A Visit with Kay Kimes
By
A Visit with Kay Kimes
01-15-09
A Story by Kay Kimes
Edited by Richard Parks
(This is an abridged version of Kay Kimes life story.)
I was born Kay Chace Kimes to Leo Gilbert and Carrie Erma (Chace) Kimes in the small town of Clearwater, Nebraska on November 20, 1928. Clearwater was established in 1880 as the railroad continued to move west. My Mother had been a schoolteacher at a one-room schoolhouse out in the country for 2 years. Mom and Dad were married in Fort Dodge, Iowa, then they moved to the Kimes homestead west of Clearwater and Dad worked there (less than one year) feeding cattle and doing farm work. They moved to Clearwater and at the time I was born Dad worked for Contois in the service station and then later drove their bulk oil and gas truck. He had purchased the truck originally but later sold it to Contois Brothers, the Ford Dealer. He bought a Model “A” Ford with the proceeds. Dad also worked for Contois as a mechanic. I remember stories of them going to Detroit to bring back new cars as in those days they drove them out. The Model T’s had a habit of losing connecting rod bearings and they sometimes put the rinds from bacon in until they could repair them. Dad also managed a baseball team and traveled around the area a lot. Clearwater’s main street business district was 1 ½ blocks long and had about 400 population in 1942, and is still 400, on the Elkhorn River in north central Nebraska. Mother said she knew a man named Kay and so I was named after him. I was born in a two story white house and it looks like it may have four rooms upstairs and four rooms downstairs. The house belonged to my Grandpa Chace.
The only real remembrance I have of those early years is of coming home from school one day and yelling to my Mother as she was hanging up clothes that I had been exposed to the measles at school. I was standing out in the street and she screamed at me to wait and not come across the little footbridge into the house. She called my Dad to come and pick me up and I stayed with my Grandpa and Grandma Kimes’ farm until I was over the measles. For you see my youngest sister Nancy was sick at home with whooping cough and pneumonia and they did not want her exposed to any thing else. My Siblings were; Carol Ann was born on March 10, 1931, Nancy Lee was born on March 9, 1934 and Joe Scott was born on May 16, 1938. Daddy worked at the Conoco service station at the intersection of Main Street and the old 275 Highway at the time I was born. He worked there and also drove a fuel truck for Contois Bros. He delivered fuel to farms and some construction sites. I remember the old soft drink machine suspended the bottles by their necks and the guys used to put watermelons and cantaloupes in the cooler also to get them cool.
The only other remembrance I have was my folks telling me that I used to run in the house and tell them when a "TEELY" car went by. Meaning a Model T. I don't remember much else about that house except Daddy burning tumbleweeds in the back yard. I believe that Daddy and some friends used to put firecrackers under cans and blow them up in the air. I do remember that there was a storm cellar out back. In that country there were cyclones and tornadoes and they did a lot of damage. There were some tornadoes when we lived there but I don't believe any of them came close to town. My wife, Mitzie, researched the genealogy records and determined that we came from Johannes Keim. He was born in Landau Speier Germany in 1675. Emigrant’s names often were changed like Kime and then later the “s” was added
My mother’s father, Grandpa Chace was involved in many businesses while living in Clearwater. Some documentation is in the Clearwater Centennial book. When Mitzie and I were in Clearwater in 2001 for the High School Reunion and to visit Aunt Ruth, we visited the local library and read many of the old 1920 – 1921 newspapers. Grandpa Chace evidently owned several farms and acreage and someone said he traded a lot.
In 1920 he went into partnership with a lady in a meat market in Neligh. Later in the paper it stated that he had gotten out of that because it was just too far to go back and forth. Neligh is 8 miles from Clearwater. Of course in 1921 that may have been quite a chore. He also delivered mail on a rural route out of Clearwater. I know he drove his old 1935 Plymouth and I suspect that in earlier days he used a team of horses and a buggy.
We understand that Grandpa Chace had the first automobile in Clearwater. It was a Chevrolet Baby Grand. He taught my mother to drive when she was 12 years old.
We moved across the street from the old home place the last of April (1935) when Nancy was one year old and lived in what was called the Wolfe house. The only thing I remember is my sister Carol Ann following me to school which was just a few blocks away, so Mother tied her up to the clothesline with a long leash/rope. We did have boarders there and I met a lady a few years ago who had lived with us probably while going to school in town. We also had some construction men who I believe were working on the highway.
Clearwater is a small town located near the east edge of the Nebraska sand hills. It is pretty flat in that area with a few small hills. The surrounding area is all farmland. Corn was the main crop in that area. There was a square wooden bandstand in the middle of the main intersection in town. It was built up off the ground so everyone could see and hear the band. Saturday night most farmers came to town and they had a band concert in that bandstand. Many men in town played in the band including Grandpa Chace and our Father. My Dad played the cornet in the town band.
In April of 1938 (just before Joe was born) we moved down to Grandfather Chace's 40-acre farm on the edge of town. The northern boundary was the Elkhorn River. His farm was kitty-corner to the town on the north east corner of the town. The money situation was quite grim for our folks. We ate a lot of navy beans and sometimes if we were lucky there was ham too. We always ate but know it was a stretch for Mother to feed us.
My folks had a 1930 Model A Ford sedan but it was up on blocks. I don't remember it ever running as long as we lived there. No tires. I used to set in it and go through the motions of driving. I probably put on a lot of miles and never went anywhere. But, it was fun. There was a large dent in the back of the car because our Mother had used the car once to stop a team of horses that were running away. That happened in town. When I lived in Nebraska I never went any further from home than to Norfolk to the east or Atkinson to the west which is about 50 miles from Clearwater. I have traveled many, many miles since then.
We all went to the County Fair in Neligh once and they had auto races on the dirt track and they had an auto thrill show. We got some good ideas from that and soon were jumping over ramps with our bicycles and wagons. We even piled up cardboard boxes and crashed through them just like the cars. We did that down the road from the house at the second bridge where there was a hill that we could get going pretty fast on.
Of course that area of the country had the seasons. The most memorable were the winters. My Dad had to drain the engine coolant from Grandpa's Plymouth because in those days we couldn't afford antifreeze. In the morning he would pour hot water in the radiator and having shaken down the coals in the wood-burning kitchen stove, he would place that pan under the oil pan of the car. Sometimes even that failed and we would have to walk to school. We walked over crusted snowdrifts that were 8 to 10 feet deep. It was about 1 mile to the school. Teachers were very good at recognizing frostbite, and thawing out the children.
The town dump was down on the river and I used to scour the area for scrap metal. I would haul it up to the house in a little wagon and when there was enough, Daddy would haul it in a truck to Ashcrafts in town and sell it. I ordered a 22-caliber single shot rifle from Sears, Roebuck and Co. and paid only $9.50 for it. I hauled a lot of scrap metal to pay for that rifle.
Hal Thompson’s Dad, Uncle Tommy, used to sell Maytag washing machines and Maytag had a little go-cart powered by a small gasoline engine and they had it there during the summers. The kids would ride it all over the place.
I graduated from the eighth grade in Clearwater. Mary Purcell my teacher also taught our Mother when she was in the eighth grade. That school went from Kindergarten through High School, all in one building. I remember when it was hot and humid that it was very difficult to study. No air in those days. Now they have a modern building with air-conditioning.
There was little work in Nebraska during the early 1940’s so my Dad went to aircraft manufacturing school in Norfolk. He and his long time friend Charles Nolze came to California in early 1942 and went to work at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California. They were building the B17 bombers at that time. The rest of our family came to California in June 1942 as soon as school was out. Our Mother also went to work at Douglas Aircraft. She worked there for many years on the B-17 aircraft.
I was 14 years old when we moved to California and Joe was only four. We stayed with George and Edna Buss' (my Mother’s cousin) in Lynwood, California for a few weeks and then my folks bought a house at 5958 Amos Avenue in Bellflower. I think they paid $99 down and payments of $42 a month. There were anti-aircraft guns down at the south end of our street. They also had those large searchlights to look for enemy planes. We rode busses to high school. I used to deliver newspapers in our area. I had a double route and we used to take out the back seat of our ’34 Plymouth and filled it to the top with papers.
Recently I found an old scrapbook with airplane pictures and also the 1946 through 1948 Indianapolis races. I must have saved every newspaper clipping I could find. These were the first races following World War II.
Dad worked at Douglas when we came to California and later he worked at Vultee in Downey and then went to North American Aviation in 1947. He worked for them until he retired. Mom had worked at Douglas also and then worked at various places. She worked at a hamburger stand for a time and then went to the Salvation Army store and worked there as manager for several years. When Daddy and I both worked at NAA in Long Beach, we sometimes rode home with different people. One night we were setting at the dinner table and we realized that neither one of us had brought the car home. It was sitting in the parking lot at work. I went to Excelsior Union High School in Norwalk. When I signed up for classes I didn't know the system that well because in Nebraska you really took college preparatory classes in grammar school. I took quite a few shop classes and actually built my first hot rod in auto shop class. I worked on the Public Address System crew and did quite a bit of work in the auditorium with the stage crew. We used to play records for the students during the noon dances held in the Girl's Gym. Harry James, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey etc. were popular during that period. Many of the students went to work in the fields after school. We went in the school busses and we were cutting spinach for harvest.
I joined the Civil Air Patrol and also the California Cadets. We had military type training and some of the time I was drilling the cadets. I went to Long Beach Air Force Base for a week and while there I took my first ever airplane ride. That was in a DC3. I was involved with cars for many years and I even taught basic auto mechanics when I was in the Army. Our family had a 1934 Plymouth four door sedan during this time. My Dad had an accident one night and had run into the back of a gasoline tanker stopped at a railroad crossing. He hit it pretty hard and the engine was pushed back to the front seat. The frame was bent so bad that the frame under the rear motor mounts touched the ground and the front wheels at full droop were off the ground. We bought another identical car and I took the engine and body out/off the first one and made a good car out of all the various parts. That was my introduction to things mechanical. This all happened when I was 15 years old. My folks bought me a Sears’s socket set and I still have a few of those sockets. We used that old car for several years as during the war you couldn't buy anything. I ran kerosene in the Plymouth because of the shortage and rationing of gasoline. I kept weaning it until it would run on 100% kerosene. I wonder if my Dad really knew what I was doing.
My first car was a single seat chassis without an engine that I had purchased. I bought a 1928 Chevrolet coupe and removed the 4 cylinder engine and transmission and then sold what was left for $15, which was what I had paid for the whole car in the first place. Later on I replaced that engine with a Model B Ford flathead. Then the body was changed to a 27 T (picture with Truman) and then even later that was replaced with a 27 T bucket with a 32 Cadillac gas tank, which made what we called a modified. We ran SCTA and ran 95-100+ mph. I have many dash plaques from there. I ran 4 bangers for years and it was hard to go 100MPH. One time at El Mirage one of our club members didn’t show so I ran our 1956 Buick (stock) and went 106 mph. Around 1947-48, I worked with Bill Finley when he ran his Cragar powered track roadster. I was a mechanic for Bill. We ran at tracks in Fresno, Las Vegas, Culver City, Huntington Beach, Gilmore Stadium and Balboa Stadium in San Diego. I obtained an old dirt track sprint car and ran that at the dry lakes and Bonneville for several years. First I ran a Ford 4-cylinder block with various flatheads like Winfield and then went to overhead with a Cragar.
I belonged to a car club named the Wheelers. Warren Marquez, Dave Ratliff, Don Gilchrist, Bob and Jack Butler, Jim Seabridge, Joe Lippi and the Bottema brothers were some names that I remember. We were all from the Bellflower, Norwalk and North Long Beach area. We ran at the El Mirage dry lake with the Southern California Timing Association. (SCTA) I was on the Board of Directors for SCTA and I worked the technical inspection area for the cars. My Dad used to go to the races with us. I think he enjoyed being with us as we were doing something that we wanted to do. I have a program from a SCTA lake meet that he had written down the times in. Richard Course, a classmate from Excelsior used to go with me and helped work on my car a lot. I met Dave Ratliff in 1940’s after WWII. I joined the Wheelers, a SCTA club where he was a member. Dave was a strong force in the Wheelers club for many years. Dave ran a 1932 roadster with a Cord engine with a centrifugal supercharger. Later he ran a Mercury flathead in that roadster. Over the years we helped each other with our cars. Once I ran his roadster at El Mirage while Dave, suffering with poison ivy was in the back seat of our sedan.
In 1949 Dave, Julian Doty and I went to Bonneville for the first Speed Weeks and ran my old dirt car with Don Gilchrist’s flathead Mercury engine. Dave was listed as the driver on the entry blank. We took turns, Dave and I driving the car at the Salt. Some of my pictures of that first meet are in Louise Noeth’s Bonneville book. We had no break in time on the engine so we drove it on the highway from Mojave, California to Tonopah, Nevada. A picture of Dave driving down the highway is in Louise’s Bonneville book. We ran 136.15 mph and placed 2nd in the race car class. If you ever see the movie, ”World’s Fastest Indian,” you will get a sense of us going to the Salt that first time. It was an adventure just to get there. In 1954 we ran Dave’s Mercury flathead engine in my car again at Bonneville. We went 136 + and broke the transmission. I had followed Dave Ratliff’s progress over the years at Bonneville and was very happy when he finally went 200. I watched his speeds when they were posted on the SCTA website. My wife and I were invited to Bonneville in 1998 when they celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first speed week. We spent time with Dave at that meet. My wife had attended meets in the 1950’s and many times in the ‘60’s as I was on the Art Arfons crew when he was running for the Land Speed Records. In 1998 my wife was impressed with the shades and the tarps on the ground in the pits. We also enjoyed the possibility of going to town (Wendover) and having a good lunch at a nice restaurant.
I sincerely believe that Dave was one of our true pioneers in hot rodding. No big money but much innovation. He had his own flow bench in his garage and did a lot with injectors and pistons. He did a lot with very little. I understand when Dave and Mary Ann Ratliff looked at the Norco house that Dave walked out back. He saw a large backyard and a barn large enough to hold several cars and he said, “We’ll buy it.” I know that Dave showed much ingenuity because instead of buying a quick-change rear end with a straddle mount pinion he built blocks of steel to reinforce the housing of his old quick change. The SCTA ran at the Bonneville Salt Flats for the first time in 1949 and we installed a flathead Ford engine that belonged to Don Gilchrist. We broke in the engine by driving the car on the highway from Mojave to Tonopah, Nevada. We ran 136.15 mph on the salt. Dave Ratliff, Julian Doty and I camped out on the salt that first year. A windstorm came up the first night and blew the top right off the Union 76 tent we were sleeping in. Gene Hersom and I built a sports car with one/half of a Dusenberg dual overhead cam 8-cylinder engine. We thought about running in the Mexican road race but that never happened. We tried to run at March Air Force Base and then again at Palm Springs. Not too successful. We ran it at the Salt flats in 1953. I don't know the speed.
Dave Ratliff ran his flathead Ford in the car in 1953 and we went 153 mph. We had a special gear in the transmission to give us an overdrive and that failed and put us on the trailer. The gear had been welded but was not heat-treated to harden it. I wasn’t smart enough to know that it should have been done. I bought the Harvey Haller/Frank Breene belly tank chassis from Frank. I replaced the entire frame and running gear except the quick-change rear end and the tank body. I originally ran the flat head engine from Moose Bice's track car at El Mirage and also ran at several drag strips including Lions in Long Beach. I was usually the only car in class so I got a trophy each time I ran. Once as we were putting the car on the trailer, Mickey Thompson, the track manager, came over and asked that I run off with him. He just wanted to put on a little show for the spectators. I had been running about 110 mph and he had been running about 150 mph. Remember these were the days of flagmen to start the races. We got up on the line already to go and when I thought the flagman was thinking about raising the green flag, I went as hard as I could. Of course Mickey was left setting at the starting line. He then took off and passed me about half-track. When we stopped he jumped out of his car mad as heck and he ran over and said, "What did you do that for?" I said, " Well, I knew that you could beat me so I just left when I thought the starter was thinking about raising the flag." He didn't think it was funny. We also ran a SCTA meet at the Colton drag strip. I ran a track roadster for Moose Bise around ’54 or “55. Willie Drown drove it.
In 1956 we installed Ed Johnson's Buick engine with 6 Strombergs, a Dave Ratliff built distributor and a racing camshaft in my belly tank and ran the 1956 meet at Bonneville. The car went 193 mph. The car had a blue and yellow paint job and was sponsored by the Mobil Station in Lakewood. I had gone 175 mph. Lynn Yakel and I drove up in my Buick. We took two youngsters, Jim Travis and Bob Opperman with us. Lynn and I thought they were too young to even drive the Buick. Now they are both active in racing. Lynn Yakel went 184 mph and the water tank did not relieve pressure so the tank swelled up and the water pump wore a hole in it. Lynn got wet and then he said that I was mad at him for going faster than I did and we had to go back home for work and I never had a chance to go faster than him. We laugh about it now. Bill Fowler drove it the fastest when it went 193 mph. We put Bob Opperman's Buick nail-head in the tank for the 1957 Bonneville meet. It ran 193 before it blew up. We just never made that 200-mph goal. The fastest speed that I drove the car was 175 mph. The car was painted red for this meet. I personally never went over 200 mph, but that is ok. The speed we obtained was good for the time and I am satisfied that we had a good time.
In 1960 Lynn Yakel and I went to the salt to spectate and we found that not having a car in competition was very boring. We met Fred Larsen and Don Cummins from La Mirada, where we lived at the time and talked to them quite a bit. Fred and Don were running a modified roadster. Later they built a real nice streamliner and Lynn designed a body for it. Lynn Yakel and I met Art Arfons at Bonneville in 1961 when he was running his Allison powered streamliner. He was short of crewmembers and they needed help so we helped. Lynn and I were just there to spectate that year. I worked with Art the next year 1962 at Bonneville when he ran the Cyclops car with the J47 jet engine. After each and every run he would comment that we should have checked the oil level in that side tank. He always said that but we never saw him check it. I think he was just pulling our legs. He ran that car at drag strips and when he was in Long Beach, California at the Lions drag strip we had him and his crew come to our home for dinner. There was some controversy when June, Art’s wife heard that they went to Kay and Mitzie’s for dinner.
During the middle 1960’s I worked at Deist and we built the parachutes for his car. George Callaway and I went to Bonneville and serviced the parachutes for Art’s car. I was at every land speed record run except the time he crashed in 1966. I couldn’t get off work at that time. I was sure glad I was not there. Art and I both drove Pontiacs for the 1965 Mobil Economy run from Los Angeles to New York City. Don Francisco was our team manager. Art was doing tractor pulling for awhile and once he was in Los Angeles at the sports arena. I went by to visit him and while I was there the local Fire Marshall came by and wanted to see how he made the flames come out of his jet engines. Art showed him and then the Marshall said don’t do that again as your flames went clear up to the scoreboard in the arena. My brother Joe and I went to Bonneville in October 1990 to the World Finals. Art was there to run his Green Monster #27. He had heart problems previously and would experience blackouts of his eyes upon acceleration. He decided to not run any more. I went to visit Art at his shop in Akron, Ohio in 2005. We had a very good visit. He showed me a lot of his pet projects. He liked to work with and run aircraft engines. He had several. He did so very much with so little.
I helped Lynn Yakel in 1962 when he had purchased a 300SL Gullwing Mercedes. I helped prepare the car and he ran it on the salt. It went about 145 mph. For helping prepare it, he let me drive it every other time. We really couldn't out do each other. But, we sure had a lot of fun. In 1963 I started helping out down at Dan Gurney's shop when he first started out on his own. Bill Fowler was his only paid crewmember and Ken Deringer and I volunteered our time to prepare his Lotus 19B. It was the first one built for a V-8 engine. It had a 289 ci Ford. Bob Opperman helped us out and we took it to the Bahamas in 1963 for the Nassau Speed Week. The following February Bill and I took the car to Daytona for the race there. Dan did not win the race because a gear broke in the car. He had a heated race with AJ Foyt until the car broke. It was really a thrill to hear the big NASCAR machines. They really sounded impressive. My Daddy and I used to go to Riverside and set in the S's and watch those powerful machines go by. My Dad really enjoyed those races. We had gone to the very first Riverside race of sport cars and then the last race in 1988 when the Winston Cup stock cars ran. Dave took me to the last race and Rusty Wallace won it.
In 1964 Art Arfons took his new jet-powered car to the Bonneville Salt Flats to run for the land speed record. I worked for Jim Deist and had made the parachutes for Art’s car. Mitzie, Dan and I went up to help. Art and Craig Breedlove kept breaking the record until Breedlove finally went over 600 mph. Art actually held the World Land Speed Record for three different times. A film crew from Scotland came and interviewed me for 3 hours for a TV documentary in 2004. My efforts with Art Arfons and other land speed efforts was the subject. I gave them some 8mm film which was taken by Mitzie of Art’s car and runs at Bonneville during the 1964 – 65 timeframe. The title is, “In Search of Speed, The Battle of Bonneville.”
I went to work for Jerry Eisert down in Costa Mesa early in 1965. He had a crew and they were building a Indy racecar for Frank Harrison from Chattanooga, Tennessee. We worked/thrashed night and day for several weeks getting ready to go to the Indianapolis Speedway. We didn’t know for a while who was going to go with the car as not everyone that worked there was to get to go. I was chosen and that fulfilled a lifelong dream to go to the Speedway and be in the garage area and the pits. We took the new car and also a Lotus 18 chassis with a Chevy in it. Both cars were powered with turbo-charged Chevrolets. Skip Hudson, a southern California sports car guy was the driver for the new car and Lee Roy Yarbrough, a NASCAR driver drove the other car. Neither car qualified so I sat in the stands and watched the race. I sat right behind Bill Finley’s pit. I had worked on Bill’s hot-rod track roadster back in the 1947-48 timeframe. We went to Milwaukee the next week and raced both cars. Al Unser and Johnny Rutherford were the drivers. My car the older one with Johnny driving had an oil leak and caught fire during the race. Not much damage occurred. I had been gone from home a month so I left and towed the Lotus car home. Danny had his first birthday while I was gone and I was very home sick. No one should miss his son’s 1st birthday. I did bring home a souvenir from Indianapolis. One of the original bricks that made up the track. Among my souvenirs also is a set of Drake-Offenhauser brand new pistons.
There was quite a battle for the land speed record that year between the Arfons brothers and Craig Breedlove. I worked for Jim Deist on parachute jobs including the chutes for Art and Walt Arfons. Art’s chute system was activated by a steel slug blown out with an explosive charge and that pulled out a drogue chute which pulled out the parachute bag. The chute was reefed to start and a reefing line cutter then cut that and then the chute blossomed out to its full size. This system worked several times at speeds in excess of 500 mph. George Callaway and I went to the Salt once to supply parachutes for Walt’s car with Paula Murphy driving to try and set a women’s speed record. It kept raining and we were there for a week. They finally ran and she ran into the water and got the chutes wet. We changed them out for the return run. I think she went 240+ mph average. Jim and Marion flew home with Don Francisco and when I took them out to the Salt to leave there was absolutely nothing out there but me. As they left I stood there and watched them fly off toward Ely and it was an eerie and lonely feeling.
I was frustrated because they could be home in a few hours and we were looking at a twelve-hour drive. We left Wendover and soon ran into snow and when we went through Ely we didn’t know it but they were grounded because of weather. We beat them home by a couple of days. We hit a deer and when we had gotten stopped and got out we were on a road with black ice. The road dropped off about 15 feet on each side and when we realized what could have happened if I had swerved, I got the shakes. The angels were looking after us that time. I went to Detroit once to visit Lynn and Roberta Yakel and while there I drove four different alternative fuel vehicles. I just drove them around a block or two. Several years later Art Arfons came up to the October World Finals speed trials with a new smaller jet powered car to break the record once again. Joe and I were there doing patrol duty then. Art had trouble with his eyes. Under acceleration they would begin to get red and then he would black out. Part of the trouble may have been the solid aluminum wheels causing excessive vibration on the rough salt. His son was there but Art said he would never put anyone else in the car. He did make some runs over 300 mph.
During the 1998 Speed Week they had a reunion for all who had made the trek to the salt in 1949. Alex Xydias put together a deal and they had a couple of receptions and a banquet for the “49ers.” Mitzie and I went and had a real good time and I met Louise Noeth (an author) at the meet and she was looking for pictures of the ’49 meet. I gave her several and she included a couple in her new Bonneville books. Recently I was looking through some old papers that Mother had saved and I believe that she had cut out and saved every newspaper clipping that had my name on things I had worked on. Articles about the Mobil Economy Run, Baja, Art Arfons and various race teams etc. As you can tell cars have been a big part of my life for many years. I know that when we were racing at the lakes that all of my money went in to the car. In 2004 there was an exhibit of landspeed cars at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles. I had given several photos to Louise Noeth and when we went to the exhibit the first time I walked in and behind Tom Beatty’s tank and Ab Jenkins’ Mormon Meteor was a picture about 10 feet square. It was of the sign at the entrance of the Bonneville Salt Flats and my car was parked in front of the sign. I was really surprised as I didn’t remember ever seeing that picture before. When I left that night I told a man at the door that it felt funny to go to a museum and see my picture on the wall.
Before the exhibit closed I took Dan and Dave up to see it. I showed them a picture of us with the tank and Dan asked, “How old was I at that time?” I said about 28 and he said I sure looked young. Yep!! Roberta Yakel passed away from leukemia in 2005 and they had a memorial service for her at the Dearborn Inn in Detroit on June 25. I went to it and spent several days visiting/bench racing with Lynn. I also went over and spent some time with Art Arfons. Neither of them are in good health and I wanted to spend some time with them. The trip was very worth while. Art Arfons and I both drove Pontiacs for the 1965 Mobil Economy run from Los Angeles to New York City. Don Francisco was our team manager. Art was doing tractor pulling for awhile and once he was in Los Angeles at the sports arena. I went by to visit him and while I was there the local Fire Marshall came by and wanted to see how he made the flames come out of his jet engines. Art showed him and then the Marshall said don’t do that again as your flames went clear up to the scoreboard in the arena.
My brother Joe and I went to Bonneville in October 1990 to the World Finals. Art was there to run his Green Monster #27. He had heart problems previously and would experience blackouts of his eyes upon acceleration. He decided to not run any more. I went to visit Art at his shop in Akron, Ohio in 2005. We had a very good visit. He showed me a lot of his pet projects. He liked to work with and run aircraft engines. He had several. He did so very much with so little.
In 1968 when I was working at Eisert Racing Enterprises, we decided to enter one of our dune buggies in the Baja 1000. The road to La Paz, which becomes no more than a rugged trail 160 miles south of Ensenada, is little improved over the route traveled by the padres on burro two and three centuries ago. And, in some places, most in fact it's even worse. The car was prepared the best we knew how and we even had to buy a new Corvair to get an engine. Ted Sutton, one of the mechanics in the shop had a 140A Cessna airplane and they decided that he and I would go and be support for our car. We obtained the auto editor of the Los Angeles Times Bob Thomas as the driver and Mike Jones who was the general manager of the Orange County Raceway to be the co-driver. We had a pickup truck with two men to trailer the car to Ensenada and follow the course to support the racecar. Initially we thought we would be gone about two days and then we would be back at the shop in Costa Mesa. Ha Ha!! Ted had an all metal Cessna 140. It had a full panel of instruments and very good radios. Ted and I flew in his little plane down to Tijuana and went through the customs procedure. Not too complicated. I believe we paid a landing fee of $.60. We flew on down to Ensenada and landed at the airport. If you don't speak Spanish they don't acknowledge you on the air, they just ignore you.
We went back to town and got a motel for the evening and the next morning got up early and started to the airport to get the plane ready to go. Our cab had a flat tire and the driver insisted that he replace it. So, we watched him and the cars as they sped down the highway. We finally got to the airport and it was a bit of mayhem. As we were taxing out to the runway to depart, someone came down the taxiway towards us and took off right over our heads. We finally took off and started south along the right hand side of the course as we were supposed to do and the cowling on the plane came loose and started flapping up and down. This was just the right one-half of the cowl but it made a lot of terrible noise and rivets and screws were popping out and hitting the windshield. Ted slipped the plane sideways. As long as he could keep it side slipping the cowl would stay down. Not too bad a deal. On final approach when he straightened out then it began to bang again but he was able to get down on the ground quite quickly and safely.
We turned off the runway to the right where there were some Mexican Air Force personnel and some T-28 airplanes. Several soldiers came out and talked to us but we couldn't speak their language. Motions were made and it appeared they would help us. First they pushed the Cessna over and into their hangar. They did all of the effort and wouldn't let us help. Finally an officer came out who spoke English. He said that they would get some sheet metal screws and fasten the cowling down. He asked if we wanted a coke, so we accepted. He wandered off as well as all the other soldiers. All of sudden Ted and I noticed that soldiers with rifles were patrolling across the open door of the hangar. Whoops? What's going on here we asked? They were gone for what seemed like an hour. Then the soldiers came back with a small ladder, a very large drill motor, 350-rpm job, and some tools and fasteners. The way this works, is one man places the ladder, another man mounts the ladder and drills the holes, and the next man goes up the ladder and installs the screws. And this is the way the job was done. Well, it worked anyway. We thanked all of them and left.
By the time we got down to the next checkpoint and landed our car had already passed and started toward the interior. I believe that running on that course was the equivalent of lifting your car 20-30 feet into the air and dropping it at least several times per mile. Wow was it rough. In fact of the 233 vehicles who started this event only 25 will end up in La Paz. I was glad that we were in the airplane and not on the ground. We had an aircraft receiver/transmitter in the truck but never were able to communicate with the ground crew. We flew on to Santa Ines, which is sort of an oasis in that desert. We had looked for our car on the way but missed it. The car was bright yellow but still difficult to identify from the air. We waited for several hours and finally decided to go back up and search once again. The windshield of the plane had gotten a pretty good coat of dust from setting by the strip because many planes and helicopters were flying around. We went back along the trail and spotted our guys stopped. They made some hand signals that something was awry with the suspension. I made a note on a small clipboard and dropped it to them. I almost hit them, though. When we returned to the Santa Inez airstrip we were going to land right into the setting sun. We couldn't see a thing through the windshield except the sun shining off the tops of the aircraft that were setting along the runway. Ted had to look out the side. He was confused and started to land with the aircraft on his left and they should have been on the right. As we passed the water tank I realized we were going in wrong and started to yell at him we kind of argued for a bit and then he swung over and we went right down the runway. If we had continued on the way he started we would have set down right on the checkpoint where there were probably 40-50 people. But, we didn't. The angels were looking after us that time, again.
The race drivers drove on into Santa Ines and Ted and the ground crew worked and welded half of the night. When it was repaired I had them sleep in the $.50 bunks we had rented in the bunkhouse and Ted and I slept on their cots out in the open. The next morning Bob and Mike got back on the course and took off for point’s south. A landing strip at Punta Prieta was a one-of-a-kind. The runway was all soft sand and had a kink in the middle. It also had a fair sized hill at one end and some giant saguaro cactus at the other. We landed there several times. That was a genuine thrill. We flew south the next morning and landed at a small airstrip at Rosarito. The car had badly broken the suspension up in a canyon a few miles south of there. Our driver, Bob Thomas had left in someone else's plane for El Arco, but Mike Jones was still there. I had Ted take Mike and ferry him over to El Arco where he could get a ride home. I had been doing the navigating for Ted so when they took off, Ted said "Which way do we go?" Mike said "I don't know how to navigate". So Ted said "You fly the airplane and I'll read the maps. The problem was that Mike did not know how to fly. Well, they made it anyway. I got a ride up to where the car was and did some quick fixes and drove it back down to the village. I parked next to a man's house and surveyed the damage. We needed to remove a broken off bolt so I could replace it with a spare. The bolt was pressed into a steel tube. We couldn't get it apart so the man and some kids and I went across the street where there was a forge. He had the kids get sticks and we cranked up the forge and got that piece red-hot but never budged it. When I got back home we found that it had been assembled with a 40-ton hydraulic press.
Late in the afternoon the man of the house in Rosarito came and said "Coffee". You see none of the people there can speak English, and I sure couldn't speak Spanish. We went in the house and his wife brought some coffee. Then she brought some soup with seafood in it and the dinner. When he and I got through eating and had some more coffee and he had a cigarette then the wife and children ate. The whole family never ate together. He and I always ate first and then the wife and kids ate. I went out in a little bit and started to roll out my sleeping bag on the ground alongside of the car. He came over and picked it up and put it up on the porch. They had an open porch and two of the small children slept there. He just put two of the kids in bed together and I slept in the other bed. When Ted took Mike to El Arco, he got turned around and was lost. He flew to another little village named Villa Jesus Maria and spent the night. The next morning we were up and about and Ted flew over and circled and headed back north towards Santa Inez. He was looking for our guys in the truck who would be coming down to take the car back. He didn't find them and came back later in the day.
We actually stayed there or at least I did for a couple of days. The people we stayed with had several children. They wore t-shirts and jeans and had good tennis shoes. The children all attended school in the village. The children there really had a desire to learn to speak English. We spent several hours on the front porch as they pored over a English-Spanish dictionary that had well-rounded corners from much use. Ted offered to take one of the kids for an airplane ride. They did a lot of giggling and fooling around but finally one said he would go. He got in and Ted said as the engine started he got a little pale-faced. When they took off he got real pale-faced and just wanted to go back. I'll bet he remembers that ride even now. Their house was made of brick with a cement floor. Some of the windows were out and some of the screens were holy or not there at all. When you ate you sometimes had to blow the flies off before you put the food in your mouth. One day I asked what the meat we were eating was and he said something that sounded like "burro". I didn't ask anymore. I know that beef in Spanish is baca. They did have a lot of meat hanging out in the yard drying. I suspect that it was beef. The man there was a cowboy and I believe they had cattle in the hills south of the town.
One interesting thing there was their market. The door was open during the day but no one tended the store. The villagers went in and got what they needed and wrote it down in a little book. I would say that the people there were very honest. In fact we left one day and I had left my personal camera and one from the shop laying on my bed. This was on the open porch and right out in the open. When I came back they were hanging in a net over the bed because I had not made the bed when I left and the lady of the house did it for me. We decided to go look again for our other crew members and flew back to Santa Ines. Ted remarked that he had always wanted to be a bush pilot and now he was one. I remember that we were cruising along when all of sudden we hit an updraft. Ted idled back the engine but we were climbing at a pretty fast rate. He had me note the drop in temperature as we rose, it was drastic. We were passing a peak off to the east of us and were going up just like the slope of the peak. We rose a couple of thousand feet I believe. What bothered me was what was going to happen when we got to the other side of that peak where it went down. Oddly it didn't do anything we just maintained that altitude. What a thrill.
We went back to Santa Ines and rented a bed in the bunkhouse for the night. ($.50) That included a shower. I hadn't had a shower or a bath for several days and we were pretty grimy (make that very, very grimy). In the apple orchard stood some pieces of corrugated iron around the shower. A faucet was nearby and a smudge pot with a salamander made of copper tubing in the smokestack. There was a valve on the showerhead and if you opened it up the water came out faster but was cooler. If you closed it down so it was slower then it was hotter. Pretty ingenious. That probably was the best shower I ever had. I even had a brand new Iskenderian Baja 1000 T-shirt to put on. The next morning we flew back to Rosarito and found that our guys had come late in the day and then taken off in the evening with the car. We had missed them on the way down because they got off track and had gone west to the ocean just before they got to El Rosario.
We found out later that they had gone east and returned through San Felipe and then gone north and taken a road over to Ensenada. In looking for them in one day we made eleven hops although some were short, it is tiring and stressful for the pilot especially. You could read that also dangerous. While flying over one airstrip we saw a yellow Pontiac that had been providing radio communications back to the states. We landed there after receiving a caution from the flying Doctor that was on the ground giving out Polio vaccine to the children. He cautioned us to watch for a ditch at each end of the runway and for cows that regularly walked out in front of you while landing or taking off. I talked to Jerry at the shop then and requested that they just send our checks to Baja as we were having so much fun. We needed oil for the plane and the Doctor told us to go to his place and he would furnish some. He was connected with a tomato-packing house that had headquarters in Buena Park. He was not home when we got there so they gave us some cokes and then suggested that we go over to the packing plant for the oil. It was a quarter of a mile away and the runways were in perfect line. We went there and got oil and they also gassed us up. No charge of course. We ended up in San Quintin and spent our first night of the week in a motel.
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 café 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 ½ 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]
Kay in cockpit of the Space Shuttle Atlantis at Palmdale, CA in 1993. |
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. Â 193 mph before it blew. |
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. |