Chance Kinsley - racer

Part One  

Young Chauncey “Chance” Kinsley was a Hoosier dirt track race car driver whose star was on the rise during the early part of the decade of the nineteen twenties but he never got his chance at the top rung of auto racing fame and fortune.

Chance born in Greenfield Indiana in 1896 was one of Marvin and Nannie Kinsley’s family of six children – two boys and four girls. Chance’s older brother Joseph and older sister Carrie both married and moved away from Indiana, while un-married middle sister Bessie lived in Portland Oregon.  Chance’s other two sisters, Nell born in 1890 and Frances, born in 1900, both lived in the family home at 218 South State Street in Greenfield and worked as school teachers.

Chance’s name first surfaced in connection with automobile racing at an event at the nearby Shelby County Fairgrounds ½-mile dirt track in Shelbyville on Labor Day Monday September 6 1920.  An advertisement in the Shelbyville Republican newspaper cautioned readers “Don’t fail to see these races or you will miss the most sensational, death-defying races ever witnessed by the public. The fastest and most daring speed demons in the country will drive in these races which will without doubt be the most exciting event ever staged in this community.” Admission to the races, held as part of the annual County Fair was 75 cents with a grandstand seat 25 cents more with the spectator gates scheduled to open at 10 AM and the racing set to start at 2:00 PM.

Due to the entries of “eleven speed artists” it was announced that “it will be necessary to hold elimination trials Monday morning in order to cut the field to the limited number of cars” for the three scheduled races, two 10-mile races and a 25-mile finale. Advance entries were received from hometown driver Dick Carroll, as well as from Wilbert “Bill” Hunt, Frank Thomas and Clarence Belt of Indianapolis, Toby Conners of Richmond, John Mahoney from Dunreith and Packey Quinn who hailed from Greensburg.

Louis Williams from Indianapolis was scheduled to drive the Keeton entry which was reported to have “held the record of 90 miles per hour (MPH) at Cincinnati,” a reference to the short-lived 2-mile board track Cincinnati Motor Speedway which had closed after the 1919 season.  Nearly 100 years after the fact, the provenance of Williams’ 1920 Shelbyville race entry cannot be positively confirmed but it seems probable that it was a former Indianapolis entry. The Keeton was seven years old in 1920 but local odds makers still established Williams as the 6-to-5 favorite to win the Labor Day races.  

 

 

The Keeton

In 1913, the company’s first year of passenger car production  Bob Burman raced a Keeton  finished in Brewster green with white trim in the Indianapolis ‘500.’ Burman’s Keeton was powered by a T-head Wisconsin Motor Company 4-cylinder engine that displaced 449 cubic inches and developed over 100 horsepower.  When one compares the specifications of Burman’s race car engine to that of the stock Keeton four-cylinder 255-cubic inch engine which produced 38 horsepower from the Detroit factory it appears that Burman’s car was an early example of a “silhouette race car.”  An April 1913 advertisement in the Motor World Wholesale magazine stated that Burman, “the Speed King of the World” had “selected the Keeton to drive and win the great 500-mile race at Indianapolis.”

Inventor Forrest M. Keeton established the Keeton Motor Company which built both six- and four- cylinder cars which rode on 120-inch wheelbase chassis that featured the radiator located behind the engine. Mr. Keeton’s patented design awarded patent number 969107 used a centrifugal fan attached to the flywheel to force air through the radiator.   

According to Keeton’s advertising, this “European design” (which was similar to Renault) allowed for a “graceful sloping hood” and “long low lines.”  The Keeton radiator design feature was carried over to Burman’s race car, which Mr. Keeton watched perform in the 1913 Indianapolis 500-mile race from the car’s pit stall.  

Bob Burman ran his single qualifying lap at 84 miles per hour in time trials and started the ‘500’ from 21st position but grabbed the lead of the race on lap 16 and quickly built up a substantial lead. Burman's time for 120 miles (48 laps) was one hour and thirty-one minutes, and as there was no previous standing mark for this distance, Burman's average speed of 79.12 MPH became a new race record.

Burman and his riding mechanic Tony Janette led the race until the engine backfired and the car caught fire on their 58th lap.  After the fire was extinguished and repairs made which included a carburetor replacement the Keeton had  lost over 20 minutes and ten laps but still managed to finish the race as “Wild Bob” who may have suffered burns accepted relief driving help from British driver Hughie Hughes.   

 

Author’s note:  there are a number of interesting photos of Keeton passenger cars and the Keeton racer in action in the 1913 Indianapolis ‘500’ on the Detroit Public Library website at https://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/search?f%5B0%5D=mods_subject_topic_ms%3A%22Keeton%20Motor%20Company%22

 

Two weeks after the Indianapolis ‘500,’ Burman was entered in the Keeton in a race at the former Oakland Trotting Park in Emeryville California, but he drove his ‘Blitzen Benz’ instead. Over the July 4th holiday Burman and the Keeton placed second in the Potlach Trophy road race at Tacoma Washington then dropped out early in the National Trophy road race at Elgin Illinois at the end of August 1913. 

William “Willie” Knipper drove the Keeton racer now owned by Burman at Indianapolis for the 1914 International Sweepstakes after Louis Chevrolet passed on the ride. After he started twelfth over the course of the race Knipper made thirteen pit stops as the crew attempted to diagnosis the car’s lack of performance and changed the coil only to later find that the engine was performing poorly due to a stuck valve. The Keeton finished the ‘500’ in thirteenth place as car owner Burman relieved Knipper and was behind the wheel when the Keeton finally completed its 200th lap an hour and half after winner Rene Thomas had taken the checkered flag.

 

 

Jack Callaghan in the Keeton racer at Elgin Illinois

 

After racing promoter Ernest Moross bought the Wisconsin-powered Keeton,  Michigander John D. "Jack" Callaghan took the controls of the for the rest of 1914 and finished fourth in his hometown AAA (American Automobile Association) race at Kalamazoo (won by Burman in a Peugeot) and fifth at Galesburg Illinois both of which were one mile dirt ovals with small starting fields.   

Callaghan also raced the Keeton in several “outlaw” non-AAA IMCA (International Motor Contest Association) events across the country often in match races against the “Blitzen Benz” before he joined the Duesenberg team. Callaghan drove the third Duesenberg entry early in the 1915 AAA season while Frank Jennings replaced Callaghan as the driver of the Keeton in IMCA races.

Callaghan finished second in the “Tropico Road Race” held mid-week after a rain delay which was promoted by Lodge #1289 of the Benevolent and Protective Orders of Elks in Glendale, California, crashed out of the other two AAA early season West Coast races.  Jack lost two teeth after he struck a pole in the first crash at the San Diego Exposition Race, but his second crash a month later at Ascot Speedway proved fatal after Jack was impaled on a fence board and died the following day.   

The  Keeton Motor Company merged with the Car-Nation cyclecar company in early 1914, but the combined company failed in at the end of 1914. The Keeton was gone after just thirty-three months in business, and the factory building at 462 Lawton Avenue in Detroit and remaining inventory of 100 Keeton cars were sold off by the bankruptcy court during 1915.

 

 

The Craig-Hunt Special

 Another favorite for the Labor Day 1920 races at Shelbyville was Bill Hunt at 4-to-1 odds in the Craig-Hunt Special which was powered by a Ford Model T engine fitted with a sixteen-valve “Peugeot style” racing cylinder head. These heads with overhead valves and the camshaft controlled by bevel gears driven off the crankshaft were built in the shop owned by Hunt and John Craig on North Illinois Avenue in Indianapolis. Craig-Hunt Inc. later known as Speedway Engineering was also an early catalogue speed shop which sold parts needed  to build a race car such as speedster bodies, underslung frames, gear sets, engine parts and Pasco wire wheels.  

A few years later, Bill Hunt would hire a young man named Wilbur Shaw and allowed the young Shelbyville native to use his Illinois Avenue shop to build his first race car and the pair became lifelong friends. Hunt drove a Ford-Frontenac in the 1924 ‘500’ and later worked as a team manager and mechanic at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before he died in mid-December 1950, at what was believed to be 62 years old in Wickenburg Arizona after he collapsed while driving from Las Vegas to Phoenix. 

On Friday, September 3 1920 the Shelbyville Republican carried the news that the race registration committee announced that the fairgrounds track “will not be turned over to the drivers for practice spins before Monday morning.” The qualifying runs, for which the car and driver had to “do over 60 MPH” were overseen by Howard “Howdy” Wilcox the 1919 Liberty 500-mile Sweepstakes race winner, the second native Hoosier to win the great race and the first American born driver to do so since 1912 even though he drove a French Peugeot.   

The entry list for the 1920 Labor Day races in Shelbyville also included several Ford Specials, a Buick, an Oakland and a five-year Chevrolet driven by Chance Kinsley who was an employee of the Maxwell Motor Company.  While the author has been unable to find any published reports of the race, an advertisement in the Thursday September 9 edition of the Shelbyville Republican proclaimed that “Chance Kinsley of Greenfield won the most daring race Labor Day on the fairground track that was ever witnessed on a half-mile dirt track in his Chevrolet Special. He also says he never uses anything but Indian Gas.”

 

 

Indian Gasoline was the product of the Indian Refinery Company originally an Indiana company formed in Asphaltum a small village midway between Lafayette and Gary but which had years before relocated its offices to Cincinnati with its refinery in Lawrenceville Illinois. 

During the period between 1920 and 1922 Indian became a national chain via acquisitions and   transitioned its logo from the previous "running Indian" design to a logo that was a red ball surrounded by the words  “Indian” and  "Gas" in dark blue letters. In 1931 the Texas Corporation (TEXACO) purchased the Indian Refinery Company and operated Indian as a subsidiary until March 1943 when Texaco officially discontinued the Indian brand. 

In our next installment we will examine how Chance Kinsley’s racing successes led to growing prominence within his home state. 

A big “thank you” to Don Capps, Dennis Mattish and Jim Thurman of the Racing History Group for the information on the 1915 Tropico Road Race. Learn more and join the group at   https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/RacingHistory/info