11 replies to this topic

[SprintCore]

The midget hall of famer Frank Burany celebrates 100th birthday in mid-August.I want some stories about him.

 

Did he run sprint cars?

[Michael Ferner]

Too busy running the doodlebugs. It seems his entire Big Car experience comes down to a couple of Champ Car starts in which he did pretty well, all things considered. The impetus was Indy, of course - it always was. Having established himself as a top midget shoe in the Chicago/Milwaukee area in the immediate postwar years, his prayers were answered in 1949 by Bill Schoof, longtime racing entrepreneur from Milwaukee, who'd been running a car or two on the National Championship trail for several years. His car wasn't new, by any means, but it had been done over in 1947 and finished tenth at the Speedway that year, so it wasn't a complete dud. In theory, a perfect rookie ride.

The Speedway liked its rookie drivers to have some Big Car experience, so Schoof and Burany towed down to Texas in April for the Championship opener at Arlington Downs, a former horse racing track that had fallen into disuse before the war when pari-mutuel betting had been outlawed by the state. Built at a reputed $3,000,000 only twenty years ago, the site was in serious danger of being shut down, when former racing driver Babe Stapp from California decided to try his hands at the promotion of auto racing in Texas. His endeavours hadn't exactly been successful so far, and after the failure of his Racing International of Texas enterprise the year before, he was now operating under the name of Universal Speedways for a second bite at the cherry.

Bill Schoof and his team had been running at Arlington Downs in both 1947 and '48, even finishing second the latter year for their best ever result on the championship trail, so they knew what to expect when they arrived in the Deep South: a very short field, and a very, very rough track! Stapp's expertise in track preparation had fallen a bit short, and so had his efforts in attracting a good field. His buddies from California had responded well enough with eight drivers from the Golden State, seated in three Californian cars and one each from Missouri, Oklahoma, Georgia, Michigan and Ohio, several of them with strong ties in the West. Other than that, there were the Schoof/Burany combo and their fellow Milwaukeeans, the Marchese Bros. team and their driver Myron Fohr, and one sophomore driver/owner from Kentucky - eleven cars in all!

The two teams from the Badger State confered, and decided to play it safe. As the 1948 Championship runner-up behind the deceased Ted Horn, Fohr and Marchese had designs to go after the title, and a good finish here could go a long way as a foundation for a serious challenge. Besides, nobody wants to bust up their precious car with the opening of the Speedway only a week or so hence. Burany's main purpose was, anyway, to merely gain experience and confidence, and to not make any stupid mistakes, so the game plan was to follow in Fohr's footsteps, and to see where it'll end.

Fohr qualified midfield, and though Burany had to start from the back of the short field, they were pretty soon running in tandem, sixth and seventh, moving up a notch when Bill Sheffler's engine expired at quarter distance. Up front was another rookie driver, a teenager with a forged ID in fact, running amok in a car almost as old as Burany's - the world was just witnessing the first Big Car start east of the Rockies by Troy Ruttman. There was no "playing it safe", "going for a finish" in Troy's racing vocabulary yet, and after lapping the field his tortured mule was emphatically crying ** ENOUGH! ** when a steering arm broke, stranding a bewildered youngster at the pits in front of a small crowd, numb from the excitement of watching racing's latest sensation.

When the race was over, the Milwaukee Express was still running, in fourth and fifth place but so far behind that nobody bothered to count the laps. It didn't matter much, anyway, certainly not as much as the money won ($600 for Fohr, and more than $500 for Burany) and the points to kick start Fohr's championship campaign. Burany's baptism had gone well enough for the Speedway officials, and there were no complaints as he was sailing through the first part of his driver's test - actually, he was even officially complimented on his driving - but a gust of wind caught him out during the 110 mph phase of the test and the car smashed head-on into the wall, eleven days before the big race.

It was the end - for another long-suffering racing automobile! Burany himself, though heavily bruised and battered, was not seriously injured, besides some cracked ribs. That's the worst part for a Midget chauffeur: being laid up in bed! A good driver, like Burany, can make $20,000 or $30,000 a year, more than everything but first place at Indy, but you have to drive the Midgets day in, day out: Rockford/IL on Wednesday, Sister Lakes/MI on Thursday, Milwaukee/WI on Friday, Chicago/IL on Saturday, Kokomo/IN on Sunday... actually, in the forties, you were spoiled for choice most days of the week! And so Frank Burany, taped up heavily and a bit worse for wear, turned up at Kokomo Speedway on May 29, ten days after the accident, to win another Midget main event. After all, that was his business for 32 years of his life.

Happy Birthday, Frank.

[ensign14]

Yeah, but apart from that? 

[Michael Ferner]

Ah yes, the "aftermath".

Well, perhaps you guessed it already, but Babe Stapp never made a dime promoting races at Arlington; after two more shows with ever decreasing "crowds" he folded his tents and left town. But that's not why we're here, right? Oh, and the Myron Fohr/Marchese Bros. attack on Mount Everest fell a few inches short, courtesy of one of those damned West Coast boys who outran him in Texas. Yes, yes, but just so you know...

We can wrap up Bill Schoof's involvement with Championship racing pretty swiftly as well, and by doing so tell the not-quite-so-popular story of Frank Burany, the Championship driver in one fell swoop. Upon returning to Milwaukee following Burany's Indy accident, Schoof told newspaper men that he didn't think the car was salvageable, but that the engine was still intact, thankfully, and that he "may sell the car", with a picture of the wreck underlining his statement. What he did was to build a completely new front end, which after a few more or less unsuccessful tryouts he then "married" to the rear end of a wrecked Kurtis 2000 Champ Car, to create a weird channel/tube frame mongrel, half man half biscuit, or: Wild & Wacky Race Cars verse 729.

It was given to Frank Burany to try it out at Milwaukee in June of 1950, and Frank wasn't fast enough to put it into the field. Never mind he was one of 18 (say it out loud: eighteen!) who failed to make the cut, an illustrous group which included luminaries such as Sam Hanks, Duke Nalon, Duane Carter and, lo and behold, Myron Fohr and the Marchese car! No hometown entry in the race? Well, there was still little Paul Russo and his homebuilt special, even if he was from Kenosha, and even if he'd moved to Indiana longtime ago, but at least he made the race and what's more, he even finished second! Cheers from the fickle Beertown crowd for Russo, and walking papers for both Fohr and Burany - boo!

By late August, the Champ Cars returned to Milwaukee for an enchore during the State Fair, and Burany roamed the pits in the hope of finding a ride. The old routine, "Need a driver?" - "Nope", "Not today, maybe next week in Du Quoin" and "On yer bike", then suddenly "Yes!", a two-man crew unloading a stretched sprinter that looked (and was!) as old as Frank's career driving Midgets (he'd started in 1935). Beggars can't be choosers, and Burany qualified it 19th, one short of the usual 18 that were allowed to start the regular 100 milers, but since this was to be a 200 mile race four extra cars were added to the field, including Burany and the blue stretch job.

200 miles on a dirt track is a tough job, not only for the driver, and halfway through the race a rear spring shackle broke, making the ride even more uncomfortable, but Frank hung in there for two and a half hours, finishing tenth and, sweet revenge, one position ahead of Ray Knepper, his replacement at Schoof's! And at a properly promoted State Fair race, even tenth place was worth almost $900 - take that, Babe Stapp! But sadly, that was also that for Burany, who roamed the Champ Car pits one more time at the next Milwaukee still date, but this time all that was on offer was a stretched... Midget (!), and Frank qualified second from last, more than a dozen places away from making the field.

By that time, Bill Schoof had already given up. To be fair, Knepper gave it all, and got some fair results in return, but it was always a struggle to merely get the car into the field, never qualifying better than 14th, and twice loading up even before the start. At the last race of the season, deep down south on a new pavement track, they made it once again only just as 26th in an extended field of exactly that number, and Ray struggled through to an unimpressive 16th place finish. Just then an excentric millionaire from Michigan arrived at Fox Point, Bill's suburban Milwaukee home, with an 18-wheel trailer and a sack of gold. It was the end of Bill Schoof, Champ Car owner, and the beginning of Lee Elkins, racing nutcase extraordinaire! But that is another story, for another day.

[Michael Ferner]

But Frank Burany was a Midget driver, above all, and so we shouldn't waste our time with his indistinguished and somewhat sub-standard Big Car career. Let's talk Midgets, for a change...

... day in, day out: Rockford/IL on Wednesday, Sister Lakes/MI on Thursday, Milwaukee/WI on Friday, Chicago/IL on Saturday, Kokomo/IN on Sunday...

Just so you don't think they raced only five days out of seven (that was just an impromptu itinerary), Tuesdays Frank usually ran at Saint Louis/MO. Walsh Stadium, actually named after the father of the car owner for that damned West Coast boy who outscored Myron Fohr to the National Championship in 1949, was the prefered venue, and only there was Frank known as "Bubbles" Burany. How come?

In those days, drivers used different methods of keeping the dust out of their mouths, or to just keep some moisture in. Eddie Sachs was known to chew on a slice of orange or lemon, while Johnnie Parsons (who he?) was usually seen with a large piece of cloth stuffed into his mouth - must've been pretty uncomfortable!

Frank Burany, like many others I'm sure, used to chew gum. One Tuesday night, upon arriving at Walsh Stadium, he found he'd forgotten to stack up his chewing gum supplies, and as it was too late to go shopping, he scrounged around the pits and stands to find a little boy who offered him bubble gum. Now, if you google "bubble gum" you'll find that it was invented in 1928, but if you search for the term in a newspaper archive the hits will explode just after WW2 - don't ask me why, but it goes to show that it was still a new fad in '47, when this story was told in a Milwaukee newspaper.

What exactly happened is difficult to find out, but apparently Frank started blowing bubbles while racing, which created a huge hit with the crowds at Saint Louis, so much so that "whenever he goes there to race, bubble gum is given to him in cartons and thrown at him in single pieces", to quote The Milwaukee Journal of August 27, 1947. Wonder what Bubbles Horsley makes of that!

Another story from the same article, about Frank's high school days at Bay View, a Milwaukee neighborhood. He "was rushing home late one fall afternoon [on his motorcycle] so that he could change clothes and take part in a homecoming celebration. As he wheeled along Kinnickinnic Avenue [that's right, folks, you can google that!], a friend whistled from the curb. Burany turned his head and next thing he knew, he was bearing down on a streetcar going the same way. On the curb side of the trolley was a big truck, tail gate down. Burany, unable to stop because of his speed, drove to the left of the streetcar and found himself looking at another trolley - coming right at him."

What the paper doesn't tell yet implies is that two streetcars filled the road, curb to curb - not at all usual these days, but apparently the norm back in the thirties. Anyway, net result was that Frank drove his motorcycle "between two passing streetcars (and) lived to tell about it. (...) 'I just held onto the crossbar on the handle bars and hoped', Burany said recently 'How I came out of that without a scratch I'll never know.'" The stories of a centenarian - and you try and tell the young people of today...

[ensign14]

Thanks Michael.  I think he will be the first driver who had a tilt at the 500 to reach three figures.  Which is quite the achievement - I think over half the starting 33 in 1955 died racing.  Including of course one that day...

[Tim Murray]

Michael, I love these fascinating anecdotes drawn from your truly astounding knowledge. Thank you so much.

[Richard Jenkins]

Thanks Michael. I think he will be the first driver who had a tilt at the 500 to reach three figures. Which is quite the achievement - I think over half the starting 33 in 1955 died racing. Including of course one that day...

Louis Gerard and Reeves Dutton also surpassed 100 years of age

Edited by Richard Jenkins, 26 August 2015 - 18:19.

[ensign14]

I never knew Gerard had had a go at Indy.  Wow.

 

What it means though is we have not had an Indy 500 starter reach 100.  Yet.

[Vitesse2]

I never knew Gerard had had a go at Indy.  Wow.

 

What it means though is we have not had an Indy 500 starter reach 100.  Yet.

1946. Got there far too late - morning of May 26th - and his car was still on the way and not expected until that evening! With no running on the Sunday that left him - and Harry Schell, who was his official entrant and team-mate - just two days to pass their rookie tests and qualify.

[Lemnpiper]

Does this mean George Conner   at 94 years plus  is the longest lived starter in the Indy 500 on record then?

 

 

  Paul

Edited by Lemnpiper, 04 November 2015 - 02:52.

[Richard Jenkins]

Frank died on Sunday. I'll update the site shortly. A long good life. RIP