Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (10 page)

It would have been hard to believe that among these eighteen
young men, eleven faced early, grisly deaths in race cars. One other,
Linden, would suffer debilitating injuries. Imagine a sport like football or hockey, both considered to be violent tests of courage, in
which half of its participants would die while playing. The risks faced
by those men on that sunny day in Syracuse seem, in retrospect,
intolerable in a civilized society. They even equaled-or exceededthe toll taken in the man-on-man gladiatorial contests popularized
during the Roman Empire.

The crowd crushed into the rickety grandstands were like the
drivers-blue-collar mechanics, carpenters, farmers, welders, hoaryhanded workers of all kinds who understood the skills demanded of
their heroes. As the giddy beat of a Sousa march pounded through
the loudspeakers and mingled with the faint screams of riders on a
Ferris wheel in the distant midway, the drivers flicked away their cigarettes and eased into their leather-upholstered seats. They pulled on
leather crash helmets of the type long favored by motorcyclists, a feeble nod to safety they had resisted for years-much as hockey pros
like Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull would sneer at protective headgear
two decades later. When a local dignitary sounded the traditional
call-"Gentlemen, start your engines"-the drivers snapped aircraftstyle seat belts around their waists, knowing full well they would be
essentially useless in the event of a flip. Behind each of them was
mounted a seventy-five-gallon tank of methanol capable of incinerating a man with its nearly invisible, iridescent flame.

Like Hemingway's bullfighters, they faced unspeakable danger, not
from a raging one-ton animal, but from an equally savage machine
twice that weight. The car could kill in the same abstract fashion that
the face of a granite cliff might a misstepping mountain climber.
Such were the penalties for men who chose the great writer's three
sports over "children's" games. The engines, guttural, unmuffled,
fierce, rattled through the grandstands as the cars rolled away, slowly at first, then gaining speed during the two pace laps to align the field,
two by two, to take the green flag.

Then mayhem. Thunderous noise. A swirl of color as a wall of dust
and the reek of methanol overwhelmed the crowd. Linden barged
into the lead for a few laps, angling through the corners in wild slides
before being overtaken by Freeland, then by Sweikert, who seized the
lead in a fiercely executed pass at the exact spot where Jimmy Murphy
had lost his life thirty years earlier.

Both Freeland and McGrath challenged Sweikert in the latter
stages, swapping the lead before the gritty surface began to shred
their tires. That left Sweikert unchallenged, thereby avoiding a repeat
of his crash the year before, which had taken both him and McGrath
into the fence. His payoff was $3,750, 60 percent of which would be
shared with the car owner and crew.

Checkout completed at the Onondaga Hotel, where most of the
teams stayed-often three and four to a room-and it was off to the
next race the following weekend at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in
Indianapolis. The Lutes Special, its nose scoured clean from the flying
cinders, was loaded onto an open trailer and hooked to a road-worn
Ford station wagon, then aimed west for the 500-mile trip to the
Hoosier State. Five more races remained on the AAA championship
schedule, which would ultimately take Sweikert and the Lutes across
the country, to Las Vegas, Sacramento, and Phoenix before season
ended that November.

On balance, 1954 would be a good year for the professionals. Just
two men, both rookies in over their heads, had lost their lives. Bob
Scott, an eager twenty-five-year-old from the West Coast hot-rod
ranks, had died of head injuries when his car rolled onto him during
the Darlington, South Carolina, 100-miler. Wally Campbell, a hotheaded kid from the eastern sprint car circuit, had burned to death
when his car leapt the outside fence at Williams Grove, Pennsylvania.
In a macabre scene, the car had continued to run in tight circles as its unconscious driver was consumed in flames. Considering the potential for death and injury on the championship trail, most of the
young lions had dodged a bullet. So too for the professional
European road racers, among whom only young Argentinian Onofre
Marimon, a protege of the world champion, Juan Manuel Fangio,
had died during practice on the notoriously twisty, up-and-down,
fourteen-mile Nurburgring in Germany.

I took a week to laze around Geneva, staying at my fraternity on
South Main Street, a tree-lined avenue bordering the western shore of
Lake Seneca that E Scott Fitzgerald once called one of the most beautiful streets in America. I would rush to the front porch when I heard
local sportsman George Harris running his incredible, thundering
Cadillac-Allard J2X up South Main, no doubt headed to the local
hills for a mad drive across the golden woodlands of early autumn.

The following weekend a friend and I drove his new Austin-Healy
100S to Watkins Glen, a tiny village at the southern end of Lake
Seneca. The largest of the five Finger Lakes, which dented the central
New York landscape like a giant handprint, Seneca was forty miles
long, with cold, impenetrable depths reaching seven hundred feet.
Route 14 meandered along a ridge hundreds of feet above the cleft of
the lake, offering a spectacular vista of woodlands bright with the
crimson and lurid oranges of turning leaves and a sweep of the vineyards that were springing up throughout the region. At roadside fruit
stands, homegrown pumpkins, squash, gourds, late-season tomatoes,
and jugs of cider were piled high and offered at bargain prices.
Watkins Glen had subsisted for decades solely on its salt mine and on
a modest tourist business based on a spectacular shale ravine carved
out during the same ice age retreat that had formed the lakes.

In 1948 young Cameron Argetsinger, the son of a Youngstown,
Ohio, steel executive whose family had a vacation home on the
Seneca shore, convinced the village elders that if a European-style
road race could be run through the streets and a network of nearby Schuyler County roadways, a giant tourism boom would ensue. His
efforts, aided by the local Chamber of Commerce and other civic
groups, resulted in the first "Grand Prix" being run on October 2 of
that year. The eight-lap race around the 6.6-mile circuit was won by
an alcoholic Philadelphia Main Line millionaire named Frank T.
Griswold Jr. at the wheel of his own prewar supercharged Alfa Romeo
coupe. Argetsinger finished ninth in the race he created. In coming
decades, the best professional drivers in the world would compete at
Watkins Glen, but in the early years the racing was strictly amateur
and based on the English model of clubby, gentlemanly competition
unsullied by filthy lucre.

The races were an immediate success, even following the death of
Samuel Carnes Collier, the heir to a Manhattan advertising fortune, in
a 1950 crash that received front-page coverage in the New York press.
Unlike the majority of men dying on the nation's dirt tracks and at
Indianapolis, Collier was well-born, a pure sportsman who engaged in
a civilized expression of motor sports that rarely led to death.

The ruling body at Watkins Glen was the Sports Car Club of
America. Like many WASP-based private organizations of the day, it
did not admit Jews. This caused a major upset in 1951, when a
wealthy Jewish businessman from New York named Erwin
Goldschmidt broke the anti-Semitic barrier and won the Grand Prix
with his Cadillac-Allard. Goldschmidt, who had endured Nazi persecution in his native Germany, won a victory that ultimately broke
down the racial policy of the SCCA. Ironically, the Indianapolis 500
had already been won three times-in 1941, 1947, and 1948-by a
Jewish engineer named Mauri Rose. But it was not until the 1960s
that Jews and other minorities who had been excluded from many
enclaves of American society were finally given proper admission.

Competition having been outlawed on state roads following the
death of the young child in 1952, the Watkins Glen organizerscomposed of village businessmen and area enthusiasts-moved the races to a network of Town of Dix and Schuyler County roads on a
hill above the village. The course was laid out on barren farmland in
a rough rectangle of narrow, rudely paved roads totaling four miles in
length. The paddock, such as it was, had been created out of a mown
hayfield, topped by a crude timing stand on the edge of Townsend
Corner Road. To the north lay the long, blue slit of Lake Seneca.

The paddock was full of rare and strange automobiles. All were
European, with names like Lagonda, Aston-Martin, Hispano-Suiza,
Mercedes-Benz, Frazier-Nash, Nash-Healy, Triumph, and Riley, in
addition to the more popular marques like Jaguar, MG, and Porsche,
all of which were appearing in increasing numbers in upscale suburbs
from coast to coast.

A large contingent of New York socialites had made the drive upstate.
They had become involved with the sport when the Bridgehampton
road races had been started on eastern Long Island in 1949. Thanks to
their exposure in the chic Hamptons, sports cars had become a fashion
item in Manhattan. Former French star driver Rene Dreyfus and his
brother had opened the Chanticlair Restaurant on East Forty-Ninth
Street. The international racing crowd and major automobile executives
used it as their regular watering hole. Henry Austin Clark, an heir to the
Singer sewing machine fortune and a major car collector and historian,
had started the Madison Avenue Sports Car and Chowder Society,
which met monthly at amateur racer Vincent Sardi's famed restaurant
on Forty-Fourth Street.

Mingling in the pits on that late summer weekend were such notables as CBS announcer Walter Cronkite, Today show host Dave
Garroway, and former child star Jackie Cooper, who would compete
enthusiastically-if not quickly-in his own Austin-Healy 100S
sports car.

Unlike in Syracuse and Indianapolis, here women were everywhere. Some lounged by the cars, while others prepared tailgate
lunches. Some helped their husbands, polishing wheels and checking tire pressures. A few even donned helmets and goggles and raced with
the men. Sports car racing, with its social exclusivity and highminded sense of separating itself from the dirt-track rabble, was an
example of sexual egalitarianism. To outsiders, the women lent an air
of casual frivolity to the scene, as opposed to the hard-edged chauvinism of the professionals.

Most of the cars were marginally set up for racing, which meant
that the headlights had been taped over and crude numbers pasted
on the doors. There were no special tires, rollover protection, or other
safety considerations. Most, like Harris's Cadillac-Allard, which had
ripped past us on Route 14 at 110 mph as we headed south from
Geneva, had been driven to the race. And presuming there would be
no accidents or mechanical failures, they would be driven home again
at the end of the day.

Some of the more serious competitors had transported their cars
on open trailers, hauled behind station wagons and standard
American sedans. And then there was the Cunningham equipe,
which had elevated the sport to a higher, more professional level.

Briggs Swift Cunningham, of Greens Farms, Connecticut, was the
heir to a meat-packing fortune and had been smitten with fast cars
for his entire life. Being relieved of such mundane chores as earning
a living, he had grown up preoccupied with yachting (he later won
the America's Cup) and motor sports. Several prewar trips to Europe
had instilled in him the desire to win the great 24-hour race held each
June at Le Mans, in France.

By 1951 he was building his own special Cunningham sports
cars, powered by the newly developed Chrysler "hemi" engines. The
cars, designed and fabricated in a new factory outside West Palm
Beach, Florida, were the equal of any Ferrari or Mercedes-Benz sports
car of the day, and with a team of closet professionals including John
Fitch, Cunningham nearly won the great race on several occasions. His
lead driver was a brilliant ex-World War II glider pilot named Phil Walters. Also well-born, Walters had returned to Manhassett, Long
Island, from the war with a restlessness for action that attracted him to
motor racing. His first involvement was in the rough-and-tumble
midget racing circuit, which his socially active family felt was beneath
his station. In deference to them, he raced under the non de plume of
Ted Tappett until he joined the Cunningham team. This kind of racing
was considered sufficiently civilized that he could use his given name.

Walters was the number-one Cunningham driver now that Fitch
had moved to Europe, taking up residence in Switzerland to work as
a double for Kirk Douglas in a 20th Century Fox production about
Grand Prix racing called The Racers. His driving skills and gentlemanly demeanor had led to a place on the Mercedes-Benz team,
which was competing in both the Grand Prix circuit and in worldclass sports car competition.

While Fitch had been uncomfortable at Indianapolis, he was fearless
at tracks like Le Mans, where the tree-lined, four-mile Muslanne
straight had to be driven at 150 mph throughout the dark of night,
often probing through fog that obscured the circuit. So too for Walters,
who never tried Indianapolis but appeared to posses sufficient courage
and skill to drive any kind of race car at any level of competition.

The Cunningham team arrived at Watkins Glen like an army of
conquerors. The three cars, painted white with blue stripes-the
international American racing colors-were hauled in a giant semitransporter. A crew of mechanics led by Alfred Momo, a genius Italian
emigre, tended to the cars while onlookers gaped at the entourage.

As a series of minor races involving slower MGs, Porsches,
Triumphs, and the like buzzed around the course, the Cunninghamsto be driven by Walters, Cunningham himself, and a well-known eastern amateur named Sherwood Johnston-were given a final warm-up
as their big V-8s were brought up to operating temperature.