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

  1. #281
    Team Member Gene East's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Master Oil Racing Team View Post
    1967 was turning into a volatile year. Race riots continued, more and more people were showing up at Vietnam War protest events, and Israel had the 6 Day War. In January of 1967 world famous car and boat speed record holder. Donald Campbell died in an attempt to bring the water speed record back to Great Brittain. He had spent some time at Conniston attempting to set the record, and had setbacks with weather and mechanical problems.

    On January 4, Campbell made a two way pass with an average of 297.6 mph, with one run at 315. There goal was to reach or surpass the 300 mph mark in his jet powered boat Bluebird K7. The plans were for him to return to shore, refuel and wait for the water surface to calm before the next run. Instead Campbell stayed on the water and came around for another set of runs.

    On his return he managed to get up to 320 mph before crashing. The last words from his onboard transmitter were "Pitching a bit down here....Probably from my own wash...Straightening up now on track....Rather close to Peel Island...Tramping like mad....er..Full power...Tramping like hell here....I can't see much....and the water's very bad indeed.....I can't get over the top....I'm getting a lot of bloody row in here...I can't see anything...I've got the bows up....I've gone.....Oh!"

    A sad day and loss for all the boat racing world. He was the only person to have set both land and water speed records in the same year.
    How many of you watched on TV that day and like I screamed from your recliner "Get down, Get down" as the bow lifted knowing full well it was too late.

    Like Charley, I'm looking forward to the restoration of "Bluebird" even if she never makes another run for the record.

  2. #282
    Team Member Master Oil Racing Team's Avatar
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    I was amazed to watch what was going on with the finding, recovery and restoration. I looked for my copy of BOAT NEWS reporting the tragedy, but I haven't found it yet. It will be a remarkable feat to restore and put that boat back on the water. When I was a senior in High School, it was a big blow to see something like that happen. I took my copy of the magazine to show all my friends. Having flown airplanes....taken off and landing...I could not imagine what went through Campbell's brain when he lifted off the water. He knew it was over when he said "I've gone!"....but it's still very sad to think about it today



  3. #283
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    About this same time a high school friend, Gene Aycock was going to buy a new surfboard and he talked me into buying his old Gordon Smith "Gordy" board. It was 12' and was cream colored with several light green and light yellow lines running down the length. At that time, Gene was the only person in Alice that surfed. I had thought about it, but when he sold me the Gordy, that put me over the edge and I went to Port Aransas and bought a set of surf racks for my Dodge Polara. I didn't like the fin, so I trimmed it up some and repainted it a bluish gray color with black stripes running down it. I don't know why I got into that paint scheme, but I would later on paint our boats that same color. I would work on the boats and motors getting them ready for the spring racing and on weekends would drive to Port Aransas to go surfing. It took a little while to learn not to "pearl", but once I learned that, it was easy to get up. We didn't have surf leashes in those days, so if you lost your board you would have to follow it to shore.

    Baldy was studying the rulebook and Roostertail magazine, making calls and generally getting acquainted with more and more racers. He kept the Roostertail by the telephone hanging on the wall in the kitchen, and would make notes on it while talking. He doodled a lot and could draw a perfect side view of a swan in a split second with just a few strokes. I would love to have his notes and doodling from when he talked on the phone. Even though the notes might be cryptic, it would give you a sense of what he was up to. Here are some examples from notes on Roostertail. Baldy had apparently called Jack Chance about something, but I have no clue as to the reference regarding Lukenback Street Scenes. Maybe Baldy had a premonition about "Wille, Waylon, and the Boys", and Lukenback, Texas. The guys left to right are Johnny Woods, Ted Gutweiler, Emmit Homfeld, and Matt Woefle, and went by the name of "The Bottles". The note on the Marchetti hydro seems to be about someone in Stillwell, Oklahoma. I don't know what the reference is to Quincy, but I suspect that a Merc Quincy went with the hydro. The note about the boat trailer is undoubtedly from the post man, and I guess he realized that the Roostertail back cover would be the best place to note his displeasure. On another Roostertail are scribblings and a phone number when he called Dick O'Dea about the Crescent motors. I remember early on Baldy taking an interest in them.
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  4. #284
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    Since I don't have anything in the way of Baldy's correspondence from the early years, I just have to go by the notes left behind here and there. He was good at saving letters and notes, but a lot of stuff was lost when his house blew away while were were on our way back from the Nationals at DePue in 1970.

    Baldy kept a yellow tablet by the bar next to his cooking grill at the lakehouse, and he would sometimes in the evening make notes while drinking Lone Star, or Schlitz beer. He would come up with ideas regarding Alice Specialty, Master Oil or boat racing. He held four patents during his life, and I am sure some of the ideas were from his personal "brainstorming" sessions.

    He would also act upon what he read or heard about things regarding boat racing. I am sure that his phone call to Dick O'Dea was a result of an add in the January 1967 issue of Roostertail, on the cover of which was my first "Alky" hero Gerrry Walin. Also appearing was the announcement of the election of Jerry Waldman to the NOA Board of Directors and the Racing Commission. From the very beginning Baldy was interested in promoting alky racing, and he did that the entire time we were actively involved. This, I am sure, sparked a telephone call to Jerry as evidenced by a note in the May 1967 Roostertail. I did not recall knowing about DePue until the next year when my sister Brenda, pit man Bud Turcotte and I drove up there to pick up three new boats that Nick and Pat Marchetti had built for us. Apparently, Jerry had given Baldy info on the Nationals and told him to contact the Holiday Inn at LaSalle for rooms. There must have been a conflict, because we didn't go in 1967.

    ADD: Spelling was not one of Baldy's main attributes. While he was articulate, he didn't always take time to get the spelling right. He never learned to type, and he never dictated. He always wrote things down, and the more he had to say, the worse his handwriting and/or spelling would be. For instance, I have a note in which he was in a hurry and in it he wrote something regarding "bote" racing. He knew how to spell boat, but he was scribbling the note out very quickly. His secretary of a long time and myself were among the few who could decipher his handwriting when he was in a hurry. After that secretary retired, new ones would have to come to me to find out what certain parts of his notes said.
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    I was able to do basic mechanic work, and grasping the ideas behind what the difference is between a stock gasoline two cycle 11.9 Evinrude on our 11' MFG and a Konig FA alcohol fueled racing motor. Among my classmates....I was the only one. Among my friends that listened to the stories I told after returning from races was Bob Burnham. We were in a number of classes together and hung out at lunch with Whitney and Dennis Reese---two big guys that were on the football team.

    Bob stopped by often after school and helped me set the boats on the sawhorses to work on them. I showed him how to hook up the steering cables, bolt the clamp around the tower housing and well as the bolts to hold the Konig down and attach the very simple Konig throttle cable, plus the fuel hoses and plug in the electrics after making sure + and - were correct on the batteries.

    Bob was very enthused with the thought of traveling, the excitement of the racing, and I never asked....but maybe girls. In any case, I had made for Bob an embroidered Baldwin Racing Team white shirt, complete with the sleeves ripped off. Bob Burnham became our first non family pitman. I didn't even have his name painted on the trailer when we went to our first race of the 1967 season. I didn't paint any names any more. Pam was my girlfriend, and I didn't have to be outside painting on the trailer anymore when she passed by.

    Our first race that we prepared for was Beaumont, Texas....the hometown of my nemesis Louis Williams.



  6. #286
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    We were anxious and excited to go to the first alky race of the year at Beaumont, although after coming off my rookie year, I wasn't exactly thrilled about the dogleg in the middle of the back straight. If all the other racers could handle the course, then why shouldn't we? I just was a little bit afraid, not of the stump, but of being able to turn right while racing.

    The boats were all polished, dry, grit cleaned from between the stringers, and a new (used) Marchetii hydro. I had been having trouble not just finishing with the hydro, but the Sidcraft didn't handle well. I had been towed in to the pits probably as often as I had driven in. Mostly it was my fault for having been wet down in the first turn. In those days, the Lone Star Boat Racing Association ran full fields of runabouts and combined AB hydro and CDF hydro.

    I would find myself trying to get outside in A/B hydro, but getting caught in the middle and getting soaked in the first turn. I would get pulled in, and to Baldy's credit, he never criticized me for my choices. At the beginning we would clean the plugs and try them again. After too many failures in the year before, someone told us that we could sandblast the Champion plugs and they would be as good as new. We started this new year of alky racing in the Lone Star Boat Racing Association race at Beaumont, on the Neches River, with a National Outboard Association sanctioned race as a new beginning

    As we had the off season to comtemplate and add a class, we picked up Bob Burnham as a pit man. Baldy would have more time to do other things than help rig up and lift boats. At that time I did the cranking of the motors. So the boat racing year of 1967 got off to a good start.

    We took the same coastal route cutting over to Texas Highway 35 and following the coastline. We always left in time to eat lunch at Gordon's Seafood Restaurant at Port Lavaca. The seafood platter always had fish, 5 or 6 fried shrimp, 2 or 3 fried oysters, stuffed crab, cole slaw, and french fries for something like $6.00.

    We got into Beaumont around 5:00 P.M. IH 10 made a 45 degree turn North on the West side of Beaumont then a few miles down the road was the exit to Calder Avenue. You could make a right there and go a few miles to Louis Williams' funeral home on the left. We continued straight, and on the North side of IH 10 where it makes a 90 back to the East is a Ramada Inn where we normally stayed while racing in Beaumont.



  7. #287
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    Sunday morning, April 23, 1967. Up early and headed east on IH 10 a few miles then about 1/3rd of a mile before crossing the Neches River we exited and crossed under IH 10 and headed north on a winding Pine Street. Under the heavy shade of tall pines, magnolia, oak and cypress trees we passed two large cemetaries on our right. Like Lake Charles and New Orleans, a lot of the tombs were above ground mausoleums and tombs If you forgot you were in the deep south near the Gulf of Mexico, the massive live oak trees festooned with massive drooping grey beards of spanish moss were all around to remind you. The directions on the flyers we got through the years always said the racecourse was at "the foot of Pine Street", and it was. A country club was on the left, with boat docks, and the pits and judges stand was to the right.

    We pitted between Pine Street and the judges stand next to Jack Chance and Clayton Elmer. This close to Louisiana we had more boats from that state. They had so many rivers and bayous in Louisiana, they rarely had to travel more than one hundred miles and have a race at a different course every weeked. A lot of their racing was on narrow courses such as the one at Beaumont. It may have been here we first met Earl Godcheaux. Of course Lucien and Bruce Marioneaux were here with Clyde Lafitte, and Poppa Smith may have been here as well, but we had not met him yet, although we were already familiar with his reputation. We never got to know Robert Weeks and his brother, I believe James, from Lake Charles, but I think they were also there. They quit racing only a couple of years after we started. At least as far as Lone Star racing. I know for sure Jim Wilkins made the trip from Dallas and so Lee Little was also present.

    The bank of the Neches dropped off sharply anywhere from one to three or four feet depending on where you pitted, and the water level. Sometimes the Neches would be up because of heavy rains that may have occurred a hundred or more miles upstream and several days earlier. That made racing a little more tricky because of a faster moving stream and stronger currents plus debris floating down.

    The race course was layed out mostly straight, but you could not race there without running a right hand dog leg in the middle of the back straight. Right there in the middle was a big cypress stump cut flat by a saw and was about 30 inches in diameter. It usually varied between an inch or so above the water to just below the surface, but most of the time that solid stump of cypress was right at water level. When we raced with flood waters coming down later on in the year, it was about a foot or so below the water, but then we had to watch out for debris. There were two or three other cypress stumps cut off near the big one but they were only 12 to 18 inches in diametr and closer to the bank. You didn't have to worry about them because that "Big Daddy" stump would keep you off them. The best I remember was the big stump was between five and ten feet off the bank.

    With a runabout you could make the right hand bend easier than with a hydro. We always tried to be aired out when we were close to the stump and would pass within just inches of it. It was the only way to halfway straighten out the course. A hydro on the inside would be at a severe disadvantage because you would have to slow down too much, then swing further to the right to set up for a decent left hand turn. I was fairly intimidated by that race course. But looking back now, a lot of funny stories came out of the racing at Beaumont on the Neches River.
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  8. #288
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    With Bob Burnham to help us, Baldy was able to do other things besides take out the triangular steel saw horses with red rubber padding and set them up. Baldy had designed them himself. We had three sets of tall ones and three sets of short ones. They could be combined for any set of circumstances with pit areas. So Mark, Bob and I set the long sawhorses up toward the river, and the short ones spaced back enough for two runabouts and one hydro. The bank sloped downward so the boats were fairly level after we untied them and hauled them onto the sawhorses. Mark was used to this, and after training Bob a little bit at our house in Alice, he knew what to do, but with all the other people around, and in a different setting, I suspect it was a lot more thrilling adventure than what we did at 1123 Jefferson Street in Alice, Texas.

    Bob was into it. He had never seen....nor smelled such boat racing such as we had that day. Bob was hooked on it and learned the tricks of the trade. Loading and unloading the boats, rigging up, rigging down, hoisting the transom so I could crank, and setting the boat in the water while shoving forward and noting the prop. Bob got to know our testing procedure, fueling, putting the boat back on the stands, and in the case of Beaumont, hauling it back up the embankment between heats. You had to watch your footing,

    ADD: Jack and Clayton were pitted to our left. Far left in the water is Clayton's T-30 Morton runabout. Mr. Morton from Baytown also built the two hydros, on one of which set the Merc F. Note the hand pump and white hose by the motor box of our trailer. We turned the crank on the hand pump to fuel the tanks in the boats. At the end of the hose was one of those adjustable spray nozzles with a spring loaded shut off and handle. This was one of the many ways we experimented with fueling in our early years.
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  9. #289
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    I don't remember what happened in A and B hydro. The Marchetti was way to long and heavy for the A to be competitive, and I was still having problems getting wet down in the hydros, so maybe that's what happened. Lone Star was mostly runabouts then, and often combined AB hydro and CDF hydro. Being close to Louisiana however, there might have been many more A and B hydros, and therefore I might have finished, but out of the money. I didn't write any of that down in my notes. I only wrote down how I finished in the money. I show a third place finish in C runabout for a prize of ten dollars. I don't recall Baldy being ecstatic about the win, so I am guessing a good portion of the field either jumped the gun, or didn't finish for various reasons.

    C runabout in Texas was highly competitive. There were the following drivers. Clayton Elmer, Freddie Goehl, Raymond Jeffries (all NOA world champs), P.G. Stepelton, Roland Pruett, Phil Crown, Jim Mouton, an up and coming Charlie Bailey, and some more I can't recall at this moment. My DeSilva might have been a Jumbo....I'm not sure. It was about the time they came out, and it was very "fat", but it was also old, so I'm not sure it was what was called a "Jumbo" DeSilva. The Konig was a two cylinder with what must have been two great big unbalanced pistons. It was used, along with the DeSilva, and may have come as a package. I don't remember that part. I never took the motor apart, but it always cranked and ran just fine. It just vibrated a lot. That's what I remember most about that FC Konig was the vibration at the throttle. Just like the FB Konig...it seemed to be indestructible, but with those whopping big pistons, it would almost deaden your hand from the vibration.

    Up to this point I only got wet twice (not counting the numerous wet downs) while racing. Once falling out of the cockpit in a slow speed half spinout at Baytown in 1966, and the second time as previously mentioned, at San Antonio when I flopped out after nearly blowing over in the face of a fast moving cold front lifting the SidCraft. This time at Beaumont, I got tangled up with another boat in the first turn right after the start.

    I always tried to go to the outside lane for many years in order to stay clear of the pack. In Texas, the outside lane belonged to Bruce Nicholson, inasmuch as the inside lane belonged to Louis Williams. I cannot say how they always managed that except to lay it down to experience, and incredible talent. So in the first heat of A runabout, I ended up as normal, as close to the outside as I could get in a narrow front chute. I was at the tail of the pack when Jim Wilkins from the Dallas area spun out directly in front of me. I was inside of Jim, and Jim's bow spun directly in my path like a log trying to trip me. I launched over Jim's runabout and went over into the Neches River. Luckily, no one was hurt.

    The wreck was captured by the Beaumont Enterprise photographer, and as far as I know was the only of many crashes I had that an image was captured. It also set the stage for the many losses of left tennies.

    I didn't hurt at all after the crash, but after we loaded up the boats and headed home I got to feel it a little bit. It was around eight by the time we got loaded up and headed home. We were starving, so we stopped at Bergeron's, at 24 hour truck stop we ate at many times on the return trip form racing at Beaumont. It was closer to Beaumont than Houston, but it was the only place to stop in that long stretch.

    By the time we dropped Bob Burnham off at his house, it was three O'clock Monday morning, Bob lived about three blocks from us. I don't know what Bob remembers about this, but we were in the same Business Class in high school. Our teacher was very young and very good looking. She must have not been long out of getting her teaching degree, All the jocks, and most of them were in our class, teased her, and were probably fantasizing about her. Beth Engleking was not only smart, but very good looking. She played that to keep the attention of her mostly male students. She was also not that far along from being a student herself, so I attribute her attitude toward my Monday morning session after the Beaumont race to her compassion and understanding. I took my studies seriously (Baldy was very strict about that with his kids), and so I got up and went to class Monday morning. When I got to business class, I couldn't keep going. I knew Miss Engleking was the most forgiving teacher I ever had, so I laid my head down on the desk and went to sleep. I heard her say something, but one of my jock friends (probably Kenneth Kattner) said "Hey he just got in three O'clock in the morning....let him sleep". Miss Engleking did, and it was the only time I ever slept in class.
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    We had a race coming up soon at Baytown. We had to get the DeSilva repaired, and I was not then, now, nor ever will be a good woodworker. Baldy was the man. I mean after all, when he was in the Navy, he wasn't swabbing decks. He was on dry land....or at least an island, at the dry docks repairing landing craft that had either been shot up, or hit with Japanese rounds, or ran into something headed toward a beachead that caused damage. Or maybe they just leaked. So it was Baldy who spearheaded the effort to repair the damage from our collision with Jim Wilkins. Baldy made me do the work, but he told me what to do, and he did the measuring and the cuts.

    In the meantime Baldy had been talking with Jack. When we would come up early for the Baytown race and Jack would have me tear down the A Konig and replace rings and pistons. Freddie Goehl and Arlen Crouch did an excellent job, but it was too far for us to drive, and we were not learning any mechanics on the motors. Jack was determined to set us on the right path. I spent many hours in his shop and I regret that I do not have one picture to show.



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