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

  1. #541
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    In the meantime, Bud Turcotte helped Mark and I testing the boats. We all went riding in Mark's Continental....taking turns, and took water skiing and wake surfing breaks. We all were in the spring semester of school, so we did all that stuff in the weekends.

    The girls from St. Mary's found that their friends liked very much to come down to spend the weekend in South Texas, and their parents were cool with that. As a consequence, I started dating Ginger Lowery, and...we always hauled off in a car or two to a dance somewhere within thirty to fourty miles away. The close ones were country and western, and we didn't listen to, dance to, or weren't welcome to those dances.

    Jimi Hendrix had come on the scene with "Hey Joe", "Fire" and a little bit later "Purple Haze". It was shortly to be named the psychedelic era. This was the very beginning of it in our part of the world. I removed the dome light in my red and white Dodge Polara and installed a red light. We would sit in the car with the AM radio turned on illuminating us in a red glow while listening to Vanilla Fudge, The Doors, The Byrds, The Animals, and Jimi Hendrix.



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    The next batch of letters was from Scott Smith all dated the same day. I'm pretty sure the copies of specs were all in the same bunch. Check out the date of the drawing of the "can" exhaust. I hope the specs can be of use to collectors. We all appreciate the long hours and efforts of all those who have done a fantastic job of restoring motors of all makes and models, as well as boats and other historical racing paraphenalia.



  3. #543
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    I don't know exactly when all the motors and parts from Scott Smith got to us. I remember though getting packages in and looking at all the different stuff, and how much there was. It was like being a kid in a candy store. We had little cardboard boxes and plastic containers to put the parts in. Scott sent us instructions, and apparently there were more improvements on the new FA's as well as VBCD's since being recently introduced.

    ADD: I had to remove the two drawings, turn them sideways and add them back in so they would be easier to remove, so now they are out of order, but at least you don't have to get a crick to read them.
    Attached Images Attached Images



  4. #544
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    Our first couple of years we ran props that we got with the motors. We had a couple of Kamic props that Curtis Mihalcheck sold along with the A deflector Merc, and a couple more with the B deflector from David and Joe Fuqua. When we started buying Konigs from Bryan Marine, they sold us some Michigan props that they thought would work good, and they worked better than my driving skills. Baldy also bought three props from Michigan, and one was brass. I don't remember, or even know why. We just ran A and B then, and I don't ever recall racing with it. I guess we must have tested it though. Baldy studied everything we did, and I recorded some of the information. Baldy was gaining more knowledge as we went along, and he knew the importance of propellers in winning races.

    In one of our used Konig purchases, either through Bryan Marine, or all the stuff we got from North Carolina, we ended up with a "Smith" propeller. I can't remember where we got it, but there were seven or eight props in the deal. One that was supposed to be stainless steel had a lot of rust spots. It looked stainless, and I polished the rust out, but it would always show up in flea sized rust spots. One that looked too small to race with was the Smith. We were told that it was a "jewel". We did not know anything about Papa Smith at that time other than we heard his name, and that he made the best props. It turned out to be an excellent prop once we got a hydro sized for an A motor.



  5. #545
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    Baldy knew that we needed a "Prop Man" to help us get ahead. He had talked to Papa Smith, but there was no way he could build us any props any time soon. Besides all the racers he had been building props for before, his boss, H.B. Marioneaux wanted his sons Lucien and Bruce to have whatever they needed to be competitive. And that wasn't even his main job. Papa Smith worked as a tool and die maker for mr. Maiouneaux. How Papa did all he did in those days was a marvel. He and Mama were guests of honor at all the races they attended I suppose, because I never heard nothing but praise, and honor for them. (Except one time two old aging bulls fought, but that's for later, and in no way demenishes either character. It's a good story though.).

    Baldy had probably met Floyd Hopkins at the first race we attended at Alexandria in 1966, and again in 1967. As I have mentioned, I didn't hang around the people Baldy did when I first started racing, so I don't know who he met when. I only know that at some time later, we were associated with certain boat racers in some way or another.

    I do remember that Baldy had talked to Papa Smith about making us some props , and I do remember Baldy couldn't wait. I'm not sure when, but I think that Baldy had talked to Floyd Hopkins about building us some props. Floyd had raced A and B, and for some reason quit racing. He like the people and alky racing though, and wanted to continue on. He was a good mechanic and started working on other boat racers motors in Louisiana. I'm not sure when he started his fledgling prop business, but the first ad I saw in "The ROOSTERTAIL" was in 1968. It could have been after the last race at Alexandria that Baldy commissioned Floyd to make us some props, and I believe that our relationship started then. If not, I know for sure he started building them for us in 1968, and he built a lot.

    Transitioning from the FA, FB, and FC's to the more powerful FA and the VBCD rotary valve engines meant that most of our props were not the best ones for most race courses. We had to do a lot of testing and give feedback to Floyd. At first he sent us props that he thought would work on the motors, but Floyd was also just making what he thought would work. It turned out that Floyd had to come to Baldy's while we tested. We went through a lot of props. I'm not sure exactly when it occurred, but Clayton Elmer and I were running a lot of the same classes and we were different heights and weights. Clayton was taller and as a consequence heavier than I was, plus had more experience and knew how to use his height and weight to an advantage, especiallly in runabouts.

    In testing, we found different pitches and maybe even diameter worked better for one of us than the other. Clayton was still driving the Morton boats and I was driving Marchetti hydros and DeSilva runabouts. To keep it clear, when Floyd made a prop for a certain motor based on the same pitch and diameter, but with some slight changes here or there he would mark the prop with his code plus CE for Clayton Elmer and WB for Wayne Baldwin. A few years ago when Clayton was still working for Rinker, he told me one of the young guys working there showed him a prop he had bought and it was a Hopkins with CE stamped in it. Clayton tried to buy it, but the kid said it was his best prop and wouldn't sell it.



  6. #546
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    It was about this time that Mark and I were returning from a cruise on the lake in his Continental. Mark was driving. We entered the cove of Pop's the little marina down from Baldy's at an idle. Pop's was like all other marina's in that they had posted a three mile per hour sign, but Mark's boat idled a little faster than that. No problem though, except when he pushed in the kill switch. We were about forty or fifty feet from the dock, and there was enough momentum to allow us to coast up to the launching ramp and tie off while we got the boat. This time though Mark panicked and hollered, "I can't kill it!". There was no reverse. Only in and out on the V drive. Mark didn't think about taking it out, and it was too late to try to turn around and get back into open water. We would hit the wooden boards bolted to the concrete sides of the launching ramp no matter what we did.

    I jumped in the back and pulled all the sparkplug wires off and that killed the engine. Then we coasted in and crunched into a two by twelve. The cracking of the board was very loud, but because it gave way, the nose of the Continental was not damaged. Like I mentioned earlier, it was a heavy and very well built boat. The board did not break, but merely got some cracks and sprang back into place.

    There was no other boat traffic or people trying to launch or retrieve boats so we were not in anybody's way. First thing we both wanted to know was why Mark couldn't kill the engine, so without even tying the boat off, we started looking over the engine. Neither one of us were good mechanics, but the first place we looked was the magneto, and there laid the answer. The black ground wire was fastened to a bolt at the base of the magneto and it had broken off at the terminal. The problem solved, we proceeded to take the boat out of the water and make repairs.

    We went back to Baldy's to get the tools and a new terminal then drove back to the marina to make the repairs. Baldy's was between a quarter and half mile west of the Marina by water, but a couple of miles winding up, down and around the hills overlooking Lake Corpus Christi. We wanted to make the repairs, then go out and test before we put the boat up.

    Having reconnected the ground wire, we started to replace all the plug wires I had pulled off. Trouble was, they were all the same length. If you remember back some previous posts, Mark had replaced all the plug wires and boots with new wires recommended by Steve Vickers. Mark had wanted to make sure he had enough wire, so he divided the length by eight and cut them the same length before replacing each wire one at a time. The problem was the original wires were cut different lengths so that it would be much easier to identify which ones went to which cylinder. In our case that could not be done, and Mark did not put any kind of tape or markings to identify where they went. We could make some guesses based on location of where the wires originated, but after several tries, we gave up. Had we been more mechanically inclined maybe we could have figured it out, but instead we went back to Baldy's and called Steve Vickers. It must have been a Saturday or Sunday and Steve was off, because he left from Alice right away and was at Pop's with his tools within the hour.

    Steve gave us some teasing as he quickly identified where each wire properly belonged and in short order the boat was backed into the water and fired up. Mark and Steve idled out into the open lake while I stayed on shore. In case there was something more than just the ground wire and they quit, I could go back to Baldy's and fetch our MFG to tow them in.

    When Mark was about a hundred yards out, he punched the accelerator to the floor as he always did, but surprisingly this time the L88 Chevy engine did not backfire as the boat broke over. It ran like a spotted a$$ ape for about two hundred feet then blew a spark plug out of the cylinder head. The plug shot off out into the lake somewhere taking the boot along with it.

    Mark shut down and idled back to Pop's where in short order we had the boat back on the trailer. I don't know how automotive cylinders are numbered, but the plug was either the second or third from the front on the driver's side. Steve guessed that two plug wires had been crossed the whole time, but was close enough in firing order that the Chevy motor still ran good. That would have been the reason for the backfire every time the boat broke over, but still had a good top speed. Steve also thought maybe there had been excessive carbon buildup in the cylinder that "shot" the plug out, and after all the wires were properly connected, the one cylinder had excessive pressure buildup when it fired when it was supposed to and the threads stripped out of the head. Don't know if that's exactly the way it went or not, but it made sense.

    Mark towed the boat back to Alice where in a day or two Steve had put a helicole in and all plug wires trimmed and labeled. We mistakenly thought maybe we might see ninety miles per hour, but that never happened. It might have been a little faster, but I don't recall that it was. It just quit backfiring coming out of the hole, and it could have broke over a little quicker, but that was about it. As far as I can remember, Mark only ran the prop that came with the boat. We might have played around with it a little and improved the performance some by testing other props, but I don't ever remember doing that.



  7. #547
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    Baldy was busy with The Master Oil, Emmord's Marine, Barbon Corporation and the main money machine...Alice Specialty Company. The long lasting effects from Hurricane Buelah had ended and the oilfield in South Texas was starting to come around again. Baldy and Joe Hendricks were spending a lot of time together working with surveyors and deciding how to plat the lots at Barbon Estates, the 534 acre lakeside subdivision.

    It was divided into Section 1 and Section 2 as the road wound around about two miles of lakefront property. It was further subdivided into lots and parcels A and B. Each section had the numbered lots A on the waterfront and the numbered lots in B on the land side of the road. As Joe and Baldy considered how much property would make up each lot, it took a lot of study because of the winding nature of not only the road, but the shoreline, the rises and dips, and the drainageways from surrounding hills. The basic concept was that all waterfront property would have one hundred feet of waterfront. in the cases that the property was on the inside curve of the shoreline, it could not be done and the property was wedge shaped. These were mostly where drainage from the hills ran down to the water, so they surveyed a generous portion by the road, and priced them so that an owner on one side or the other would buy it for more space. There was really no other way to make such a property attractive. To this day, these are the properties that have been bought by the adjacent landowner, or a speculator and do not have structures on them.

    While this was going on Baldy had the welding shop at Alice Specialty build two cylinders about twenty inches in diameter and six to eight feet long with domed caps welded on each end. They were partially filled with sandblasting sand or some other weighting material before the top dome was welded, the a dozen or so small hooks welded all around the top dome. The vessels were then white blasted with sand, primed and painted with a polyurethane white paint. These would serve as the buoys permanently anchored and surveyed to serve as the radius for the turning buoys at the Barbon race course. The little hooks were to hang small red reflectors to catch the attention of boaters on the water at night.

    The buoys were low in the water, and not natural. There were lots of submerged trees that could cause problems, and well as many that were above water, but no one expected to come across something akin to a non explosive mine floating just above the surface. He just did not think of the consequences of serious injury. A boat should not have any serious damage if it struck one because it would bounce away even if struck directly, and it was white with reflectors. Boaters should run with a spotlight at night lighting the way like he always did. He didn't think about dumb kids like us skiing in the moonlight and watching the skiers rather than where we were going. Besides that....nobody ever drove a boat back into the cove at Barbon in those days except a few fishermen with aluminum boats and two cylinder outboard engines. There were absolutely no houses, no pleasure boating and no skiing because that was the southwestern portion of the lake and nobody knew what may lay under the surface. There were lots of place known on the lake to be full of big trunks and tree limbs just below the surface. Barbon had yet to be explored.



  8. #548
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    Having done some research after more talking with Clayton Elmer, Joe Rome and found a couple of newspaper articles pasted six pages past 1968, I was able to put a fix on a couple of stories I could not place. The first one would be the Donald Duck motor that I thought happened in November 1967, but records of the races and pictures proved that was not the case, and an old staple story Joe Rome told, but didn't remember when.

    I had set up the story about when we got our first rotary valve Konigs, and Jack Chance went to work replacing the Konig ignition system with coils Baldy, Jack or someone else had told us was superior. I was still having problems of getting wet down then, and shields over the carbs had not stopped the problem. We also knew that the motorcycle batteries weren't holding up as advertised. We did lot's of cleaning, gapping and changing of points, but the one thing we never experimented with was coils.....except for one time. Somewhere way many pages back I think I told about the new super duper coils that had to be mounted on rubber insulators and grounded. I wired them as instructions said and instantly the wires from the motor to the off/on switch started smoking. I had melted skin branded on my fingers when I pulled the hot, melting insulated wires from the battery.

    This time, the coils would be more reliable, and better than the one's that came with the Konig. I mentioned about how Jack had to mount them on the front boss where the serial numbers were usually stamped.

    We got the new rotary valve motors in March 1968. The first race of the year was in front of Baldy's new homestead, but there was no house their yet....only a judges stand and lots of good pit area. The race was April 7, so Jack had no time to go through the motors and test before the races like he always did. He just installed the new coils on the motors and got everything else race ready.

    The only problem was that Jack mixed up Clayton's C Konig and my D Konig. They all looked the same and when Jack stamped the motor class on the block he did it just backwards. I don't recall how we did in the races, but apparently Clayton ran away with the C hydro and runabout running a D Konig. I did not do good at all in D hydro. I don't know where Clayton finished in D hydro, but Joe Bowdler was very dominant with his new Quincy looper. He beat Clayton Elmer driving the Konig that Clayton had outrun Jerry Waldman with at Alex only a few months earlier. Joe Bowdler and team had kept their new Quincy Looper under cover until each heat was to begin. I have a spark of rememberance about that, but only that it happened. I need to talk to Clayton again. Anyway....we ran the races, and I do not remember anything about the races except the stories told later about mixing up the motors.

    Clayton blew away the competition with the D Konig stamped "C", but I didn't do so good with my very first "D" Konig....and it was a rotary valve. It was probably made more apparent with Joe Bowdler beating Clayton so handily with his new Quincy Looper, but it sparked this comment in the pits after the races were over. Baldy told Jack Chance "Don't do anything to Clayton's D....but that C of Wayne's is a dog."

    It wasn't until after Jack pulled the motor down that he discovered he had the C Konig stamped "D" When he went to correct the mistake, he used a 3/8 inch stamp and hammered a deep "D" over the 1/8" inch "C", but it was not stamped evenly, so he moved over a fraction and hit the hammer hard and stamped another deep "D" with the 1/4" stamp. So there were two large D stamps side by side on the block with the first one being deep on the top side of the D.

    This was the race that that happened. The very first race at Barbon, and the road was not paved yet. The rest of this story will appear in order as an addendum tommorrow

    ADD: About a year ago Joe Rome called me while I was on a lease road on the way to a job. I told Joe I had to flip on my 4 wheel drive as I skidded around a corner. The caliche road was slick and I was slipping and sliding for several miles. I asked him if he ever drove on slippery caliche and he said "Oh yeah.......it was at Barbon when we raced down there." Joe has a very good memory about things to do with boat racing, but he is bad at placing a year on when something happened. I told him "It couldn't have been at Barbon, you were never there until after the roads were paved." I was sure that the first race held in the cove at Barbon was the second half of the 1968 NOA World Championships which had been blown out in Forest Lake, Minnesota. Joe insisted that the incident happened on a caliche road in Barbon. I was somewhat confused because when Joe remembers something in that kind of detail, he is generally correct.

    A few hours after speaking to Clayton Elmer, it hit me that what Joe had told me a year earlier had happened on the first race at Barbon and the road was compacted, but not yet paved. I asked Joe to tell me again about what he said happen and where it occurred. I had a particular curve in mind that I thought it might be. Joe described it exactly, and it was the curve I suspected. The road was less than two full lanes. He went down into a dip that curved to the left, then up the hill and a switchback curve to the right that starts back downhill. It was right in that curve that Joe's car lost traction and the back end started coming around. He was able to steer into it and get back under control before skidding off the road and down into the brush. But he had a good enough fright for him to remember in good detail. Not quite as bad as ice, but driving on a slick, crowned caliche road can be hairy. So that solves the mystery on Joe's driving on caliche in Barbon.

    Another story that Joe has told many times over the years also took place at that race. It was the first time they stayed at the Ranch Motel in Mathis. Mathis is just on the other side of the lake and Lake Corpus Christi had been called Lake Mathis until the new dam was built and raised to an elevation of 94 feet.

    Mathis was not very big and had limited places to stay. The only decent one was the Ranch Motel with about thirty rooms. It is still there and about the same as it was back then. It is made of cinder block, and I've never been inside but the walls back then were painted over cinder block. The floor was colored cement, and the furnishings were all spartan. It was nothing fancy, but it was clean and a place to sleep. As far as I know it's still like that on the inside except maybe they might have added carpeting, and new beds, etc.

    Louis Williams had booked a room there for himself Joe Rome and their constant companion who went to all the races with them Alvin Roddy . Roddy as he was always called, was a very nice guy, but he never went anywhere without a bottle. He never got belligerent, but he had over the years found himself behind bars when he caught the attention of cops while drinking in public.

    They had checked into the Ranch Motel at night. A rollaway bed was brought in for Roddy and it was right up against one of the cinder block walls The next morning as Roddy began to wake up, his head was right up against and facing the wall. He jerked up catching the attention of Louis and Louis asked "What's the matter with you Roddy?" Roddy replied "I thought I was in jail again."

    These were just some of the things that happened at the race I had forgotten about.

    ADD: The other race that I had forgotten about was one that never took place. I don't remember the official name. Perhaps I can find out, but I remember it as the "Houston Ship Channel Race". POWERBOAT'S Dick DeBartolo wrote a funny piece about the annual event a few years later. The best I can remember was that it was an open event. I believe Joe Rome told me one year the water was calm and a 7 liter hydro was there and back before the outboards even got spaced out. I was there in the spring of 1968, some date in March, to be a co-pilot for Johnny Long (Johnny R. Long here on BRF).

    Johnny started dating my sister Brenda sometime in very late 1967 or early 1968. Brenda was also going out with Sandy Tullis and Martin Spickerman. She really didn't have a steady boyfriend at that time and went with guys who liked to take her to country and western dances....specifically Al Dean and the Allstars who played in all the best C&W dancehalls within 70 miles of Alice, Texas. I never really thought of Johhny as a dancer, but I can remember one afternoon Brenda telling me "I've got a date with this guy. He is a boat racer. Can you talk to him while I'm getting ready?" I agreed, and after the appointed time Johnny showed up and I had boats in the garage on stands and I was working on one of them. Brenda had told Johnny her brother raced, and so he knew in advance. That gave both of them something to talk about later, so Johnny immediately came over to where I was.

    Johnny, and his brother whom I met many years later were OMC guys, but Johnny was fascinated by the Konigs, hydros and runabouts. He was an OPC racer back in the days when it was Outboard Pleasure Craft. We talked and talked while Brenda was getting ready, and Brenda ended up waiting on him. Johnny came over quite regularly to talk to me after that, and was really into talking boat racing as well as wanting to go out with Brenda. He may also have done a little PR work because Baldy intimidated him. As a father should. Brenda has questioned me the first time I met Johnny how I liked him and what I thought. I was just a dumb stupid kid, and I told her I liked him, because I did. We both liked racing boats, and even though we didn't race the same kind, we were both outboarders, and our Dad was a partner in a Marine business with OMC motors as the headliner. Baldy liked Johnny too.

    So this business of the Houston Ship Channel race put on by the Houston Gulf Coast Marathon Association race comes up. Johnny entered and asked me to be his co-driver. I only had run the one OPC race at Rockport I chronicled earlier where we had finished second place overall, but I was willing to do another one. This would be in a V Bottom boat, and I am guessing that we had a 75 hp Evinrude. Johnny may have told me about the rig we would race, but since I never saw it, I can't remember.

    Why was it that I never saw the boat and motor you ask? Maybe I did and it was in the fog, but Johnny never walked us over to it. We had met at the pits just south of IH10 just past the Monmouth exit. That was the first and last time I exited there, but I remember it because it was just before we made the Highlands exit to race at Baytown.

    There were a lot of barges in and around the Monmouth exit. I think we exited then must have made a sharp right because there was a large asphalt lot, many boats and a launching ramp to the west. Northwest and and backed up toward the foundations of IH10 as it passed overhead was the metal building that served as the clubhouse. It was nice and big and stretched about 200 feet southeast from the end below the freeway. It was early morning and the clubhouse was the only thing not socked in fog. That was only because we found it, and it was too big to miss.

    There were lots of racers on hand that found it too. There were many boats scattered across the lot on trailers. Most of them I did not know. That was the first time Baldy and I met many of the OPC, and a few inboard guys that would become our friends.

    We were now working with Floyd Hopkins with our props, but Baldy had heard about Baumann Propellers out of Houston. A lot of the Baytown Boat Racing Association members ran Baumann Propellers. Baldy had talked to Louie Baumann and we had several propellers. The difference was Floyd came down to south Texas when we were testing, and there was no way Louie could leave his lucrative commercial propworks building 24 and 36 inch props for boats plying the Houston ship channel. But Louie and Baldy hit it off, and were instant friends. They had only talked on the telephone together until the Houston Ship Channel race, then they actually met. It was the first time I met Louie myself, even though I wasn't sure he met me as a kid.

    I don't recall the exact starting time, but the drivers meeting was in that building very early in the morning. I think it was around seven a.m. Fog was ruling. We all brought our helmets and life Jackets for approval. Went through the course rules, the course itself, safety procedures, starting procedures, starting time for the various classes, and then after everything else that could be talked about was discussed we were dismissed for a time to be called when the fog lifted. For helicopters flying to the platforms it was called "Socked in".

    And that's what we were, so we made the best of it. I don't remember all the officials that were there at the time, but I do recall Gus Knight and Pete Alaniz. Gus was all over the pits keeping things smooth and I can remember Pete up near the northern edge of the asphalt where Louis Baumann had his inboard hydro parked. Behind it and fifty feet above was Interstate 10. David Alaniz was sitting in the cockpit and Louis was interviewing him like he had just made a run. I was very impressed. Louie had walked Baldy and I among others out there to talk to David. He asked David some questions and David answered. Didn't last long, but I met David's Dad Pete then. I didn't actually meet David himself until four years later, but I always remembered him sitting in Louie Baumann's inboard hydro.

    And we waited on the fog. At the first driver's meeting we were told that we would get the signal to start backing down the ramps when the fog started lifting. The smallest classes would start first after everyone was in the water. Then we waited some more.

    After a couple of hours without the fog abating in the least, it was decided that the race would hold off for another hour or two. We walked around, and talked around, and Baldy got to meet some people that would help him in the future. I don't know if that's where he first met Jack Waite, but it could have been.

    Baldy had a meeting on Monday and he stayed as long as he could for the race to begin. He left around 1:00 P.M. I would have left, but I wanted to experience this race, and having the opportunity I hung around with Johhny waiting. The fog was like it gets further down the coast sometimes, and just hangs in thick all day long. It is rare for it to do so this far inland, but it did and sometime in the afternoon the officials called the race since there was no way to finish in the daylight even if the fog cleared.

    Baldy had already left. He knew he could only see me away and not be there for the finish. I gathered up my lifejacket and helmet and gave my farewell to Johnny, thanked him for the opportunity, then headed south through the dark roads of US Highway 59. It was a very lonely stretch back then. On a Sunday night it was very lonely. Not a full highway, but a series of improved stretches between quiet towns. When I got into Bay City, Texas the Beatles song "Lady Madonna" came on the radio. I felt so lonely, and it was still a long way from home. That song has always brought me back to that same place and time. Sometimes in boat racing, there is a sense of despair or depression. You don't win.....lose....fail.....or even compete. It's just a feeling that boat racer's can have on a dark lonely road home
    Last edited by Master Oil Racing Team; 11-03-2013 at 06:19 PM. Reason: new info



  9. #549
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    It was a couple of years before we started making the trek to Lakeland, and we still only raced NOA and Lone Star sanctioned races. So our first race that we got on the water to race in 1968 was a Beaumont, Texas on the Neches River during the Neches River Festival. I'm not sure if it was April 20 and 21st or the following weekend, but I'm pretty sure it was the earlier date. Louis Williams was always the lead man in the Beaumont races, and they never failed to attract a good field of boats and huge crowds because the action was good, and it was front row seats for everyone. Plus with all the tall pines and other trees, there was shade everywhere.

    We began as normal, leaving the house at Alice in the morning having packed everything the night before. The fuel was always stored at the Alice Specialty warehouse on Highway 281 on the southern outskirts of Alice. I usually got pretty sweaty mixing the fuel as the drums were stored in a wire caged room with heavy wooden doors, and no breeze. Now that we were running ABCD hydro and ABC runabout I had to mix about four cans of fuel. Batteries were all charged, and we left the last one on the trickle charger until we were ready to leave.

    Since we had our shop and plenty of spare parts, and I was now capable of doing regular maintenance and repairs on the motors we didn't always stop at Jack Chance's on the way to Beaumont. In that case we would take state Highway 357 through Orange Grove, Mathis, Tynan to Skidmore where we would pick up U.S. 181 to take us to Beeville where U.S. Highway 59 passed through on the way from Laredo to Houston. Back then it took about five or five and a half hours to get to Houston because of passing through downtown of numerous towns. South Texas had no interstates then, and no bypasses. The only loop in south Texas was in San Antonio.

    From Beeville we went through Berclair, Goliad, Fannin, Victoria, Telferner, Inez, Edna, Ganado, Louise, El Campo, Pierce, Wharton, Hungerford, Kendleton, Beasly, , Joe Rome's hometown of Rosenberg, Richmond, and Sugarland before reaching the outskirts of Houston. An action movie called Sugarland Express originated at this town.

    After getting through Houston, we got on IH 10 east just east of downtown Houston. From there on we breezed past the edges of cities until we got to Beaumont. The speed limit was 70 during the day and 65 at night, but Baldy had to pay special attention near Winnie close to halfway between Houston and Beaumont. It was one of the most notorious speedtraps in Texas and Baldy was sometimes heavy footed. That part of the trip ran about a hour and a half.

    We started staying at the Rodeway Inn just on the northern access road of IH 10 because it was easier to get to and closer to the Magnolia Street exit than the Holiday Inn was. There had been some very heavy flooding in East Texas during the previous week, but the weather for that weekend was good.



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    Here is a listing of some of the drivers that were most likely racing that weekend.

    Beaumont area Louis Williams Jr., Mel Ocker, Scott Edmundsen, Ed Eastham, Jr., Curtis Dumesnil, Jr (seems like a lot of Jr.s in Beaumont , Jerry Nunez,

    Houston/Baytown area Clayton Elmer, Bruce Nicholson, Charley Bailey, P.G. Stepleton, Roland Pruett, Ray Yates, Doug Hooks, Marshall Rushing,

    Central Texas Freddie Goehl and Deannie Montgomery.

    San Antonio area Raymond Jeffries, Artie Lund, Joe Bowdler

    Corpus Christi area Dan Waggoner, Steve Jones, Wayne Baldwin, Tommy and Alex Weatherbee, Larry Baker, Richard Frye

    North Texas Joe and Denny Henderson, Craig Lawrence, Phil Crown, Ed Harrison, James "Fitz" Fitzgibbon

    Louisiana Reles LeBlanc, Earl Godcheaux, Jim Mouton, Robert and Ronnie Weeks, Don Nichols,

    There were others just about to quit, or just about to start racing, but this would have been the approximate roster of drivers racing that weekend of the Neches River Festival.

    Most likely Red Adair and Richard Hatteburg were also there running SS or SK boats with about six or seven other flatbottom racers, and the Golden Triagle area around Beaumont was the largest concentration of inboard hydros in Texas. They usually fielded one or two classes of the smaller inboards.



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