A pair of races at the Oakland Speedway and the death of Fred J Wagner

Part Two

Ironically, the next race for the AAA Pacific Coast big cars after famed racing starter Fred J Wagner’s death reportedly from the injuries he sustained at Oakland on New Year's Day 1932 was scheduled for Sunday November 12, 1933 at the Oakland Speedway.  Besides Wagner’s death (actually from heart disease), the face of big car racing on the West Coast had changed dramatically since January 1 1932.

Bryan Saulpaugh, who had set multiple world’s records at Oakland Speedway on New Year’s Day 1932 before his car swerved out of control and struck the judge’s stand, perished in a practice accident at Oakland Speedway on April 22, 1933.


Saulpaugh was practicing when he lost control of Danny De Paolo’s ‘Red Lion Special.’  Witnesses reported that Saulpaugh’s car appeared to clip the outside guardrail as Bryan exited turn four then overturned three times with Saulpaugh crushed beneath the car during the accident. 

April 1933 was a particularly deadly month in West Coast big car racing, as in addition to Saulpaugh, on April 2 Class B racer Tom Forsyth died in an accident at Legion Ascot Speedway, and the 1932 AAA National Champion Bob Carey was killed in a practice crash at Legion Ascot just six days before Saulpaugh’s fatality.

‘Babe’ Stapp, the winner of the 1932 Oakland New Year’s Day race, on the comeback trail after he suffered critical injuries in an April 27 1932 crash at Legion Ascot and missed much of the 1932 racing season, crashed in the October 22 1933 ‘big car’ race at Oakland after a tire blew out and his car hit the inside railing and rolled over.

‘Babe’ was thrown out of the car and fractured his right leg. Although he was only confined to the Fairmount Hospital overnight, ‘Babe’ was again out of racing action for several months but returned in time to race in the 1934 Indianapolis 500-mile race.       

As the AAA Pacific Coast big car championship competitors arrived in Oakland for the 100-mile race on November 12, 1933 there were three men at the top contending for the championship - Ernie Triplett, Rex Mays and Al Gordon.


Ernie Triplett, the 1931 and 1932 Pacific Coast champion had started the 1933 season strong and in the early stages appeared to be headed for his third title in a row, but in the latter part of the 1933 season, Triplett’s usually reliable car suffered a succession of mechanical failures, which opened the door for a young up-and-coming racer from Riverside California named Rex Mays.

After several troubled early 1933 season outings after he graduated from the Class B ranks, the 20-year old Mays served notice that he was for real when he scored a third-place finish at Oakland on April 23. At the next race at Legion Ascot on May 1, Mays qualified well but fell out of the 100-mile feature on the race’s 23rd lap with a broken axle.  On lap 40 Mays took over for veteran Art Boyce in the Sparks & Weirick "Poison Lil"  after Boyce lost the feeling in his left arm after he was hit by a rock and pitted.   Mays rejoined the race in seventh place but stormed back through the field to win in a time of 48 minutes and 14 seconds for his first big car win.

Mays continued to score wins, and before the October 22 Oakland race, Mays led the AAA Pacific Coast championship over Triplett by six points. During that race, both Mays and Triplett dropped out - Mays’ machine with a broken crankshaft and Triplett’s car with carburetor trouble. 

Their retirements opened the door for third place points man Edgar “Al” Gordon to grab the win and make it a three-man race for the 1933 Pacific Coast title. By the time they returned to Oakland in November, Mays led Gordon by 39 markers and Triplett by 74 points. A win at Oakland would reward the winner with 83 ½ points while the second-place finisher would earn 41 points.

During Saturday’s practice session, 18-year-old Oakland resident Lowell Lamoureux presented Ernie Triplett with a hand-built pine scale model of Triplett’s red Miller-powered machine owned by Bill White.  

Al Gordon was the day’s fastest qualifier and he re-set the world’s one-mile dirt track record, as he circled the one-mile oval in 33.86 seconds, with an average speed of 106.32 miles per hour.  Also spicing up time trials were incidents that involved Mac McCulley whose car lost a right rear wheel, and Bob Valla who spun but did not hit anything and finished his run.


Time trials were followed by a series of five-mile Class B races, with wins scored by George “Swede” Smith and Jim Wilkerson. Louis Tomei won the 15-mile semi-main event over Art Boyce and Ray Gardner.

In the 100-mile feature, Cavino “Kelly” Petillo jumped into the lead from his outside front row starting position and led the first eight laps before Gordon steamed by into the lead.  Triplett then got past Petillo, whose machine retired on lap 66 and surrendered third place to another newcomer Harris Insinger who earlier in the week had been named the pilot of the De Paolo ‘Lion Head Special’ formerly driven by Saulpaugh, as a replacement for George Connors.

Al Gordon who lived in Long Beach clinched the 1933 AAA Pacific Coast Championship after he won the postponed 150-lap (92 mile) race at Legion Ascot on December 10 an event during which he re-set the track record at 25.71 seconds. Gordon won again at Legion Ascot the following week, then the final race of the 1933 season a 200-lap race scheduled for December 31, 1933 was postponed by rain for one week to January 7, 1934.

Waldo Stein the acting AAA Western Zone supervisor announced that the points from the rescheduled race would count towards the 1934 tally, but controversy quickly erupted. The decision was reversed, and in an odd situation, the points earned in the first race of 1934 were awarded for 1933.

After all the buildup, Al Gordon breezed to his eighth consecutive victory in the Art Sparks & Paul Weirick owned "Poison Lil" Gilmore Blue-Green Gasoline-sponsored #5 machine.  Despite running out of fuel on the last lap, Rex Mays coasted across the finish line in second place ahead of Kelly Petillo and thus claimed second place in the 1933 AAA Pacific Coast Championship over Ernie Triplett who finished the 200-lap grind in fourth place.  

On January 18, 1934 Ernie Triplett announced that he was retired from ‘big car’ racing events and would restrict his racing activities to Indianapolis and road “stock car” races.  However, early March found Triplett back in a ‘big car’ on the one-mile Imperial Speedway in El Centro California, and he died in an accident that involved "Swede” Smith and Al Gordon that also claimed the lives of Smith and a mechanic Cambern “Hap” Hafley.

Al Gordon would later figure into another accident that claimed the life of another of the racers mentioned in this article. On the third lap of the 50-mile Sunday September 8, 1935 AAA Pacific Coast ‘big car’ race, Gordon’s car hooked wheels with the machine driven by Harris Insinger. Insinger’s ‘Garant Special’ cartwheeled down the back straightaway and Harris just 26 years old, suffered a fatal skull fracture with Gordon cast as the villain in the accident in newspaper reports.     

Al Gordon himself would lose his life in an accident four months later during the January 1936 ‘Ascot 150’ the second AAA championship car race at Legion Ascot Speedway. The grinding crash of Bill White’s cream and blue “Cocktail Hour Cigarette Special” also claimed the life of the riding mechanic William “Spider” Matlock. 

The unfortunate pair of Gordon and Matlock were last two racers to lose their lives at the dangerous oiled-dirt 5/8-mile high-banked oval,  as the track closed days later which brought a particularly dangerous era of West Coast racing to a close.

Prior to the 1938 Indianapolis 500-mile race,  Pearl, the widow of William “Spider” Matlock,  married race driver Al Putnam who had been married previously with two sons. Tragically, Pearl was widowed a second time as a result of an auto racing crash on Sunday September 15 1946 as Putnam perished in qualifying crash at the 'Indianapolis 100' held at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.