Ketzer Racing Team

[Ketzer]

Thanks, Bill Van. Amazing how they change history, huh? And I agree with you and Wayne: Politicians fought that war from their desks, and lost it. I’ve got to tell you, though, I have such admiration and love for fighter jocks like your brother. Being in Life Support, I had coffee ready for them when they came in all bleary eyed in the morning, and was the last to see them before they headed back to the hooch after a mission. I hung out in the pilot’s lounge with them and watched mission films, took their abuse, and gave them abuse. They were so fearless and so much fun. I lost a couple while I was there. One, a little 1st Lt. we nicknamed “Frenchie” completed all his missions and was on a C-130 to Cam Ranh Bay to catch his flight back to “The World,” and the C-130 got shot down. Broke out hearts. Another, a major, got shot down during a mission, and his parachute got hung up on a tall tree. The tree lowering device (part of the parachute harness), either didn’t work, or the enemy was near, so he popped the clips on the harness, fell , and broke his neck. That broke our hearts, too. I lost a pilot in Iceland, as well, but we never knew why. He went up on a mission, chasing Russians, and never came back; crashed or punched out over the North Atlantic somewhere, but we never found him. Anyway, with all that sad stuff, it was great to hear from you, Bill Van. Dad thought you were, in his words, “The Cat’s ***.”

[Ketzer]

Hey, thanks, Smitty! A Wetback, huh? That's great, and glad you like the story, but don't expect too much more. I've only got a short story going here. Wayne Baldwin's got the novel. As to general aviation these days, Smitty, do a homebuilt that runs on auto gas. You're a welder, you can do it!

[Bill Van Steenwyk]

Stevie:

Regards your reply to who you thought was me in post #41. That was Eileen talking about her brothers experience when he got home, although I would have given almost anything to have had his job in an F-4, as I was not over my love of flying at that time and really never did get over it. He would never talk about it after he got home though. I have been meaning to join in a little on this thread about your Dad and the rest of the Arkansas bunch, but just haven't taken the time yet. I finally figured out what the problems were with the "Coffin Craft" several years after your Dad bought it, and think I told him what my thoughts were. Will add some to your thread shortly regards that boat and some more stories about that time.

Did you know or ever run into Jim McKean over there. He was an F-100 pilot and served there but not sure of the date. I know they phased them out but do not remember when. That may have been before your time there as I think he was out and flying for Continental while you were gone if I remember the time frame correctly.


I was kind of out of boat racing as far as driving myself after 74 for about 5 years and never heard just what happened with your Dad as far as his passing. Would like to know about the rest of the Hot Springs bunch also, especially Mickey Mcquire. I bought his C Konig that ZAK had made into a twin of mine and then resold it after I got hurt. I have a funny story about him in a fish house in Winona, Minn. that I will pass on soon.

Good to have you on BRF and filling in some of the Arkansas bunch's history from that time.

[Ketzer]

Oh, sorry, Eileen! But I sure was glad to hear it was you and not Bill that was 18 at that time. I was thinking, darn, I thought Bill Van was older than me. I’m happier knowing he robbed the cradle with you. As to his F-100s, I don’t recall the pilot he mentioned, but there were three squadrons of F-100s at Phan Rang (I was in the 615th, “Black Panthers”), and there were also F-100s at Ben Hoa, all being used up and phased out. I heard that a few years later, they rigged the F-100 to fly unmanned, and used them for air-to-air target practice. A few more “Hun” pictures for the aviation minded.

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[Ketzer]

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Backing up, Wayne just sent a couple pages of Roostertail results for June 1969, and it looks like the Ketzer Racing Team did some good at El Dorado, Arkansas, with Dad finishing 1st in C-hydro, 2nd in X-hydro, and Vernon Ashley taking a 3rd in X-hydro. While I took a 3rd in C/D-hydro at Womby, Texas. I’ll put the Roostertails below.

The racing flyer above for El Dorado, shows Steve Ketzer and Tommy Goslee working on Tommy’s C-Service. Obviously, the little town of El Dorado had quite a history of putting on boat races at Lake Calion. I found a newspaper article from the Delta-Democrat Times, dated July 5, 1950, that talked about Earl Roberts, then Vice President of the Arkansas Powerboat Association, serving as referee for a race. The years don’t seem to add up for a “Memorial Race,” but that’s what it said—maybe they had more than one race a year.

We raced at El Dorado several times over the years. The Razorback Boat Racing Club could be counted on to show up. It was an interesting venue. The lake was small with stumps around the edges and in the shallow areas—you didn’t venture too far from the race course or even swing too wide on a turn, because you’d end up in the stumps. The pits, though, were beautiful, grassy, and covered with shade trees. Up on the hill was a roadhouse/juke joint, one side served white folks, the other served black folks, but they partied together well into the night. It was loud, but there was no trouble that I recall.

The trouble at Lake Calion came from the air in the form of mosquitoes. We had relatives down for one race, and with the camper full, I slept in our Ford Falcon station wagon. It was a conundrum whether to sleep with the windows up and sweat to death, or roll them down and get attacked by mosquitoes. I threw a sheet over myself for protection and chose the latter. I don’t recall if we had “Off” back then or “Cutter”. If we did and I used it, it didn’t bother those blood suckers one bit. When I crawled out in the morning, I counted more than thirty welts on my legs, and between racing and carrying boats, scratched all day.

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[Master Oil Racing Team]

This is the T shirt I mentioned earlier. I'm pretty sure it was the 1972 Pro Nationals at Alex. That would be the last NOA Pro race at Alex. After I bought the T shirt and put it on my Dad said "That's old man Ketzer on that shirt". I have no clue whether your Dad was the inspiration for the artwork or not Steve, but my Dad sure believed he was.

[Ketzer]

Wayne, I’m going to agree with Baldy: It looks like the old man to me. My favorite T-Shirt was a grey one I bought down at Alex one year. It had a racing graphic of a picklefork and a Konig with expansion chambers. Above the graphic it said, “Boat Racers,” and below the graphic, “Do it Faster.” I was wearing it in a Walmart in Hot Springs, and this cute black girl walked up to me, pointed at the shirt and asked, “Is that true?” Tongue-tied in such situations, I could only offer a grin. While I no longer have the shirt, I still have our racing jackets hanging in the closet and will attach a photo in the next post.

But I have another “old man” anecdote. We were at Alex and Dad was climbing into a hydro. A family of spectators was standing in our pit to watch the race, and their young boy pointed to Dad and shouted, “Look at that old man a’gettin’ ready to race that boat!” While I might have been devastated, the “old man”, all of 52 at the time, thought it hilarious.

[Master Oil Racing Team]

I had to do a double take when I first posted this picture. While wearing the T shirt or looking at it on a hangar, I never noticed it before, but when looking at it in the photograph the North American Continent looks like a leaping Razorback hog.

Stand by Steve for some Roostertail results I am about to scan.

[Ketzer]

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In the Summer (and Fall) of ’69: Wayne sent more Roostertails with racing results from 1969-70; specifically, of the World Championships at Alex. In ’69, I was in Tech School up at Chanute AFB in Illinois, but Dad had someone in the N.O.A. write to my commander to request my participation in those boat races. So I was sprung for the Alex race. Dad qualified in C-1 runabout. In 1970, he did better with me in Vietnam, qualifying in C-hydro, C-runabout, C-1 hydro, and C-1 runabout. He took 5th in C-1 hydro and in 1970 High Point, took 4th in C-1 hydro. The Ketzer Racing Team had only been at it a few years, but was getting better! Here are just a couple of those Roostertails.

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[Ketzer]

Wanderlust: This might be a little bland before I get to the next boat of interest. While I was gone, my brother Charlie worked the pits with Vernon and Uncle Ed and sometimes raced a D-runabout gas-burner, but he took off to work the oil fields out of Gillette, Wyoming, and stayed because he loved the hunting and fishing up there. With the war winding down, early-outs were in abundance, and I got out four months early. I was fairly spooled up when I got discharged in March of 1973 (I think I’ve had my racing dates off by one year). Between the boat racing trips and the military, I developed a bad case of wanderlust—now, forty years later, I’m getting over it. I hadn’t been home a month before I took off on a road trip in my ’65 Mustang with a high school buddy, Mike Freeman, to the East Coast, down into Florida, along the gulf to New Orleans, and then back to Hot Springs. Several months later, I moved to New Orleans for a month and worked on the river off a tugboat at Kenner Bend with a crew, black and white and all in our 20s, that tied grain barges together into a flotilla or separated them after a trip down the Mississippi, and then cleaned them out with fires hoses. On the entire crew, I was the only one with a high school diploma; indeed, one or two were illiterate, but they were all great guys and fun to be around. It was hard work and only paid $2.75 an hour, but quite an experience. Also, I met a very pretty girl in Hot Springs who would later marry/divorce me, and that required time. Still, as my hair grew out, I got in some boat racing that summer.

(Steve Jr., Mikey, and Roger Purtee rigging Miss Mouse. Mikey went into the Navy right after this, and as mentioned before, died in an auto accident coming back from a Joe Cocker concert while based at Meridian, Mississippi.)

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(Steve Jr. and Uncle Ed topping off a C-Service—you can’t see Ed in the picture, but that’s him doing the heavy lifting.)

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During 1973, we had a couple big races in Arkansas, one at Diamondhead in Hot Springs, and the other at Dumas. Remote towns like Dumas, for their “Ding Dong Daddy Water Festival,” pulled out all the stops and held the races in conjunction with other activities: parades, bass tournaments, skiing demonstrations. The media coverage was excellent, and for several days the newspaper was full of race boats, skiers, people holding bass and related stories.

(From the Dumas Clarion, this looks like Bill Van getting towed in.)

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(Also from Dumas, the Leavenduskys getting awards.)

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(Steve Ketzer and Tommy Goslee sending Jerry McMillian out in one of our runabouts.)

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(A story about Rex Hall "splashing" one, and the trouble with pleasure boats.)

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(And, lastly, a program from Diamondhead.)

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It was a busy summer. Jerry McMillian had a beautiful Harley-Davidson, a metallic purple 1969 Super Glide with “Z” bars, and with money I saved while in service, I bought it to bomb around Arkansas with my blond girlfriend, Delline, on the back. With the racing season pretty much over, she and I took off for Denver in the Mustang pulling a U-Haul trailer with the Harley inside, among other things. Dad was okay with it, or if he wasn’t, he didn’t say anything. He had many boat racing buddies, and besides, after leaving the military, he had the wanderlust, too. Mine just lasted a few decades longer. I enrolled in college, starting at a community college owing to my lackluster academic record in high school—Hey, I was working at the airport, racing boats, flying airplanes, and skipping school to hang out in the pool hall; in comparison, except for girls and football, high school had nothing to offer. After two years, I transferred to the University of Colorado at Denver to be educated and indoctrinated by ultra-Liberals and a few avowed Communists come down from Boulder, but when summers rolled around, it all came to a halt. We quit our jobs—mine always part time to augment the G.I. Bill—sealed up the apartment, and headed to Arkansas to jump back into the nest, family and all. Dad had me lined up with a job at whatever aviation company he worked for, and we boat raced.

Over the years, Dad was so busy doing his own thing that he didn’t notice wages in the aviation industry had risen considerably and that Futrell was paying slave wages, until a friend of Jerry McMillian’s who owned a crop dusting outfit down in DeWitt, called Bullock Flying Service, offered him, and Uncle Ed, jobs at double the wages. Dad gave Futrell an ultimatum, Futrell called his bluff, and Dad and Ed packed up and headed to DeWitt where they (and I) worked during the week but returned to Hot Springs on the weekends. Actually, I worked on a farm where I drove a tractor, poured cement and built a few grain silos, and ran across rice fields flagging for crop dusters (the days before GPS). The money was good, but when the opportunity arose to be the Director of Maintenance for a Cessna Service Center and pilot school down in Texarakana, Dad took it, as long as they also hired me and Uncle Ed, and the next summer we drove back and forth to Texarkana and got to see Joe and Bobby Bolton frequently.

Futrell began to understand that he had screwed the pooch. Buying and selling used Beechcraft was one thing, but to do it without mechanics of Dad and Ed’s caliber, who were also pilots, Dad being a commercial pilot with multi-engine rating, and could not only go get some out-of-annual, used up dog and ferry it back to Hot Spring, but make it airworthy, pretty and easy to sell, ate into Futrell’s profit margin big time. He begged them to come back, at higher wages, and they (we) did.

The only race driver experience I have this time is of an automotive nature. My buddy, Mike Watkins, and I, along with wives, took his car to a boat race in Louisiana while Dad, Uncle Ed and Vernon took the rig. After the races and stopping for dinner, we blasted ahead in the car with Mike driving and apparently feeling “the need for speed” after watching boat races. He was burning up the asphalt, as they say. While passing through some one-stop-sign town in southern Arkansas, the flashing lights came on behind us—it may have been a speed trap, but we were definitely speeding. Not only did the cop give Mike a ticket, but he hauled him down to the town’s little pokey and demanded the fine be paid on the spot, and, furthermore, the car was impounded: no one was going anywhere until that fine was paid. Well, it wasn’t a great amount of money, but between the four of us, we didn’t have the scratch. So I walked back to the highway, it being the age before cell phones, and in the darkness, walked up and down the white line awaiting the Ketzer Racing Team, who eventually came rolling down the road, I flagged them down, Dad paid the fine, and set us free.