Early Passions

It's intriguing how you find a certain passion in life, whether it's woodworking, flying a plane, or driving a race car full-out on a straightaway with your closet competitor breathing down your neck. I can tap my dad as the guy who instilled in me the earliest inklings of my lifelong gearhead obsession. Dad was running the family business on my grandfather's property. The company consisted of a wood and metal pattern shop, and a small sand foundry where we made all kinds of parts for all sorts of applications. Dad was also into go-karts, and the guys working for him built a lot of patterns for them. Those speed machines had sand-cast aluminum gas tanks, brakes, center columns, and butterfly steering wheels with welded steel frames.

For the most part, two-stroke West Bend engines were used for power, though I recall that some of the guys ran McCulloh chainsaw motors on the half-mile dirt racecourse Dad had graded through the five acres of woods behind my grandfather's house. Sometimes, the guys put together some twin go-karts, and with two ten-horsepower motors on the back those things would fly. As a little kid, I found the entire building operation beyond fascinating. I used to love to watch the go-karts being fashioned out of sundry parts, and then being taken to the races in their completed forms. I strongly believe that my love of the pattern making business grew from those early days when I was first introduced to the ingenuity of skilled metal workers and the rudimentary facets of automotive design. I'm sure Mom felt a little uneasy about it too. Her darling blond-haired kid with flashing green eyes that twinkled with endless mischief even at that age kept her hands full, and her husband seemed to always tease out the best and worst in me at the same time. He always made me a handful for Mom, and I think he really liked it that way.

"Gerald! What on earth are you doing with that boy now?" she'd sometimes say.

Dad would shrug and say, "Oh, just teachin' him a thing or two."

Like about go-karts!

If the go-kart competitors wanted to get really fancy in terms of a racing venue, they'd head into town and ask storeowners if they could set up a speedway in the parking lot, which I loved because there was the tantalizing possibility of an ice cream cone. Setting up a racecourse in a store parking lot might sound a little weird today. In fact, it could never happen today, what with all the worries about insurance liabilities and getting sued, not to mention the inevitable visitation from the big men in blue. Back then, though, people just figured if you crashed a go-kart during a race and you got hurt or killed it was your own damn fault. The idea of suing never came up. The cops watched and enjoyed the races and said nothing. Picture it. A group of guys wanting to race would stand at the store counter and longingly eye the parking lot.

"So can we set up here tomorrow night?"

If he or she was smart, and that accounted for most of the merchants in town, the answer would be a resounding yes. "Why sure! Go ahead and set it up!"

Go-kart racing attracted crowds. Crowds were good for business. Up the cones went to denote the course, and then it was off to the races. I cheered and shouted and whooped as I watched ten to fifteen go-karts going at it. The wipeouts were cool too.

Of course, I couldn't just sit there and watch the action. I wanted to be a part of it. I just had to race. Dad made me a small go-kart. It was equipped with an electric start and a massive three-horsepower motor. I was only three years old. I don't remember my first ride all that well, but I'm told I hit our dog, knocking her in the pool, and that I ran into a bush in the first twenty feet. Dad and Mom had a serious discussion about my talents as a go-kart racer after that, and they decided to unhook the starter until I got old enough to handle the spunky speedster. Evidently, I didn't mind all that much. I was fine with walking around my machine, admiring it and sitting in it for hours on end.

My earliest memories of actually driving a go-kart center on going down the long back stretch on the ½ mile dirt roadcourse on my grandfather's land, and having two racers split me at five times my speed, zooming by on either side. I remember not liking the feeling at all of being passed at all. It just didn't seem to feel right. I wanted to be first over the finish line, not last. More and more racing went on over the next couple years.

Evidently, my grandmother figured enough was enough. She put her foot down, and our much-loved Sunday morning two-stroke scream fests came to an abrupt halt. The racing still went on in parking lots in town, though. One pattern maker working for Dad lost it coming out of a turn and hit the curb head on. I don't remember it, but Dad said it just looked like he stood up and stepped off the go-kart. His pants around his crotch were soaked in blood when he got up. He was rushed to the hospital, having messed up his nut sack on the steering wheel as he was thrown out of the go-kart. In those days, seatbelts weren't installed in go-karts. People thought it was better to get hurled out in a crash. Well, Dad's employee was going to be okay, but he was in for some good-natured ribbing. My cousin, who also raced and worked at the shop, went in early the following Monday, got two one-inch nuts, wired them together, and hung them on the injured guy's bench vise. Of course, all the joking that week involved this poor guy's messed up balls, and to this day anybody who talks about go-kart racing in our little town inevitably brings that story up.

The bloody balls incident marked the beginning of the end of go-kart racing for me, serving as a good example of how the sport could be quite dangerous. The Sunday races were shifted to the real racecourse at nearby Spring Water Park, and they continued for a while longer. However, one day, a father who wanted to get his ten-year-old son involved in racing put his boy, who had never driven, into a go-kart and told him to take off. The kid spun out in front of the field on the first lap, causing an accident that killed another racer. The kid who hit him flipped the go-kart and died right there on the track from a head injury. Dad came home and took the wheels off my go-kart. He sold everything involved with the go-karts, and he never got back into racing.

In spite of the danger, I was hooked. The smell of hot oil and the sound of an engine, that rush when you pushed to the limits and all you focused on was the racecourse and the wind in your face, it was as addictive to me as a hot fudge Sundae, and then some. Motorsports of all kinds found their way into my life, but I also loved all kinds of sports in school. I was good at some, and pretty awful at others. I guess you might say I was a typical kid from a small town, horsing around with my pals and getting into trouble of the more wholesome kind, unlike what many kids get into today. It was just plain good old American fun and games, and the fond memories flood back to me very easily.

I honestly remember my very first day of school. Not necessarily the school day itself, but, rather, feelings I felt before and during this monumental transitional period in my young life. I remember protesting to my parents that I could already read. I said I did not need to go to kindergarten, but they told me in no uncertain terms that staying home was not an option. So, at around 7:30 a.m., my mom had me out in front of our house waiting for my teacher, Mrs. R.

"Well, where is she, Mom?" I asked.

"Oh, she'll be along."

I stood silently, fearing the great unknown.

Suddenly, I heard the rumble of an engine and glanced down the road to see a 1948 Studebaker coming. The car stopped in front of our house.

"Go on, Gregg. That's your teacher," my mom said.

When I approached the car and saw strange kids in the backseat, I refused to get in. My mom had to drive me, but I got over my fears that first day when I realized the strange kids who would be riding with me weren't so bad. My year at kindergarten was fun, except for the boring stuff, which amounted to everything except history, art, and recess. Playing kickball, red rover, basketball, baseball, and football were my specialties, and they made school worth the trouble.

A year later, when I initially entered my first grade classroom, I was checking out everybody with caution and looking for the man everybody called Mr. R, the principal of Yorktown Elementary School. My sister, Denise, had been filling my head with scary things about him. He was supposedly seven feet tall and hit kids with a wooden paddle that was four feet long and studded with rusty poison-coated nails. Corporal punishment was common in public schools during the early 1960s, though I came to understand that the girls didn't get spanked as much as the boys, at least in Yorktown. As I was seeing if I knew anybody in class, I heard a voice call my name.

"Hey, Gregg! Remember me?" the kid asked. "I'm Bill Webb."

I saw a kid a bit taller and thinner than me with the same burr haircut I had. Boys also wore flattops, which even back then I thought looked stupid. The tougher kids usually wore a flattop with a little butch grease to hold it up. Instantly, I figured I could take him due to my vast experience with kindergarten red rover battles. I usually placed in the top three in a class of ten in those battles, generally getting beaten by the larger and older kids. But, to put it simply, Bill was not threatening to me. He was actually smiling as he walked toward me with his hand out. We shook hands, as we were actually taught to do at an early age back in those days.

I did not remember Bill at first, but he informed me that he lived a few houses down from my cousins Randy and Steve in an addition called Bradford Park. Bill told me that we had played baseball together in his yard the previous year. It suddenly dawned on me that Bill was probably a member of the same neighborhood gang as my cousins. This gang, known as the Swamp Fox, always did battles in sports and neighborhood fights with a rival gang called the Red Coats. The fights rarely were actual fights, and the gangs weren't actual gangs like the ones that exist today. Fights were more like wrestling and tripping matches, unless someone got mad and threw a punch or two. The Swamp Foxes were the cool kids, and the Red Coats were the not-so-cool kids. These designations were, of course, decided by the members of the Swamp Fox, which was run by the biggest, toughest, and oldest kids in the neighborhood.

Back then in the sandlot baseball games it was common to field a nine-man team on both sides with actual substitutes. Captains were chosen, and then we proceeded with the bat toss and the hand-over-hand thing to the top of the knob to decide who would have the first pick after arguing over who had cheated whom. It was very important to get first pick, as there were always the guys who ruled the neighborhood in baseball. That was not Bill, and it certainly wasn't me. However, we were both good ball players and we were certainly above being a substitute, or, in other words, the guys who had to chase foul balls.

Bill and I hung out that first day of first grade, and we hung out a lot after that. In fact, we soon became fast friends. Mark was also in my first grade class. Of Italian heritage, he was a pesky bundle of energy with his nonstop jaw flapping. He possessed a unique and hilarious sense of humor, and he made an impression on me, as did Bill. When you're a kid, you don't think about friendships lasting a lifetime, and I'm sure none of us even considered the possibility that we three were onto just that. No, life was all horsing around with a special emphasis on go-karts for a while, and then on team sports through school and with the boys who lived near me in the neighborhood.

After school let out the summer before I entered second grade, my friends and I practically lived at the baseball diamond my dad built for us. It had a backstop, staked-down bases, an elevated pitcher's mound, and even chalked base lines that we had been playing on since we could hold a ball and glove. We played a lot of Junior Athletic Association baseball at that diamond, and the kids from Yorktown were formidable. The rules of the game back then were pretty much the same as the ones in the big leagues, but we had a few rules that the pros didn't. We could only wear rubber cleats and could not steal bases—a terrible rule in our minds, although most of the catchers could only one-hop it to second base. The distance between bases was the junior league sixty feet, and the pitcher's mound was forty-five feet from home base. Most of the players knew the rules already and had been playing some form of neighborhood baseball for a long time.

We lived right on the county line between Muncie and Yorktown. A dirt road that saw maybe five cars on it per day ran along the line, and so it was a matter of one hundred feet that separated me from being a Muncie city boy. Their baseball program paled in comparison to Yorktown's, which was surprising because Muncie had much larger schools. My location did mean one thing in my life was different from my classmates: neighborhood baseball. Except for practice and games with the JAA team, my summer ball was with kids who went to West View Elementary, a soon-to-be-rival city school.

Our ball diamond was always full. It was quite a crew. My grandmother, Opal, ruled the roost. She could also hit a mean long ball. She doubled as the umpire and always had the final word, so she was a highly sought after pick. A short stocky woman, she could hit a baseball into the trees in left field, a home run of about two hundred twenty feet. We didn't have a fence. The railroad tracks in right field amounted to a slightly shorter home run—about one hundred ninety feet. We all tried to hit from both sides of the plate, and we talked about it constantly as we fantasized about hitting like Mickey Mantle. Center field was deep. There was nothing to stop the ball, so inside-the-park homers hit in the gaps were common but not really recognized in after-game bragging rights. You had to hit the trees or the railroad for the honorary slow trot home run ball, and that's what we all went for, especially in close games.

All of us guys played baseball mostly from sunup to sundown, with occasional breaks to swim in our pool or to play army at the creek in our woods. All the kids had to go home for lunch and supper. As five o'clock drew near, we all knew to listen for the thunderous deep voice of Mr. W. That man's bellow carried at least half a mile to the creek and all the way into the neighborhood next to ours. He'd open his front door wide and shout, "Gary! Jimmy! Jeff!"

Those boys flew home like the rest of us, with Gary in the lead, Jimmy taking up second, and Jeff bringing up the rear. The neighborhood stopped for thirty minutes during each meal. Most of the families sat down to eat together at basically the same time, so about half an hour after Mr. W's roar, the doors flew open and out we fifteen or so kids would go at a run. We'd try to hit the pool right away on hot summer evenings, but our parents made us stay out for an hour.

"You'll get cramps and die," they'd say.

That last half an hour before six o'clock we timed down to the second by a countdown from ten. Then it was all or nothing. Swimming was a highlight of my life as a young boy, one of the early passions that filled my days with joy and a feeling of freedom I'll never forget. The times were different back then. They really were. It was swimming that took hold in a big way even before go-karts, though not long before. I actually don't remember learning how to swim. I could always just do it. My family has eight-millimeter film of me swimming around at Tippecanoe Lake in Northern Indiana, where my parents had purchased a lake cottage when I was around two years old. I never swam competitively in any serious way until my freshman year of high school, but I was naturally fast, so fast in fact that my parents entered me in a swim meet at Thuey Pool in Muncie when I was five years old. The starting age group was eight years old, but I remember not worrying because I knew I couldn't lose. I was also entered into the diving competition, and there were supposed to be three separate consecutive dives on a board that was about three feet higher than ours at the pool.

The diving competition came before the swim meet. My first dive was a swan dive. As I spread out in glory, I hit the water face first and got a bloody nose. I quickly got back up on the board for my second dive, a front flip. Now that was a big-time dive in our neighborhood, a real badge of honor when you could do one well. Sadly, I had only mastered the flip about half to three quarters of the way. I realized when I left the board I was in trouble. With the increased height of the board, I was concerned about going too far and smacking my face again, so the dive turned out to be a slow rolling half-and-splat on my back. I swam to the side of the pool in pain, trying not to cry in front of all those people. My very red back now matched my front. Battered and bloody and very small compared to the older kids, I had won the hearts of the audience, or at least I'd certainly gotten their attention.