A pair of races at the Oakland Speedway and the death of
Fred J Wagner
Part One
In time
trials for the twice-postponed scheduled 100-mile 1932 New Year’s Day race at
Oakland Speedway, a new one-lap, one-mile qualifying world record was set by
Bryan Saulpaugh in the Gilmore Lion #19 at 101.95 miles per hour (MPH). The Oakland Speedway, which opened in 1931 was a fast one-mile dirt oval actually closer to Hayward California, the site of which is now the Bayfair Mall.
Ernie
Triplett, the defending American Automobile Association (AAA) Pacific Coast ‘big
car’ champion grabbed the lead at the start of the feature and proceeded to set
new AAA race records at the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10-mile distances. Bryan Saulpaugh
grabbed the lead from Triplett and set a new 25-mile race record at 94.163 MPH.
Back in the pack, Ralph Hepburn’s car crashed after the
right front tire of his car blew out and the car plunged through the upper guardrail.
Hepburn a former champion motorcycle racer who had finished third in the1931
Indianapolis ‘500’ was thrown from the machine in the accident and suffered a
broken jaw and a broken kneecap.
Hepburn’s injuries kept him confined to the
Hayward General Hospital through the end of March and sidelined him for the
1932 season.
During the clean-up of the Ralph Hepburn accident it began
to sprinkle rain, but the AAA officials elected to let the race continue. As he
neared the completion of his fiftieth lap, race leader Bryan Saulpaugh lost
control of his DePaolo/Miller machine and in the crash, the struck and
collapsed the judge’s stand.
Saulpaugh suffered serious injuries as his car veered into a
guard rail and rolled over after it struck the judge’s stand. Saulpaugh was
thrown from the cockpit and suffered a fractured skull and a dislocated
shoulder.
Five AAA officials– referee Bert Dingley, assistant starters
George Theobald and Les Manning, AAA zone supervisor Hal F Weller and starter
Fred J. Wagner - were inside in the 14-foot high wooden stand when it collapsed
onto the track surface. The two assistant starters were reported to have
suffered “cuts and scratches” while the other three officials were said to only
suffered a “mild shaking up.”
Elbert ‘Babe’ Stapp miraculously steered his car through the
wreckage of the judge’s stand to complete his 51st lap and was
declared the race winner. The car piloted by Stapp, formerly was driven by
Francis Quinn who was killed by a drunk driver on December 13, 1931 in a
highway accident just north of Fresno, California. Quinn nicknamed “the Bald Eagle”
was on his way home to Southern California after the original Oakland Speedway
race date was postponed due to rain.
Hal Weller, an automotive advertising executive and a
resident of nearby Berkeley, had been a member of the AAA Contest Board since
1924 served as the AAA Western zone supervisor and was on hand to oversee the
day’s timing and scoring activities.
Bert Dingley was a retired pioneer-era West Coast race car
driver who drove in his first race in 1904 at the Del Monte race track near
Monterey California. In 1909 Dingley drove for Chalmers-Detroit and scored two
race wins and four top five finishes and for many years, the AAA recognized
Dingley as the 1909 National Champion until the AAA Contest Board retroactively
made revision to the standings in 1951.
Bert’s promising racing career ended with
an accident on July 4, 1914 as he fought for the lead on the penultimate lap of
the 250-mile Montamarathon Trophy Race held on the 2-mile Pacific Coast
Speedway dirt track in Tacoma Washington.
Initial news reports following the 1914 accident stated that
Bert and his riding mechanic Edward “Swede” Swanson were “probably fatally
injured.” They were thrown from their bright green Ono (a chain drive Fiat
retrofitted with a Pope Toledo engine) after it ran into ditch and overturned.
Dingley
recovered from his severe injuries, which included a fractured skull, broken
shoulder and a compound leg fracture but he never raced again. Dingley worked
in the automotive industry and at the time of the 1932 New Year’s Day accident
was a vice-president of the Stutz Motor Company and served as a referee at AAA races
across the nation.
The role of starter was an important one in those days
before radio communications - the starter controlled the action on the course
with knowledgeable assistant starters to help keep track of the action. Assistant starter George Theobald was the
flagman at the original San Jose Speedway while Les Manning, an Oakland police
corporal, was the regular starter at Oakland Speedway.
Fred J. Wagner was born in Covington Kentucky in June 1869
and began his sporting career as a track and field star, then became a bicycle
racer after which he served as a starter for bicycle races for a dozen years.
Wagner claimed to have flagged his first automobile race in the fall of 1899 in
Chicago Illinois.
Away from the track, Fred was a shrewd businessman with deep
ties to the automotive industry and was at one time was the president of Horseless
Age magazine. He increased his
notoriety by publishing his memoirs in serial fashion with the title “Roaming
through Speed Mad Years” in the AAA’s American Motorist magazine.
Wagner’s historical stories, while entertaining, contained many factual
errors.
“Wags,” as he was known in his younger years, then a
resident of Long Island New York was the starter for all but the first of the
Vanderbilt Cup races, at the time the most prestigious auto racing events in
the United States. There is substantial evidence to support the contention that
it was Wagner who pioneered the use of a black-and-white checkered flag to
signal the end of an automobile race.
Wagner, served as the starter at the Indianapolis Motor
Speedway beginning in 1909 and Fred started the first 1911 International
500-Mile Sweepstakes Race. Wagner’s reign as the starter at Indianapolis ended
after the 1912 500-mile race when he and track president Carl Fisher got into
an argument.
Their dispute was over whether to flag off the final car
still running on the track long after the winner had taken the flag and fans
had left. In the early days of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, to collect the
prize money, a car and driver had to complete the full race distance.
Hours after winner Joe Dawson had taken the
checkered flag of victory, the Knox of Ralph Mulford continued to circulate
around the 2-1/2-mile brick oval, and the sun began to set. Wagner was ready to
flag Mulford off the track, but Fisher insisted that Mulford be allowed to
finish.
After he lost the argument, Wagner stormed off and never
served in any official capacity at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway again. Mulford
eventually completed the 500-mile distance but it took nearly nine hours and he
finished with an average speed of just 56 miles per hour which makes him the
slowest finisher in Indianapolis 500-mile race history.
As the years passed, Wagner became nationally famous as the pre-eminent
starter of automobile races across the United States except of course at
Indianapolis. In addition to working the flags at the races, Wagner also
shepherded teams from race to race, oversaw track preparations, worked with the
local race promoters to ensure a smooth event principally that the competitors got
paid and that the AAA received its sanctioning fee.
By the nineteen twenties, as he entered his sixth decade,
Wagner became known affectionately as “Pops.” Competitors admired and respected
Wagner so much that prior to the 1925 season-ending ending AAA national
championship race at the Culver City board track, Wagner was given the keys to
a new 1926 Buick sedan, paid for through by a collection from nineteen of the
country’s leading race drivers.
After the New Year’s Day 1932 Oakland race, the AAA Pacific Coast
‘big car’ racers moved on to the ½-mile dirt Bakersfield Speedway on January 3,
1932 for a 50-mile feature. The race, aired live on the National Broadcasting
Company’s Orange (Pacific Coast) network in a broadcast sponsored by the
Richfield Oil Company, was won by Ernie Triplett in Bill White’s car powered by
a 151-cubic inch Miller Marine 4-cylinder engine with oval side draft intake
ports.
According to published Bakersfield news reports Fred Wagner served as
the race’s starts assisted by Fresno pioneer-era race car driver turned car
dealer Eddie Waterman as the referee.
The report about Wagner at Bakersfield seems curious in
retrospect, as ten days later, his hometown newspaper described Wagner as recovering
from the injuries received on New Year’s Day at his ranch in the orange groves
of Covina California.
In early February, Wagner, 66 years old, was reported in
critical condition in a Covina hospital from the injuries he had suffered in the
New Year’s Day accident. A few days later, a follow-up article stated that
doctors had been forced to relocate Fred to a sanitarium for privacy as he had
been unable to rest due to the constant stream of visitors in the hospital.
Wagner had sufficiently recovered from his injuries in
November 1932 and he returned to his roots as he acted as the starter of a
six-day bicycle race held on the temporary velodrome built inside the Winter
Garden ice skating rink in the heart of Hollywood.
In late December 1932,
Wagner visited the Legion Ascot Speedway and watched the races from a private
box. During a break in the racing action, Wagner
was escorted to the track surface where he presented several awards and
addressed the crowd for few moments.
In April 1933, Wagner and his friend, former driver and car
owner Frank Allen, hosted a dinner for Los Angeles area ‘big car’ drivers that
included Louis Schneider, Bill Cummings, Howard “Howdy” Wilcox II, Bob Carey
and Ernie Triplett and ‘big car’ owners Art Sparks and Clyde Jones.
The group
met to discuss the recent cut of purses by the board that controlled Legion
Ascot Speedway (remember the country was the depths of the Great Depression) and
Wagner and Allen proposed to act as intermediaries to mediate the dispute which
had seen the top drivers refuse to enter events at Legion Ascot.
During the Summer of 1933, Fred J. Wagner’s health took a
turn for the worse and he was hospitalized again in Covina in late October
1933, where he passed away on November 5 reportedly at 67 years of age.
The
injuries that Wagner suffered in Oakland on January 1 1932 were blamed in newspaper articles as the cause of
his death. Fred was survived by his wife
Nancy also known as “Mother Wagner,” he was interred in the Forest Lawn
Cemetery Mausoleum in Glendale California.
A few years ago,
fellow racing historian James Thurman researched the circumstances of Fred
Wagner's death and found Wagner's official death certificate in the Los Angeles
County Records office. The official causes of death listed included chronic
myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), chronic aortitis (inflammation
of the aorta) and acute bronchitis. The former two conditions were noted as
having existed for several years. Thurman's research refutes the
period newspaper claims that Wagner died from complications from the injuries he suffered at the race in Oakland.
In 1938, five years after his death, Wagner’s memoirs, entitled
The Saga of the Roaring Road, (the genesis of which had been published
in American Motorist in 1926) were published in hardbound format by
Meador Publishing, a small firm based in Boston. Wagner’s racing stories combined with his
memories of working in the early automotive industry written by author John M.
Mitchell, were later revised and published in 1949 by Floyd Clymer in both
hardbound and softbound editions.
In
1952, Fred J. Wagner became one of the inaugural ten inductees in the AAA Auto
Racing Hall of Fame (now known as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum Hall
of Fame) and was a member of the second class of inductees into the National
Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 1991.
