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

  1. #391
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    Default Bill, I wish you hadn't mentioned moving the race course....

    as that will probably trigger his memory of a "gotcha" story about me, and Baldy moving their trailer. OH WELL!!!!! Good thing I have broad shoulders.

  2. #392
    Team Member Master Oil Racing Team's Avatar
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    You were right about moving the race course for the Eastern Divisionals Bill, and Bill Van was both right and wrong at the same time. It's in his genes I think to do that. You were right Bill Van that I would post that story when the time comes, but you were wrong that Bill "triggered" it. Yes....I rely a lot on triggers that others have posted, but in this case it is one that has been ingrained in my mind for a long time, and I know you can hear in your own mind right now Baldy's laugh.

    A further word about how it seems my memory is so great. I use a few tricks. Every racer that has raced awhile has traveled to and from the same race course many times. Maybe the first time you went to a new place, it might have been difficult directions or there might have been something that you keyed on. Every time you go back to race there, something in your memory kicks in. Early on in this thread John Schubert alluded to the same thing about how I could remember in so much detail. Our first trip to race at Highlands on the San Jacinto river was to cross the railroad tracks, then turn left at Dills. We missed it the first time, but turned around and drove several blocks back across the railroad tracks to approach the road on the left again. We missed the turn again several months later, but then it became ingrained in our minds. My memory was rewarded when I rememered the turn 39 years later when Joe Rome and I made that turn to the last Lone Star Boat Racing Association Reunion. So I use the familiar traveled roads to add spice to my story.

    Everyone usually has favorite stops on the way to and from a race. That's part of the fun. And also you have the ONLY places that might be open on the way home. There might be remembrances of a 3/8ths thin ice cold round steak that was delivered to you at 10:00 PM Sunday evening 6 and a half hours from home because the waitress set all the plates our for the rest of your crew and hurried to place your forgotten order in front of you. That kind of stuff has happened to everyone that has raced. It happened to me. I have never forgotten it, and I know when I put that in one of my stories, it will take you back to where that, or something like it happened. That is my goal. Not only to relive my story...but to help you relive yours.

    Food, traveling, and difficulties on the trip are part of boat racing. I figure if I can relate what happened to us, so can you. So Bill, that's a lot of why I can recall so much. For all those years we stopped at the same places, met with the same people, had a routine, and he new race courses and cities and towns brought the excitement that some things stayed in our memories from the trip. I want to thank you Bill for the opportunity for me to explain in small part how I put together this story.

    When I first envisioned it, it was for the memory of Baldy and his boat racing friends and recipes that they experienced and some still talk about. I wanted to place in context where Baldy was, how boat racing came about within our family, and how much he dedicated his life to it while we were involved. He jumped in head first. To his dying day in May of 2000, boat racers were his best friends. I think for the most part I have stuck to my original idea, although I have not kept up enough with the feel of the times as we lived them. To me it was mostly music, but there were a lot of cataclysmic goings on that we feel today.

    I had planned to finish the Denison Race, but next time.



  3. #393
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    For such a big lake, Lake Texoma was calm and peaceful on Sunday. The officials, pickup boats, bouys, ambulance and everything was in place.

    I don't know what happened to our Alice Specialty team in B hydro because I didn't write it down. The B Konig was very reliable, but I still couldn't keep water out of the carbs much in those days. Also, starts were not good. I was light handed on the throttle and scootching back not to jump, or heavy handed and way too late.

    In A runabout though it was a different outcome. I always liked the hydro's better than runabouts because the cockpits were too wide and I slid around too much. But somehow, I was chalking up wins in runabouts more than hydros.

    This A runabout win in the fist heat was a big hit for Baldy because I once again outran Bobby Wilson. Bobby was still, and would remain for years, one of the top A runabout drivers. In the Roostertail it shows Bobby first. It does not list finishes of heats, In my book I recorded a first and a third. I beat Bobby the first heat with him chasing me. He won the second heat and I finished third. Craig Lawrence from Dallas had enough points to finish third.

    I dont know why I won C runabout. This is one of the things that has puzzled me over the years. I didn't finish the second heat and unless Roostertail is wrong, Phil Crown and Joe Bowdler ended up second and third behind me.

    This is my memory. I was driving our Jumbo DeSilva with the FC Konig. It was vibrating like crazy and I could even feel it in my throttle hand. I was running third and Joe and Phil were ahead. They had jumped the gun so that gave me a first.

    The second heat, the water was still beautiful with no wind, no rollers and we could run full throttle. I broke out in front, but I knew it wouldn't last because Joe Bowdler and Phil Crown had Merc Quincy's. On the front straight, I scooted all the way to the back with my arms outstretched. Before I got to the safety bouy the DeSilva started to lift. I moved forward, but I didn't weigh enough to offset the lift and span of that wide bottom. At this point I had almost blown over a B hydro, but landed it. No experience at a blowever yet and didn't know what to do.

    The deck was so suddenly straight up vertical, that I got scared and dumped the throttle. That two cylinder C Konig had a lot of torque, and I guess and lot of stopping power. As soon as I shut off that throttle, the DeSilva did a 90 degree turn and kept runnin exactly straight and upright until it coasted to a stop. The kill switch worked. So did gravity. A forward motion will keep going until some force stops it. That's exactly what I did. When the DeSilva made a 90, I kept going straight, loosing my left tennis shoe in the exit or in the water. The boat and motor were towed back to the pits after I was picked up and brought in. It was a sudden exit from the cockpit, but other than a nose full of water and one less shoe, it was nothing. Somehow though, I ended up first in C Runabout. Still can't figure that one out..



  4. #394
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    The boat never veered and all, and just came to a stop right side up. It went fifty or sixty yards into a little cove about halfway between the safety bouy and start. If I would have been a few hundred feet further down and past the judges stand, it would have gone into the pits. We never thought about it at the time, but it could have been a disaster. The light blue and white is the water splashing as I tumbled through it and coasted to a stop.
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  5. #395
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    If you're going to flip, do it right in front of the pits so everyone can see!

  6. #396
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    That's what Jim Schoch and Jerry Simison did at the Nationals at DePue Gene. You remember that I'm sure. The water was slick. It was as hot as if you walked out onto Frank Zorkan's patio in August. Jim and Jerry were racing A runabout side by side and inches apart. I think one started up, and the other went up in a blink. The boats toasted one another with a "clink" before they went bow over transom and Jerry and Jim both went to the hospital. They were Okay, as it turned out, but no racing until they got back, because there were no more ambulances. All this happened while they were dueling for the lead, right in front of the pits. That was a spectacular show.



  7. #397
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    So right Gene.

    I went up to the cliff after the racing was over to see Linda, but I never saw her again. I don't know if she got bored, didn't like the flip, or what. I guess also, I might have hung around the pits too long before going to look for her because Marsha and her cousin Leeann Wetherbee were there along with a friend named Mandy were in the pits.

    After a good day of racing, we headed back into the Holiday Inn. Mark, Bob and I wanted to visit with the girls some more, but they were not staying in town. They were camped out in the pits like a lot of other racers.

    Denison and Sherman were two towns very close together and are now merged so you don't know where one starts and the other ends. They were very close together when we raced there, and there was so much construction going on it would not be long before it was one long stretch of cities on that road.

    I can just remember a lot of raw, yellowish red earth piled up everywhere as construction projects were in different phases. There was a lot of clay in the ground. It wasn't a heavy rainfall area, but with the clay, there had to be a lot of light watering, compacting, scraping, and compacting again for projects to be built. The Holiday Inn we stayed at was brand new and next to another one just built on the left from our exit on the west side of the highway. When Debbie and I spent a weekend in the same area ten years later, nothing looked the same. We stayed at a lodge overlooking Lake Texoma, and I couldn't pick out any of the old spots.



  8. #398
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    The water on Lake Texoma proved to be good for racing Sunday, and we were looking for a good day of racing on Labor Day.

    I wasn't too sore from tumbling across the water because I didn't hit anything. I did a lot of hitting the water from being pulled while skiing behind friends who thought a ski boat was made to show them how hard water could be at the end of a ski rope jerked away. The only thing that was sore was my left ankle, and there was the missing tennis shoe.

    I don't recall whether I rounded up another shoe or not. In a couple of years, I raced barefoot like Dub Parker until it was outlawed, but I don't remember what I did at Lake Texoma. All I recall about that part is that I saved the right shoe, because I already lost another left shoe at Beaumont. That was the first time I recalled that whenever I flipped, I lost the left tenny. That's when I started saving the right, so I would be able to balance it out at some point. I did that for a year or two until I didn't flip so much, and I never did get a balance. I finally threw away the right side Tenny's. That was about the time I started racing barefoot.

    Back to the Labor Day race.

    We were all rigged up for A hydro, B Runabout and C hydro. It looked like a fine day for racing. I was kind of getting to know Joe Bowdler on our right, but I was still shy, and he had a lot to get ready for. He was running D Runabout, F Hydro, C Hyro and F Runabout.

    Alex Weatherbee tested his McDonald cabover again and he was satisfied with it, so us pit guys started hanging around the Wetherbee girls and their friend.

    The racing was scheduled to start just after noon. Right about the time of the driver's meeting though, a hard, driving rain norther blew in. In South Texas it was typical for a wet norther to blow in hard, with lots of rain, then after fifteen or twenty minutes, no rain, then calming winds take place within an hour or two. We didn't know how it was in North Texas.

    Apparently, the officials thought the same thing was going to happen this time. The blow came in with a force. Thirty mile per hour winds hit, and whitecaps were as far as the eye could see. It wasn't long before two foot swells were hitting the beach and giant raindrops started to fall. Baldy wasn't the first one to get the New Yorker up to higher ground, but he was among the first to realize, no way were cars going to be able to make it up that steep curvy clay packed road to the top unless they pulled out now.

    Baldy drove to a level surface, close to the top of the hill, pulled over and went back down. We watched as the waves piled up against the shore and rain came in so heavy that visibility was cut. When the heavy cold drops came pelting down, everyone ran to the closest cover. Now we all watched as the waves continued to build. The wind was from the north and we were on the south shore. It did not look good.......except for me, Mark and Bob.

    We talked the girls into leaving their damp, cold tent, and join us in Baldy's New Yorker where we could be dry and listen to music. They instantly agreed and we made our way a couple hundred feet to where the Chrysler was and slipped in.

    Marsha and I were engrossed in conversation. I know the others were too, and with all that humidity, the windows were fogging up. We were having a great time until someone knocked on the door and said Baldy wanted us.

    We had been in the car about an hour and a half, and Marsha had mentioned that the girls had really wanted to take a shower bad. They didn't like living in the tent, so I gave her our room key and told her they could take a hot shower in our room. I suppose she had her Mom Betty take them in, while we went to see what Baldy wanted.

    We got back to the pits to find that since the norther had not abated, there was no way it was going to by now. It would be impossible to race, and so we needed to start rigging down. In the meantime, all the other vehicles that could drive out had left the pits. The few remaining would have to be pulled out. From the pits to the top, it was nothing but a slick curving road. It would take industrial equipment to get the trailers out, and there were plenty around to be called upon.

    The heavy rain had passed, but the wind pressed on heavier and colder from the North as we rigged down, and a mist had kept us wet down. It didn't bother me at all though because my thoughts were of Marsha in a hot shower that I made available, and we would be able to visit some more after we got the boats, and trailers back up to the motel and gotten cleaned up ourselves. We had planned on spending Monday night before heading home, so all was looking good. I didn't care that we didn't get to race, because it was the first time I had been able to spend that much time with Marsha since I first saw her.

    I don't know where Marsha and her friends went after she came back and gave the key back, except her and LeeAnn had to get with their parents, wherever they were. We went back to the Holiday Inn and got cleaned up. We didn't see the girls anymore. We were disappointed in that, but I was feeling very good about Marsha. I kind of forgot about Pam. And Linda.

    These are results from the race....Saturday only/
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  9. #399
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    Back home, pitman Bob Burnham and I registered to begin attending freshman classes at Texas A&I University in Kingsville, Texas thirty miles south of Alice. Bob moved into a dorm, just across the street from the main classes on campus, and I elected to commute. Mark started his junior year at William Adams High School in Alice.

    We had been in a severe drought for some time. When Wesley Seal Dam was completed, and began to fill in 1958, they would only raise it to 88 feet above sea level, and not any higher for eight years. The dam was engineered and built to impound water up to 104 feet above sea level, but it was decided to not go higher than 94 feet. That last ten feet would have flooded much more ranch and farm land, but that didn't bother the authorities. It was the Southern Pacific rail line that would have to be moved at a tremendous expense that cause them to stop at the 94 foot level. The eight year moratorium was to allow oil and gas producers time to extract more oil and gas, then properly plug and abandon the wells. Not all were plugged and abandoned, however, most were.

    At the middle of summer I had taken Pam on a cruise up the lake in our twin Evinrude Thompson boat to see what it looked like with the water so far down. It was easy to navigate the old river because it was lined on both sides with massive dead live oak trees. It was a very impressive sight. Now, it was impossible to launch any big boats.

    In between Baldy's house at Pernitas Point and Calvin Cron's Boat landing across the way in Carmel hills was only a creek bed with several feet of water and spanning about twenty feet. Toward the right where Mark and I competed in our first race was Pop's. There was a little water in his basin, but from the launch ramp to where the canal opened up to the lake was just mud and potholes of water. The actual body of the lake ended at a caliche mound in front of Pop's that had been an island a few weeks earlier. When the lake was at the 88 foot level, this thirty foot diameter mound was completely submerged and deep enough the boats would pass over and never even know it was under them.

    So, back at school I had to wait until a weekend to go to Jack Chance's to work on the 4 carb Konig. I had to get this done in the next couple of week's because we had a race coming up In Alexandria, Louisiana the next month. Baldy normally did not like us to miss classes, but this was the National Outboard Association World Championships, and we already fell in love with the race course and officiating at Alexandria.
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  10. #400
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    I added additional info on the bottom of post number 380.

    I also found info regarding why we had to work on that 4 carb Konig on a different packing slip coming up next.



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