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Kay Kimes Continued......

  The next day we traced the truck’s trail over to the east side of Baja and ended up in San Felipe. We got a motel room and contacted the Chief of Police and he was going to attempt to get a phone patch back to California. He tried all night but was unsuccessful. I told Ted that we had been flying too much and we were too tired to fool around any longer. I said we are going towards home regardless of where the truck and racecar are. We flew to Mexicali and to Calexico where we went through customs. Then I called the shop in Costa Mesa and found out that the other guys had just gotten there a couple hours before. When we flew over the airport at Salton City it was marked on the air maps as unsuitable for landing and we said that it looked a lot better than anyone of the strips in Baja that we had landed on. When we returned, I said that we had enough adventures to write a book about. Well, now it is almost thirty years later and I am finally getting around to it. Mitzie always said I was one of the better procrastinators. I talked to Bob Thomas and he recalled many stories that I didn't know about. Mickey Thompson, Danny Ongais and Bob's future wife were in Mickey's airplane. Bob said that Mickey was a wild flyer and he made Danny sick.

   The following is what Bob Thomas wrote in the Los Angeles Times where he was the Auto Editor: Our car, a Corvair-powered dune buggy, the Bugetta, which at times went as fast as 110 mph and others as slow as 5 mph, made it halfway down the peninsula. Then it expired, fighting and kicking. Our elapsed time was 25 hours, 48 minutes. There were 17 interruptions for “pit stops”… on mountainsides, cactus-covered gulches, sandy deserts and at lonely adobe ranches. They lasted from moments to hours. But other competitors had it worse, far worse. Our car, the Bugetta, left the starting line at Ensenada at 6:12 a.m. Our first problem didn’t occur until 6:13 a.m. …at 100 mph. The nose of the car was darting from side to side as we steamed around mountain curves (no guardrails!). We didn’t know it but the steering arm which connects to the right front wheel was broken in half. Only one bolt was holding the steering in place. It sheared several hours later, fortunately when we were creeping at slow speed over a rocky ledge. The pavement extended nearly to the first checkpoint at Camalu, 93 miles south of Ensenada and 150 miles below the United States border. After that it was dirt, then rocks, then silt. At 8a.m., the accelerator stuck at part throttle. We nursed the car into the second checkpoint (El Rosario), 152 miles from the start. There our crew, which had driven ahead the night before, made quick repairs with a helping hand from Mickey Thompson, the Bonneville racer. Then we headed into the roughest sections of the run. And the throttle stuck again---wide open. 

   The only way to keep going was to drive with one hand on the steering wheel -- when three wouldn’t be too many---and switch the ignition key on and off with the other hand, using the engine in brief spurts. It was an exhausting way to fight the ruts, rocks and chuck holes and after an hour and a half, we stopped to wrestle with the problem. We had progressed only 25 miles from the checkpoint. Forty-five minutes later we re-entered the competition after fixing the throttle linkage and discovered for the first time, the real nature of our steering dilemma. Clearance over the road is vital on the rock pocked route. We lost ours early. A front spring mount broke.  It wedged into the chassis and at least held the assembly in place, but lowered the road clearance to six inches. Not enough for fast running. At 5p.m., we pulled into the next checkpoint, the Ranch of Santa Ynez. We had covered 86 miles, some of the roughest on the peninsula, in eight hours, stopping twice to fix the steering arm and twice to coax the engine back into operation.

   Santa Ynez looked like a wrecking yard. When we arrived, there were 27 cars under repair. Part of our crew had flown ahead to Sant Ynez where they went to work reconstructing our car. That new burst lasted only 20 minutes. The engine stalled again. Three clean plugs induced it to start. After midnight, twice it stopped again on a cold mountain top. In the company of cattle and a full moon, we changed the points, condenser, rotor, spark plugs and coil, then pressed on toward Punta Prieta, the next checkpoint 76 miles away.. We arrived there to huddle around a warm fire and to refuel at 5a.m. Now it was a matter of finishing. The end, however, came only 30 miles from Punta Prieta, as we crawled through a canyon. The right rear shock absorber mount broke. We were done.

   In 1947 after high school I went to work for North American Aviation in Long Beach. My salary at that time was less than $.50 per hour. We were building the B45 medium bomber. I worked in several departments. Welding, where I was a passivator. In those days they used flux when welding aluminum and stainless steel and that flux needed to be neutralized. I did that in tanks of acid and hot water. Detail parts, small assembly, upholstery shop and ran an automatic riveting machine called Erco for a while. When I worked the assembly area of the horizontal stabilizer, we were shooting and bucking rivets. At times you would have your head right down inside the structure while 2 or 3 people were shooting rivets. Nobody wore earplugs or protection and it is a wonder we can hear today. I worked there two years and then quit. By 1949 I moved to Banning and ran a garage in conjunction with Lester Bobo's service station. One day a couple of Mexican fellows that only spoke Spanish came in with a truck and tried to tell me that the clutch was out. I finally got in and started to test drive it but it shook so bad I stopped. About then one of the guys reached under the seat and pulled out a fan blade. We had never even shut off the engine so didn't notice the fan was broken. We couldn't get a part because the truck was a Reo. So I cut off the other blade and it balanced and off they went to San Bernardino where they could get a new fan.

   A couple of weeks later a family in a 1940 Chevy coupe pulled into the station and this nicely dressed elderly Mexican gentleman got out and said he thought that their clutch had gone out. I stood there and without opening the hood told the young man driving to start up the car. It shook just like that truck. I told the gentleman that he had a broken fan. He said, "How do you know?" I said "Oh, I've been a mechanic for years and I just know." I was about 19 years old at the time. He was astonished when we opened the hood and sure enough the fan was missing a blade. He thought I was pretty good. In all of my years working on vehicles, I have never seen another broken fan blade. But then I hope I don't. I moved to Morongo Valley where I had a small cabin on a 5-acre plot that I had actually homesteaded while I was in high school. My Mom helped frame this cabin. Our family had gone to the desert to visit the Bobos when the second World War ended. The Lester Bobo family had homesteaded a plot out there. I worked for Allen Bobo for a while as a roofer and then he and his father, Otto had gone to work for the government surveying.

   I started working with the survey crew early in 1950 and we were living in tents in Yucca Valley. We surveyed most of the 5-acre lots from Yucca to Twenty nine Palms from a mile south of the 29 Palms highway to Lucerne Valley. We went from there to survey the land that is now under Folsom Lake. Then we went to Lake Tahoe where we camped in the forest and it was a beautiful place. We were surveying the land between the old and new California/Nevada state line. The line had been moved around 1900 and we surveyed the last portion from Lake Tahoe to the south for several miles. Beautiful country, one day we were on top of Monument peak and could see all of Lake Tahoe.  One job we did was to survey a mine where we went into tunnels and ran line, angles and everything. That was in Gabbs Nevada. It was out in the middle of nowhere. Minden, Nevada was a job surveying some cattle grazing lands. While there I received my draft notice. I went to Sacramento and took my physical. I got drafted.

   My first day in the Army was Thanksgiving Day 1950. We went to Fort Ord on the train from LA. I took my basic training at Fort Ord where I met a life long friend Lynn Yakel and I was trained to be a rifleman or foot soldier in the Infantry. That was the only training that we received. Not a good situation to be a foot soldier. That training lasted four months and then we were given a delay-in-route (vacation) of a couple of weeks before we were to report to Camp Stoneman for shipment overseas. We reported to Camp Stoneman to ship out and our destination was changed from FECOM (Far East Command - Korea) to Hawaii. The first night out of San Francisco we ran into a storm and it was very rough. We probably had 2,000 troops all sick at the same time. We were on a troopship and I thought I was going to die from seasickness. About three days into the trip I finally was able to eat and lived. I was assigned to Schofield Barracks on Oahu. I was in the Signal Corps and for about 10 months we installed and maintained public address systems on the 26 firing ranges. I learned to climb poles and did that by myself. We worked long hours, sometimes from 4 AM until Midnight and that was 7 days a week. 

   I transferred into telephone work and spent the rest of my two years doing installation and troubleshooting. We also got quite a bit of time in swimming and other important things. We usually ate breakfast at the Golf club on the Post because the mess hall food left something to be desired. While performing our telephone duties it allowed a certain amount of latitude. Such as picking coconuts from backyards, but we explained to the lady that it was necessary to clear the telephone wires. Well, actually they were several feet away but we left before she figured that out. We usually had coconuts, fresh bananas and avocados in our truck and ready to eat. Army life was not really my bag. I wasn’t used to having someone tell me everything that I was supposed to do. But I felt it was easier to swim downstream so I just went along with the flow and did my time. While at Schofield I was teaching Auto Mechanics at the USAFI school in my spare time. I wanted to do some experimenting with an engine so I went to Schubert's Cyclery in Honolulu to try and buy an engine/motor. I talked to Mr. Schubert and before I got out of there, I had a part time job as a motorcycle mechanic and had bought a motorcycle. It was a 1951 BSA Golden Flash 650cc twin. Working at Schubert's Cyclery in Honolulu was an interesting experience and I learned a lot about motorcycles. One thing was in the twenty miles riding to work you could get rained on and dried off completely three or four times on the way.

   In 1951 a bunch of enthusiasts got together and five of us became charter members of a motorcycle club. We called our club the High-Siders. When falling down with a bike you end up digging in and then flying over the top you have just high-sided. Bob Glines, Bob Keane, Jim Noss, Roy McCarrell and I were the charter members of the club. We were authorized by the Post Commander and took over an abandoned motor pool (formerly used for storage and maintenance of Army vehicles). We cleaned it up and had a place to work on our bikes. We had a lot of fun and put on a lot of rides, field meets and other events. I think we had about 25 members most of the time. We did a lot of riding, quite a bit of beer drinking and fortunately no one got seriously injured while we were there. We did get lots of bumps, bruises and an occasional case of pavement rash. Some of the fellows were into photography so we have lots of pictures. Some of them are even embarrassing such as when I fell trying to get my comb out of my back pocket once. Of course a picture was taken before anyone would help get the bike up off my leg.

   While in Hawaii and working at Schubert’s we thought of running the bike at the Bonneville Speed Week. I entered an entry but the Army said if you go stateside then we have to discharge you early and they would not do that. It would have been all right with me. But so be it. Our club was invited to ride in a Hare and Hound races put on by the Pacific Motorcycle Club (local people) and were riding in the sugarcane fields, which was 10 or 14 feet high. Many little roads and they went everywhere. We kept crossing each other’s paths. Of course this was at night so it was difficult to figure where you were. We had gone around the island for a ride earlier in the day and when returning to the Post we had seen some riders laying lime bags on the main highway. As we maneuvered around in the cane I figured out they had gone back to the highway and so I went there right-away. We got way ahead of most of the riders. I was riding near Fapp and he kept kind of blocking me as we searched side roads looking for the course. He said that several riders were ahead of us. 

   I finally figured out that he was pulling my leg and we were out in front. He had a 500cc single and he and his girl friend were rather large (heavy, that is). My girl friend and I were on my 650cc twin and we were significantly lighter than they were. We came to a big curve as we went through a small town and I told my rider to hold on tight and I cut the corner and even went on the wrong side of the road and passed them big time. The problem was that when we did this we passed up the finish line and didn't even see the guys trying to stop us. After a bit I realized that we had overrun the finish because there were no more lime marks in the road. At that time we were traveling over 60 mph. I told my rider to hold on tight as we were going to stop. I downshifted and grabbed hold of the brakes and stopped as fast as we could. Because of our heavier bike and our combined lighter weight we were able to stop a lot faster. They went right on by. We turned around and went back and were still the 3rd and 4th bikes in. I got a lot of razzing for passing the finish and wore the club 8-ball for the next week. Lots of fun and we ended up on the beach and had hot dogs and stuff.

   I traded in my bike for a 500cc single BSA. They actually gave me a new bike for what my old one was worth. I wish that I still had the 650cc twin. It was a better machine. My Dad learned to ride the BSA. He used to go pickup cigarettes or run whatever little errands that he could think of. I think he enjoyed riding the bike. In October 1952 my nearly two years were up and time to go back stateside. I was sure glad of that. We shipped back to San Francisco and when we went under the Golden Gate Bridge, we could barely see it through the fog. I rode the train and bus in to LA and then got on the old PE red car and went to Bellflower. I couldn't tell my folks exactly when I would be arriving so said I'll call you from the station. I remember it was very early in the morning when I got in. Nancy came in her pajamas and got me in my Pontiac, which I hadn't seen for a couple of years. It sure was good to be home again with family. I decided to go and live out in the desert for awhile so I moved out to Morongo Valley and lived in my cabin. John Scott ran the Chevron station in town and he had built a garage in the back for his son-in-law Orville Welcher to run. Orville had gone to do something else so the garage was idle. John made me a real good deal to run the garage. I didn't advertise but before long I had more work than I could do. 

   I decided to try my hand at off-road motorcycle racing and entered the Greenhorn run which starts in Pasadena and winds out through the desert by Red Mountain and then back to the LA area. I had never ridden deep sand such as washes so I had some learning to do. Fortunately I was riding with three experienced riders and they helped me get on top of the sand and keep it there. I did quite well the first day and only slipped down once and that was an easy one. That night we slept out on the side of the mountain at Red Mountain and my lower back was really killing me so my girlfriend rubbed it down with Deep Heat. I got up in the morning and it was quite cold there and I was riding in sand washes and in about twenty miles I fell twenty times. Each time you go down it takes more out of you. I got to a checkpoint where my friends were and told the officials that was it for me. I started a new job the next day at the auto parts store in Banning. For about a week I walked around bent over like an 80 year-old man. That rigid frame on that bike really took its toll. 

   I had left Morongo and moved to Banning and went to work for Ralph Weeks Auto Parts. I worked selling parts over the counter and also spent two days a week on the road selling and delivering auto parts all the way to 29 Palms. I rented a garage in town and had my motorcycle and my old sprint car there. The garage was behind a station and I had all the services such as air and water. Bob (Pappy) Glines and I decided to ride the Cactus Derby Motorcycle Run, which started in Riverside. He came up from San Diego and my Dad and brother Joe were our support vehicle. When we got down by the west side of the Salton Sea Pappy blew a rear tire and had to pack it in. Daddy and Joe picked him up and waited near Truck haven on the old 99 Highway. I had been wearing some bubble goggles and couldn't see too good because of the dust and sand as I had ridden without any goggles for long enough to really affect my eyes. I also was not running a front fender and sand got into my front forks and the front wheel would not always turn upon demand. When the bike was assembled in Honolulu they had not put enough grease in the front fork head. 

   I spilled near a railroad track and picked up sand in the carburetor and when I got going again the next time I shut down the throttle for a dip, guess what? It didn't slow down. I picked myself up and proceeded to ride down the railroad tracks until I reached a road. I was having a very difficult time even seeing. I stopped in a little town and someone was kind enough to give me some water. It was hot and dusty out there. I just stayed on the road back to where Daddy, Joe and now Pappy were. The whites of my eyes were bright red and I couldn't really keep them open. Daddy drove us to San Diego to take Pappy home and then took me home to Banning. I never rode another of those types of runs. If the bike had had a good suspension it would have been a different story. When I ordered it in Hawaii they said the next year we could obtain a swing arm rear half and bolt it right on. Didn't happen. Bob Keane and Pappy Glines have died from cancer. Roy McCarrell had an accident with his tractor and lost his life. Jim Noss had a major stroke a year ago and now has passed away. Kind of spooky. I am the only one of the original Hi-Siders alive and still walking around. I picked up the club scrapbook from Bob Blazivic recently and am preparing pictures, story and my jersey to send to the Museum at Schofield Barracks. They will put them on display and if any of our children ever go to Oahu they could see what their fathers were doing over there.

   I left Banning in 1954 and went back home to live with my folks. I hired in again with North American Aviation and worked at the Downey, California plant where my Dad worked. I worked as a template maker for awhile and then transferred up to Laboratories and Test. I was a research Mechanic and worked on many different projects. While working in L&T I learned that I really should have continued school when I graduated from high school. Leon Lambert and I started to Long Beach City College in 1956 and took Engineering Drawing. I continued school for the next eight years but never did get a degree. I went to Cerritos College and then on to Fullerton Junior College.  While working in the shop I became acquainted with the girl who delivered blueprints. We talked a lot about cars and other things and in November of 1956 we were married. When I met Mitzie she was driving a 1952 MG. A project we got involved in was putting a new top on her car. She loved that car and had a lot of fun with it. I bought a 14 foot plywood boat and I talked her into selling her car to pay for the motor. We bought a 30 horsepower Johnson. It was for water skiing mostly but we also did some fishing. We went to Salton Sea a lot and had a lot of good times there. The Yakel’s went with us quite a bit. Sam and Shelley Green bought a small catamaran and we about wore it out. I went boat racing with Harry Schwendtner and also taught their son Denny to water ski. 

   We belonged to a Thunderbird club in ’60 and one trip we made was to the Ford proving ground in Kingman AZ. I drove one of the very first Cobras and it really went fast. In July of 1957 there was a Navaho layoff. This was a big day at NAA as about 5,000 people all got laid off. Mitzie worked at the Autonetics division. I really jumped around doing a lot of things, Employment agency, real estate sales (I sold Salton Sea lots, in fact we still own a lot there. It's the only property that we have where the taxes were going down steadily), mfg. of hydraulic oil well pumping equipment and mfg. drafting machines, for the next year and a half. I was able to go back with NAA in the Autonetics division. In fact I went to work in the same department that Mitzie did. She was secretary to the boss and I worked in the drafting area. We designed and built in house electronic testing equipment. Over the years I progressed to an engineering position as an electronic research engineer. One assignment I had while at Autonetics was to go to Downey and work on the Apollo Program. I converted a manual test program for the Apollo SPS engines. That is the unit that lifted the module off the moon when the astronauts left for earth. The new method that was used was a punched tape reader and coding. The present day methods using computers would have made it so much easier but of course that was before the age of computers. So much for progress.

   While still working at NAA, I had started helping Bill Fowler when Dan Gurney started out on his own with his own racing shop. Dan had rented a shop on Randolph Street in Costa Mesa. There were some guys in a sign shop next door and they had a couple of go-carts. Well we sort of got the bug and before long we were having races every afternoon as soon as most people left the industrial complex. I raced Richie Ginther one day and beat him. Of course it was the first time he had ever been in a go-cart. He had raced Formula One for years and was a very famous race driver.  One afternoon Dan got one of his Montesa motorcycles and was racing me on a go-cart. I surely did not want him to get by me, but he is a real intimidator. He would run up right behind me but he couldn’t make the turns like the go-cart can. He kept trying and I kept holding him off for many laps. He finally got mad and charged by me on the straightway. He went right out into the street as I went around the corner. I won. We had a lot of fun!! Dan had bought a Lotus 19B and it had been built for him in England and it was powered by a 289 ci Ford V8. We prepared it for the races. Ken Deringer also helped out and we were volunteering our time. We went to Nassau in the Bahamas for the Speed Week events. We did not have a pickup to tow the car so Bob Opperman was called and invited to tow with his new pickup. We also ran an EMPI VW. We drove the VW across to Miami with a stock engine and then when we were in Nassau we installed the race engine. 

   When we were testing at the track one day we went out to a remote section of the track and blocked off two long straight-aways and a short one. It made sort of a U- shaped area. I was on one end with a motorcycle and one of the other guys was at the other end. We had been having trouble with hot air coming into the cockpit and Dan asked me to get in with him and find out where the hot air was coming from. I crawled in and stuck my head down under the dash and felt where the body lifted at speed. After I found out where the air was coming from I sat up and was holding on. The car didn’t have any seat or belts in that side. Dan went down around the course again and I must have been putting on the brakes as he was grabbing another gear. I think the car would go about 165 mph in those short stretches. It surely was thrilling. I didn’t have time to get scared. That is until the next lap after I got out and Dan spun out and went through a bunch of bushes/trees about one inch in diameter. He was very embarrassed as he did it right in front of his whole crew. He had always said he would give us a ride in the race car but never seemed to get around to it. But, I had a ride.

   The Lotus broke the suspension in the race and did not finish. Dan won the VW race and made some money. He gave us each $100 and had paid all of the expenses. We worked every day but one and then we went water-skiing with the crew members from the Cobra team. We were skiing in the bay and could see the real white bottom in areas. We asked when we got back to the dock how deep was the water in the harbor. They said 80 feet. It was remarkably clear. One of the Cobra crew was Dave McDonald who was a real nice guy. Unfortunately he lost his life at Indianapolis the next year driving a race car in the Indy 500. I left NAA in May of 1964 with the idea of working in the racing car field. I had a job with Dan Gurney but before it even started Bill Fowler told me that Dan had changed his mind and someone else was hired for that spot. Bill got me in contact with Howard Gidovlenko who was trying to put Chevy innards into Jaguar transmissions. His shop was in a hangar at the Orange County Airport. I used to go to lunch at a little caf� right under the old wooden tower. I even worked on some aircraft and helicopters while there. That was a very interesting experience.

   The Jaguar transmissions were very difficult to shift. You had to hesitate between each gear. The Chevrolet gears were easy to shift. I took a guy for a ride one day and showed him how good it worked. He couldn’t get his wallet out quick enough. That job lasted a few months and then I hop-scotched around to different race car shops. I worked at Deist Safety Equipment a while designing parachutes for drag racing and land speed cars. We supported Art Arfons and Walt Arfons attempts at the Bonneville Salt flats.  While at Deist’s I contacted Don Francisco and got a ride for the 1965 Mobil Run. During that time I also signed on with Don Francisco, the Pontiac Team Manager to drive on the Mobil Economy Runs which ran cross country. The first year George Calloway was my navigator and we went to New York City. We drove a Pontiac Tempest in Class F and our mileage was XXXX mpg. George and I had difficulty communicating (we fought). He had trouble figuring out the navigation and I could roughly figure out in my head while driving. I drove too slow in the mornings and then had to drive too fast in the afternoons. It was my fault for doing that. We got a penalty once for coming in late. We stayed in Niagara Falls one night and I have promised Mitzie that I would take her there for our second honeymoon.

   A test car was brought from the factory to NYC and it had a new overhead camshaft 6 cylinder engine in it. The Pontiac engineer and a technician and Don and I ran it and a similar run car (6 cylinder) for a test run. We went north back up to Buffalo, New York and then headed down through western Pennsylvania on small back roads through a rolling countryside and through a lot of Amish farming country. We would switch the lead every half hour and drivers every two hours. There were measuring devices in each car (fuel flow meters) for comparison purposes. We went through Youngstown, Ohio and then cut west to Columbus and then back up to Pontiac, Michigan. It was a very interesting trip. When I left there and went to Omaha to visit NE was the first time I ever flew in commercial aircraft. So the next year when we signed with Ford, I got Lynn Yakel to go with me. I had a lot of confidence in Lynn’s capabilities. We really worked well as a team. Except the time in Dalhart, Texas when the observer wouldn’t let us in the car after lunch break. He saw the Kay and Lynn painted on the front fender and thought he was going to spend the afternoon with a couple of girls (Honeys). We had to get one of the officials to convince him that we belonged in that car. Second year we went to Boston and we drove a Ford Custom 500 in Class F and got 18.1885 mpg. The third year we went to Detroit while driving a Ford Custom 500 again in Class E and our mileage was 19.2848 mpg and we came in second in class. 

   One year as we were making our test runs, we went from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to Tucson five weekends in a row. One Saturday Lynn had the flu and it was doubtful whether he could go. We finally decided to go anyway. The speed had been changed for the day but only a couple of miles per hour. He gave me the speed to drive on the open road and once we were underway he crawled over into the back seat and went to sleep. He woke up about two hours later and we were by Palm Springs. He checked his calculations and I was only off by about 20 seconds after 120 miles. Dave Apple, a Ford technician rode with us in the afternoon and he kept asking me what speed I was driving. 53.8 mph was always the answer. We told him what had happened in the morning about Lynn sleeping for a couple of hours. Then Dave went to sleep for a couple of hours and when he awoke he asked ‘What’s your speed now?” 53.8 mph again was the answer. We drove all the way in to Tucson and kept the same pace and came in right on time. He got up at the debriefing and told everybody what we had done that day. He was impressed. We made a test run to Cleveland. Lynn and I were in a Mustang with an engineering test engine. When we reached Wichita we had a meeting with Humpy (Bill Humphrey) our team manager and Bill Gay a vice president of Ford Motor Co. and head of the engine division. Mr. Gay decided to exchange two of the crews and put us in Fran Foster’s car with the baselined engine and have her drive ours. We were getting about � mile to the gallon more than they expected and wondered whether it was the driver or the car. The next morning at our get together he announced to everyone that this swap was going to take place. Of course Fran was surprised and her and I made a bet that whoever lost would take the other out to dinner. The Dodgers were playing in St. Louis that night , in fact they were loading on the bus to go to the ball park when we got to the hotel. We did not beat the girls so we bought hot dogs for dinner at the ball park. That was the first major league ball game I had ever seen and it was boring. I believe that Sandy Koufax pitched and it was a very low scoring game. 

   Our final year we would have gone to New York City but that is when Dr. Martin Luther King got assassinated and we were stopped in Indy. As part of the run we drove in and made one lap of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway track and then went to impound. The historical importance of this was the fact that very few get to drive around that track that are not race drivers. The cancellation meant there were no finish line pictures so the next day they said to take the cars out and we would make a few laps and get some publicity pictures. I told Lynn that he could drive if he wanted to. After all I had gotten to drive around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway myself. He agreed and we started out. After several laps I told him to stop as he shouldn’t get all of the fun. Then I drove another 10 laps or so. I got up to 83 mph in the 2nd turn but then the Mustang would only go 85 mph down the back straightway. Anyway we had lots of fun and he had left his camera in the hotel room. Our car that year was a Ford Mustang 2+2 6 cylinder in Class A and our mileage was 22.6487 mpg. We had two NASCAR drivers on the Ford team: Nelson Stacy and Johnny Allen and then we had Ronnie Duman who was an Indianapolis race car driver. We had a lot of fun with those guys.

   In July of 1965 I went to work for Skyvalve. Bob Keane was the General Manager. The company had started in Anaheim and then moved back to New York State for family business reasons. Don Hyer purchased the company and moved it back to Fullerton. Don had invented variable speed drives and I made some patent drawings at first. The equipment for the valve shop soon arrived and we put that together. My title was Quality Control Manager but I also did Production Control. We purchased all of our machined parts from outside machine shops and I was responsible for all of the purchasing. We had some very good dependable products and did very well. In April 1968 the company was sold out to Victor Equipment Co. and they were in Sacramento and we did not want to live there. 

   In May of 1968 I started to work at Eisert Racing Enterprises in Costa Mesa. I had worked for Jerry before on a project with Indy cars and went to the brickyard in 1965 for the first time. I was a mechanic. I had always dreamed of going there because there is so much history and nostalgia. We didn’t qualify either car for the race. Leroy Yarbourgh and Skip Hudson were our drivers. We went to Milwaukee the next weekend and Al Unser and Johnny Rutherford were our drivers. Jerry had the new Harrison Special and I had the old mule, which was a modified Lotus 18 with a Chevrolet engine. Ours was blowing oil out of the engine and proceeded to catch fire during the race. Not much damage. I worked at Eisert’s until June 1970. I was the Assistant General Manager and did all of the purchasing and much of the administrative work. We designed and built some special vehicles, most notable was the Lead Wedge (which I designed the chassis and the body), an electric car for the Land Speed Record. It ran 139+ mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. We built some high class (read that – expensive) dune buggies and even ran one in the Baja 1000 in 1968. I went down with Ted Sutton, one of our mechanics, in his 140 Cessna. 

   I did one project that was a lot of fun. Paul Newman came to us and wanted to put a Ford engine in the back of a Volkswagen Bug. It took a year and a half to complete. He used to call every week and ask how things were going. He always asked about our race car teams. I believe that he just wanted to get away from the other world that he was in so I never once talked to him about or asked about his career. He was a real gentleman. He used to come down on Saturday mornings when he lived out here. One day he brought his daughter. I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride in one of our fancy dune buggies. She said yes so we asked her Dad if it was ok. He said yes so we took off. We went over by the Orange County Airport where there were empty fields and she saw a snake cross the road. She wanted to stop and get it but when we went back it had disappeared. Then we saw a rabbit running across a field. On the way back she saw a bird way up in the sky and exclaimed, “There is a red-tailed hawk.” When we returned to the shop her Dad asked how she liked the dune buggy ride. She said, “Oh, we saw a snake, a rabbit and a red-tailed hawk.” That was neat. She didn’t really care about the car. She was very polite and thanked me for the ride. Nice people. I always felt that he came to our shop to get away from his busy life so I never asked him about his work or never got an autograph, souvenir or took any pictures.

   Paul used to come to the shop on Saturday mornings and we would take his VW to Orange County Raceway and run it around. He just seemed to enjoy being out with the guys and sometimes the mechanics and I would drive the car around and he would just watch and talk with the guys. He had another VW with a Porsche engine in it and he was always asking me to drive it because he liked it so much. Well, one day as we went to track I said OK. One of our mechanics rode with him and I drove his VW with the Porsche engine. After we started I thought of the fact that he hadn’t been to the track too many times and didn’t remember where to turn off. The mechanic probably wouldn’t know to tell him. So, I took off to catch them and we ended up catching them on the San Diego Freeway at about the same time he was passing a Camaro. He went on one side and I went on the other of the Camaro. We were probably doing well over 100 mph when this happened. There is always a possibility a hot VW is out there somewhere but two of them. The Camaro pulled to the side of the road and stopped. I bet that he was shook.

   I designed the body and chassis for an electric powered car for the Bonneville Salt Flats. It was powered by automobile Autolite batteries. I recently gave all the info and pictures to Jerry Kugel as he is the one who got to drive the car. The shop took on a project with Disney and NBC called “Disney on Parade.” We built a lot of items for the show; the lights that hung over the stage, some carousels that rolled on the stage, a floor section that surrounded the stage and it had lights in the floor. The lights were connected electronically to music and the lights were brighter as the music came up in volume. They were visible through the fiberglass flooring. It was beautiful when it worked. It made little fires when it didn’t. We assembled the whole show on a sound stage at KTLA in Hollywood. After rehearsals the show was transported to the Long Beach Convention Center for final dress rehearsals. We were able to have our families come and see the shows. Jackie Cooper came in as the show director towards the end of our involvement. The show went on to open in Chicago on Christmas. I took a temporary job with All American Racers to repair an Indy car for backup for the 1970 Ontario race. I built new front suspension and repaired other parts. During the race both Bobby Unser and Swede Savage’s entries were wrecked so the one I was working on had to go to Indy for tire testing. I had to repair Swede Savage’s car that he had knocked off the right front and left rear corners and suspension. I worked there for about three months until Sept. 1970.

   I worked for Bob Keane at Keane Engineering for several years up to 1973. We had various valve designs and did a project for General Valve Co. in Long Beach. They had designed valves and when they went to assemble them they had quite a few interference fits that were incorrect. I was tasked to take all of the detail drawings and calculate and relay out them to verify the designs. We did about 30 of those and found enough errors to justify the effort. Bob designed many different valves. I did the drawings and then got the parts made. Then I did the testing. He was always two designs/valves ahead of me. He was really talented and it is a shame that he died so young. Bob had designed an air system for drag race cars and I worked on that for a couple of years. We installed systems in a couple of top fuel cars and a funny car for Gene Snow. It worked very well but just never got off the ground as far as a commercial venture. We ran straight methanol and never blew an engine in several years of testing. We had run one system on Mickey Thompson’s dyno in Long Beach. It was the only dyno that could take the instant horsepower that the air system engines could generate. Several magazine articles were written about this system.

   George Striegel of Clay Smith Cams is restoring his dragster with the air system.  The car is to be put in the NHRA museum in Pomona. I have given him a lot of data. Bob Keane had also developed a fuel system for Indy racing cars. It was really to be used in conjunction with the Hilborn fuel injection system on the Drake-Offenhauser engines. In order to keep our testing secret we went to Fresno and worked with the Gerhart racing shop. They had a dyno and Offy-Drake engines in their Indy cars. Dale Drake was the President of Drake Engineering in Irvine. He had ridden as a race mechanic with Louie Meyer in the 1932 Indy race. He had also flown Jennys during the First World War. He told us a lot of stories as we made those weekend trips to Fresno. We tested our system on several cars and in 1970 went to the speedway to install units on as many cars as we could. They worked very well and some of the cars were able to go 3 or 4 miles per hour quicker. Actually I think some of those drivers believed in Dale so much that they just went faster anyway. I remember standing down in turn one and watching Johnny Rutherford qualifying. He looked so smooth that we thought he wasn’t really going all that fast. As it turned out he was one of the fastest cars. The smooth driving really paid off. I stayed through the first weekend of qualifying and left for home as we were moving to La Habra Heights.

   I went to work for Virgil Fouts at Con Fab in May of 1973. We designed and built baghouses for concrete batch plants and other applications. One project I was involved in consisted in taking an old transit mix plant in the back yard and converting it for use in an automatic batch plant for making concrete blocks. This was for Angelus Block Company in Orange. I made about 20 drawings of conveyor systems and structures to house them and supervised the manufacture of the components and then went to the site and assembled it. What a job! I had worked at places where we machined parts to the thousands of an inch and here they drilled holes with a cutting torch, but they did a very neat and concise job. We had lived in La Mirada for 11 years and now had bought a home in La Habra Heights. We moved there on May 16, 1970 Joe’s birthday. Dan our first born was 6 years old by this time and Dave was 5 years old. We wanted them to be able to grow up in the country and they surely liked the idea too. Mitzie and I went to the World’s Fair in Seattle back in 1962. We visited the art museum and we saw what I considered “dumb” paintings. I said to her that I could do better. When we lived in Nebraska once in a while we would shoot cans of something and kind of make them explode. I went to a store and got some little glass globes for craft projects and I got several kinds of paint from the garage for each one. I sealed them with wax and then went out in the grove and suspended them from the trees. Having put gesso on some masonite panels for canvas and laying it on the ground under the globes, I then shot them with a .22 caliber pistol. “Splatter, Splatter,” I suppose these are very valuable now. Ha!

   In May of 1970 we went to the Ontario Motor Speedway on Labor Day weekend to attend the inaugural Indianapolis car race. While we were gone that day a small fire broke out below our house. It burned about one half of an acre. It probably started from a cigarette tossed out by the road. It didn’t do much damage except to some of Stan’s trees. While I was working on our house later, a large fire burned from Brea across through the heights. I remember that the gas company was here that day hooking us up to the gas main in the street. I saw an article in the local paper after that asking for volunteers for the local fire department. I asked, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Then I realized I was somebody. I contacted them and joined. Well I spent almost 20 years in the department. An interesting fact surfaced while doing research for this biography. My great Grandfather Scott Winfield Kimes was a member of the Clearwater, Nebraska Volunteer Fire Department in 1911. He was part of the initial forming of the department. Mitzie decided that she wanted to go into business and in 1972 we purchased Village Art Center in Fullerton. It had art supplies and also had some basic equipment for custom picture framing. We started to buy picture frame molding and equipment and before long had quite a bit of work. The framing grew and turned out to be the most profitable part of the business.

   Mitzie wanted to go on a “Painting Vacation,” so in 1974 we went to Rexburg, Idaho so she could study with Don Ricks and Milford Zornes. Then in 1976 we went on another one and stayed at Grand Targhee a ski resort just west of the Tetons in Griggs, Idaho. Then we went to Jackson, Wyoming, in Yellowstone and then over to Dillon, Montana. That is the area where Mitzie’s mother was born. In 1978 we finally sold the store. I had been laid off at ConFab at the end of the year and I had talked to Lynn Yakel and he said that Rockwell was hiring. I went over and was hired by Erwin Johnson in the Materials & Processes group. They were starting a system called MATCO (Material and Analysis Tracking Control). Due to the loss of three astronauts in a pad fire of Apollo 1 they had implemented the MATCO system. We took all shuttle drawings and evaluated them for the metals and non-metals that were used. A lot of the job was boring but at least it was a job. I was able to get some hard ones to work on and that made it more challenging. One was plumbing that had hazardous material became one of the more challenging tasks. A decision was made by Rockwell management to cut back MATCO, so in January of 1978 I and Howard Rowe were given notice that our services were no longer needed. 

   I had gone to lunch with Bob Keane after I was laid off and he knew that I was out of a job. He called one day and asked if I would come over and work at Keane Controls. I went over and they put me to work in the assembly and test area working on solenoid valves. I thought about it for awhile and realized that I had never done the actual work at Skyvalve, but always wore a white shirt and tie. A week later I went to Bob and said “You really have some problems there in the back room.” He said “Come and talk to me about it in a couple of weeks.” They were having gross quality control and production problems. He had taken on a financial expert. Frank and I met with him and Bob said, “What will it take to straighten it out?” I said, “I can do it if you’ll just leave me alone. I may not know the greatest or most efficient ways but I had done it before at Skyvalve and I could do it again. It took several months but I had the whole situation under control. Quality was improved by initiating 100% inspection on all critical dimensions on all detail parts, which was what we had done before at Skyvalve. Production control was also back on track after proper ordering of materials in a timely manner.

   I was recalled to Rockwell in October and of course I had to go back where the retirement benefits were but Bob knew that when I went to work for him. I went back into M&P but what a task was before us. They had let everyone go and no drawings had been reviewed for some time. They hired about 20 people all together and I was to teach the new encoders. We had some direct employees and some job-shoppers. We had a 17,000 drawing backlog. It was an interesting time. I wasn’t too happy with things (boss) there so I transferred to the Main Propulsion System Design Group. I worked for Will Mynar for the first year and I had received a promotion to MTS 1 (MTS is Member of Technical Staff) when I transferred. In about 4 months I received a significant raise and a promotion to MTS 2. I worked on various projects but a major one was testing the Space Shuttle Main Engine mounted heat shields. That testing was conducted out in Building 288 (Laboratories &Test). Chuck Schroeder was my manager during this period. I had conducted some testing on LH2 cryogenic pumping. I wrote my first EAR (Engineering Analysis Report) and submitted it to him. He called me into his office and asked me if I could take constructive criticism. I said I could and then he showed me my report. It had red marks all over it. I think I worked and worked on that and rewrote it about a dozen times before he would send it on. I learned a lot about doing report writing from Chuck. I really appreciated the knowledge I gained from him.

   Later I worked on the separation testing of the 17 inch disconnect. The 17 inch valves are between the external tank and the shuttle. All of the propellant flows through these valves and they are very critical to the safe operation of the space shuttle. I worked with Bob Dow for many years. We were doing the testing of the LOX unit at Downey and Bob and Jay Hance had done the LH2 testing out at Rocketdyne. It took a long time to do the testing and then to complete the required reports. Work in our area was slowing down and I was requested to go interview for a position in Reliability. Frankly, I didn’t even know what Reliability was all about. I went and talked to George Drozd, who had been there a long time and I got an idea of what it was all about. I transferred there in 1985 and worked on MPS problems. I didn’t get away from the 17 inch disconnect after all. Reliability is the organization that does failure analysis and looks into improvement of design to preclude failures if possible. It was interesting. I was reassigned to Certification and had a long term relationship with the NASA Shuttle Logistics Depot located in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

   On January 28, 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. The people at work just could not believe it at first. I can remember we were upstairs in Bldg. 1 next to M&P at the time. The information was slow in coming and when I saw the pictures it was as if the seventeen-inch disconnects had closed under flow. That was a scenario we always feared. It was proven later by data that they were still fully open. They were recovered from the ocean and were still in the opened position. Nevertheless much redesign was done including a latch was added to insure the flappers remaining open. We worked with many of the astronauts during the redesign, manufacturing and testing of the new configuration. The launch of STS30 was scrubbed at 31 seconds prior to liftoff because a circuit breaker leading to the LH2 recirculation pump had opened. The pump used to be my hardware when I was in Reliability, so I was sent to Florida the next morning to help lead the investigation. We did a failure analysis and cleared the vehicle for flight. I suggested as I had put in a lot of long hours that perhaps I could stay and see the launch on Thursday. My bosses agreed so I really got to see the Space Shuttle launch. It makes chills run up and down your spine and gives you goose-bumps. More analysis was being done and Larry Korb from M&P came down to help. I had initially gone there on Sunday and I was planning on going home on Friday. Of course politics gets in the middle of things. I had been told by Downey management to bring the failed electrical connector back with me and the balance of the failure analysis would be accomplished at Downey.

   I packed up all my clothes and checked out of the hotel and went out to the NSLD. I saw Ron Torino (NSLD Director) and remarked to him that I was finally going home. He wandered off and came back in a little bit and said, "I have good news and bad news for you." He said that the good news was that the connector was going to stay in Florida to complete the failure analysis and the "bad news" was that I had to stay with it. Finally on Wednesday I said forget it, I'm outa here and I came home. NSLD (NASA Shuttle Logistics Depot) took up a lot of my time with many trips and when Mitzie and I went to Orlando for the 1993 Gideons International Convention we visited NSLD. That way she could see where I spent quite a bit of time. We also were trying to see the launch of STS-28. We went out to a very good site and watched two Saturday mornings in a row but no luck. It actually launched several months later.  At least Mitzie got to wade in the Atlantic Ocean. We visited the Kennedy Space Center and did the tourist tours. My lead engineer, Mike Ragusa was promoted to Manager in 1990. He went to System Safety. My Certification work and Florida Ops were related to him more than Reliability so I was transferred to System Safety also. He was probably the best manager that I ever worked for. At least I got the best of it. I did get promoted to a MTS 4 which I never expected having not finished college.  Mike got smart a few years ago and retired. I really hated to see him go, because I was losing a friend to talk to but I understand his need also. 

   An event happened one day at our staff meeting. Mike Mezzacappa, our director showed up which was unusual. Mike Ragusa called me up in front of the group and gave me a Reliability Excellence Award. I started to set down and he called me back. I received another NASA award for LH2 leakage investigation. Then they gave me another award and it was a Rockwell traveling alarm clock. I don't remember what that was for but expect they were ready to send me on another trip. They even had the company photographer there and took some pictures. Wow! I never got hardly anything from the company before but three awards in one day! Kip Mikula then became our Manager and he was probably the most organized management person I have ever known. He put out a document specifying each and every person's responsibility. Even went to the depth of each person's back-up. I was really impressed. I surely never saw anything like that done anywhere before.

   George Callaway called me one day and said that Art Arfons was going to run his new jet car at the World Finals at Bonneville. The next morning as I was going to work I really wanted to go but knew that we really didn’t have the money. At work my boss came by and they gave me an instant compensation award and a check for $500. I immediately knew what I wanted to do. I called Joe and we went to Bonneville. We had a good time. Mitzie and I visited the Aerospace Museum at the Kailua Kona airport on Hawaii when we there a few years ago. Hawaii was Ellison Onizuka’s home state and there were excellent displays of the Space Shuttle there. Walking through and observing things which were very familiar to me caused lots of emotion and many tears. We went to Houston in December of 2004 to visit the Johnson Space Center. We met Bill McArthur there so Mitzie got to meet an astronaut. Bill had flown twice before on the Space Shuttle and after we saw him he went to the International Space Station for a 6 month period.

   In October of '93, Don Wurzburg of the simulation labs in Building 4 had contacted me to look at the feasibility of a new project for Rockwell. They wanted to take some aerospace technology and convert it for use in the civilian sector.  Don was one of my fireman when I was Fire Chief on the Fire Department in La Habra Heights.  It actually evolved into a good project but I didn't want to work more than one day a week. It was called Strike Force and had to do with disaster planning in case of major problems. During the disastrous fires of 1993 in Malibu and Laguna there was a problem of determining where all the resources were and their status or availability. This and many other problems were to be addressed by this methodology. I worked on that and it was very interesting but after I retired I worked a few months and decided it was easier to give them the information that they needed over the phone and not go into work. They had gone well beyond my expertise and knowledge. When they got contracts from the Federal Government they asked if I would work full time and I told them I had a full time job working for the Lord and I thought that is more important. A few months ago Dan, Dave, Bob Grafton, Scott Jones and I went to see a demonstration of what Strike Force had accomplished over the past two years. We went at 1 PM supposedly for a 1 and a half hour demo but we left at 5:30 PM. They showed us the computer generated spread of the Calabasas fire from a few weeks before. Within 20 minutes or so they had plotted the progress of the fire for the following three days. Bob and Scott said that it was right on. I am proud to have been part of it from the start.

Gone Racin' is at [email protected]

Kimes 01

Kay in cockpit of the Space Shuttle Atlantis at Palmdale, CA in 1993.

Kimes 03AA

Mobil Run: In 1966 we drove from Los Angeles to Boston in a Ford Custom with Lynn Yakel as my navigator. We averaged 18.18 miles per gallon.

Kimes 02

Belly Tank: The engine expired at Bonneville in 1957 so we had a little memorial service for the car. Left to right : Jack Richardson, Kay Kimes, Bill Fowler, Jerry Eisert and Bob Opperman. � 193 mph before it blew.

Kimes 04AA

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