Wilbur Shaw by tallpindo

Writers • Atmosphere/Mood • posted on Aug 18, 2017

Open full image in new tab Zoom on image

Hover over top left image to zoom.
Click anywhere to exit.

Members remain the original copyright holder in all their materials here at Renderosity. Use of any of their material inconsistent with the terms and conditions set forth is prohibited and is considered an infringement of the copyrights of the respective holders unless specially stated otherwise.

Description

There is only one thing that truly gave me the willies. The thought of being compelled by pride and respect for myself and entering Indianapolis as a driver was far off but the idea of riding my bicycle on the top of a wall like Wilbur Shaw did as described in his biography simply chilled me. Many years later picking out books for me for Christmas presents my father one year chose A. J. Foyt’s biography and another year he chose Chuck Yeager’s. By that time, I had parked my car and not owned a motorcycle for at least a decade. At the public library in the town I grew up in, a row of books lined the window ledge behind the librarian’s desk where she checked out the books. They were bound in linen and about one and a quarter inch thick with the rough-cut page edges of a pulp novel. Each book described the flying activities of a group in WW-I. I read them all. The last one had a grisly description of flyers falling from a burning airplane without parachutes and as they crashed onto the after deck of a moored ship their thigh bones jammed up into their insides. Oddly, this was not something I feared. I won a book for reading a certain number of books that Summer and when it came it was about a cat looking in a mirror. Gee! Can I give it to the neighbor girls? We had a dog that got run over by a car after it’s one eye was scratched out by a cat that got into his dog house one Winter. There he lay with his guts crushed out of him in the gutter where he crawled; Still trying to bite his adversary. Later the County Coroner described to me how the surgeons tried to repair the innards of those crushed when they hit trees with their cars. I don’t have a dark outlook naturally. I am just someone that has been allowed to consider the mechanism of death. Look, hear, see, retain, you choose the word. Couldn’t I just limit my aggression to about the Parnelli-Jones level? He actually came in contact with John Desoto on a Baja 1000 race at a downhill. I’ve ridden with John Desoto in the Mojave Desert. He was on his very same AJS Motocross bike. I’ve also ridden with Jerry Grant who did race at Indianapolis so my fears were not irrational about Wilbur Shaw. Dan Gurney was the central figure in all this and I never met him. Jack Simmons offered me a Yamaha 350 TR-4 racer which could go 180mph at Daytona. I declined and that locked me into an All American Racers (Gurney’s brand) Kawasaki ZR-1 1000 cc American Turbopak street bike that had tried for 200 mph at Bonneville. As geared and with the waste gate at 8.5 psi at the top of second gear this bike would go 172mph in fifth at 9600 rpm on a humid day at sea level. I know the difference between a kamikaze and a SEAL. Commando is a type of surgery for a bone Cancer of the jaw as reported to me in Key West. The SEALs had a UDT school in Juno Beach though I never knew that sitting on the beach there or meeting the manager of a liquor store next to the US Chamber of Commerce in the strip mall there. That wall the bike ran on? Secretly, it was marketed as MOHAWK tank car vodka by a bookie who lived in my apartment complex in Lakewood, California. My youngest son located the owner of the construction firm putting up steel for a Levitz furniture store in the penthouse of the Phoenix Towers right next to the tallest building in Florida at that time, the Tiara. When my cousin showed up in Del Ray Beach and came to help us move furniture that steel contractor wanted to give him a job on the steel. (Hurricane David blew down the unfinished skeleton.) Later, in Washington, DC, a man on the sidewalk came up to introduce himself as someone who wrote stories about 10 years after high school and 20 years after and mentioned High steel. Lots of T cranes all over up there. Am I dodging to show you a Duesenberg and not an Alfa-Romeo, LeMans winner with Jimmy Murphy and not Indianapolis. Duesenberg won at Indy. They just don’t have the cache of Millers which came from Long Beach and not Auburn, Indiana. I don’t care if you have no interest in classic American cars. I don’t care that this could be about leg injuries. (Francesco Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, Hermann Goehring, the chief of the Luftwaffe, had leg injuries. Augie Duesenberg did not survive his.) My mentor about cars in high school insisted I be interested in preservation of Duesenbergs. The closest we had locally was a Riley v-8 from an Indy car and a bunch of Model-T dirt track special with Riley, Offenhauser and Frontenac heads. The Navy recruiter filled a garage with them. I found a museum in the Middle West that features just these items. By that time folks were trying to steer me to the Panoz and the Barber museum in Georgia.