The Wally Stokes story

Part three

For the 1948 racing season, Wally Stokes who now lived in the suburb of Gates Mill east of Cleveland Ohio, concentrated on ‘big car’ (today known as a sprint car) racing with his car owner fellow Northeastern Ohioan Andy Dunlop’s blue #2 255-cubic inch Offenhauser powered machine. Stokes became the featured performer in John Sloan’s American Booking Agency promoted 1948 racing programs, and Stokes and Dunlop competed in both IMCA (International Motor Contest Association), the CSRA (Central States Racing Association) and a handful of independent events. 

Throughout the 1948 season, pre-race press reports continued to identify Stokes’ hometown as Honolulu, and stories frequently referred to him as “the rim riding Hawaiian.” Some stories such as the one in the Burlington Iowa Hawkeye Gazette went so far as to call Wally “the Hawaiian pineapple king” and related that he “takes time off from his Honolulu pineapple canning factory for 3 months of racing.” While it made a good story, in truth Stokes was born and raised in the Cleveland area, never visited Hawaii and certainly did not own a pineapple cannery.  

The CSRA season opened on April 18 with a race at the half-mile Celina Speedway on the Mercer County Ohio Fairgrounds with another race a week later at the high banked half-mile south of Greenville Ohio. Both of those tracks were promoted by Arthur Zimmer’s Valli Enterprises which was based in Dayton Ohio as was the CSRA. Stokes was mentioned as an entrant at Celina along with Jimmy Daywalt who drove Franklin Merkler’s “404” ‘big car’ powered by a “Hisso” engine, a 359-cubic inch, single overhead cam, 4-cylinder power plant created from one half of a World War era 718-cubic inch Hispano Suiza aluminum block V-8 aircraft engine.

The April 18 Celina race was won by Bobby Grim as he drove what was described in press reports as a “brand new Offenhauser.” It seems entirely possible that Stokes although listed as an entrant, did not appear at Celina, as Andy Dunlop in his book, Damn Few Died in Bed, written with Thomas Saal, recalled that the team’s first race for the 1948 season was at Greenville “in late April.” Stokes won the 20-lap feature April 25 at Greenville over Cliff Griffith, Red Bales and Carl Hooper.   A month later, when the CSRA ‘big car’ circuit visited Greenville Speedway Stokes again won the 20-lap feature.   

During the 1948 season, in the days before the interstate highway system, the Dunlop team sometimes traveled long distances between races. They took part in the first annual Shrine Memorial Day races held on May 30 the Iowa State Fair track in Des Moines promoted by the Za-Ga-Zig Shrine temple of Altoona Iowa. In front of a crowd of 7,500 fans, Stokes, in the Dunlop Offenhauser powered blue #2 ‘big car’ grabbed three victories during the five-race program – his heat race, the trophy dash and the day’s 10-lap finale on the half-mile dirt track.

The next night. May 31, Stokes was entered in the ‘big car’ race at Heidelberg Raceway, a new 5/8-mile dirt track located a few miles southwest of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania which was more than 800 miles east of Des Moines. The Dunlop team members made the trek to the inaugural event at Heidelberg by driving in shifts but they arrived at the track late.


The Heidelberg track manager Henry P Miller certain got his money’s worth for the $800 he paid Dunlop in appearance money, as during qualifying Stokes recorded a best lap of 23.92 seconds, which reportedly broke the standing “world’s 5/8-mile one-lap record which had stood since 1938." Stokes’ fast lap was more than a second faster than Everett Saylor’s old record.  According to Dunlop’s book, Stokes once again won his heat, the trophy dash and the feature which was shortened from 30 to 20 laps by dusty track conditions.    

Stokes stayed on his winning streak as the CSRA circuit headed back to Greenville Ohio for a special Father’s Day race, and before the race it was reported that Wally led the CSRA standings over Daywalt, Grim and George Tichenor. 


On June 27, the teams revisited Heidelberg Raceway with much the same results as earlier in the season, as Stokes won over Daywalt and Tichenor as Wally completed the 20-lap feature in eight minutes and 17.71 seconds. Back in Iowa for races over the July 4^th holiday, Stokes scored his eleventh and twelfth wins of the season in back-to-back races at Burlington and Des Moines.

The September 19 MDTRA (Midwest Dirt Track Racing Association) program at the Johnson County Fairgrounds in Franklin Indiana serves to remind historians just how dangerous dirt track racing during this era. In one tragic afternoon, James “Chick” Smith and 40-year-old Indianapolis veteran racer Les Adair were struck down in separate accidents.   

During an early heat race, two cars driven by Adair and Webb Reed locked wheels, crashed through the outer fence and flipped with Reed's car coming to rest on top of Adair’s machine.   Reed was hurt in the crash but Les received fatal head injuries.


On the first lap of the feature event Smith from Louisville Kentucky crashed when his car’s throttle stuck open, then the car crashed through the wooden fence and overturned. Smith was taken to the Johnson County Hospital in Franklin in critical condition, where he succumbed to his head injuries the following day.  Stokes won the feature race that sad day at Franklin.

Stokes and Dunlop traveled to Hagerstown Maryland to race on Sunday afternoon October 3^rd at the year-old ½-mile banked clay Conococheague Speedway. During time trials, Stokes’ CSRA rival Bobby Grim toured the track in 24.67 seconds which broke the “world’s half mile record.” Later when Stokes had his chance to qualify the blue Dunlop #2, Wally was even faster, and completed his lap in just 24.15 seconds which broke the old mark set at Williams Grove Speedway by .63 seconds.

Later in the afternoon program, Stokes won the 20-lap feature at Conococheague as he bested Grim, Paul Becker, Woody Hill and Bob O’Neil. The October 4^th edition of the Hagerstown Morning Herald newspaper reported that as a bonus for the 3,800 fans, after the feature was completed, Stokes and Grim ran a match race of indeterminate laps which finished in what fans described as a ‘dead heat.’

Over the course of the 1948 racing season, Wally Stokes won 13 of 14 CSRA races and was crowned the 1948 CSRA champion over Jimmy Daywalt, George Tichenor, Bobby Grim and Carl Scarborough. In IMCA competition, Wally also won 11 of 13 IMCA sanctioned races he competed in during 1948, but because he ran so few IMCA races, he was only scored 13^th in the season-ending points totals. Overall, Wally Stokes’ documented record for 1948, recounted in the Dunlop book, was 27 wins in 30 races, truly a “dream season.”     

Wally Stokes wanted to move up to AAA (American Automobile Association) championship racing, but Dunlop did not have a sponsor to financially support that effort so Stokes left the team.  During the 1949 season, without a steady ride, Stokes made occasional midget racing starts at familiar tracks namely Sportsman’s Park in Ohio and Ebensburg and Heidelberg Speedways in Pennsylvania.   

In April, Wally was nominated as the driver for the 33^rd running of the famed Indianapolis 500-mile race in a “new car” powered by a 270-cubic inch 4-cylinder Offenhauser engine owned by Thomas Kupiec of Hamtramck Michigan.


Nothing is known about this car or car owner beyond what was learned from a May 27, 1949 Associated Press report that identified the Kupiec car as one of four cars that never reached the 2-1/2-mile brick paved oval. The author was unable to discover any other details of the construction or ownership of the Kupiec machine.   

Wally’s next appearance on the 1949 AAA championship trail came on July 31 for the non-points "Indianapolis Sweepstakes" held at the ½-mile Williams Grove Speedway in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. According to the Somerset Daily American newspaper James Lamb, the Secretary of the AAA told Williams Grove Park owner Roy Richwine that ‘the sanctioning of this type of program on the Williams Grove Speedway is an experiment and does not establish a precedent.“


The article stated many of the the big stars of the AAA were expected and specifically named the 1949 Indianapolis ‘500’ winner Bill Holland, Rex Mays, Johnny Mantz, the 1949 ‘500’ second place finisher  as a rookie, Johnnie Parsons, and fellow ‘500’ rookie Troy Ruttman as entries.  

Advertisements in local newspaper printed the week before the “Indianapolis Sweepstakes” stated that “this race is definitely limited to all Indianapolis drivers and championship cars only. Open only to cars with a maximum displacement limit of 183-cubic inches supercharged and 274-cubic inches supercharged that meet national championship specifications.”

Parsons and Ruttman were not among the twelve drivers that appeared for the race, and Holland’s ‘Marion Special’ and Stokes’ ‘Lutes Truck Parts Special’ suffered mechanical troubles and did not start the 50-lap (25 mile) feature. Witnessed by a massive crowd of 38,156 fans, Johnny Mantz won the feature which took only 24 ½ minutes to run as he finished ahead of Duane Carter and Rex Mays.

AAA officials and promoter Richwine must have considered the experimental race on the half-mile at Williams Grove a success, as Indianapolis cars and stars continued to appear at the non-championship “Indianapolis Sweepstakes” at Williams Grove until 1955, then it continued under USAC (United States Auto Club) sanction through 1959. The 1959 running of the “Indianapolis Sweepstakes” attracted 12,000 fans who saw the fatal crash of Pennsylvania’s Van Johnson who died in the same car owned by Jake Vargo that had claimed the life of Dick Linder at Trenton Speedway in April 1959.   

Wally Stokes entered an Offenhauser powered ‘big car’ (not Dunlop’s) for the races held on August 14 at Hawkeye Downs in association with the All-Iowa Fair. In an article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette newspaper, Hawkeye Downs track superintendent R K “Doc” Hunter said that Stokes told him that “it was doubtful if he could pilot the machine personally, that the driver would probably be Gene Aldrich. “

On Saturday afternoon August 20 at the Illinois State Fairgrounds mile dirt track in Springfield, Stokes made his first AAA championship start in the ‘Springfield 100.” Wally qualified the Offenhauser powered car owned by WJ Lutes of Detroit for the ninth starting position in the eighteen-car field, then was credited with a thirteenth-place finish in a poorly documented race won by Mel Hanson.  After the race was completed, Wally and his wife Grace left immediately, headed East so Stokes could compete in a midget race scheduled for Sunday afternoon in Bainbridge Ohio.

In the early hours of Sunday morning August 21, west of Springfield Ohio with Wally asleep in the passenger’s seat as his wife drove, the right front tire on their car blew out, the car went out of control and struck a tree. Grace Stokes was injured but Wally, who had just hours earlier had completed his first championship race, was killed in the accident. Wallace E Stokes was interred a few days later in the village cemetery of his hometown of Willoughby Ohio.

In his book Damn Few Died in Bed written with Thomas Saal, Andy Dunlop remembered that “Wally was a great driver and fierce competitor, not only one of the most talented race drivers I ever knew but he was also good with mechanical design and fabrication.”  We are proud to research and publish the Wally Stokes story as a remembrance of a great racer who fell victim to the hazards faced by racers as they traveled the roads before the interstate highway system. 

The Wally Stokes story 

part two

In January 1941, journeyman race car driver Wallace “Wally’ Stokes joined many of the stars of midget auto racing at the San Antonio Midget Speedway.  On Sunday the 5^th Stokes finished in second place in his heat race and third in the feature behind the reigning AAA (American Automobile Association) Eastern midget series champion Charlie Miller and one-armed driver Wes Saegesser. Miller who drove an Elto outboard engine powered car, lapped all but the top three finishers by the end of the 25-lap feature.

On January 12th, Wally finished third in his heat race and fourth in the 30-lap feature behind Cecil Zent who took over the Southwestern midget series points lead. Three weeks later, on Sunday January 26th, Stokes who hailed from Willoughby Ohio avoided disaster during the feature race when his car bicycled onto two wheels after contact with two other cars.  Wally brought his car back under control in one piece and finished the race in third place behind repeat winner Zent. The next several weeks of scheduled Sunday night races in early and mid-February were lost due to rain and/or unseasonably cold weather.

On the afternoon of March 2 at San Antonio, Stokes qualified ninth in time trials with a best lap of 18.60 seconds compared to Jay Booth’s pole winning time of 17.73 seconds.  Later in the program Wally won the Australian Pursuit race, an event wherein all the racers started the race spaced equally around the track, with the object for each racer to catch and pass the car ahead and therefore eliminate it from the race. The winner of the pursuit race was the last remaining racer to cross the finish line.

Later during the Summer of 1941, on June 11, Wally was one of the racers that participated in the inaugural night of midget auto racing held at the year-old Rubber Bowl stadium in Akron, Ohio. The entry list included Wes Saegesser, Carl Forberg, Perry Grim, along with Al Bonnell and Duane Carter as teammates in Carter’s pair of Offenhauser powered midgets.  Midget racing continued weekly through the summer on the Don Zeiter circuit with Sunday night races on the ¼-mile dirt Sportsman’s Park Speedway in Bedford Ohio, Wednesday nights at the 1/5-mile Rubber Bowl track and Thursday night programs held on the ¼-mile cinder track inside Buffalo’s Civic Stadium.  

Stokes also raced a ‘big car’ at the Genesee County Fairgrounds oval in Batavia New York in mid-August 1941 in a race which marked the end of a 13-year hiatus of auto racing at the track. In addition to the 29-year old Stokes, the entry list featured Indianapolis ‘500’ veterans Ted Horn, Tommy Hinnershitz and Bob Sall.  

A few days before the Genesee ‘big car’ race, Californian Duane Carter broke his left arm (reported in some sources as his left leg) in a traffic accident near Monroeville Ohio and the injury kept Duane off track until mid-September. Carter recovered and returned to racing on Sunday afternoon September 14 as the Zeiter circuit midgets raced at the Huron County Fairgrounds in Norwalk Ohio after a two-year absence of racing at that facility.

Despite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, that plunged America into World War II, the annual series of wintertime midget auto races continued as scheduled in San Antonio, Texas, with the first race held December 14 with racing scheduled through the month of February 1942. A highlight for Wally Stokes during this series came during the January 25, 1942 program when he won his heat race and later the same evening later he raced in a special five-lap head-to-head match race with Wes Saegesser although Stokes lost to Saegesser who later won that night’s feature race.

Wally Stokes raced in the July 4^th, 1942 midget program at the half-mile Ashland County (Ohio) Fairgrounds, one day after the Office of Defense Transportation (ODT) issued an order that prohibited all automobile racing in the United States, to conserve rubber tires. The ODT order, originally due to become effective July 10, applied to all motor vehicle racing meets, including midget cars and motorcycles. Racers received a brief reprieve on July 7, 1942 when without explanation, the ODT announced postponement of the commencement of the motor racing ban until midnight, July 31, 1942.  

During World War II, Wally Stokes was classified with a Class III-B draft status which denoted him as a man with dependents who was engaged in work essential to national defense. Wally and his wife had a young son Norman born in 1937, and Wally was employed a tool and die maker at Jack & Heintz Company, which made airplane parts for the war effort which included engine starters and early autopilot devices.

The wartime auto racing ban was lifted by the ODT office on August 16, 1945, two days after the Empire of Japan formally surrendered.  Stokes was entered for the midget races scheduled on Labor Day 1945 on the half-mile oval at the Berea Fairgrounds in Berea Ohio and was joined on the entry list by the man billed as the “world’s only one-armed race car driver,” Wes Saegesser. 

Other Berea entries included Johnny Wohlfeil, identified as the "defending 1942 Ohio midget champion," and Steubenville Ohio’s “Wild Bill” Boyd, the 1941 Ohio midget champion based on October 12, 1941 victory in the 100-lap Ohio Banked Track Championship held at Sportsman's Park in Bedford Ohio.  Incidentally Wohlfeil and Boyd were pre-war teammates in a pair of midgets owned by Wohlfeil.

During 1946, racing as well as civilian life in the United States began to return to normal, as Stokes appeared in the midget races held on Sundays at the Sportsman’s Park Speedway “the nation’s fastest quarter-mile banked track,” along with Wohlfeil. Carl Forberg, Bill Spears and Ralph Pratt.  On April 28 Wohlfeil made a clean sweep of the program as he set quick time, won his heat race and the 25-lap feature over Deb Snyder with all the races completed in record times for the track.  

Two nights later, many of the same cars and drivers were in action for the second week of post-war racing at the Akron Rubber Bowl stop on the Zeiter Speedways Michigan-Ohio Midget racing circuit. Al Bonnell, from Erie Pennsylvania identified as the 1939 Ohio state midget champion set a new track record of 16.68 seconds which broke his own week-old track record of 16.77 seconds. Bonnell then notched his second consecutive 25-lap Rubber Bowl feature victory that was completed in the record time of 7 minutes and 13 seconds before a crowd of 8,717 fans.

On May 15, 1946 Wally Stokes broke through for his first win both at the Rubber Bowl and on the Zeiter Michigan-Ohio midget circuit, as he won the feature by five car lengths over Akron’s Clarence LaRue. A record crowd of 9,443 fans watched as Stokes completed the 25 laps in seven minutes and 28 seconds.

Three days later, Stokes and the Michigan-Ohio Midget circuit racers for their initial visit to the ¼-mile track at the Canfield Fairgrounds.  In addition to the regular twenty cars and stars due to be in action at Canfield, the East Liverpool Review reported that “Wild Bill” Boyd would fly back from “the Indianapolis speed trials” to compete. That newspaper story took some liberties with the facts as AAA records indicate that Boyd did not appear as a driver at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway until 1951. 

Four of the first five scheduled early season races at Canfield were rained out, and during that period the Zeiter circuit visited another new venue on Tuesday night May 21, 1946, as the Zeiter Michigan-Ohio midget circuit racers made their inaugural appearance at the Ohio State Fairgrounds half-mile track in Columbus which had been “completely rebuilt after the War Department took over the fairgrounds during the war and made into one of the fastest half-mile tracks in the country.”  Between 1942 and 1945 the Fairgrounds had been rented out for $1 a year and the Army Air Corps used the 360-acre fairgrounds as an aircraft repair depot and equipment storage yard.

Stokes’s midget racer had a spate of mechanical problems during the last two weeks of May, as the engine blew up during the races at Sportsman’s Park in Bedford, then on the last day of May in the race at the Rubber Bowl, Wally was forced out of the race with a broken radius rod while he was in the lead.   

Later in the season Wally reunited with Andy Dunlop to drive Dunlop’s new 255-cubic inch Miller powered big car, and the pair won back to back races at Jackson Michigan on September 9 and 13 as recalled by Dunlop in his book written with Thomas Saal, Damn Few Died in Bed.   

The ‘big cars’ were scheduled at the Ohio State Fairgrounds in a very late 1946 season appearance on November 10 for a race promoted by pre-war driver Harry Robtoy. Stokes was scheduled to appear along with several prominent ‘big car’ racers – 1946 CSRA champion Carl Scarborough, Mike Salay and Clay Corbitt but not surprisingly, the races were cancelled due to wet track conditions.

Wally Stokes opened his 1947 season in a midget at the Canfield Fairgrounds in a AAA sanctioned Michigan-Ohio circuit race held on April 26. By stepping up to AAA competition, Stokes now raced against such midget stars as Scarborough, Bob Harner and Al Bonnell.  Stokes and Clarence LaRue were teammates on the Ray Leo racing team, while Harner and Bonnell in the Coy Kurtis-Kraft Offenhauser.  

At the Canfield Fairgrounds on May 10, Stokes was one of the day’s top four qualifiers and won the helmet dash which prevented George Witzman from scoring a clean sweep of the evening, as Witzman the fast qualifier from Detroit won his heat race, the Australian Pursuit race, and the feature. During the season the East Liverpool Review newspaper wrote glowingly about Wally Stokes, who was concentrating that season on midget auto racing as the writer called him “one of most likeable persons in the business, and one of the shrewdest drivers.”  

Wally Stokes was scheduled to make his first season appearance in Andy Dunlop’s Offenhauser-powered ‘big car’ June 22, 1947 at the ¼-mile oval on the Mercer County Fairgrounds near Celina Ohio. The race carried Central States Racing Association (CSRA) sanction and was promoted by Art Zimmer’s Valli Enterprises, which also promoted tracks at the Van Wert, Carthage and Lucas County fairgrounds in Ohio. Other entries advertised for the Celina race with a guaranteed $2140 purse, or 40% of the gate receipts included Witzman, Jimmy Wilburn, Ralph Pratt, Les Adair, Joie Ray and Jackie Holmes. 

Wally was listed as one of the drivers for the Ray Leo team for the July 5 midget race held at Canfield and he faced competition from several other Kurtis-Kraft Offenhauser powered cars, with drivers that included his former teammate Clarence LaRue, Bob Harner and Harner’s Pollock racing teammate, Jack Kabat. 

In 1947, midget auto racing was the fastest growing form of motorsports in the nation, and many new venues opened to host the tiny cars. An example of this growth was the re-opening of the Ebensburg Speedway, a ¼-mile track located on the Cambria County fairgrounds 75 miles east of Pittsburgh. Weekly midget racing at Ebensburg started on Monday night June 2, 1947, after a twelve-year absence of auto racing at the facility.    

Entries for the Ebensburg races which supported the local American Legion post charities, included many of the same drivers Wally Stokes had raced against since after the war. The Ebensburg races promoted by Don Zeiter with AAA sanction featured timing via the M. H. Rhodes Electric Timer, a system which used three synchronized clocks to provide lap times accurate to 1/100 of a second.  During the season, Ebensburg became known as “the State’s fastest quarter-mile track” with “Little” Mike Little in his ‘Coal Miners Special’ the dominant midget car and driver.

While midget racing was skyrocketing in popularity and drivers could race almost every night of the week if they were willing to travel, racing in this era was indeed a dangerous occupation.  On August 11 while racing at Ebensburg, Akron midget racer George “Joe” Selzer crashed after his midget hooked wheels with Eddie Johnson’s machine on the 18th lap of the 25-lap main event. Selzer’s car flipped high in the air, and Selzer’s midget flipped four times with the 1946 “Ohio midget champion” thrown onto the track surface the married father of two was killed instantly.

Another example of the hazards of midget auto racing is Clarence “Jack” Walkup a veteran racer from Stow, Ohio. On the night of May 24, 1947 during the fourth race of the evening at Akron’s Rubber Bowl, Walkup’s car brushed the outer wooden wall. After the impact, the right front wheel of Walkup’s machine broke off, and as 10,000 horrified fans watched, the wheel bounced into the stands and struck 26-year old spectator George V. Chupek in the head. Chupek an unmarried Goodyear factory employee and former paratrooper who had survived five campaigns in the European theater during World War II was killed instantly, but miraculously his date for the evening, Mary Ellison, seated in the box seat next to Chupek escaped miraculously unharmed. Walkup managed to bring his three-wheeled racer to a stop without further incident.   

Less than two months later, on the afternoon of July 20, 1947, while qualifying at the ½-mile Dover Speedway on the Tuscarawas County Fairgrounds, Walkup’s car rolled over three times down the backstretch and came to rest upside down. Rescuers righted the car released Walkup’s seat belt and carefully loaded him in the ambulance. Walkup was taken to the nearby Union Hospital but the injured driver who had turned 33 years old on July 4, died a few hours later at 5:30 PM from a fractured skull and internal injuries.  

Through late July and through August, Stokes began to rack up a string of consistent top three finishes, with a third place recorded on July 23 at the Rubber Bowl, followed by another third-place finish on August 20 in a race held on the 1/5-mile Erie Stadium track in Erie Pennsylvania. August 23 found him back in a ‘big car’ in Sedalia Missouri for the final day at the Missouri State Fair and Stokes finished second in the 30-lap feature on the ½-mile dirt oval behind Jimmy Wilburn in a race viewed by 10,000 spectators.       

As the 1947 season wore on, Stokes raced Dunlop’s ‘big car’ more frequently - Dunlop recalled two races the pair competed in were in St. Paul Minnesota over the 1947 Labor Day holiday which was followed by three races in Topeka Kansas.   Dunlop recalled that Stokes had committed to run a mid-September 100-lap midget race at Bainbridge Ohio, and offered to fly back to Hutchinson Kansas for three races on September 16, 18 and 19, followed by an event in Oklahoma City on September 22. Wally won two big car races for Dunlop during October 1947 – on the 5^th on the 1/5-mile track at Muskogee Oklahoma and the ½-mile Inter-State Fairgrounds in Coffeyville Kansas on October 11.

Dunlop recalled in his book a conversation with John Sloan that occurred near the end of the 1947 season.  John, the son of famed promoter and IMCA (International Motor Contest Association) founder J. Alex Sloan, had assumed the operation of the American Booking Agency but not the IMCA after the death of his father. Sloan reportedly told Dunlop that he wanted to make Wally Stokes in Andy Dunlop’s ‘big car’ the main attraction at fairgrounds races during the 1948 season.

Late in the 1947 season, Wally was one of more than 70 drivers from across the nation entered for the 100-lap ARDC (American Race Drivers Club) championship midget race at Langhorne (Pennsylvania) Speedway. Langhorne’s owner and operator John Babcock was in the second full season of his operation of the high banked circular one-mile dirt oval with a wicked reputation. Opened in 1926, the lightning fast track had claimed nine lives, a total that included three spectators that were killed in a single accident in 1937.

Qualifying to winnow down the entries to the 33-car starting field was held on Saturday afternoon October 11, with the race scheduled for the following afternoon. We do not know whether Wally Stokes was in the starting field for the poorly-documented Langhorne race, but the day’s fastest qualifier Don Brennan lapped around the mile track in 35.048 seconds which equaled an average speed of 102.716 miles per hour.  Scheduled to start alongside Brennan for the Sunday afternoon Langhorne feature was young (19 years old) Californian Troy Ruttman with Illinois’ Mike O’Halloran slotted third in the 33-car field which was arranged for the start in eleven rows of three cars each. After qualifications were complete, most of the ARDC midget regulars loaded up their cars and towed 150 miles east from Langhorne Pennsylvania to Danbury Connecticut for a race that evening. 

On Sunday, before an enormous crowd of 39,722 fans, Troy’s car failed to fire, and once the field got rolling with an alternate car tagging the field O’Halloran jumped into the lead on the first lap and led until lap 25 when he was called to the pit area for tires and fuel by his wily car owner, Midwest Kurtis-Kraft chassis and Offenhauser engine distributor Johnny Pawl. With O’Halloran momentarily stationary, George Rice, who had clinched the 1947 ARDC drivers title after the race in Danbury Connecticut the night before, picked up the lead of the race which he held until he pitted at lap 50.

After a flurry of pit stops by the series of new race leaders who in turn each suffered right rear tire troubles, O’Halloran and Rice regained the top two positions. The front pair raced away and built up a lead of four laps over the third-place driver Al Bonnell and Johnny Mantz in fourth place. With three laps to go, Bonnell’s Offenhauser engine expired and then on the following lap Rice’s charge for victory ended as his car ran out of fuel. The race winner Mike O’Halloran cut two minutes off 1946 race winner Bonnell’s time and won by four laps over Mantz and ARDC regular front-runner Chet Gibbons.  

In our next installment we will review Wally Stokes’ sterling 1948 racing season.

The Wally Stokes story

Part one

Wallace “Wally” Stokes was a journeyman race car driver who raced ‘big cars’ and midget race cars on the dirt tracks of America during the rough and tumble nineteen thirties and the active post-war period. Just as Wally was on the cusp of a breakthrough into the upper echelon of the sport of auto racing, he was struck down in a traffic accident in 1949.    

Stokes, who for publicity purposes sometimes claimed Honolulu as his birthplace, hailed from the village of Willoughby Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie east of Cleveland.


Born on May 21, 1913 Wally was the first child and only son of Edward a carpenter and Bertha Stokes who latter was joined by two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Alma. We do not know what drew young Stokes in automobile racing, but by age 22 he raced in in events with the Jones Speedway Association circuit.  

This association led by David W.A. Jones claimed to operate 21 tracks in the Eastern United States scheduled a July 4, 1935 racing program at the Dawson Driving Park in southwestern Pennsylvania.  The Dawson Driving Park was a slightly banked half-mile dirt track built around the turn of the twentieth century for harness racing.


Overlooking the track located about ½-mile north of the small town of Dawson which is situated on the bank of the Youghiogheny River the facility featured a covered wooden grandstand,

The Dawson Driving Park thrived and expanded and became the hub of Tyrone township activities - in addition to hosting harness races, the grounds which included an auditorium became the site of mushball tournaments, dances, socials, family reunions and for a time the County Fair.


The Park hosted its first automobile race on September 19, 1925, the last day of the Fayette County Fair, a 25-mile affair won by future three-time Indianapolis ‘500’ competitor William ‘Speed’ Gardner of New Kensington Pennsylvania in a time of 28 minutes and 21 seconds.

Promoter Bud Lewis continued to present automobile races annually at the Dawson Driving Park until tragedy struck during the 100-mile race on September 20, 1930. One of the racers, Lawrence ‘Mike’ Hickson was killed after his Frontenac car catapulted high off the embankment and overturned.


Hickson was trapped beneath the wreckage and died four hours after the accident from a fractured skull and crushed chest in the nearby Connellsville State Hospital. Mike who had started racing in 1923, was one half of a pair of racing brothers from Pittsburgh - his brother Bill had died in a crash during a race in Butler Pennsylvania six years earlier.

It appears that after the 1930 accident, the Dawson Driving Park did not host an automobile race again until 1935 with the arrival of a new promoter. Advance publicity from the Jones Speedway Association before the July 4^th event promised two preliminary five-mile races followed by 100 laps of racing in the 50-mile feature.  

The Daily Reporter of Connellsville provided a partial list of the 22 entered drivers, which included Larry King of Clarksburg West Virginia, the 1934 champion of the Jones circuit with a Dreyer Hal. King who reportedly had won the pole position in nine of his eleven starts in 1934 and 1935 was joined by Johnny Ritter of Detroit as well as Buckeye drivers Bill Chittum and Shorty Wolfe of Columbus along with Spud Green and Wally Stokes from Akron.

The race starter, a man named Eddie Young would be assisted by Roy Young “the state auto racing champion of 1932 and 1933.”  A late entrant was local driver Dick Furtney from Connellsville, billed as “the former Tri-State champion attempting a comeback.” The Daily Reporter of Connellsville also reported that “unusual is the fact that the races will start Pacific Coast style, an innovation of the Jones Speedway. All drivers will be introduced to the audience.”

On July 3 the Morning Herald newspaper of Uniontown reported that “the track has been specially prepared by a corps of workers busy for the previous ten days making necessary repairs.”  All that work went for naught when rain on the 4^th forced the race to be delayed until July Sunday 7^th making this one of the earliest Sunday auto races in the Commonwealth which had banned the presentation of sporting events on Sundays until 1933.

The rescheduled race was a disaster – only 600 fans showed (termed in the press as “a surprisingly poor turnout”) and when the gate receipts failed to reach $800, Jones Speedway Association officials eliminated the two preliminary five-mile races and cut the length of the feature down to 25 miles.

Many of the advertised drivers including King, Ritter, Wolfe and Chittum did not appear and there only twelve cars and drivers on the grounds. The time trials were delayed for two hours as the drivers refused to run until the guaranteed purse of $400 was brought to the track in cash. Once activities started, Garnet “Bud” Henderson of Akron in his Hal was the day’s fastest qualifier with a lap of 32 seconds flat against the track record of 29.2 seconds.

The following day’s article in the Daily Courier of Connellsville reported that “Jones Speedways has a fine reputation in other sections of the county for similar programs, but failed to make an impression here. There was a feeling of dissatisfaction and indignation among the spectators who had to ante over big fees to gain admittance.” Worse yet the article stated the “failure to properly treat the course resulted in clouds of dust blanketing the track” which contributed to the day’s worst accident.

On the second lap of the 25-mile race, Henderson led trailed by Larry Evans, Adelbert ‘Deb’ Snyder in his Hal, and 25-year-old Johnstown driver Ivan ‘Butch’ Baumgardner, who sometimes raced under the assumed name of Gardner. As the 10-car starting field entered the third turn, Baumgardner “got lost in the dust,” and his car partially spun and blew a tire. With the steering on the car damaged, the out of control car careened through the fence and over the embankment. Baumgardner was thrown against the steering wheel during the crash and suffered a fractured clavicle and fractured ribs.   

On the third lap, Evans whose car was slower on the straights, but faster through the corners, took the lead from Henderson. Evans built his lead, and nearly lapped the second-place machine on the 40^th lap but Larry eased off the throttle and won by 7/8 of a lap over Henderson with Snyder third in what the next day’s Daily Courier headline called a “thrilling auto derby.”


Nine of the ten starters finished the race with the former Tri-State champion Dick Furtney in seventh place and Wally Stokes the eighth-place finisher in a Riley powered machine finished far ahead of the slowest car driven by Pittsburgh’s Harry Unger.   

The Daily Courier article about the Dawson race closed with a statement from the Fayette County Fair Association, the group the owned the track. The statement read that “the Association had no part in the promotion,” and that “it had previously sponsored similar shows which always were commended by the thousands that turned out because of the large field of drivers available and the promptness with which all the advertised events were conducted.”   

The following year, the Uniontown Motoring Club sponsored a midget car race at Dawson on Labor Day 1936 as part of the club’s annual picnic. Newspaper advertisements placed by the promoter, Speed Events Enterprise, promised “three solid hours of racing thrills” with 12-15 cars in time trials and five races for a 50-cent admission charge.

Al Bonnell of Erie was the fast qualifier and won the trophy dash but Floyd Fogel who claimed Havre France as his hometown won the day’s 8-lap feature race in the ‘Peugeot Special’ midget. The little cars were not a hit, a crowd of 2000 witnessed what appears to have been the last automobile race held at the Dawson Driving Park.  The facility slowly faded into history although the outline of the half-mile track is still visible along Banning Road north of Dawson.  

Saturday August 18, 1935 found Wally Stokes and his ‘Riley Special’ at 4-H Speedway near Dunbar West Virginia, a ½-mile Fairgrounds dirt track built for horse racing that was also known as Dunbar Speedway. In addition to Stokes, many of the Jones Speedway Association regulars were entered - Larry Evans, Bill Chittum, Bud Henderson, Deb Snyder, Speed Haynes with his Frontenac and the “wild driving” Clyde Schwartz in a Cragar Special.


The five-event afternoon program was topped off by a 20-mile race for the “West Virginia State Championship.”  We don’t have the details of that race, but the two subsequent 1935 ‘big car’ races held at Dunbar were promoted by the Dixie Racing Association.

Wally Stokes was an entrant for the July 4, 1936 races held at the half-mile Jenners Speedway with the 100-lap feature sanctioned by the National Auto Racing Association. Along with Stokes, the entry list included Bud Henderson, the 1935 Central States Racing Association (CSRA) who now listed his hometown as Los Angeles, in a new Miller and the ‘southern champion” Larry Beckett of Tampa Florida. While the Miller was a purpose-built racing car, all the other cars – the Hal, the Cragar, and the Frontenac were all powered by modified versions of the four-cylinder Ford Model B engine.

The touring stars were joined by three local Jennerstown drivers - Butch Gardner, Mike Serokman and George Polychak in a “knee action” Chevrolet. The Bedford Gazette noted that a two-man Indianapolis car that placed eighth in the 1934 race would appear along with unnamed California drivers “that have become very popular on the West Coast.” 

Pre-race reports stated that the track had been “reconditioned to the peak of perfection” and would be “dustless,” but such was not the case. The schedule called for time trials at 1 PM followed by a pair of five-mile preliminary races with the 100-lap feature race set to take the green flag at 2 PM, but rain delayed the start of the day’s racing program.

“Whitey” Flickinger won the first preliminary race, then in during the second five-mile race, the left front wheel came of the machine of ‘Butch’ Gardner (whose real name was Baumgardner- he was the driver who crashed at Dawson in 1935). The wheel “sliced into the air and sailed over the heads of onlookers,” but did not strike anyone, and the second race was won by Ted Wright.   

Reports the next day carried in the Somerset Daily Herald stated that as the Jenners race approached lap 30, “the track had dried and clouds of yellow dust went skyward behind each car.”   Soon, the paper reported, “the clouds of dust were so thick you could have sliced them with a shovel.”  To compound the dust problem, the track was rough as the paper reported “there were depressions and humps low enough to shoot the car high off the ground.”

On lap 30, as Joseph Ventre tried to pass under Paul Snyder’s machine in one of the turns, the right rear wheel of Ventre’s car touched the left front wheel of Snyder’s car.  Both cars flipped, with Snyder thrown onto the track while Ventre hung onto his car which landed on all four wheels then tore through a nearby barbed wire fencing before it finally overturned.


Ventre was horribly lacerated by his car’s trip through the fencing, and an eyewitness reported that he saw Snyder rise to his knees before he was hit by two passing cars as he was all but invisible through the dust.  

The race was immediately stopped and both the injured drivers loaded into ambulances and taken to the Somerset General Hospital. Snyder had suffered a broken neck and was pronounced dead on arrival, while Ventre who suffered a fractured skull and multiple deep cuts passed away at 11 PM that evening.  

After an hour-long delay, the race resumed, and Mike Serokman passed the early leader Flickinger, but later while in the lead, a connecting rod broke in Serokman’s engine.  With Serokman’s retirement, Flickinger from Sebring Ohio regained the lead and went on to the victory as the race was shortened to 40 laps. Flickinger claimed the $250 purse as Ted Wright of Greensburg finished second and Butch Gardner was the third-place finisher.

Records of the next few years of Stokes’ career are spotty, but we know that Wally won the 1939 & 1940 CSRA Memorial Day 25-lap feature race at Sharon Speedway in Pennsylvania driving Andy Dunlop’s Miller Marine powered big car. Despite their success, according to Dunlop, in his book Damn Few Died in Bed written with Thomas Saal, “Wally wasn’t interested in driving for me regularly as he was driving midgets for other owners at the time.” Stokes’ racing as this time was not well documented in newspaper reporting but he was a star participant in the October 6, 1940 100-lap “Ohio State Midget Championship Classic” at the ½-mile Canfield Fairgrounds oval.  

The fall and winter of 1940 found Stokes racing in San Antonio, Texas as he scored a second-place finish in the ‘B’ feature on Sunday November 17 at the 1/5-mile Alamo Downs Raceway behind Roy Houston. Stokes won the ‘B’ feature at Alamo Downs on December 1 and set a new but short-lived 10-lap record of 2 minutes 49.55 seconds.

On December 22, 1940, Stokes won the evening’s third heat race and the Australian Pursuit race at Alamo Downs as he edged the eventual feature winner, the one-armed Wes Saegesser.


The following week, Wally finished third in his heat race and again won the Australian Pursuit race but was involved in a three-car crash during the feature with Ralph Purnell, whose car had caught fire the week before, and Howard Brand. None of the three drivers were injured, but they were unable to resume racing after the crash. 

We’ll continue with the story of Wally Stokes’ racing career in our next installment.