Wayne Baldwin's Amazing Story: Baldy's Eual Eldred Baldwin

**Master Oil Racing Team** · 12-04-2022

Time to resume the story

**Ketzer** · 12-04-2022

'bout time.

**Master Oil Racing Team** · 12-04-2022

Yeah.... I know.

Back up a little bit. We spent the first night in Sanderson Texas at Sanderson Motel. It was kind of an adobe style motel with colored cement floors and the electrical wiring was fastened to the wall up near the ceiling. I don't know how old the motel was at that time but thirty seven years later Debbie, the kids and I stayed at the same motel on our way to spend a week with some former neighbors that moved to San Francisco. The motel was clean both times and we were only there for a few hours to sleep, then back on the road. The motel was just on the north side of IH10 and the Union Pacific line was just on the south side of IH 10. Several trains passed through thie whistle stop town during the night.

Back on the road we saw lots of desert. Sanderson was about halfway between San Marcos and El Paso, and we spent the first part of the day getting out of Texas. Not mcu traffic or homes, or building for miles and miles. We stopped at a as station way out by itself on the side of a road. I asked a kid who was working there what they did for fun. He said they would hang old tires on the arms of tall seguaro cactuses. This is a photo of Gerel and Baldy waiting in from of the station wagon in the heat of the day waiting for the motor to cool down enough to add water.

ADD: That is on the side of IH 10 in 1969 with the Union Pacific railroad on the other side. Pretty desolate back then.

**DeanFHobart** · 12-04-2022

Wayne,

Lots of old memories…. Really cool. We need to talk soon.

Sincerely, Dean Hobart…..

**Master Oil Racing Team** · 12-04-2022

Okay. Think I have your number somewhere

**Master Oil Racing Team** · 12-04-2022

There wasn't much to see after we went through El Paso and besides stopping for gasoline every now and then and to top off our radiator we didn't see any towns until we hit Phoenix. It was fairly big then but not like now. It did have a large and active airport though.

We got through Pheonix and on our way west. I already mentioned about the incident with Baldy and the Coors beer. But as we got closer to our destination I noticec a lot of low hills to our left that were mostly black and desolate. Not much if any vegetation. It didn't look like volcanic activity. It looked like slag or tailings from a mine, but how could that be because they were higher than everything else around. Never figured that out.

We drove on into Needles that night and got a room at a motel. We would go back east into Topock Arizona in the morning to find a place in the pits.

**Master Oil Racing Team** · 12-05-2022

The next morning we drove back east into Arizonato the race course near the town of Topock. As we pulled off the hgihway onto a road overlooking the race course we found the pits pretty well filled up. We were elevated and could seethat there were not really any openings with boats stretching for a couple hundred yards like a nationals. Well this was advertised as the Winternationals and it was to be our very first APBA event to compete in.. We didn't know what to do and were stting in that Chrysler upon a hill overlooking the scene and try to come up with a plan.

Baldy watched very carefull as he noticed a farm tractor towing a boat trailer into the water to a mall island located abouttwo hundred feet offshore from the eastern side of the pits. The water not not very deep and appeared to have a good bottom. Once the tractor spotted the boat trailer, it unhooked and came back across to the shore to haul another boat racing trailer across. Baldy then decided on a course of action.

He drove down the hill to the pit area where the tractor was crossing then just took that station wagon and trailer across to the little island and found us a good pit area. Some more came across and there ended up being six to eight teams pitting on the island. We were pitted toward the western side with Sid and Bob Viera on our left and Jay Root on our right. We had never met any of them, but we all got along great and became friends. about four teams to our right was one of three boat racers we had known from NOA races. They were Milly and Kay Harrison. The other was Bob Hering who we ran into later. He was pitted somewhere on the mainland. The only others that I knew who they were but didn't really know them were Ron Hill, Ted May (who came to race at our house in Texas a few months earlier), Doc Collins andRich Fuschlin, . We also knew Ken and Gloria Steelman who came to Texas, and though not racers, but a big part of the boat racing community.

**Ketzer** · 12-07-2022

Enjoying the story, Wayne. I had to Google "Earth" to see Topock...well, as Topock is today or recently. It would be cool if Google or Bing or someone could come up with a map search where you could ask for, say, "Hot Springs, AR in 1930," and you could check it out and walk the streets of those days.