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

[Master Oil Racing Team]

This is a cover of my second Roostertail---March 1966. It was so alien....so cool. Color TV just became widespread over the airwaves, James Bond and Johnny Rivers were entertaining us with segret agent actions, Voyage to the Bottom of the Ocean had an underwater spaceship like submarine fighting giant squids, evil people and disasters all in color...and you could sense change...some good...some bad, in the air. The cover of Bill Holland in this fantastic looking hydro fascinated me the first time I saw the cover.

I looked at this cover many, many times during my early racing career and I kept thinking I will see Bill Holland at the races. He was living and raced in the same circuit I was just jumping into. However, he quit racing alky just when I was beginning. He had come to some of the races, but since he wasn't entered, neither he nor anyone else around thought about him being a big deal to a 16 year old kid who was fascinated by his boat and the nearly 106 mph it had been clocked at as reported in Roostertail. This was the March issue, so it would only be weeks until our first bonafide entry in an alky race.

As I mentioned I never saw him there or any race I ever attended, but at the Lone Star Boat Racing Association Reunion he and his wife Dortothy attended. He brought a couple of albums with him. I was so fascinated with his history, we talked at length. He was gracious enough to let me take his albums home to scan. At that time we were very busy in our business so it took awhile to get everything scanned and he was anxious to have his books back. One thing he showed me at the reunion were the concept drawings of this boat. There was not only the drawing of the boat on the cover, but another one with two engines. I cannot remember what the speed goal of that rig was, however, the drawings were very exceptional, and he didn't want to lose them.

We had numerous telephone conversations while I was scanning the photos and posting the story of Bill Holland here. Our business was really booming then so I did not have time to finish the Bill Holland story when the computer I had scanned everything on quit being able to send over the internet. It works now, but Andrew has commandeered that room and I very seldom can work in it because he has all his music stuff plugged in and one or more of my printers, recorders, scanners unplugged and it's a hassle to track down all the wiring. It's a full day's project.

I really enjoyed my conversations with Bill and was very upset to hear when he passed away. He was a very, very nice man. And very talented with whatever project he took up. I talked at length with his second wife Dorothy after he passed away. They had both known each other from racing, but it took Ray Yates' matchmaking to put a stop to their gloom and get them together and back into the boat racing fraternity. A son of Bill had contacted me several months after Bill's death mentioning that I had been posting Bill's history and he was going to help me with any additional info I needed. I was having numberous E mail troubles back then going on for more than a year, and I lost his E mail and name. I'm hoping he may pass through BRF again and recontact me so we can finish the Bill Holland thread.

ADD: The doodling on this cover was by my sister Brenda. Baldy kept the Roostertails by the telephone hanging on a wall next to the regrigerator in the kitchen and directly across from the grill on the island bar at our house in Alice. Mark, Jan and I had "our" phone hanging on the wall in the hallway between the girls and the boys rooms. Brenda would use the kitchen phone if Baldy wasn't home when she was talking to her boyfriend, and she would doodle while she listened. I was pissed when I saw what she did to MY Roostertail.

ADD: The reason Baldy kept the Roostertail there was so he could call somebody new when he saw something that he wanted to know about, and when he got home and started cooking, the Roostertail would be handy.