av8
05-07-2004, 07:41 AM
Kent Fuller forwarded a picture and short description of the recent Inyokern nostalgia meet posted by Lee Schelin of the Standard 1320 group. The car in Lee's photo is John Bradley's flathead fueler.
It prompted me to recall my own first experience at Inyokern, in 1954, which I reported in American Rodder's all-Deuce edition in 1996. Here's the exchange between Schelin, Fuller, and me . . .
_____________________________________
http://pic5.picturetrail.com/VOL64/2013751/4260039/53059655.jpg
There he goes with both Ron and I recording history...Someone asked John how many runs he has made down the 1320. His answer was, "I never counted them." When I pressed him for an answer, he guessed between 600 to 800.
This pcx should you an idea about the track. On the left the fans lined up their cars to the fence and sat on the fenders just like the 50's
Lee...
___________________________________
Inyokern has changed very little since its first NHRA event in October 1954. I was there as a member of the "Scavengers Speed Team," which consisted of two pals, Dick Funk, 17, Harry Batchelder, 16, and me, 17. We flat-towed Harry's Deuce from Bishop and "camped out" in a small cafe owned by the mother of one of the Dust Devils. Here's an account of the event I wrote for American Rodder magazine when we did an all-Deuce issue in 1996.
_________________________________________
SECOND THOUGHTS
THE DEATH OF A DEUCE
When you have only one good Deuce story it's a shame that it doesn't have a happier ending.
by Mike Bishop
NEWS ITEM
The Inyo Register
Bishop, California
October 15, 1954
"In a freak accident Sunday, two Bishop youths were shaken up when the car in which they were riding and another they were towing overturned near Olancha on Highway 395-6 at the intersection of the Death Valley cutoff. Driving the lead car, a 1948 Mercury coupe, at the time of the accident was Richard Lee Funk and he and Mike Bishop were both slightly injured but not hospitalized. The cars ran off the highway into a pasture and overturned. The car they were towing was a 1932 Ford Coupe and the youths were en route to Bishop when the accident happened."
The yellowed newspaper clipping was in a shoebox full of old snapshots and mementos my mother gave me last year, a couple of months before her death. I hadn't seen the article since it was published and had forgotten that the misadventure had been documented in a couple of column-inches in our local weekly. It was pretty heady stuff, being the subject of a news item in my hometown newspaper at age 17. It would have been even better if the story had been complete, if the reader had been told of the important historic drama that unfolded that weekend.
The Big Story began on Friday when I ditched school with two buddies--Dick Funk and Harry Batchelder--to go racing. Not just any old race--it was the inaugural NHRA-sanctioned event for a new drag strip near Inyokern, California, staged by the local Dust Devils club. Now, right from the start, you can see how far away from the story the Register was.
We made plans to go to Inyokern when we first heard about the event, and had parental permission for that extra day off, so we weren't really truant. The focus of our effort was Harry's '32 three-window coupe--an unmarked, uncut red-oxide-suede sweetheart motivated by a modestly displaced, full-house flatmotor that Harry skillfully switched back and forth from gas to alcohol with little more than a change of carburetors. The coupe was a runner, and no one who knew its reputation would mess with it.
We called ourselves "Scavengers Speed Team" because it gave us a dramatic, legitimate persona, and there were too few of us to call ourselves a club. We picked the moniker because exhaust scavenging was a hot, high-tech buzz-word term at the time, and it sounded bold and confident.
The SST left Bishop around midday on Friday and rolled into Inyokern at about five. We were billeted in a cafe belonging to the mother of one of the local hot rodders. It was one of those crisp breakfast-and-lunch places that close in the afternoon, still common in small-town America--a half-dozen booths and a row of stools at a short counter. After hours we were free to bunk there, as long as we didn't "act up", which, being good '50s kids, we didn't. At worst we were noisy, keeping the Seeburg jukebox going non-stop with our own nickels and getting silly on beer--maybe two or three cans apiece.
When we tech'd on Saturday we were nailed for not having a hood or some other device covering the carburetors. What did they think we were going to set on fire? A couple of other Scavengers who had driven down from Bishop that morning were sent off to get some hood makin's, returning soon with a pristine four-by-five-foot panel of 18-gauge steel, pre-painted with the name of an unwitting sponsor--Coca Cola. Dick borrowed some tin snips and we soon had the hood problem solved.
The racing was great that weekend with cars coming from all over southern California--serious cars, race cars, cars we'd seen in Hot Rod Magazine. We hammered the competition in our class and set a national record that held for at least a month or two. The weekend couldn't have been better.
We were pretty pleased with ourselves, cruising home in the dark, flat-towing the victorious Deuce behind Dick's yellow-primered Merc coupe, listening to Sunday evening comedy shows on radio from one of the network fifty-thousand watters that skipped loud and clear into our big valley at night.
Suddenly, everything went totally wrong. An oncoming car made a left turn directly into our path. Harry, who was driving, cranked the wheel hard right, aiming for a side road next to a small cafe out in the middle of nowhere. The Deuce hanging on the Merc's rear bumper acted like a huge counterweight, as both cars spun, sliding into a berm which vaulted us over a four-strand barb-wire fence, upside down, disturbing only the top strand. We landed on our top, still spinning and rolling, both cars winding up on their wheels. At some point near the end of this excursion the Deuce broke loose, rolling backward through a stand of cottonwood trees.
We were cut and bruised but okay. Dick got the worst of it--a scalp laceration from the trophy Harry had won. Ironic. Dick's dad and mine came to retrieve us with a wrecker from the Ford dealership where Dick's dad worked. They towed the Merc home that night and we picked up the Deuce a couple of days later. Both cars were totaled. The Merc was later "top-half'd," and Harry just parked the battered Deuce. I don't know what eventually happened to it because my family moved to Los Angeles about a month later, but the destruction of a '32 three-window even then was a sad occasion. When it happened to one as neat as Harry's had been, well, it just broke your heart. But there wasn't any sense of the joy and sorrow of that weekend in the little news snippet in the Register. I guess you had to be there.
The Deuce at Inyokern . . .
http://pic5.picturetrail.com/VOL64/2013751/4260039/53059649.jpg
The remains of the Merc . . .
http://pic5.picturetrail.com/VOL64/2013751/4260039/53059652.jpg
Damn! The '50s were fun!
It prompted me to recall my own first experience at Inyokern, in 1954, which I reported in American Rodder's all-Deuce edition in 1996. Here's the exchange between Schelin, Fuller, and me . . .
_____________________________________
http://pic5.picturetrail.com/VOL64/2013751/4260039/53059655.jpg
There he goes with both Ron and I recording history...Someone asked John how many runs he has made down the 1320. His answer was, "I never counted them." When I pressed him for an answer, he guessed between 600 to 800.
This pcx should you an idea about the track. On the left the fans lined up their cars to the fence and sat on the fenders just like the 50's
Lee...
___________________________________
Inyokern has changed very little since its first NHRA event in October 1954. I was there as a member of the "Scavengers Speed Team," which consisted of two pals, Dick Funk, 17, Harry Batchelder, 16, and me, 17. We flat-towed Harry's Deuce from Bishop and "camped out" in a small cafe owned by the mother of one of the Dust Devils. Here's an account of the event I wrote for American Rodder magazine when we did an all-Deuce issue in 1996.
_________________________________________
SECOND THOUGHTS
THE DEATH OF A DEUCE
When you have only one good Deuce story it's a shame that it doesn't have a happier ending.
by Mike Bishop
NEWS ITEM
The Inyo Register
Bishop, California
October 15, 1954
"In a freak accident Sunday, two Bishop youths were shaken up when the car in which they were riding and another they were towing overturned near Olancha on Highway 395-6 at the intersection of the Death Valley cutoff. Driving the lead car, a 1948 Mercury coupe, at the time of the accident was Richard Lee Funk and he and Mike Bishop were both slightly injured but not hospitalized. The cars ran off the highway into a pasture and overturned. The car they were towing was a 1932 Ford Coupe and the youths were en route to Bishop when the accident happened."
The yellowed newspaper clipping was in a shoebox full of old snapshots and mementos my mother gave me last year, a couple of months before her death. I hadn't seen the article since it was published and had forgotten that the misadventure had been documented in a couple of column-inches in our local weekly. It was pretty heady stuff, being the subject of a news item in my hometown newspaper at age 17. It would have been even better if the story had been complete, if the reader had been told of the important historic drama that unfolded that weekend.
The Big Story began on Friday when I ditched school with two buddies--Dick Funk and Harry Batchelder--to go racing. Not just any old race--it was the inaugural NHRA-sanctioned event for a new drag strip near Inyokern, California, staged by the local Dust Devils club. Now, right from the start, you can see how far away from the story the Register was.
We made plans to go to Inyokern when we first heard about the event, and had parental permission for that extra day off, so we weren't really truant. The focus of our effort was Harry's '32 three-window coupe--an unmarked, uncut red-oxide-suede sweetheart motivated by a modestly displaced, full-house flatmotor that Harry skillfully switched back and forth from gas to alcohol with little more than a change of carburetors. The coupe was a runner, and no one who knew its reputation would mess with it.
We called ourselves "Scavengers Speed Team" because it gave us a dramatic, legitimate persona, and there were too few of us to call ourselves a club. We picked the moniker because exhaust scavenging was a hot, high-tech buzz-word term at the time, and it sounded bold and confident.
The SST left Bishop around midday on Friday and rolled into Inyokern at about five. We were billeted in a cafe belonging to the mother of one of the local hot rodders. It was one of those crisp breakfast-and-lunch places that close in the afternoon, still common in small-town America--a half-dozen booths and a row of stools at a short counter. After hours we were free to bunk there, as long as we didn't "act up", which, being good '50s kids, we didn't. At worst we were noisy, keeping the Seeburg jukebox going non-stop with our own nickels and getting silly on beer--maybe two or three cans apiece.
When we tech'd on Saturday we were nailed for not having a hood or some other device covering the carburetors. What did they think we were going to set on fire? A couple of other Scavengers who had driven down from Bishop that morning were sent off to get some hood makin's, returning soon with a pristine four-by-five-foot panel of 18-gauge steel, pre-painted with the name of an unwitting sponsor--Coca Cola. Dick borrowed some tin snips and we soon had the hood problem solved.
The racing was great that weekend with cars coming from all over southern California--serious cars, race cars, cars we'd seen in Hot Rod Magazine. We hammered the competition in our class and set a national record that held for at least a month or two. The weekend couldn't have been better.
We were pretty pleased with ourselves, cruising home in the dark, flat-towing the victorious Deuce behind Dick's yellow-primered Merc coupe, listening to Sunday evening comedy shows on radio from one of the network fifty-thousand watters that skipped loud and clear into our big valley at night.
Suddenly, everything went totally wrong. An oncoming car made a left turn directly into our path. Harry, who was driving, cranked the wheel hard right, aiming for a side road next to a small cafe out in the middle of nowhere. The Deuce hanging on the Merc's rear bumper acted like a huge counterweight, as both cars spun, sliding into a berm which vaulted us over a four-strand barb-wire fence, upside down, disturbing only the top strand. We landed on our top, still spinning and rolling, both cars winding up on their wheels. At some point near the end of this excursion the Deuce broke loose, rolling backward through a stand of cottonwood trees.
We were cut and bruised but okay. Dick got the worst of it--a scalp laceration from the trophy Harry had won. Ironic. Dick's dad and mine came to retrieve us with a wrecker from the Ford dealership where Dick's dad worked. They towed the Merc home that night and we picked up the Deuce a couple of days later. Both cars were totaled. The Merc was later "top-half'd," and Harry just parked the battered Deuce. I don't know what eventually happened to it because my family moved to Los Angeles about a month later, but the destruction of a '32 three-window even then was a sad occasion. When it happened to one as neat as Harry's had been, well, it just broke your heart. But there wasn't any sense of the joy and sorrow of that weekend in the little news snippet in the Register. I guess you had to be there.
The Deuce at Inyokern . . .
http://pic5.picturetrail.com/VOL64/2013751/4260039/53059649.jpg
The remains of the Merc . . .
http://pic5.picturetrail.com/VOL64/2013751/4260039/53059652.jpg
Damn! The '50s were fun!