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

[Master Oil Racing Team]

#4. My parts man and best friend Joe Rome explained that to me last year. The exhaust had a lining in it that would give up after enough time and heat and collapse causing first a choke in the system, the burnout at the turnpipe out of the exhaust. As far as what choice we had, my girlfriends Dad sold New Yorker's, Newport's , Barracuda's and later on Dart's and Charger's. She was a Southern girl, and very sweet. And the Chrysler and Dodge products pumped out lots of power back then. That was the final days of muscle cars. GTX, GTO, etc. We still had respect for Detroit back then.

#5 I'm not sure what you refer to as insufferable leftists as far as the story goes.

#6 I didn't understand exactly what you were referring to about Mouse Milk when we were talking. I kind of understood a little bit, but not much. I could comment regarding comparisons with Master Oil and Mouse Milk if I had a better understanding.

#7 Bud and I were very good at that. In fact, we were so good I am almost afraid to admit it. Because it's not like we were drinking Dr.Peppers the whole trip and tossing them every fifteen minutes and had lot's of practice. It's just how uncannilyy accurate we were with a couple of bottles in a three and a half hour drive. I am a very firm advocate against doing that now, and have been for four decades. I taught my kids not to toss things out of a car. But, Baldy's is about what we did, and that was what kids did back then. Send me an email of your poem Steve. Maybe I can turn it into a song.

Thanks for your comments Steve. I have very much enjoyed your Ketzer thread, and I found more things to send you, although it will be several days. As far a messing up my thread, that doesn't happen. But, in fact I am going to take this opportunity myself for a little diversion.

No one in my family reads any of this because they know my stories. My Son in Law doesn't want me to post things about my Grand Son. He doesn't was a big exposure. So I will not post his name, or anything about him, but I can't help but looking at his pictures every day. Here are some over the last six or eight months.

Well...I couldn't do it because none I looked at were sized properly, and some would have to be edited first because they were sideways. Maybe I'll do one before I sign off

[Ketzer]

Wayne, I guess we never pitted close enough to you guys to get a free sample of Master Oil, or we would have tried it. As aircraft mechanics, we did use Mouse Milk where high heat was a factor: exhaust pipe slip joints, and on the turbocharger waste gate butterfly shaft. (A pilot would come in all fretting about “wild manifold pressure fluctuations.” After checking the induction and exhaust systems for looseness or other trouble, we’d squirt Mouse Milk on the butterfly shaft, work it back and forth with a wrench, and say, “Try that.” The shaft would coke up, stick, break free, coke up, etc., which caused the fluctuations 90% of the time). Anyway, I was just curious if Master Oil would have worked just as well.

Great picture!

[Master Oil Racing Team]

We didn't just hand out samples to whoever pitted next to us or nearby Steve. If Baldy heard about a problem freeing up a part, or something he thought Master Oil could help, he would give them a spray can or metal 8 oz can. Then he would explain how to use it, especially if heat was required. If you or your Dad had mentioned anything about airplanes and "Mouse Milk" Baldy would have sent you home with one or more samples of THE MASTER OIL to give it a try.

Boeing out of Seattle bought a LOT of Master Oil at one time. They bought so much that the manufacturer's representative approached Baldy about buying his company. I will not mention the name, but it is part of the story that will come up much later. They had found lots of good uses for it, but one was that the machines that polished aluminum were able to polish two sides at once. The polishing media didn't clog up, and they were able to skip a couple of steps in the polishing.

Except for extreme situations, THE MASTER OIL might seem to first time users an expensive oil. It became so prized, hoarded and cherished when people found that they could salvage parts they thought were lost due to extreme corrosion and or welded together because of electrolosis of dissimilar metals. What manufacturers found was that on extremely hard or very soft metals, THE MASTER OIL was a genius. That in a nutshell is why THE MASTER OIL never became mainstream, and is like a "CULT" oil. Since it was never nationally distributed by common retailers (specialty outlets serving the oil industry, refining, offshore drilling, etc were another story), the only people that know about it hoard it. I know friends that have kept a can for twenty or thirty years because they didn't know if they could ever get another can when they especially needed it.

I will send you a can Steve. Try it and tell me what you think.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

It was sometime after the 1968 racing season was over that Alex Wetherbee and his son Steve came to Baldy's house at Pernitas Point. I don't remember Alex's wife or daughter being there. It may have been a gathering of a few of the South Texas boat racers. Steve Jones made all the gatherings, and Dan Waggoner, his wife Blanche and Son David would always be together. Clayton Elmer, his wife Doris, and kids Paula and Donny would have been there. That close to hunting season, Jack Chance was always down. Jack would go to the hunting lease twenty minutes west to get everything prepared for opening day. I don't remember that particular evening, but Steve Wetherbee does. It may have just been him and his Dad Alex. What Steve recalls is that Baldy made a cheese dip with Velveeta Cheese, Rotel tomatoes, and had added crumbled sausage. Steve had never tasted anything like that before, especially with the sausage, and it became ingrained in his memory. He has served it to his guests many times since then.

[Ketzer]

Thanks, Wayne! I'm going to be hanging out at the mailbox awaiting the Master Oil. As soon as it comes in, I'm going to rub some on my knees.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Can't hurt Steve. Way back at the beginning of this thread when I mentioned Baldy being in the Aloe Vera business, one of the Aloe products was a skin moisturizer, the base oil for the moisturizer was the same base used in the patented MX237 THE MASTER OIL. It is an organic oil and was chosen for some of its properties, not the least of which it has the same ph as the human skin. The girls in our pit crew would spray it all over themselves to help with a tan during the downtime between waterskiing, racing, surfing and riding motorcycles. When Baldy got out of the Aloe Vera business a chemist and friend who worked with him said the oil was not widely known outside of used for cooking in Japan and had some very interesting and unique properties that could be enhanced with some other harmless additives. It would be a very safe oil, and that's what got Baldy's attention, and it got started from there.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Back to the story:

We were somewhere in the mishmash between the end of racing, school, and starting to test before the next season of racing. I did a lot of traveling back to Baldy's on some weekends where Jack Chance was there bringing stuff to Alice, or most of the time to the Lake House at Pernitas Point, and we would go deer or quail hunting, or I would go see Ginger if she was home in Houston. Mostly it was going home.

The time is around November and December 1968. Nixon had trounced Hubert Humphrey for President of the United States. It was at this same time that the FCC authorized a very limited pay television experiment to begin. Restrictions were high. Limits of broadcast were very strict and tightly bounded to 35 miles.

The top TV shows then were Rowan & Martin's "Laugh In", "Bonanza", "Gomer Pyle USMC", "Julia" (which I have no idea what that show was), "Mission Impossible", "The Dean Martin Show", "Gunsmoke" "My 3 Sons", and "The Ed Sullivan Show".

Charts of December 8, 1968 listed these as the top songs
LOVE CHILD Diana Ross and the Supremes, ABRAHAM, MARTIN AND JOHN, Dion, FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE Stevie Wonder, STORMY Classics IV, THOSE WERE THE DAYS Mary Hopkins, BOTH SIDES NOW Judy Collins, CHEWY CHEWY (Yuk) WITCHITA LINEMAN Glenn Campbell, I LOVE HOW YOU LOVE ME Bobby Vinton and HEY JUDE The Beatles.


"Hey Jude" displaced "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum as my favorite song.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

With the purchase of all those Konigs in 1968 plus parts, Baldy answered Scott Smith's ad in the Roostertail and we became Konig dealers. It all started because we had pitted next to Freddie Goehl and Arlen Crouch at Sunset Lake just north of Corpus Christi, Texas in 1965. Sunset Lake was so perfect as a body of water and total lake control, that at one time NOA had considered it a permanent World Championship race course.

We had been buy everything through Bryan Marine, but Baldy got hooked up with Scott Smith at the end of 1967. We were still friends with Freddie and Arlen though and although Mark was now running a flatbottom with an L88 Chevy engine, we still had contact with Freddie and Arlen.

It was the beginning of hunting season, and Freddie and Arlen came down to Baldy's to visit and hunt. Barbon was still being surveyed and the road being built. Baldy has his house site picked out, but it was a long time before it would be surveyed and started upon.

Baldy had started cooking supper. For some reason we headed over from Baldy's house at Pernitas Point to where the race course was. It was there, but the house was to be there more than a year later. I cannot remember now why we headed that way, but both Arlen and Freddie went with me. They both had rifles in Baldy's Chrysler station wagon from the hunt that day and about 3/4ths of a mile into Barbon one of them saw a young spike, or maybe four point deer. We were supposed to go get what Baldy wanted and come back, but Freddie or Arlen, or probably both wanted me to stop the car so they could shoot the deer. I did reluctantly. In the first place....it was sunset, and too dark to shoot. It was probably ten minutes too late, and illegal. Secondly, and most important, I thought my Dad might get mad. Unfortunately, I was just a young kid driving a car with two of the best boat racers telling me what they wanted to do, and I complied. I stopped. I think Freddie shot. The deer dropped.

It was now dark, going into deep dark. Baldy was in the middle of cooking, and we were supposed to go to Barbon, get something and come back. The deer was down, and I think it was Arlen Crouch who walked up to the deer. I had thought Freddie shot it , but Arlen went to hit it on the head. Before he walked up, he got out of the station wagon, reached in the back to pick up a steel cross section of one of our "horse" stands we set the boats on. In case the little buck was still alive, Arlen was going to whack him in the head to finish him off. That cross section would have done it except when Arlen got up to where the deer had fallen, it woke up and sprung away so fast Arlen was standing there with nothing to swing at. It's not uncommon for a head shot to hit a horn or the head to stun an deer and knock it out momentarily.

I really dreaded the drive back home, and was very bummed out that I had pulled over at Freddie or Arlen's request to shoot a deer just at sundown. It was only ten minutes back to Baldy's at Pernitas Point, and I can't remember if it was Freddie or Arlen who told Baldy of the small buck one of them had shot and had gotten away. Baldy immediately chewed both of them up one side and down the other and said as I remember....We were not hunting at Barbon....it was too dark to hunt....and when you shot a deer you should have walked up to it with a firearm to finish it off....not a $#%&&% piece of a sawhorse.

I don't remember the exact words, but that's what basically came down and I felt very bad all the way around because I was driving and I knew I should tell them no, but it all happened so fast, it was over before I could do anything,, and then after Baldy reamed them out, I felt bad more about what they did than what Baldy said, because they should have known better, and I had thought them better than that.

The next morning though, we got up early, went on a deer hunt and came back for a hearty lunch that Baldy and his mother fried up. Venison, mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans with bacon and onion. And hot biscuits.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Can't believe I have been away from this thread for that long. I was trying to find some pictures and my darkroom is all messed up again. I started to straighten up a lot of it, but have had one thing after another that needed attention. Got all the APBA and NOA rulebooks on two separate shelves, and a whole shelf of magazines, Propellers, and Roostertails in order. So it "might" be a little easier to do research and put things back where I can find them again. Especially if I can find some critical missing B&W negatives.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

I have tried to find information about when Baldy put his houses in Alice and Lake Corpus Christi up for sale, but I could not find anything. All I know is that I remember that he lived in the house he planned to build only nine months before it was destroyed. He started construction of it right away after the other two were sold. It would have been some time in December of 1968 that Baldy put both of his houses up for sale with the intention of living in the unsold house while building a new one at his site on the hill at Barbon. This was a dream Baldy had that was coming to fruition. He and his partner Joe Hendricks were selling a few lots at the new edition, and Baldy was anxious to get the construction of his new house underway. It was a big surprise to Baldy that both houses sold during the same week he put them on the market. Not one to back down, or try to beg off for time, Baldy looked at other opportunities and made a deal for us to move into the second unit of a series of four separate lodgings built on a cliff over looking Lake Corpus Christi. It was at the Western Shores Motel where Pam and I were when her step brother got hit in the neck by a wasp and almost died the year before.

My older sister Brenda had gotten married a few months earlier. Mark was halfway through his senior year so Baldy, Mark and Jan moved in while I went back to San Marcos after the Christmas holiday. Baldy didn't have any plans for the builder Speedy Thomas. He drew some outlines on the caliche hill and told Speedy what he wanted. Since Baldy had built a few houses he could speak the language and Speedy understood. I was not around when all of that was going on, but I guess after Speedy hammered in the stakes, set the lines and Baldy agreed, they got high behind on the construction. I really don't know how Speedy built the house the way he did without plans, but maybe Baldy had a picture or possibly Speedy showed him something to go by. All I know is that I lived in five houses with Baldy, and the only one that I ever knew that had plans was one built by a contractor that Baldy bought in 1959. The first two I lived in from 1948 to 1959 Baldy built himself. The first was a commercial building with a living apartment and designed with very good airflow. The second house Baldy built himself in 1949 with a black man as a helper. A very unique and interesting design with an Arkansas flagstone exterior. The last was this house that Baldy had a contractor build, but with the layout only in his head and consultation with the builder. I can remember many years later how the contractor that rebuilt it after it burnt to the ground was desperate for plans because he could not on his life figure out the roofing. Baldy told him that there were no plans, and it had already been rebuilt once before. He just had to figure it out himself. That was when I remembered taking aerial photos of it a couple of times, and so the builder was able to see all the angles.