May 30, 1955, Springfield, Massachusetts. That’s me in the laundry room of Jack Handy’s house, drawing a beer from an iced keg of Michelob. I’m dressed in civvies for this Memorial Day holiday, having packed the few items of army gear I decided to keep in a single duffel bag back in my barracks at Fort Devins. Tomorrow, I’ll be fully discharged. Yes, I remind myself, my three years of military obligation is up in a matter of hours. From a small radio on top of a washing machine, the sounds of race cars from the Indianapolis 500 swell and fade. It has been minutes now since the announcement of auto racer Billy Vukovich’s death, and the radio’s voice tells us listeners that he was killed in a multi-car accident on lap fifty-seven.
Couldn’t be true, I thought. He’d been leading the race, going for his third win in a row at this hallowed oval. How in hell do you get killed while being ahead of all the other cars?
“He’d started to lap some of the other racers,” Jack Handy tells me.
Handy is a nice guy I met in Boston. He digs that city’s jazz scene and, though he has never served in the military, I consider him a buddy. He and some of the others here are aware that Vukovich and I both share the same hometown of Fresno, California.
“Don’t really know Vukovich,” I told everyone earlier, before the Indianapolis 500 started. “My uncle introduced him to me once.” Now, as the radio voices speak to the accident, I’mshocked to hear the names of other Fresno drivers. Johnny Boyd’s car is in the center of the track, upside down and on fire. Both Fred Agabashian and Ed Elisian have stopped their roadsters on that same turn. “Awful day for the Fresno contingency,” I say. “My hometown will be in mourning.”
“Come into the living room with the rest of us,” Handy says. “I’m about to put some Miles Davis on the turntable.”
I meander into the living room and find my girlfriend standing near a window. The day is so bright outside that she is in dark silhouette, slender, rather tall.
“How is the driver they call Vuky?” she asks.
“He didn’t survive the crash,” I say.
She steps forward and whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
The room is almost silent. From the laundry room, the spinning cars keep spinning. I turn to the faces of college students, thinking this girl, Connie, I brought with me today and I are strangers here. Connie is from Leominster, Massachusetts. A quiet, soft-eyed girl of French-Canadian parentage, she is a million miles from the Ivy League types surrounding us. I wish Don Thomas, a close friend I’d enlisted with, were here; I would swear and cry anguished tears. Just the other day, we’ddiscussed, along with Neil Dau, another Fresno friend who’d joined the army with us, how the Indy Speedway was built for the average speed of 90 miles per hour. The radio voice today is speaking of an average speed of 139 MPH.
I turn to Connie. “Don and Neil should be on their way to the Midwest,” I tell her, picturing the two of them, dressed in civvies, tooling the vast countryside in Neil’s brand-new Austin Healy sports car. “They plan on hooking up with a couple of our army pals for a reunion.”
Connie nods. I’ve told her my plans to fly away in two days and join the get-together. Maybe never see her again.
The horn of Miles Davis cuts the room in two. Someone mentions the Beat Generation, and across the ceiling of Jack Handy’s parents’ white-boarded, white-fenced house in Springfield, Massachusetts, the distant refrain of speed keeps turning.
Remember this night, I told myself.
My Uncle Fred’s Speedometer Shop in downtown Fresno was a busy venture. He singlehandedly ran the place, dressed in laundered whites pressed a second time by my Aunt Clara, white cap cocked over his thinning black hair, cigarette Bogart-style between his lips, half pint of premium bourbon hidden on his person but as much a part of him as his black leather wallet, white socks, and polished black brogans. Aunt Clara, my mother’s sibling, often invited my sister, Regina, and I over to play with our three cousins. As the years passed, we five kids mixed and matched according to our whims. The two families were close, sharing holidays and short vacations when the money wasn’t too tight.
One evening in the early Forties—I must have been around twelve years old—Uncle Fred singled me out for a ride.
“I’ll take you out to Kearney Bowl,” he informed me. “Billy Vukovich is racing tonight.
I had never been to Kearney Bowl to watch the midget races, an event that seemed perfectly conceived to break the monotony of those warm summer nights in Fresno. The first thing that grabbed me when walking into the ring of wooden bleachers was the sound. These small race cars were a noisy bunch. Fine-tuned by mechanics for one thing: speed, they belched fire in the pits and roared on the track’s straightaways and banks during what I learned were their qualifying runs. The mixed odors of cordite, exhaust, and nearby farmyards drifted fog-like among us as Uncle Fred escorted me into the arena. Remember this night, I told myself. Instead of veering toward the banks of seats, Uncle Fred managed to lead me close to the pit area, where several men were preparing their cars for tonight’s racing. One young man broke away from a car that had caught my eye because of its blue green paint job.
“Hey, Fred,” he said.
Uncle Fred shook his hand and quickly thanked him for taking a minute to say hello. There wasn’t much more to it than that. Clearly, Billy Vukovich was in no mood to leave his auto, where it seemed he was the master mechanic of its performance as well as its driver. Any memory of that evening has been made larger over time, as Vukovich progressed during the following decade to become America’s greatest race car driver. Trying to bring back a picture of him now, I see a dark-featured young man capturing everyone’s attention, certainly mine. Dressed in black dungarees and stark white T-shirt, he looked fit and healthy. Yes, there is always that when Billy Vukovich comes to mind—how ultra-physical he appeared while walking back to his roadster.
The way he stood for a moment, conversing with a crew member, and then easing himself into his roadster’s cockpit—I swear the picture is easy for me to see this very minute.
Fully seated, his head and shoulders complete the portrait. One hand scrubs his closely cropped mop of hair before pulling down the sides of his helmet. He raises one bare arm now before letting his hand drop down to grasp the wheel of his racer. Then, his fingers work their way into a pair of black gloves, and he pops a closed fist into an open hand. Still, he appears so vulnerable. So fully exposed. There is no roll bar behind him. Unless you count the goggles he finally adjusts over his piercing glare, he wears no fire-repellent gear of any kind. Just that white T-shirt and his Warner Brothers movie star persona. No MGM technicolor nonsense with this guy. He is not your Van Johnson or Gene Kelly. Not this lad they call the Mad Russian. No, not this intense rebel behind the wheel of a racer he’d helped to form with his own two hands.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars of automobile there,” Uncle Fred told me after we watched Vuky win his race that night. “Not too long ago his father went broke trying to farm a few acres in this valley. Vuky and his brothers have been getting by crossing the finish line first ever since.”
Yes, Fred Thorp, known for his speedometer shop and for being a soft touch, might have divulged a few things to me then and during the other times he took me along to watch the races at Kearney Bowl. Like my father and other men who’d worked their way out of the Depression one penny at a time, he was an expert witness to how it was done. I don’t know for sure how much he contributed to the Fred Gearhart race car that consistently helped Billy Vukovich get the checkered flag in Fresno, California and in many other tracks across the western states. But, I damn sure knew that $25,000 was an enormous amount of money back then, and that Fred Thorp might have kicked in more than the cluster of gauges on that little gem of a vehicle’s dash panel.
“How did you recognize me?”
This is my first day of student teaching at Sequoia Junior High School. My master teacher has introduced me to an overloaded room of students, most of whom have signed up for this forty-five-minute elective, thinking it might give them a break from their required subjects. He hands me a roll sheet marked with his handwritten notes and leaves the room. This isn’t my first time in front of a class. I’d been assigned to teach at Fort Devins after serving overseas in the army for a year and a half. Not the same, I tell myself, looking at the faces of all these kids, the air loaded with their burgeoning hormones.
“This class is called Basic Art,” I say. “But as we move along through it together, I hope each one of you will want to rename it your Favorite Class.” Pause, filled with snickers, light laughter, disgruntled groans. “If not,” I tell them, “we are all in for a lot of trouble.”
Presently, the semester is a couple of weeks old, and the students are working on an assignment included in a general curriculum my master teacher suggested I follow. “Tweak it at your own risk,” he warned me.
As the class settles into a trancelike routine, broken regularly by sudden outbursts of bad behavior, I examine the typed roster I’d been handed earlier. Two entries, both deserving handwritten comments, spark my attention: Lanny Mendoza Talented. and William Vukovich Good Boy.
I pick them out with near certainty. Both are in the back of the class, a pair of steady-as-you-go wise guys at the same table. I approach them, straighten my tie, run a hand along the pleat in a suit I’d had tailored (continental style) in Hong Kong, and study Mendoza’s work first.
“You go by Lanny?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Thought maybe it was a misprint.”
“Well. It ain’t.”
I don’t tell him that he is the image of his father, LarryMendoza a local artist, I’d come to admire for his bar murals around town.
I turn to Vukovich. “You go by Billy?”
“How did you recognize me?”
I recall measuring the span of time since his father’s death at the Indianapolis Speedway, how I’d heard it on the radio a couple of days before my discharge fewer than two years ago. “By your white T-shirt,” I say.
“My kindergarten teacher was named Hill,” he says.
“My sister Regina.”
“I liked her.”
“She liked you too.” True, she had mentioned him to me on more than one occasion.
“Well, Mr. Hill,” he says, glancing at the threat of chaos blooming like a hurricane in the room, “if you need me to keep things in line here for you, I can handle it.”
I look into his eyes for any indication that he is putting me on and see what I’m convinced is an honest attempt to put me at ease. “I’ll remember that,” I assure him.
“It’s speed with him,” I say. “Right?”
A decade slides by from my time teaching that junior high class, and then one day—it must have been in 1970, Lanny Mendoza comes into my sign shop/art studio looking for work. I do the math. He’s in his late twenties, but visually gone is the kid who once spirited my student teaching experience with his exuberant dedication to his art. Look who’s talking, I say silently, while giving him my best misdemeanor smile.
Lanny launches into a story of bad luck, something about losing an eye while working for an electrical sign shop in the Bay Area.
He points to his temple. “This one peeper is marble,” he says. “Probably why you didn’t recognize me right off.”
“Probably.”
“I ain’t afraid of work,” he says. “Maybe two days, till I get my pickup fixed.”
Then, to my astonishment, he completes a perfect back flip in front of my drawing board, the explosive energy of his act leaving his face flushed and a lank of black hair over his one good eye.
“Far out,” I say. “Maybe I can use you for a day or two.”
I show him around the shop, tell him that this is my new location, better now that I’m farther north of downtown. I let him know that I keep a small crew. “Two guys out on a wall job today, and an older artist who comes in when I need him.”
He seems impressed. “I’m not much with a lettering brush,” he says, “but I’m hell on the end of a roller, squeegee, or shovel.”
“What I really need is help in moving my wife and kids into a home on Christmas Tree Lane.”
“You must be moving up.”
“Just an interim residence,” I explain. “Till a house I helped design is ready.”
“One even farther north?”
“That seems to be the trend,” I say.
The second night Lanny is in town, I have my wife, JoAnn,set him a place at our table. He and my two sons, Kirk and Darren, have spent the day hauling stuff here from our first home, a small tract house we recently sold. While I’m sitting there, it hits me that my two sons are approaching the age Lanny was when I first met him. That age when soon they will be entering junior high. Yeah, that age. And this move on top of it all—What in hell have I done to my family? I ask myself.
JoAnn breaks the silence. “So, Lanny,” she says, “Larry tells me you’re quite an artist in your own right.”
When Lanny balks, I say something about showing off the sketches he has brought by. We begin to eat. I start to relax. Soon we will be in the new house. With a pool. I picture myself completing a perfect jack knife off the diving board. JoAnn and my sons are laughing. Kirk holds up an imaginary card. “Four,” he shouts.
An hour later, when Lanny and I are still seated, drinking beer and smoking from a pack of my Marlboros, I ask him, “Ever run across Billy Vukovich Jr.?”
He shakes his head. “I hear he’s followed his old man into auto racing.”
“Better that,” I tell him, “than if he followed someone elseand went to Vietnam.”
I put in that Vuky Jr. got seventh place just last year at the Indianapolis 500. “Rookie of the Year honors,” I say, surprised that Lanny might be ignorant of his peer’s success.
The following day, I’m about to say goodbye to him at my studio. A girlfriend of his from the Bay Area is here to pick him up. I find some time with her while he helps one of my employees finish up silk screening a bunch of real estate signs.
“Take care of him,” I tell her.
“I’ll do my best,” she says, running her fingers through a huge helmet of frizzy black hair. Everything about her is large and a bit outrageous. “He keeps me running.”
I like her. She obviously loves Lanny. “It’s speed with him,” I say, “Right?”
“Amphetamines,” she says to let me know I’m correct. “On top of the liquor and sedatives to slow down.”
“Yeah,” I utter, and I let it lie there. She is a smart young woman, smart enough to see the full throttle after-midnights in my own eyes. “I’ve packed a box of sketch pads and some drawing supplies for him to take.”
“Lovely,” she says.
“You into art?”
She smiles ear to ear. “Poetry.”
We hug. She smells like hair spray. She smells like a headshop. “Any hope for workman’s comp on that eye of his?”
“I’m working on it,” she says.
“He might get out alive.”
About six or seven summers pass from Lanny’s visit, and I see Billy Vukovich Jr. on a golf course, first out on the fairways when I’m not quite sure it’s him, and then later in the clubhouse when I turn to my golfing partner, Charlie.
“Man over there getting up from his table,” I say, “is Billy Vukovich Jr.”
Charlie is an insurance broker, a close to scratch golfer who knows his way around the country clubs.
“Wow,” he says, after downing half his cocktail. “Do you know him?”
“Taught him in a class once for five minutes,” I say, reminding myself that Billy Jr., though he looks fit and still must get his share of second glances, is, according to recent news reports, considering retiring from racing. On that point, I offer, “He might get out alive.” I taste my beer, and drift into a story about how I heard, on the radio’s coverage of the 1955 Indy 500, of the senior Vuky’s fatal crash. “Half the field of thirty-threeracers died in accidents proceeding that race,” I add to emphasize how dark is the legacy of the “sport.”
“Not what you’d call very good odds,” Charlie says.
Then, he stands to beckon our two golfing opponents, a pair of characters coning our way through the crowded tables, their faces still flushed from the course’s wind and sun.
I look to spot Vukovich again and see him pass the viewing window. He has slung his golf bag caddy style across his back and moves, with the grace of a thoughtful loner, toward the parking area. Evidently no 19th hole of drinking for him. No, he doesn’t need to make his day of golf bigger with the aid of alcohol the way my foursome will. Who knows when Charlie and I will be heading home? We won the front wager, doubled it on the back, and captured the push bet. Our spirits are simmering.
I watch the man who once was my teenage student vanish from my view. We both were so young back then. He was such a good kid. I picture him driving home, a veteran racer now, his hands on the wheel of his vehicle, his eyes focused on the highway. Might he play with the thought of men like I am who will be driving the same route later, our bellies full of drink, our heads jammed with unfulfilled dreams? What might this future Hall of Fame Racer fix my odds at making it home without mishap, perhaps a crash of metal and glass that claims the life of an innocent driver or passenger? A horrible collision that kills multi victims?
What’s the bottom line on one of those scenarios taking place today?
Speed was in his DNA
After failing to qualify for the 1983 Indy 500, Billy Vukovich Jr. walked away from racing. In the dozen times he challenged the oval, he finished in the top ten six times, getting 2nd in 1973, and 3rd in’74. He got out alive; that is how I thought of his career. He’d kept the Vukovich profile in the news, and now he could grow old, looking back at his accomplishments with pride. Those of us who’d followed him could watch the yearly event at Indianapolis without a lump in our throats and a skip beat in our hearts every time the name Vukovich hit our ears. This pleasant lull didn’t last many years. The town of Fresno was soon tied to the sport of auto racing again, when Billy Vukovich Jr’s son, Billy lll, turned eighteen.
The kid wanted to ride! Yeah, he liked baseball, and his father had gone out of his way to make his life full of things other kids were interested in, but his dream was to find a car that would fit him, sit behind its roar, and take off. Speed was in his DNA. Hell, everybody knew that. His name was Vukovich. Say the name silently and listen to the cyclone.
Billy lll followed his grandfather’s pattern. He dominated the Super Modified circuit, eventually equaling A.J. Foyte’s win streak of seven first place finishes in a row. He was a natural, a true phenom behind the wheel. There was little surprise among the racing crowd when he accepted an offer to drive in the 1988 Indy 500. In this, his first attempt at the classic oval of auto racing, he managed to garner, as his father had twenty years before him, the Rookie of the Year award for his 14th place finish. His next two tries got him 12th and 24th place finishes, not enough to satisfy his ambition. It was no secret: he would soon be given the opportunity in a better car and win the race. After all, it was only a matter of time, most aficionados of this blood sport agreed, and this young man called Vuky lll would get that checkered flag on Memorial Day.
Then on November 26, 1990, while hot lapping his CRA sprint car for a race at Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield, California, Billy III suddenly swerved into the wall. The impact was devastating. Billy lll was rushed to Kern Medical, where he died from massive head injuries. A throttle malfunction was later blamed for the crash. Billy lll was twenty-seven years old, the age that seems to stop so many earthly stars from rising.
Recently, I watched an interview with Billy Jr. and Billy III. Both looked dashing in their racing jackets—Billy Jr., his hair thinning, his iron-featured face timeworn from his life racing cars—Billy III, his face untouched by time, a slightlybored smile on his lips as his father dealt with the inevitable question: Did he have any qualms about his son’s choice to follow the family name into racing.
The father answered truthfully. Yes, after all Billy III was his boy, and he had trouble watching him race, so much so that he had to leave the scene and walk among the motorhomes near the raceway. God, I felt so much for him right then, his boy alive, sitting next to him. And my thoughts went to all the fathers who’d sent, with their blessings, their children into war, many going out of their way to make sure their boys went into battle with silver bars on their shoulders. Life expectancy for second lieutenants during one long stretch of the Vietnam War was two weeks. Worse odds than bullfighters. Worse even than race car drivers.
While researching this piece, I watched films detailing the life and death of Brazilian racing champion, Ayrton Senna. Shortly before seeking his fourth Formula One World Championship in 1994, he was asked by one of his longtime team members, why not stop now and go fishing. “We both love to fish,” his friend reasoned.
Senna, who had been consumed with what had become a “difficult car,” had a simple answer. He didn’t know stop. That was something he could never do. A few days later, they would carry his body away from his devastated machine. After leading the San Marino Grand Prix, seemingly on his way to his fourth world title, tragedy struck. Team members reported that there wasn’t a mark on him, that the collision of car and concrete wall at 190 miles per hour left him sitting in half a racecar, his soul surely gone from his body upon impact. He was thirty-two years old. Later, his steering mechanism would draw the blame. Something minute had malfunctioned.
Oddsmakers will tell you it is always something small that can determine the wagering
“line” on an event. No matter how much fire is in the belly of a participant, no matter their devotion to detail, or how many times they have suited up for the game, the final score depends on those factors so imperceptible that they lie between the unknown and the mystical.
I can’t lose the expression of bemusement on Billy III’s youthful face as his father spoke to the danger in motor sports. Could it be that the thought of not finding the top speed on the track never occurred to him? This boy, after all, was born to catch the wind. His life was a mortal certainty, his death an immortal accident.