Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (5 page)

IN A RARE MOMENT OF REFLECTION, THE SPEEDWAY
management stood down for part of a day to honor Chet Miller. On
the Monday following Vukovich's daredevil drive in the rain, practice was suspended for Miller's funeral services, which were held at
the Speedway City Funeral Home nearby. Father Leo A. Lindemann,
the Catholic track chaplain, gave the eulogy. It was announced at the
ceremony that the Chevy Chase Country Club in Glendale,
California, planned to erect a water fountain in the seventh hole in
memory of Miller, who was a devoted golfer and a longtime member
member of the club.

Six of Miller's rival drivers, including Wilbur Shaw, were pallbearers. Shaw was an icon in Indianapolis. Not only had he won the 500
three times, with a fourth in his pocket until a wheel broke, but he
was the Speedway's President. He worked for owner Anton "Tony" Hulman, the Terre Haute sportsman who had purchased the track
from Eddie Rickenbacker in 1946. Yale man Hulman's family owned
Terre Haute, for all intents and purposes, as well as the Clabber Girl
Baking Powder Co. and Indiana's Coca-Cola distributorship.

Following the funeral service, the engines were back at full cry. As
if to take a chunk out of the bear, Duke Nalon was among the first on
the track to make some practice laps in the second Novi. To climb
into a sister car that had killed two of his teammates and had tried to
burn him alive was an act of pure defiance. Nalon was a crafty, lowkey Chicagoan, not given to big talk. Like many Indy veterans, he had
abandoned the sport full-time for a job with Ford Motor Company in
its aircraft division, and only drove once a year at Indianapolis. Many
believed that his deft touch with the evil Novis came as close as possible to maximizing the car's potential. Only one Novi remained.
Owner Lew Welch announced that the Hepburn/Miller machine
would never be repaired. Enough was enough.

With Vuke on the pole for the race, he was able to relax as seventysix drivers hammered around the track seeking the remaining thirtytwo positions. He remained reclusive, choosing to confine his limited
conversations to Travers and Coon and a few other drivers. Some
believed him to be an angry man, full of venom and hatred for
strangers, but this was not the case. In private he was affable and easygoing. But he sought no public image and asked for none in return.

One morning we were hanging around his garage when a writer
for Life magazine approached me and asked if I might intercede to
arrange an interview. I told him the possibility was unlikely, but that
I would ask.

"Hey Vuke, a guy from Life magazine would like to talk with you.
What do you think?"

"This does my talking," he said, a wry smile crossing his face. He
was pointing to his right foot.

In fact, Vukovich's entire mind and body were able to talk racing at a level of intensity seldom seen in the sport. He trained vigorously for the ordeal, both back home in Fresno and at the Speedway,
where he ran the 2.5-mile track each morning and flailed away
steadily on an exercise machine mounted in his garage. Like many
drivers, he had fashioned a steering wheel mounted on a shaft connected to a friction shock absorber. Twisting on the wheel developed upper-arm and shoulder strength, a critical component in
controlling a nose-heavy, one-ton race car at speed during an era
when power steering was only available on a few luxury sedans.
Born in Alameda, but raised in Fresno where his immigrant father
had run a small vineyard, when he was sixteen he and his two older
brothers were orphaned and had raised themselves on the tiny
spread on the edge of town.

He drifted into the world of motor racing before the war, fascinated by the fierce competition and lured by the possibility of making a living away from the hardscrabble farm. He made little impact
prior to his military service in World War II, but returned a stronger,
brighter, more focused competitor; and by 1950 he had won the
national midget racing championship in the face of fierce competition from masses of hungry, restless veterans like himself. Vukovich's
dream was to race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the Mount
Olympus of the sport, and he took an instant liking to the foreboding rectangle. He felt no fear of the place.

For others it was not so easy. John Fitch was a P-51 fighter pilot,
prisoner of war, and an expert sports car driver with the top-notch
Cunningham team. He had just won the arduous Sebring 12-Hour
endurance race and had returned to Indianapolis, his native city,
where his father was an executive with the now-defunct Stutz motor
company. He planned to race in the vaunted 500, but like many, this
courageous and skilled driver simply could not get comfortable in the
vast arena. After attempting to run competitively in two different
cars, he left quietly to return to the amateur sports car world, whose drivers Rodger Ward and other pros lampooned as "strokers and bro-
kers"-i.e., rich playboys lacking the cojones to run with "real" men.

This was surely unfair, although in Fitch's case, it was true that
he was unable to exceed 129 mph in a new Kurtis roadster while
forty-six-year-old Bill Holland, who had been suspended from the
Speedway for two years after running a so-called outlaw (unsanctioned) race, easily qualified the car at 137 mph. Holland, a former
winner of the 500, was clearly someone who had no trouble running
the big track at record speeds. Yet Fitch's career in motor sports would
be long and distinguished, despite his failure to crack the mental barrier at Indianapolis.

Somehow an eastern Brahmin was at a massive disadvantage in
professional automobile racing. Of the thirty-three men who made
up the starting field in 1953, more than half were native Californians.
Eight had either won the 500 or were destined to win it during the
fifties.

All were working-class Anglo-Saxons, with the exception of
Vukovich. All had been trained in the crucible of competition like the
booming midget racing leagues, where competition was carried on
around the Los Angeles basin seven nights a week, or in the crazed
California Roadster Association, where wheel-to-wheel hot-rod racing took place at the elemental level of survival of the fittest.

They were hardly boys of summer. Of the thirty-three, only two,
at twenty-four years of age, were young enough to play major
league baseball in their prime. A few others were in their late twenties or early thirties. Three were in their forties, bringing the average age to twenty-eight. All had been in racing since their teenage
years, bouncing around the dirt and asphalt bullrings of the nation,
honing their skills behind the wheels of lethal, unhinged semiwrecks owned and campaigned by local gas station and garage
owners, all dreaming of a shot at Indianapolis. All had suffered
injuries ranging from broken noses and teeth and cheekbones, to horrific arm bruises from flying clots of dirt, to multiple fractures
and burns. Many were unmarried, content to live out their lives
drifting from racetrack to racetrack, with cheap hotels and tourist
homes offering the only respite from the noise and violence. Weeks
on end might be spent sleeping in the backseat of a car towing a
race car known simply as "the Ford motel."

A man of Fitch's background, where gentlemanly amateur motor
sports was the fashion, could not easily adjust to the fanatic level of
driving to be found among the Californians. So it would come to pass
that Golden Staters like Johnny Parsons, Oklahoma transplant Troy
Ruttman (absent from the 1953 starters due to an arm injury),
Vukovich, Bob Sweikert, Sam Hanks, Rodger Ward, and Jim
Rathmann would win at Indianapolis while gentlemen sports car racers, the "teabaggers" and "strokers and brokers," were resigned to secondary status, at least in the deadly game being played out each May
at Indianapolis.

As an example of how unforgiving professional racing at the
Indianapolis level was: among the thirty-three men who started
the 1953 Indianapolis Motor Speedway International Sweepstakes
(the official name of the event), seventeen would die in racing accidents. Another would be permanently disabled. Four would meet
death at Indianapolis, while the rest would die at various dirt track
and asphalt speedways around the nation. By contrast, in Fitch's
world of sports cars, death and injury were both rare. The racing
speeds were slower, and the environment was more relaxed.

Medley and I ate dinner the night before the big race with a few
journalists at a little downtown steak house called St. Elmo's, famous
for its mouth-frying shrimp cocktail sauce and tender beef. We
planned to rise early and be at the trackside long before the prerace
festivities got underway at ten o'clock. But I was awake far earlier than
expected, when a hot breeze rolled into my bedroom. I checked the
clock: 3 a.m. and already it was stifling. Unless a cold front arrived, Indianapolis would be blanketed in insufferable humidity by the time
the green flag fell.

The cavernous grandstands were slow to fill, the throng (estimated
at two-hundred thousand) perhaps sensing that a late arrival would
minimize exposure to the heat. By ten o'clock the thermometer outside the Associated Press hut read 88 degrees. A steamy layer of soft
nimbus clouds hung over the track, and people were already dabbing
their foreheads with soaked handkerchiefs.

The Purdue University marching band was a traditional performer
at the prerace ceremony. It would accompany Martin Downey in his
rendition of local favorite "Back Home in Indiana." The program
went according to plan until a pretty blonde drum majorette keeled
over with heat prostration. She was followed by four band members,
who went down like tenpins in heat-induced faints.

The cars were rolled out of their garages and pushed onto the front
straightaway, there to be swallowed up by a sea of sweating pit crewmen, VIPs, journalists, and track officials. The drivers, sensing a long,
hot ride, were wearing polo shirts, ignoring fire protection in favor of
simple ventilation.

Whistles blew and a battalion of track guards wearing blue shirts
and yellow ties-a uniform resembling the Indiana State Highway
Patrol began to clear the grid.

Only the cars, their drivers, and the crews stood on the bricks.
Then came the world-famous words from speedway boss Wilbur
Shaw: "Gentlemen, start your engines."

Starters whined. Engines blurted into life. A cheer swept through
the grandstand. William Clay Ford, the son of the founder of modern automotive transportation, eased onto the track at the wheel of
his white Ford Sunliner convertible pace car. Ford slowly accelerated to lead the field on a pair of pace laps. Vukovich's gray Fuel
Injection Special was flanked by fellow Californians Freddy
Agabashian in the Granatelli brothers' Kurtis-Kraft roadster and Jack McGrath in Jack Hinkle's narrow, bright maroon, upright dirttrack Kurtis.

Meldley rushed off to the first turn with his camera, hoping to get
some early race action. Dripping sweat, I made off to the pits to await
any emergency stops.

The race started. Deafening thunder as the field pounded past and
slashed out of sight. A minute later they reappeared, with Vukovich
already well out in front. Lap one of two hundred.

Four laps and a yellow flag. Caution. Andy Linden, a burly ex-navy
boxer from Manhattan Beach, had started fifth among the fast guys,
but had lost control in the second turn and slammed into the wall. I
headed for the infield hospital, where the chief doctor, C. B. Bohner,
had set up a small army of physicians, nurses, and ambulance drivers
to handle the inevitable crunch of injuries among the massive crowd
and the competitors.

As I trudged through the infield, I passed a row of bizarre scaffolds
that had been erected along the main straightaway. They looked like
medieval assault towers, built out of spindly pipe frames used as temporary construction and painters' platforms, and enterprising fans
had erected them for better race viewing. Though they were guywired, they looked over-packed and dangerously wobbly. A year later,
one such structure would topple, killing several people. The towers
were subsequently banished from the Speedway.