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

  1. #381
    Team Member Master Oil Racing Team's Avatar
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    There was some kind of problem that kept us from running the new 4 carb C, but I don't remember what it was. I don't remember whether we tested it and it wasn't right, or it could have been simply a different throttle connection that we didn't have time to convert to our system yet. Anyway, we ran the old FC.

    I was not able to finish in the money in A runabout, and I took a third in A hydro. The reliable two cylinder B Konig brought me home to a third place in one heat of B runabout, but I didn't place in the other heat. Same with B hydro as far as only coming in one heat but this time is was a second. No places written down in my book on how I fared in either C hydro or runabout, but for the first time we entered the Free-for-All, and I took a fourth place. I was the only hydro. Free-for-Alls were pretty much exclusively D and F runabouts, but we wanted to give it a try with our C hydro.

    I don't remember who won the FFA, but I was competing against the likes of Clayton Elmer, PG Stepleton, Bruce Nicholson, Roland Pruett, Charlie Bailey, Artie Lund, Jim Mouton, Phil Crown, and others, so we were pleased with the outcome.

    We didn't hang around Jack's, but I believe he wanted to keep that 4 carb C. I'm thinking it didn't have enough compression, and he wanted to do some of his own modifications, but with me being there. We had a Sunday/Monday Labor Day race coming up on Lake Texoma the following weekend, and that was a long drive, so Jack kept the motor, and would wait until after the Labor Day race for me to come up and work on it. I do know we ran the FC at Lake Texoma near Denison.

    ADD: I found some photos of this race. It was the 1967 LSBRA Texas State Championships.

    The first photo is Baldy standing next to the trailer talking to Jerry Nunez. I don't know who the girl with Jerry is. Under the shade of the trailer are Dorothy "Dot" and Leonard Huff whose daugther Jeannie was to become part of the CB Racing Team pit crew the next year. Little in the chair is my younger sister Jan. Note all the white gallon jugs with the dark oval to the right of Jan, and also in a rack behind the tandem axles. Those are part of hundreds of gallon jugs left over after Baldy pulled the plug on the Aloe Vera business. We tried different methods of fueling, including the pressurized system and handcrank from a bulk tank to these individual gallon jugs. We premixed all the fuel, then filled up the jugs. Some of our fellow racers must have thought us "crazy" at times.

    The third photo is Clayton Elmer leading out of a turn in C, D, or F hydro. In the center is Phil Crown from Dallas and a very rare photo of Joe Bowdler from San Antonio on the inside.

    The second photo is of me being towed in. That is what happened in a least one heat of A Runabout. Don't know if it conked out or I got wet down.

    ADD:This is in the first turn at Baytown. Joe Bowdler is in the lead with his Looper followed by Clayton Elmer.
    Attached Images Attached Images



  2. #382
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    Some of the old cobwebs go away when I really try to thing about what was going on, and why the 4 carb C was left at Jack's to overhaul, but not for him to do it by himself.

    I have had a very clear memory of the first time we tore it down. It was totally different than the two cylinder motors I had been working on since we first hooked up with Jack. The FA was piston ported with the carbs on opposite sides, one high one low to be able to provide the proper porting, and exhaust ports were the same. One high and one low, where they were fixed and complemented the intake ports for maximum breathing and horsepower.

    The FB and FC were internal rotary valve motors with the porting inside the block. The VC 4 carb Konig was another animal. The four carbs were on the "drivers" side and the open exhaust stacks were on the opposite side along with the coil assembly.

    When I remembered about how Jack built the motors for Clayton Elmer and myself, I remembered some machine work must be done before it was gone through and rebuilt to Jack's specs. We left the motor with Jack, but some of the work I couldn't do was done at his direction while we were gone.

    What triggered my memory was that back in the beginning of our hookup with Jack and Clayton was the fact that Jack was not always around at the beckoned call of Baldy. Jack would look for any excuse to come down to our place, or for me to come up there, but at this particular time, Jack was still night foreman at the Humble Oil & Refining plant at Baytown. That's why we went a lot of places without him in the beginning. So after we got back from Denison, I would come up to Baytown for a weekend to work on that four carb. School (college now) was starting, so it would have to be on a weekend.



  3. #383
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    There were two ways to start off toward Denison. One straight up 281 North out of Alice or take Highway 359 through Mathis left on Highway 9 to 72 then cut over to Kenedy. That's the route we took, and was the same way we went to Dallas the weekend of the Darkest Day of Unlimited hydro racing. I still look at that church with the upswept roof, and an architectural rarity. It's survives to this day and is still having services.

    Everything that could be fixed was fixed, we were fueled up, batteries charged and raring to go. The race up by the Oklahoma border would mean less of the Gulf Coast racers and more of our Dallas/Fort Worth area drivers and the ones from Oklahoma.

    From Texas 72 we headed north and after passing through Karnes City, we pulled over to The Smokehouse setting atop on of the rolling hills surrounding the area. It was Barn red with a gravel parked lot, picnic table setting under a have dozen good sized mesquite trees and a smokestack pouring forth some mouth watering smells. It was a favorite stop of ours.

    In addition to many types of cold cuts such as salami, balogna, cervalait, summer sausage, etc.they did their own smoked sausage. Beef and pork, pork and garlic, and a couple of others. You could take some home to cook, or buy whatever you wanted coming off their pit. Cheeses were in abundance too, with the common swiss, cheddar, Monterey Jack, mozerella and the like, but they also had several big wheels of sharp, and mild cheddar and a couple of others.


    then there was the homemade fresh bread and pies. Their white bread was very good, but the wheat was like non I have ever had at any other place. They used empty gallon peach cans to hold the bread dough while it was rising and also when cooked. The tins were open at both ends. They placed the cans vertically and filled them with the right amount of dough. As the dough was rising, the top came out of the can and make a mushroomlike top. When it was done, the cook would push the loaf out from the bottom. You could see the striated indentions that encircled the can as well as the strip where the circle of the cylinder was made together. It was a wonderful tasting bread. A few times we stopped there (it was later enroute from home to college) the bread had just come out of the oven. You could smear a generous heaping of homemade butter and never was there anything that tasted better.

    You could eat there at one of a dozen tables inside, or at the picnic tables outside. You could have a sandwich made of regular bread, or have slices of homemade Besides the pie there were homemade pickles, relishes, jellies, jams, local honey and all sorts of homemade items that were woven, sewn or painted. It was the first nostalgic type country store that I ever saw. You could also buy rice and beans out of wooden barrels.

    We ate Barbeque (which was also excellent), and filled the cooler with cold cuts, cheeses, condiments, and homemade bread for meals in the pits. Baldy didn't forget to get a big supply of jerky for the trip.



  4. #384
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    We went up Texas Highway 123 through Stockdale, Sequin and got on IH 35 north of San Antonio at San Marcos, It was only a little more than half an hour to Austin, and back then it was a breeze to fly through, which we did. We crossed the Colorado rivier south of the Capitol, and was at one time a paradise for Drag Boats. The staging area was under the IH 35 bridge which crossed the Colorado River. The boats would unload west of the bridge, idle or be brought over to the staging area, and many wrapped out under the bridge and the echo could be heard miles up and down the river valley. It was there that the 200mph barrier was cracked for the first time. It was I believe in 1973 and I took pictures.

    Anyway, we passed over the Colorado and in a couple of hours we also passed over the Brazos. It was a very muddy river, with lots of red clay coloring it. Colorado means the "color red", but it had been tamed by a series of flood control dams upstream, so at Austin and several lakes above, it was clear. We crossed the Brazos at Louis Collins' hometown of Waco and the birthplace of Dr. Pepper patented in the 1800's.

    Somewhere an hour or so past Waco there was a "Fork" in the road. A two lane divided highway is not a traditional fork, but there was the choice of taking the left fork to Fort Worth, or the right to go to Dallas. At that time it was shorter and faster to get to Denison by going through Dallas. On the north side of Dallas we had to go through the town of Plano to get on the highway to Denison. Which we did. Then the highway narrowed down.

    It was about eight hours to Dallas and less than an hour to get on the other side of Plano, so we got to Denison in the evening and got checked in to the Holiday Inn. We would get up early the next morning to find a pit spot. Our team partners Jack Chance and Clayton Elmer did not come up to Lake Texoma.



  5. #385
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    Lake Texoma was big. The southern shore was Texas....the northern was Oklahoma. We didn't like big open bodied lakes, but the pits were at the very southeastern part of the reservoir. The dam was in sight just to the east. We could see it on the way to the pits. In fact, we turned off a road going to the pits that would have led us to the dam.

    Baldy liiked to eat breakfast so we ate before finding our way to the pits.

    It was a winding clay and gravel road, up and down, mostly down after we made the turn off the main highway toward the pits. About a quarter mile from the pits the road was about a hundred fifty or two hundred feet above the lake. There were flat places overlooking the lake, not unlike a plateau, but not exactly like a cliff either. It was a former river bank that sides had caved off before the river was impounded. The river bed under the lake was close to Texas at the point where the engineers chose to build the dam.

    We descended a steep yellowish red clay road down to the pits below. It is a state park now, but then it was crude, bumpy with rocks, and sloped toward the lake. The pit area was littered with big rocks amongst the clay, and footing was tricky.

    We spotted our trailer east of the judges stand as did most of the racers. We ended up with the San Antonio bunch of Raymond Jeffries, Joe Bowdler, and Artie Lund on our right, and Alex and Tommy Wetherbee on our left. Hooray!. Maybe Marsha came this time.



  6. #386
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    It wasn't as big a gathering as it would have been in the summer, but there were still some big name racers. It was too long a haul for drivers with kids in school for a lot, and being that it was a Sunday/Monday schedule some couldn't take off even though it was Labor Day. Still, it was a good gathering of competitors.

    On our left were Alex and Tommy Wetherbee...two of the hottest B hydro drivers with top of the line Quincy Loopers. They were also top notch in A hydro and A and B runabout, but they usually never bothered to look over their left shoulder if they broke out of the turn first in B Hydro.

    To our right were the San Antonio boys, and that's where we got to really get to know Lucky Lund. Lucky was Artie's brother and pit man. I don't know if Lucky ever raced himself, and I don't know his first name. All I know is that Baldy and myself really got to know and like Lucky at this race. Artie tended to stick to himself at this point, as well as Joe Bowdler. I think Artie was still getting back to racing after a stint in the Army, and Joe was just getting things race ready. He was only a year or two older than me, but he stood about six inches over me. I idolized him and his pit crew. Half of them were girls.

    Joe's sister Barbara was there along with Erma and Jeri. I don't know if Jeri was married to Lucky yet, or Erma to Artie, but they were good looking and working next door in the pits.

    Joe's Dad Sid Bowdler and his Mom (Margeret?) were there as well, and Sid and Baldy formed a close relationship at that race. Sid was a sales manager at a car dealership in San Antonio, and was a very classy guy. He didn't look like he belonged in the pits at all the way he was dressed, but he would do anything he could to support and be with his son Joe. It was a family affair. Sid Bowdler was one of the gentlemen racing supporters. He didn't do any lifting, but I imagine he was the main supporter of the racing team financially.

    Phil Crown was pitted east of the San Antonio bunch, and I think Bobby Wilson was a couple of boats west of the Wetherbees. Dudley Malone was somewhere in the pits along with Charlie Huff, Keith Taylor, Craig Lawrence, Tom Goslee, Cecil Johnson, and Lyndol Reid. So the field of drivers came from South and North Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. There were about thirty teams with numerous boats entered in A through F hydro classes, plus the same for Runabout and including C Service Hydro and Runabout.



  7. #387
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    Pit men were Bob Burnham and my brother Mark. Baldy was Pit Boss and cranker. We got everything rigged up and tested for the first heats. It was a one mile course and everything looked good.

    Alex Wetherbee had what I think was a McDonald cabover with a 6 cylinder deflector Merc. I never recalled Alex running that rig before so he must have just picked it up somewhere. He and his brother Tommy always ran A and B Hydro and Runabout. He did a lot of testing that morning and I remember well. It was fortunate that he pitted next to us because Tommy needed lots of help in the pits. That cabover was heavy. It took Mark, Bob, Steve Wetherbee and myself to lift it while Tommy cranked. The lifting was complicated by a stubborn motor hard to get fired off, and the rocky bottom. Our energy was just about spent by the time Alex got it set up like he wanted.

    While waiting for the races to get underway, I walked back up the road and over to the cliff overlooking the pits and racecourse. It was a great view. You could see everything up there and the cliff was already lined with hundreds of spectators. The weather was perfect, and the water was just right for racing. The big yachts and pleasure boats I feared would be throwing up rollers had been controlled.

    As I strolled along I heard a girls voice holler "Hey Wayne!" I looked over and saw Linda White, one of Pam Yawn's best friend sitting on the ground close to the cliff's edge. I sat down and said "What are you doing here?" She said "I heard there were going to be boat races and I thought you might be here." I don't recall why she said she happened to be in the Denison/Sherman area, and it had only been a few months since I had last seen her at graduation. Since she was one of Pam's best friends I had seen her a lot before we graduated. She was a petite but very atheletic girl with a very sexy smile and short brown hair. She also seemed like she had a perpetual tan. She looked very nice that day, and she was alone. She just came down to watch me race.



  8. #388
    Team Member ProHydroRacer's Avatar
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    Wayne how do you remember all this stuff. I have a hard time remembering what I did yesterday, and you are recalling events from 30 years ago.
    Why did racing die out in Texas?
    I assume your dad died when did that happen?
    Stories are super by the way.
    Bill

  9. #389
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    Some things are easy to remember, Bill, but when it comes to the fuzzy stuff I call Joe. He remembers some details that are vague for me, and I do the same for him, then when we start talking a lot of it comes back. My biggest help in the early years are two things. First, I kept a notebook of facts to learn about boat racing, and to record my finishes in the money, and secondly boat racing had a profound effect on my life and I was very impressionable at that age. As we met new people along the way, I remembered certain facts about those times. Also, if there were music turned on somewhere, I remember the songs, and certain songs bring back very vivid memories....such as "What's New Pussycat" when we were in New Orleans.

    There was so much that happened on the trip to North Carolina, that I have repeated some of those stories over the years, and know them by heart. I do get confused sometimes about what year a certain thing took place at a particular race course, but the date is usually only one year's difference, and a couple of times I have had to go back and edit a part to get it correct. If you read it the first time, you might not know the facts because I only announce any earlier post corrections if I am adding photographs or a document that I could not find at the time. Old photos also help stir the memory. If I still had some old photos and documents that were lost during Hurricane Celia, I could probably remember some of the old hydros and motors.

    So I have to tell you I don't remember everything. I still cannot be certain where we got our first CDF Marchetti or the length, and who ended up with most of the boats and motors we sold. Baldy did all that, and I can't remember, but then sometimes I have help from others that do. Bill Boyes met Baldy in San Antonio once when he delivered a runabout.

    As far as quotes go, they are accurate. I may not remember the exact wordage,but if it wasn't it was damn close. I don't put any of what was said in quotes unless I specifically remember it occurring. Now as far as what I did yesterday, or last week, heck.....I have no clue. I do have a record book for my business, and I can tell you from that what I did. Errr..if I bothered to write it down.

    Boat racing in Texas as far as Pro Division goes ended in the mid eighties. As you remember the Carter years were disastrous because of extremely high interest rates, high unemployment, high gasoline and diesel prices, an embattled and shrunken military, a huge drop in the value of a dollar, and a "malaise" that set in upon America. We lost a lot of Texans to the huge increase in the cost of foreign motors due to the fall of the dollar. Then Jimmy Carter's windfall profits tax caused a loss of oilfield jobs in Texas, Lousiana, and Oklahoma 450,000 direct and indirect jobs. Reagan's war against the Soviets brought oil down to ten dollars a barrel. That cinched it for us, because when the oilfield went down, so did travel, food, recreation, banking, and everything else went down. Hundreds of banks folded with the Banking and Tax reforms of 1986. It also cost us personally our 5 million dollar investment of an offshore facility we were building for the oil and gas industry. When we quit racing in 1981 after several of Baldy's key employees betrayed him, Baldy got out of the business of promoting and backing racing in Texas. We had a company to save. Pro racing in Texas was gone in three or four years. Baytown Boat Club was the only thing that survived thanks to the members there and their dedication.

    I will say though, that I would never had remembered as much as I have since I started this thread without a lot of deep thinking and triggers. If it were not for BRF, and people like you, Joe Rome, Bill Van and others who have expressed an interest, I could not have been inspired to do this. I thank everyone who has had an interest in following this thread because I feel it in some ways reflects a lot of the same things they did when racing, and we all share the common love of boat racing. Boat racing will never be the same. It never was and never will be. Things change, but it's fun to look back at some of the things us boat racers of the era did and saw. And this gives me a good time to remind all you young boat racers out there to take pictures, take notes, and pack rat them away for the future like Ron, Danny, Lars and others have done. And Marlee.....thanks much. A lot of people will be thanking you in the future for what you are doing today.



  10. #390
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    Default Old time Racing

    Carter years! I thought we wouldn't see anything that bad again in my lifetime, boy was I wrong. Lived in the Chicago area for 60 years, I could always get a job in mechanical engineering, not any more. Most of my work time was in industrial automation, country wide most of the automation houses have closed their doors. Most manufacturing has moved to China. The outlook for this country doesn't look good to me. I feel sorry for my sons and all the young people looking to be employed for the next 50 years.

    Keep up the racing stories, that all I have left now.
    Bill

    I do remember going to San Antone(sp) Texas with Rod Walk, I guess in the 80's. The race course has to be moved because of weather, so we all had to move the trailers down the road. That was Good Times, I do miss Rod.

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