Moody Mile Memories

By Kevin Eckert

November 4, 2009 Speedway, Indiana: First words from a new house. I have changed addresses all of my life. There were three in New Jersey, four in Allentown, six months in California and two residences in Reading, Pennsylvania. Three army bases and three years of national discovery later, father fielded my mail from Arizona, recycling press releases by typing race results on the back. I did discover that Indiana was the place for me. But after four Hoosier home spaces, I drifted to Oklahoma to build Open Wheel Times, out to Arizona for six months (thanks Ty) before coming back to Indiana where as of November 1, Dean Mills and I reside at 4929 West 14th Street. Yes, we actually moved one block north and four clicks east. Excluding the army, it is my 18th home.

Halloween candy would have been a good way to meet my new neighbors. But that required purchasing chocolate for strangers. I withdrew instead to my grand new Stat Cave, of which I am very proud. Thirteen milk crates now stand precisely stacked full of Open Wheel, Flat Out, Trackside, Sprint Car & Midget, Stock Car Racing, National Speedway Directory, National Sprint Car Annual, Dirt Track Fury, USAC media guides, World of Outlaws yearbooks, Penn National programs, Sports Illustrated swimsuits and any artifact of Oakland Raider respectability. Milk crates have long doubled as my magazine racks and furniture. To read the dairies (Johanna, Freeman, Clover) from which they originated is to map my own origins north on the Delaware and west on Lehigh and Schuylkill Rivers.

Barring a flight to Tucson, frosty ride to Kansas City or some act of god (quite a stretch for an atheist), my 2009 racing season is complete. It will soon be trade show season. And since bigger houses require bigger rent, I must sell, sell, sell, which I hate.

My first Saturday in the new digs clicked Syracuse modifieds on Speed TV. Syracuse still holds a special place in my heart. It was (is) the biggest event on the biggest track for the eastern cult of modified stock car racing. We natives of New Jersey followed those cars. Everyone we knew went to Syracuse at the end of September, beginning with my uncle George, who attended its first Schaefer 100 in 1972 and to this day, demands its latest program book to keep his collection complete.

George was a garage rat; just the type of modified man that college boy Glenn Donnelly hoped to recruit to the New York State Fairgrounds. Glenn’s timing was perfect because George was among the thousands displaced by the 1971 loss of Langhorne, home to the Race of Champions that climaxed each modified season. Almost immediately, they flocked to Syracuse. We followed them up I-81 in 1974.

I was 11 years old, and waking at three AM for a four-hour ride to the biggest race of the year was a Big Deal. Mom packed sandwiches and everything. Sunrise over Scranton held the promise of something special.

Windshield wipers were on as we approached the Salt City. Weather is the constant enemy of any multi-day outdoor event, but never more so than Syracuse around Columbus Day. The Great Lake of Ontario is 30 miles away, bringing anything from snow to rain and every ten years or so, sunshine. To a half-mile hero from Weedsport or East Windsor, it took gumption to wake to sleet, down a cup of coffee and barrel down the mile’s bicycle path of a backstretch to a shaded turn three that may or not have defrosted.

On that first trip, the sky cleared, we found our seats overlooking turn one, and Bob made the acquaintance of someone from Lebanon Valley. Dad did this frequently, usually when he overheard someone asking who drove a particular car. A quarter of the way through the ’74 Schaefer 100, Reading messiah Kenny Brightbill grew tired of tucking low to protect fourth-place and sailed into the lead with one outside sweep of turn one, a move which may still be unduplicated and one which brought dad’s new friend to his feet.

“Did you see that?” The Valley guy asked.

Bob Eckert smiled, puffed on his Telly Savalas cigarette and said, “Buddy, I watch him do that every week.”

Brightbill’s junkyard Chevy seized 12 miles from the finish and it would take 14 years for him to finally win his division’s biggest race. Taking over was the gleaming Gremlin built by Whip Mulligan for Billy Osmun, who led Merv Treichler’s asphalt conversion when rain reached turn three. Under caution, Osmun pointed skyward to the flagman, who dropped the checkered on lap 95 of 100. “Marvelous Merv” rammed “Billy O” with an anger eventually tempered somewhat in 1981-82 when Treichler topped Syracuse with a Maynard Troyer-built Mud Bus.

So rich was the Syracuse purse in 1974 that the biggest sprint car stars of the era, Jan Opperman and Kenny Weld, were among its 53-car field. By our arrival, Weld had already established a one-lap modified mark that would stand for some time. In 1977, he returned with big wings and big Chevy sprint car to reclaim the World Record he set at Dover in ‘73. And as anyone from New York or New Jersey will tell you, 1980 is when Kenny was contracted on a deal with the devil (Gary Balough) to destroy modified racing via Miami vice.

Opperman ran the ’72 Race of Champions at Trenton for Jack Tant and ’74 Schaefer 100 at Syracuse for Joey Lawrence. Like most of Jan’s rides, Joey’s car was not much to see: a flat black Mustang with a splash of gold and white Number 16. But the owner knew how to make horsepower. Opperman timed tenth of 152 qualifiers. A week later, Jan ran the Schmidt’s 200 at Reading for Bob Eppihimer, so pleased to have the legendary preacher grace his seat that he carved Opperman’s trademark cross in the nose. A year later, Jan skipped Syracuse for Gold Cup but was ready to return for a possible 1976 USAC Dirt Championship when he suffered life-altering injuries in the Hoosier Hundred.

During his agonizing road to recovery, Opperman was befriended by modified legend Will Cagle, who provided a car for Jan at the ’77 Syracuse 100, which rained out. Before that difficult verdict, I remember Jan addressing early arrivals in some kind of Sunday service/solicitation for his Montana ranch for troubled kids.

When he was hurt in ’76, Opperman was replaced as Bobby Hillin’s driver by Al Unser, winner of 14 mile grinds in eight seasons yet too slow for the ’76 Salt City 100. That never happened to Unser again because he left Syracuse so humiliated that he rejected any more Dirt Champ car offers.

Kenny Weld’s strategy for his only Schaefer 100 was to pit late and hope a heavy fuel load would increase traction on the ultra-slick surface. But he hit the raised road to the pits too hot, bounced in the air and broke a shock. That was Kenny’s original modified, which he sold to the Statewide Fencing team of Osmun, nitrous oxide system intact. During the ’75 Syracuse 100, “Billy O” made an extra pit stop yet was all over winner Dick Tobias at the end.

Toby’s triumph stirred mixed emotions. I was not a fan. To me, he was the dull guy downstairs perpetually stretching the rules. I had seen him disqualified so therefore, he was a cheater. Only later did I come to appreciate the indelible mark that Richard Lincoln Tobias left on all of eastern auto racing. It was also lost on my young mind that unlike most weekend warriors, Tobias had raced on miles from Langhorne and Nazareth to Springfield and DuQuoin before starring at Syracuse, where he was such a perennial polesitter that the achievement was posthumously named in his honor after Toby turned his last lap at Flemington in ’78.

As a 12-year old, I naturally boarded the bandwagon by declaring Toby’s Syracuse score one for the Reading regulars. Brother and I grabbed the soot-covered fencing and cheered our little lungs out. We helped convince the gate guard that the lady in the pink pantsuit was really Mary Tobias, wife and winning car owner (Toby keen to tax shelters) who must get to victory lane at once. Color photos show a black soot smudge on Mary’s pink sleeve.

Heading home from Syracuse on a Sunday night never left many options for food. When father finally found a greasy spoon somewhere north of Binghampton, we were surprised to see Toby, Davey Brown and crew at the same diner. Though he had just reached the peak of his sport, Dick Tobias considered himself an everyday Dutchman.

Super DIRT Week ’75 grew into a two-day experience so that father could fulfill his goal of seeing supermodifieds at Oswego. We arrived late from rain-delayed time trials for 248 modifieds to a shining Steel Palace on the hill. I can still feel my seat shake when those big blocks opened the throttle off turn four. The wildest weapon was a gun metal gray rear-engine, four-wheel drive device built by Bill Hite and driven by Fred Graves, who cut through the field twice before losing a wheel in a shower of sparks. It was the car’s last race at Oswego because four-wheel drive was banned before their 1976 opener.

We dirt trackers chose Oswego asphalt over the KARS sprint race at Weedsport in an indication of the high regard that dad had for Oswego, home of one division for one solid purse just like Reading. The following afternoon, Donnelly invited a handful of sprint cars to the mile for an exhibition. The following Fourth of July was the first winged sprint race ever at Syracuse. It was won by the Weikert Livestock big block of Paul Pitzer. Before the ’76 Schaefer 100, Bentley Warren hot lapped his ragged super to feed the reality of pitting Oswego cars against Pennsylvania sprint cars for Super DIRT Week ‘78. To help the heavy supers stay competitive, sprint teams were told to leave wings at home, which became a recipe for disaster. The carnage was incredible. Randy Wolfe bounced down the backstretch like an orange basketball.

Sprint cars were given their wings for the ’79 Syracuse Super Nationals. But by that time, father had enough of the Moody Mile. Though he had seen through the charade right away, dad probably continued coming to Syracuse for the sake of his sons. Sure, there were stars from Buffalo and Albany who rarely if ever reached Reading. But the track has never been a place to see a good race, and a factory worker with two boys could not justify the expense.

Looking back, I can see dad’s difficulty. He rented a motel room in ’75 but slept three to a Hornet in ’76, waking to snow flurries. That was the year when Donnelly moved his USAC Champ Car date to Super DIRT Week. Dad knew how much I wanted to see those cars but could not afford three tickets, so he sent us in without him. By the ’77 USAC return, father was part of Keystone Auto News and hoped persuasive editor Barry Shultz might swing a press pass. But ol’ Gert was unmoved, so we began the long walk around turns three and four to watch the Salt City 100 from the bed of a truck outside the backstretch.

Suddenly, there was the horrible sound of metal on concrete and an over-revving engine. We peered through the railing and dust to see Jim Hurtubise scramble from his botched time trial. What may have been the final Dirt Car attempt by the native New Yorker was sadly, the last for James McElreath, who was killed a day later at Winchester while the Schaefer 100 was being rained out.

The charred hands of Jim Hurtubise brought Leon Harrison’s words to mind. Leon won big with little engines but never quite clicked with a modified. He tackled Syracuse a few times with an orange car built by John Burnett and owned by Henry Verity, who counted uncle George Eckert among its volunteer crew. Super DIRT Week ’76 was the first champ car event to ever have modifieds in the same pit. Leon watched various Indy Car heroes hobble by with bent or useless limbs and asked, “Does a driver have to be half crippled to run USAC?”

Leon was no longer racing by the sixth Syracuse modified classic, postponed until April of ’78. We returned for its one-day conclusion to witness more mangled modifieds than I had ever seen. Virtually all B-main transfers were trashed on the absurdly-skinny backstretch. Kevin Collins cleaned the cage above Wayne Reutimann while Glenn Fitzcharles burst into flames.

Dad never did return. He correctly determined that the best aspect of Syracuse were the Syracuse qualifiers that visited selected short tracks on Tuesdays and Wednesdays of summer. These races brought some of the biggest modified stars to Nazareth and Flemington like the All Star League of old.

These were but a handful of memories that washed over me when I saw Syracuse on Speed TV. When the enormous starting field funneled blindly into the first dusty corner, I was glad to be somewhere else.

To make the broadcast interesting, I downed a shot of tequila each time the imbecile Kenny Wallace began a sentence with, “I’m ‘on tell you what” like his southern fried mentor Larry McReynolds. To hear talking heads like Larry, Kenny, Dee Dubya and retarded Terry Bradshaw is to easily understand why kids can’t read.

I’m hoping the snail mail will find me at 4929 West 14th Street, Speedway, IN 46224.

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