stevenson, Walt Faulkner, these
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  kind of guys that crop up a lot of the time when you're reading about sprint
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  and midget car racing in this period.
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  Key written sources which deserve special mention are Dick Wallen's series of
• 3:47
  comprehensive histories of oval racing and Tom Motter's work on the history
• 3:52
  of the Bay Cities Racing Association.
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  Earl Motter was a midget racer.
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  Tom, his nephew, has become a leading historian in the area.
• 3:59
  The literature, Wallen in particular, gives the minutiae covered in the
• 4:03
  archive some sort of proper context.
• 4:05
  In 1949, a movie called The Big Wheel was released, and it shows how much midget and
• 4:11
  sprint car racing was the zeitgeist of the age, or at least especially so in Southern
• 4:16
  California, Los Angeles movie town.
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  It starred Mickey Rooney in, well in my opinion, a rather unremarkable plot
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  and not really very good racing scenes, but the pit scenes do in fact feature a
• 4:26
  Silver Arrow pre war Mercedes Grand Prix car, so I didn't feel as if my time was
• 4:31
  entirely wasted in watching the movie.
• 4:33
  I also visited the Woodland Auto Display in Paso Robles, which is about
• 4:37
  four hours south of San Francisco.
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  It includes four midgets from our period, and a Ford V8 Roadster, or
• 4:44
  jalopy, in addition to various big cars.
• 4:47
  The midgets are of different marks.
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  So there's one that's made by a company called Solar.
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  They made planes as well, and it has a stainless steel chassis.
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  shape the frame rails, those stainless steel.
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  I found the museum very useful in terms of showing the evolution of the cars
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  from the late 40s to the early 50s.
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  Terms like big car, jalopy, and roadster become much clearer to understand when
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  the cars are there in three dimensions and you're looking at them instead of them
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  in some kind of grainy two dimensional image where the car's two inches long.
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  My favorite exhibit was Bill Vukovich's midget.
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  It's a drake.
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  He used it in the 30s.
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  They had wider tires and were a bit lower by the 40s and into the 50s.
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  They really looked more like 50s and 60s sprint cars.
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  Want to draw attention to this, those of us who've been around racing cars
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  are quite familiar with this, but if you've not, it's really a shocking thing.
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  The shift levers between your legs.
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  And I wonder if you were meant to change gear whilst
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  keeping the thing in the drift.
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  Your right hand was on the shift lever and your left hand
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  was holding it in the drift.
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  Or did you just get it up in top gear and did you just slide it
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  and have both hands on the wheel?
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  I, I don't know, but I thought that was worth highlighting as a way of
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  making these vehicles come alive.
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  And I guess what I wanted to say is that the TLDR is that midgets and jalopies
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  were around before the war, but the scene really exploded in popularity immediately
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  after World War II in the late 40s.
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  And the jalopy seemed to have given way to the midgets, which in turn gave
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  way to big car strokes, what became known as sprint cars and hard tops,
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  which of course leads us towards NASCAR and that kind of stock car racing.
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  The Lappachet archive covers a five year window with this general
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  sort of evolutionary trend.
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  There's adverts in these magazines, and they tell you where you
• 6:29
  can go and buy Hot Rod Parts.
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  You've got Edelbrock's Place in Hollywood, advertised the same place
• 6:34
  as a plumbing supplier in Daly City up here in San Francisco, advertised
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  on the same page as this address here, 4720 Geary Boulevard, which is about,
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  I don't know, three minutes drive from where I'm sitting here in San Francisco.
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  This is where you could buy a Curtis midget.
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  This is probably where Vuki came to buy his midget in the post war period.
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  Shiatsu massage is, is what takes place there.
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  And the reason why I'm emphasizing this is that the most striking thing about
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  investigating this archive is where the racing took place has completely changed.
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  Racing tracks tend to spring up on the edge of town where land is cheap.
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  As the town grows, that land is no longer on the edge of town or cheap, and
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  pressure grows for it to be repurposed.
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  This is what happened to Riverside in Los Angeles.
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  Tom Motter's book on the Oakland Stadium shows in detail how this
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  process happened in the Bay Area too.
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  Taking just the midgets, the variety and sheer number of racetracks was enormous,
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  with indoor and outdoor quarter mile or five eighths of a mile tracks, banked and
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  flat, different surfaces paved and dirt.
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  Old venues disappeared and new ones sprang up regularly.
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  In 48 and 49, the midgets raced on nine tracks within a two
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  hour drive from San Francisco.
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  So that's racing every night.
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  Nine tracks within a couple of hours of where I'm sitting in at the moment.
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  Today, no trace of any of those tracks remain because, of course,
• 7:58
  it became prime Silicon Valley real estate and those multi million
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  dollar homes got built on the spot.
• 8:05
  So I guess what I'm saying here is, is that many of us will remember Netscape,
• 8:09
  Nokia, those of us who are a little older may even remember the era of disco.
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  This was the midgets.
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  There was nothing.
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  Then they came.
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  They were enormous.
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  They were the talk of the town.
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  And then they went, all in quite a brief period.
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  The drivers and their world really come alive through this archive.
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  There are a surprising number of photos of drivers, and it's true that this kind
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  of magazine was the only media for the audience to get to know the drivers.
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  So no TV, no radio, nothing like that, only these magazines.
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  Newspapers, but not this level of detail.
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  A contemporary British magazine such as Motorsport in this period,
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  published few photos in this way.
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  And in an era of Drive to Survive like docu series.
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  It's interesting that the BCRA and Speed were really plugged in.
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  They knew 70 years ago what drew fans in.
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  The other draw played upon in the archives are what are referred to
• 9:00
  as the thrills and spills of racing.
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  I mean, that's to say it's the crashes and the injuries and the fatalities
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  that we're talking about here.
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  And some pretty unflinching, even salacious reporting of these incidents.
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  It's a very noticeable feature of the archive, and one which is
• 9:16
  quite jarring to 21st century eyes.
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  In one May 1949 edition, a leading driver in a race is flung from his
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  car onto the track, and narrowly avoids being run over by the field.
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  In another incident, a driver is described as having his throat cut.
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  In one 1949 edition, a fatality is mentioned on the cover,
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  juxtaposed with the race winner.
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  So you've got like, this dude won the race, this dude, he didn't make it.
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  These incidents were frequent because the small, tight tracks
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  led to very close racing.
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  Midgets could easily roll over and none were fitted with roll bars.
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  It was seen as very much part and parcel of the racing spectacle.
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  This is a blood sport and the drivers are eulogized in gladiatorial terms.
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  Despite this attitude, there are some concessions to safety.
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  Helmets were compulsory.
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  However, the contrast with British attitude is striking.
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  When Mike Hawthorne, the first British Formula One world champion
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  driver, was killed in a road accident a few months after he retired, the
• 10:10
  story and his obituary were buried deep in the pages of motorsport.
• 10:15
  The run of speed is nearly complete, and each issue lists championship
• 10:18
  standings, race results, lap times, the car owner, the chassis, and the engine.
• 10:23
  And as such, it's possible to really drill down on individual
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  drivers and answer questions such as, Was Driver X underrated?
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  Overrated?
• 10:32
  When did Offy Motors take over from the Ford V860 or the Drake V Twin?
• 10:38
  The rise of Curtiss is documented in lap times and individual race wins.
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  Lap times 10 seconds inside the previous lap record are not unknown and that
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  speaks to the pace of technological development in the midget series.
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  It also probably speaks to the fact that the circuits were changing all
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  the time so that banking may have been higher this week than it was last week
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  or it may have been that you decided to run discovered nitromethane and were
• 11:02
  running it and the other guys weren't.
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  This was the kind of technological development.
• 11:07
  So my research wasn't that thorough, but it did reveal that there are
• 11:10
  pretty significant differences between an Ed Normie or a Jerry Piper, a
• 11:14
  regular frontrunner at the BCRA local series, and somebody like Fred
• 11:20
  Agabashian, who was a constant winner.
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  In this local BCRA series, he was major champion in 47, 48, and 49.
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  Significant difference between them and the traveling celebrities, guys
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  like Johnny Mance and Bill Vukovich, who raced all over the country.
• 11:35
  And I've just, I've tried to do this like a medieval.
• 11:38
  Piece of stained glass, right?
• 11:39
  Where the important guys and the big names, they're biggest.
• 11:42
  So here's Jesus, Bill Vukovich.
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  So he's the biggest guy.
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  And then, you know, the bishops and so on the traveling celebrities.
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  We've got Johnny Mance and Johnny Parsons up on the top left.
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  And then in the bottom, right, we've some guys that maybe would
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  win when they came to the area.
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  There's Raho Jack in the bottom left and Edgar Elder in the middle
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  there, who was a local guy who built cars as well as race them.
• 12:05
  The BCRA yearbook talks about fans having to decide whether to cheer or
• 12:08
  jeer Bukovic on to yet another win.
• 12:11
  The archive, therefore, provides a real sense of the pyramid of racing, with Indy
• 12:15
  at the top and the local racing that we're talking about here as a rug on the ladder.
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  A spectator at a Bay Area track would have known that success here
• 12:23
  was a stepping stone to the biggest motor race in the world by birth.
• 12:27
  In an edition of Speed from February 1951, it's reported that there were
• 12:31
  so many happenings that the timekeeper gave up, reminding us that this is still
• 12:35
  a young sport, an amateur endeavor.
• 12:38
  Yet a scan of the entry list over the page shows that about half the
• 12:41
  entrants have sponsors, and some of the names, Bardald, Offenhauser,
• 12:46
  Curtis, sound ready for Indianapolis.
• 12:49
  The reader can feel just how much the sport is on the cusp of professionalism.
• 12:53
  Equally, the traveling celebrities, Buki, Mance, Parsons, were obviously
• 12:57
  able to make a living by traveling in this way, even as the dominant local
• 13:01
  driver, Aggie there in the bottom left, still had to have a day job selling
• 13:05
  Cadillacs, or at least that's what he did according to the advertising in Speed.
• 13:09
  Turning to Speed Magazine itself, its very existence reveals the nature of
• 13:14
  racing in the Bay Area in the late 50s.
• 13:17
  There was racing in the Bay Area every night of the week so that
• 13:20
  even the dedicated race fan could not hope to make every meeting.
• 13:24
  The frequency of races meant that Speed had to be produced weekly, with
• 13:27
  fans needing to take the magazine to learn what happened at other races
• 13:32
  that week before the circus arrived back at their local track once more.
• 13:36
  For Context Travel from San Francisco to tracks in Lodi or
• 13:39
  San Jose was two hours each way.
• 13:42
  Race reports follow the same structure.
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  A sum up and results in the first paragraph, crashes and incidents in the
• 13:48
  second and a detailed race descriptions spread over paragraphs three and four.
• 13:53
  Early editions have a section entitled Goggle Gossip, full of tidbits
• 13:57
  of information about the driver's personality, their superstitions,
• 14:00
  their favorite food, the names of their wives and children.
• 14:03
  Surprisingly, the tone is similar to a 21st century gossip rag, the
• 14:08
  ones that you find at supermarket checkouts, you know, Us Magazine and
• 14:11
  People Magazine, those kind of things.
• 14:13
  Editions from mid 1949 asked for volunteers to quote Cover the races
• 14:18
  in your town or vicinity if, quote, you have a secret yen to be a writer.
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  And in that sense, it's almost like a modern interactive blog or
• 14:27
  forum or Facebook where readers are asked to contribute content.
• 14:31
  Later editions have coverage of auto racing in the Los Angeles
• 14:34
  area and stories about the sport nationally, especially Indianapolis.
• 14:38
  As content developed, the number of staff involved in producing the
• 14:41
  magazine grew and the quality of paper it was printed on improved.
• 14:45
  BCRA yearbooks give far more detail, providing necrologies of the top
• 14:49
  drivers, pictures of them in their car, headshots, and the kind of
• 14:53
  details which imply that face to face interviews must have taken place.
• 14:57
  One of my undergraduate tutors was Dr.
• 15:00
  Ian Wood, a leading thinker about the early medieval period.
• 15:04
  In trying to explain the sources he worked with, he used the metaphor of a plane
• 15:08
  flying above clouds on a summer's day.
• 15:11
  Where there is a cloud, we in the plane cannot see the ground at all.
• 15:15
  However, where there is a break in the cloud, the sun shows the fields,
• 15:20
  the hedgerow, the crops, the farmers at work, all in perfect detail.
• 15:24
  For him, medieval history was like this.
• 15:27
  For me, this archive has been that break in the cloud, a moment of perfect
• 15:32
  illumination of a period of racing history I knew nothing about previously
• 15:36
  and which has been largely forgotten.
• 15:37
  Vukovic is of course the name which is most memorable from my research,
• 15:41
  but really the biggest story of the archive is the detailed documentation
• 15:45
  of the early days of Curtis.
• 15:47
  Whose cars will win the Indy 500 with Johnny Parsons in 1950, Lee Waller
• 15:52
  in 1951 and Bill Vukovich in 1953 and four, and Bob Schweiker in 1955.
• 15:59
  I've explored this very rapid development in the use of land when looking at
• 16:02
  other elements of racing and motoring history, for example, many of you
• 16:07
  will have heard of the Yanko Kamara.
• 16:09
  You probably don't know, but Dana Chevrolet in Los Angeles
• 16:12
  were fitting 427s to Camaros before Don Ianco in Pennsylvania.
• 16:18
  My wife is Dana.
• 16:19
  It seemed only natural to visit Dana Chevrolet, except there's no trace.
• 16:23
  Not only has the dealership gone, but so has the building.
• 16:27
  In fact, as far as I could discern, As of 2015, not one of the buildings on
• 16:32
  the four way intersection where Dana Chevrolet stood in 1968 in Los Angeles,
• 16:38
  not one of those buildings remains.
• 16:39
  And much of this is a function of California and the West Coast.
• 16:42
  We have earthquakes, we build from wood and stucco, not bricks and mortar.
• 16:46
  However, it's a phenomenon which I've seen elsewhere.
• 16:49
  Some years ago, I presented a paper at this conference about Mike Hawthorne,
• 16:53
  British Formula One world champion who was killed in that car crash in
• 16:55
  southern England in January 1959.
• 16:58
  In the years since the accident, not only is the exact location of the tree that
• 17:03
  he hit now impossible to discern, but the road direction has been reversed, then
• 17:07
  the carriageways have been split, and the whole landscape has been gently remodeled.
• 17:12
  But what does that mean?
• 17:13
  Well, the people are dead and gone.
• 17:15
  The land has changed beyond recognition, but the cars and the magazine archive,
• 17:20
  they remain to tell us their story.
• 17:22
  Luckily, the magazines are accessible, the stories are
• 17:25
  dramatic, the photos are compelling.
• 17:27
  The cars with their noisy smelly motors and the gear shifting conveniently
• 17:32
  between the driver's legs and the visceral driving characteristics that they have,
• 17:35
  that all sits dormant in a museum.
• 17:38
  And that Plus this archive that ensures that this brief era of racing history
• 17:44
  will keep its place in posterity despite this new, safe, televised, electrified
• 17:51
  future which we are rushing towards.
• 17:53
  Thank you very much.
• 17:55
  Let me know if you have any questions please.
• 17:59
  So where do those magazines reside and are they being digitized
• 18:03
  and available on the internet?
• 18:05
  They're sitting on a shelf about six feet away from where I'm sitting at the moment.
• 18:10
  The guy's daughter was going to throw them away and contacted the S.
• 18:14
  A.
• 18:14
  H.
• 18:14
  and I was local, so that's how I acquired them.
• 18:17
  So, no, no plans to digitize at the moment.
• 18:20
  John had a, uh Rendezvous in a hospital parking lot, right?
• 18:23
  Where she worked?
• 18:24
  Yes.
• 18:25
  In fact, the park at the hospital is on Geary Boulevard, so I drove past Frank
• 18:31
  Curtis's Northern California location on the way to go and pick up the magazines.
• 18:36
  They're in safekeeping.
• 18:38
  Was Danny Foster Sr.
• 18:39
  a part of the San Francisco midget racing scene at all?
• 18:42
  That is not a name that I've run across in the archive.
• 18:46
  I've limited myself what we were given.
• 18:49
  And it seems to me as if Lapachat, it seems to me as if he was really into
• 18:56
  it for the late 40s, and then by 51 or 52, he wasn't collecting anymore.
• 19:01
  Thank you, John.
• 19:02
  Pretty fascinating what you've done with that collection.
• 19:05
  Uh, Pat Young says you really look like you've gone hippie on us now.
• 19:09
  I mean, I told her it was just the bikes.
• 19:12
  Thank you, John.
• 19:13
  We appreciate it always.
• 19:15
  You're always welcome.
• 19:22
  This episode is brought to you in part by the International
• 19:24
  Motor Racing Research Center.
• 19:25
  Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history
• 19:28
  of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series.
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  The Center's collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie
• 19:36
  of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.
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  The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of
• 19:43
  race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and
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  brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events.
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  To learn more about the Center, visit www.
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  org.
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  This episode is also brought to you by the Society of Automotive Historians.
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  They encourage research into any aspect of automotive history.
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  The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers.
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  Organizational records, print ephemera and images to safeguard, as well as to broaden
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  and deepen the understanding of motorized wheeled land transportation through
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  the modern age and into the future.
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  For more information about the SAH, visit www.
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  autohistory.
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  org.
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