An excerpt from The Brown Bullet 

Today, we are proud to share an excerpt from the forthcoming book written by Bill Poehler which is due out on May 5 entitled The Brown Bullet: Rajo Jack's Drive to Integrate Auto Racing, that explores the life and career of  the African-American auto racing pioneer.

This excerpt from The Brown Bullet shares a story from 1937. 

"The rained‑out three‑hundred‑lap stock car race for the mile oval at Oakland Speedway was rescheduled for May 30, and Rajo had a better idea than putting his wife in his race car this time. Originally entered in a Dodge passenger car, Rajo managed to procure a Ford sedan delivery truck. The truck’s engine didn’t have the horsepower of the passenger cars entered, but it had another advantage.

Where most passenger cars of the day had a hard time surviving rutted and difficult dirt tracks like Oakland, a truck was one of the few vehicles capable of withstanding the pounding. Rajo removed the fenders and windshield of the truck—modifications allowed in the rules and common for the stock car class. 

The truck was nearly unrecognizable by the time he was done stripping it of its extraneous parts. And he painted the number 33 on the side. It was the first time in his career he used the number—the traditional number of starters in the Indianapolis 500—and it would become his trademark.

Oakland Speedway had a set of bathrooms for men and women in the infield. Though there were no signs the bathrooms were specifically for white people, it was assumed. But there were also no specific bath‑ rooms for black people. 

If Rajo or Herman Giles—who frequently traveled as Rajo’s mechanic—wanted to use the bathroom, they had to wait until the race was underway so it would be empty, and no one would see them use it. If there was a line for the bathroom, they would have to wait.

The Oakland race was minor in the racing world, but it was being billed as a national championship as Curryer was apt to do, and ten thousand fans arrived to bear witness. Joe Wilber led the other twenty‑ six drivers briefly from the pole position, but Duane Carter quickly passed him. 

On the fiftieth lap, a horse in the infield threw his rider and wandered onto the track through a gate mistakenly left open on the backstretch. The horse galloped along with cars down the backstretch for two hundred yards before being corralled and exiting uninjured.

On the fifty‑second lap, Ernie Criss—driving a Ford truck like Rajo’s—took over the lead, but Rajo passed him on the ninety‑third lap. Criss went back into the lead laps later and stayed there, though Rajo was never far behind. Criss pitted for fuel on lap 246, surrendering the lead to Rajo. 

Criss caught up to Rajo’s truck but blew a tire with twelve laps left, and Rajo’s lead extended to two laps in front of Les Dreisbach. Rajo slowed his pace greatly in the final laps and won after four hours and sixteen minutes.

“It should be called the Altamont Pass Sweepstakes. The trucks wouldn’t let the autos by,” purported IRS examiner John V. Lewis said.

The win was popular with Rajo’s fellow competitors, especially after his previous hard‑luck results at the track. And he took over the ARA lead with 730 points, ten more than Bay Area upstart Duane Carter.

Rajo’s win made headlines across the nation again, spreading throughout California and into places like Oregon, Montana, Nebraska, Hawaii, and Washington. Some in the press proclaimed it to be a victory for the working man over the idle rich. All Rajo cared about was that it put him closer to winning the ARA championship." 

Buy your copy of the The Brown Bullet: Rajo Jack's Drive to Integrate Auto Racing  at your favorite bookseller. 

They called him “Lucky”

Part one- the 1935 & 1936 seasons

William Lloyd Logan was born in Oakland California in 1912 and by 1932 he raced a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in 1/5-mile flat track races. In November 1935 Logan raced a midget car in a series of Sunday afternoon races at San Francisco Stadium located near Bayshore Boulevard at the end of Jerrold Avenue in the city’s Butchertown neighborhood.

Many of the other drivers that raced at the Stadium became Bay Area midget racing legends, a list that included Fred Agabashian, Lynn Deister, Neil Grady, Al Stein, ‘Skeet’ Jones, Newell ‘Dutch’ Van Tassel, and Dave Oliver, and they raced under Charlie Baker’s Midget Auto Racing Association (MARA) banner.  

 

 

The 1/5-mile Stadium flat dirt track introduced midget auto racing to San Francisco with an 11-race program on Saturday evening September 21 also hosted motorcycle races on Thursday nights.  Charley Baker advertised as the “1934 champion”  won the first three evening 30-lap features held on September 21, 28, and October 5 behind the wheel of the #21 Ted Brenneman Special.

A slate of Sunday afternoon races began on November 2; we were unable to find results from the earliest races, but the races on November 17 at the Stadium featured “spinning and crashing almost every other minute” according to an article in the San Mateo Times. Stadium General Manager Sterling Price, told the Times he had been “connected with auto racing for many years, and I’ve never seen so many crashes. Those boys drive like mad.”

During the November 17 30-lap feature won by Skeet Jones, Logan was eliminated when his #74 car ran into the side of Art Armstrong’s #99 and both were eliminated.  November 17 also marked the debut at the Stadium of 17-year old Berkeley driver “Sonny” Rogers billed as the youngest driver on the Pacific Coast.  

A new season of racing began at San Francisco Stadium on Saturday night April 18 1936 and by late April a three-track touring schedule had emerged which already included tracks in Emeryville and Hughes Stadium in Sacramento, and after an April 23 meeting possibly a track in Fresno. Two drivers, Dave Oliver and Bill Larzalere had obtained “screaming new outboard motors” from Wisconsin and Oliver claimed to have “spurned” an offer to race at Indianapolis and chose instead to race the new midget circuit.   

 

On Saturday night May 2, Price’s crew which had been “building over the track to create the fastest 1/5 mile flat track in the world” had their efforts were rewarded as Lynn Deister set a new track record of one minute and 25 ½ seconds during his 5-lap heat race.  Deister than watched as his record was broken in the next race by Al Stein, the 1935 champion, who covered the same distance 1/10 of a second faster. “Bad boy” Van Tassel, who reportedly weighed just 116 pounds, won his second consecutive 30-lap feature in the Ernie Lauck midget.

 

 

The restored Lauck midget

 

The next week it was announced in the San Mateo Times that “in response to popular demand from followers of the sport” the midget race shifted to Friday nights as midget fans found it “impossible to take weekend trips and attend the races.” A tragedy was averted during the season’s first Friday night race on May 8 when 10-year old Allen Berlin jumped over the inside railing and attempted to run across the track and was struck by Lynn Deister’s machine but fortunately suffered only a broken leg.

 

The evening’s 30-lap feature was highlighted by a duel for the lead between Stein and Van Tassel. As reported in the San Mateo Times, Stein repeatedly bumped the tail of Van Tassel’s machine over the last seven laps but could not get past and the Fresno ‘bad boy’ posted his third consecutive win at San Francisco Stadium.

The following week’s races at San Francisco Stadium boasted a 44-car entry list with the late addition of an entry by Art Armstrong who came off recent ‘big car’ wins at Oakland and San Jose Speedways. Lloyd Logan recorded a 5-lap heat race victory, but  Les Dreisbach of Berkeley won the feature over Stein with Van Tassel third with the 30 laps completed in eight minutes and 47 ½ seconds.   

On May 29, a crowd of 3000 fans watched as track records fell at the Stadium. First Van Tassel broke the 8-lap track record only to see Deister reset the record at 2 minutes and 13 ½ seconds, while Al Stein lowered the five-lap track record to one minute and 25 seconds.

 

Dave Oliver, who earlier passed on his chance to race at Indianapolis, found victory lane for the first time in 1936 as he won by feature race by ten feet over Dreisbach, followed by Van Tassel, Agabashian, and Armstrong. The following day at Fresno, the 1936 champion Al Stein broke through for his first feature win of the season.  

On Thursday evening July 25 1936 the San Francisco Stadium added a 25-lap “old timer” race limited to cars built before 1910 with drivers at least 50 years old, to the regular midget racing program.  The fourteen entries included a 1901 Oldsmobile, a 1905 Reo, a 1907 Maxwell, a 1909 Hupmobile, a 1906 Ford, a 1907 Packard and a 1910 Buick.  65-year old George Hoadley in his 1904 Buick was installed as the pre-race favorite as he won a similar race held during the Golden Gate Citizen’s Celebration the year before.  

The most unusual entry in the July “old timers’ derby” was the 1895 Crestomobile, built by the Crest Motor Company in Cambridge Massachusetts, powered by a single-cylinder 3-1/2 horsepower air-cooled engine that drove the front wheels. The spindly 400 pound carriage-style machine was driven by Ed Shapiro of San Francisco, who according to the Oakland Tribune was “the only man living who knows how to run it.”

The “old timer” race driver lineup included an actual veteran race car driver, Eddie Hearne, the winner of 20- and 40-lap races at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in September 1910 and a participant in the first International 500-mile Sweepstakes in 1911. Hearne who had retired from open wheel racing in 1927 with eleven AAA race wins to his credit, but still drove a Studebaker factory entry  in stock car races drove a 1908 Hupmobile despite being technically ineligible as he had turned 49 years old five months earlier.          

The August 2 1936 issue of the Oakland Tribune

featured this photograph of George Hoadley

As expected, Hoadley an employee of the Oakland Buick dealer, the Howard Automobile Company and his riding mechanic Bill Reichert romped to victory at an average speed of 30 miles per hour and won by half a lap over the Ford and the Packard. Later in the evening, Van Tassel won his fourth consecutive midget car feature at the Stadium over Deister.

Lloyd Logan was entered in the Sunday August 16 1936 40-lap ‘big car’ race at the one-mile oiled dirt Oakland Speedway sanctioned by the American Racing Association, a group run by Oakland track owner Charlie Curryer. Other notable drivers entered at Oakland Speedway that day  a track actually located in an unincorporated section of Alameda County south of the City of Oakland included Fred Agabashian, ‘Bud’ Rose, Jack McNamara, ‘Herk’ Edwards, Ed Haddad, and Duane Carter. Logan’s #26 “Fitoil Special”  ‘big car’ was fitted with a pair of very unusual features for the day; a roll bar above the nose of the car and a taller roll bar behind the driver.

During pre-race practice on Saturday evening Jack McNamara of San Francisco a racer since 1933, crashed to his death in the red #18 machine.  Around sunset at 7 PM as he exited the unlit fourth turn, McNamara’s car got into the outer wooden guardrail and cartwheeled down the straightaway and came to rest in front of the grandstand. McNamara, 28, was pronounced dead upon arrival at Fairmount Hospital which led Alameda County Deputy Coroner Walter Flierl to recommend that night driving at the unlighted Oakland Speedway be discontinued.  

On Sunday Art Armstrong equaled his lap record in qualifying with a lap of 28.2 seconds and then won the “fast heat” while Logan won the other 10-lap heat race.  Before the start of the feature, Lloyd Logan was selected by his fellow drivers to carry the checkered flag during a tribute lap in McNamara’s memory.

Moments later, at the start of the nine-car feature as the field entered turn one, Carter’s #15 car got into the back of Logan’s machine which sent Logan’s #26 car flipping wildly. During the series of end-over-end flips, Logan was thrown from his machine and Lloyd unconscious landed face down on the track. Carter narrowly avoided the prone Logan, crashed his car through the outer fence and ran to Logan’s aid. 

 

The Oakland Tribune carried these photos of the 1936 Logan-Carter crash

 

Logan was loaded into an ambulance headed to the Fairmount Hospital, and unbelievably while enroute the ambulance was involved in a traffic accident. The driver of the car was cited and both a passenger in the other car and Logan were transported to the hospital. Upon arrival Logan was found to be bruised and scraped but miraculously otherwise uninjured and was transferred to the East Oakland Hospital where he remained overnight.   Once the battered ambulance returned to the Speedway, the seven remaining cars re-started the feature race which was won in dominant fashion by Art Armstrong.   

McNamara a single man who lived with his mother was laid to rest on Tuesday August 18, and the August 20 issue of the Oakland Tribune carried an emotional article written by Alan Ward. He wrote that “McNamara raced for fun, he didn’t need the money. He had a job that paid more than $300 a month” (equal to $5000 today) and noted sadly that “in a little while McNamara will be forgotten by the great majority like Bryan Saulpaugh, Bob Carey, Stubby Stubblefield, Ernie Triplett and a lot more.” Ward closed his article with a personal note - “there is a reason we don’t get pally any more with these fool kids who race around Oakland or any other Speedway. It’s a hard job writing the obituary of a friend.”

With a new nickname “Lucky” Lloyd Logan returned to race at Oakland Speedway two weeks later though Alan Ward wrote in the Tribune that Logan “still walked with a limp and can’t travel faster than a slow walk.” Logan drove the same car which had been in the August 16 accident which looked a little worse for wear and missing the hood, but no longer did fans and other driver mock Logan’s “safety car” as the sturdy roll hoop stood up through the multiple flips and likely saved Logan’s life.

In the next chapter we will examine Lloyd “Lucky” Logan’s increasingly successful racing career.   

Midget racer Bob Harner before World War 2.

Photograph of Bob Harner provided by JD Cormack

JD Cormack recently shared two vintage photographs with the author of nineteen forties and fifties midget racer Bob Harner .  While Harner (his actual family surname was spelled Harnar)  did not have a Hall of Fame midget racing career, research into his racing career demonstrated how popular midget racing was during the post-World War 2 period, as Harner raced at a number of long-lost and little-known tracks all across our country. In a series of short articles, we will trace Harner’s travels to these various tracks and trace the history of the individual tracks.

Bob Harner was born in Akron Ohio in 1916, raced locally in the Northeastern Ohio area during 1942 and newspaper articles credited Harner with winning the 1941 West Virginia 'Class B' midget championship.

Harner appeared on the half-mile dirt at the Mansfield Fairgrounds located on Springmill Street in a pair of shows promoted by famed thrill show promoter B. Ward Beam. Beam had originally run a flight school near his hometown of Celina Ohio in 1917 but later went bust with a failed airplane manufacturing company.

By 1923, Beam had formed ‘Ward Beam's International Congress of Daredevils,’ a barnstorming thrill show that featured the ‘T-Bone crash’ and the lengthwise transcontinental bus jump. In addition to his thrill show bookings, at various times Beam also promoted races at Roby Speedway in Hammond Indiana near Chicago and the deadly half-mile board track at Bridgeville Pennsylvania.

On Sunday afternoon May 3rd 1942,  26-year old Bob Harner’s name was among those on the entry list for an open competition midget racing program which was paired with “Lucky” Lee Lott’s Hell Drivers thrill show at Mansfield. 

While we have no results for Harner in the May 3^rd race, the day’s 15-lap feature race was captured by Toledo’s Al Menominee on what was described as a “dust-bound” track, despite a week’s worth of track preparation and the sprinkling of the track surface the night before the race. The racing program was interrupted several times during the afternoon as young boys swarmed the track, but the reported crowd of 10,000 went home awestruck after they witnessed Lucky Lott’s transcontinental bus jump with a stock automobile.

Fortunately, we found more information about Harner’s next reported race a month later at Akron’s Rubber Bowl stadium, a venue which had hosted midget car racing since in June 1941. Built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) crews during 1939, the 30,000 seat horseshoe-shaped stadium’s primary tenant was the University of Akron ‘Zips’ football team.

Veteran Cleveland racing promoter Don Zeiter leased the Rubber Bowl Stadium, located adjacent to the Akron Fulton Airport, Goodyear Airdock, and Derby Downs (the home of the All-American Soap Box Derby) from the City of Akron fore weekly midget races in exchange for a minimum rental fee or a percentage of the nightly profits, whichever was greater.  Zeiter’s crews built and maintained a one-fifth-mile cinder oval track with elevated turns with an inside wooden rail to keep the racers off the football field.

On Thursday night June 4, 1942, with 3,500 paying fans in the stands, Bob Harner who lived on the south side of Akron with his wife and two daughters, finished third in the 25-lap preliminary “Class B” feature before Dennis ‘Duke’ Nalon outdueled local Steubenville driver ‘Wild’ Bill Boyd and Duane Carter for the victory in 25-lap “Class A” feature.

After going silent for World War 2, midget car racing resumed at the Rubber Bowl on April 26 1946.  The number generated during the 1946 racing season at the Rubber Bowl demonstrates how popular midget racing was immediately following the War. The 1946 Rubber Bowl season featured 24 races and paid attendance totaled 260,607. The City of Akron received $31,409.00 as the city's portion of the profits per the agreement with promoter Zeiter, which is equivalent to over $370,000 in 2015.    

Midget racing at the Rubber Bowl continued through 1959 despite two tragedies. On the night of May 24 1947 during the fourth race of the evening, the midget racer of Jack Walkup of nearby Stow, Ohio brushed the outer wooden wall.  The right rear 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 George V. Chupek on the left side of the head.

Chupek an unmarried tire 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.  

Chupek’s surviving family members later filed suit against the City of Akron, but the suit was eventually dismissed by the Summit County Court of Appeals in February 1951, which stated in part that the city, acting as a landlord was not liable for failure to make the premises safe.

Just over a year after the Chupek tragedy, on Thursday night May 27 1948, veteran Detroit driver George Witzman was warming up Jim White’s Offenhauser powered midget before the evening’s racing program when the car’s steering assembly apparently froze. The car crashed through the wooden outer fence and overturned with the worst result, as Witzman was transported to the Akron City Hospital where he died six hours later. His car owner who ran the Fort Miami Speedway and Witzman’s fellow competitors staged a memorial race at the Fort Miami Speedway on June 4 to benefit Witzman’s widow and five children.

In early 1949, promoter Don Zeiter sold his 'Zeiter Midget Speedways' operation to Earl Clay and retired to his farm in Northern Michigan.  Harold Zeiter bid on the operation of the Rubber Bowl midget races in 1949, but lost out to a syndicate led by Rubber Bowl manager Charles Burns. Burns' team which included Ed Palmer and sports promoter Bill Griffith bid promised the City a minimum of $450 per event or 15% of the gross profits after taxes whichever was greater. 

Harold Zeiter's bid promised 18 1/2% of the gross profits after taxes but a lower minimum, which the City shied away from, as attendance at the Rubber Bowl midget races was dropping due to the general decline in the popularity of midget racing and the opening of new larger local tracks built exclusively for racing; both took a heavy toll on spectator turn-out for races held at the Rubber Bowl. From a high in 1946  of 260,607, in 1947 paid attendance for the season dropped to 202,753, and in 1948 season attendance fell further to 112,155.  

Rubber Bowl racing promoters later added hot rod roadsters and stock cars to the ARDC (American Racing Drivers Club) midget racing programs with little success before racing at the Rubber Bowl ceased at the end of the 1959 season.

The Rubber Bowl remained the home to football and the occasional concert (including the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane in 1972) until the final Akron Zips football game at the Rubber Bowl was held on November 13, 2008. After the Zips moved their home games to a new on-campus stadium, the Rubber Bowl has fallen into disrepair as it passed through the hands of various owners, each with plans to renovate the stadium, none of which ever came to fruition. The latest scheduled event at the Rubber Bowl, a hip-hop concert in May 2015, was relocated due to the dilapidated condition of the Rubber Bowl.  

On the afternoon of June 7, 1942, Bob Harnar, billed as the "Flying Amishman from Akron," raced on the Ashland Fairgrounds 3/8-mile dirt track which was located inside the harness racing track in Ashland, Ohio. This special program was rescheduled after a rain out on Memorial Day. Harnar, advertised as the "1941 West Virginia Class B dirt track champion," signed up during the extra week to race against  drivers nicknamed the "Indianapolis Big Three" - Dennis 'Duke' Nalon, Paul Russo, and Mel Hanson, who was billed as the "Firecracker Kid from Los Angeles."   Since the Indianapolis Motor Speedway had suspended racing for the duration on December 29 1941, these three drivers were not busy at their typical venue on Memorial Day 1942.  The seven-race program was scheduled to be topped by a 15-lap feature, but the results from that day are lost to history.
    

Bob Harner’s next race, and his last race until after World War 2, was on Sunday July 26 1942 again at the Mansfield Fairgrounds half-mile track, in a race that Ward Beam billed as “Positively your Last Chance to see races until after the War.” Although the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941 and the United States Congress declared war on Japan the following day, life on the domestic front did not change overnight. For example, gasoline rationing did not go into effect in 17 Eastern states until May 15 1942, and rationing only went nationwide on December 1 1942.    

In order to conserve rubber, the Office of Defense Transportation General Order 14 part 501 had initially commanded that all auto racing must cease at midnight on July 10, 1942, but the date was later moved to midnight on July 31, 1942.  Harner and the Central States Racing Association drivers participated in the “One Half Mile Midget Championship” show with 22 cars entered for eight races in a program supplemented by the ‘International Congress of Daredevils’ thrill show which climaxed with a rocket car bus jump by Captain Dick Rogers.

In addition to being the last local race until after the war, this also marked the final auto race held at the Mansfield Fairgrounds on Springmill Street. The Richland County Fair was relocated to its present site, 3-1/2 miles northwest in 1956, and the Fair Board sold the site to its current occupant, Taylor Metal Products Company.  

In future chapters, we will follow intrepid midget racer Bob Harner as he resumed touring and racing across the country after World War Two.