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Show Page B6 Thursday, August 21, 1986 Park Record 23? Malice TTwairdl Nome by Jim Smedloy White loves his Offenhauser 3M Do offer good August 21 through September 6 l Buy seven gallons of Cuprinor Stain & Wood Preservative and get three gallons free. Limit 28 gallons purchase per household. Cuprinor Stain & Wood Preservative When it's wood against weather. 649-8477 wmm Park City's Visitor Guide and Magazine serving Park City for 10 years established. reliable consistent To be part of this tradition VCAXX lVX X Support Local Business Keep your dollars circulating in Park City M I 1 Aficionado is a word used to describe someone whose love for sport or other pursuits in life goes beyond just being a fan. It has always been a special word and should not be applied to someone carelessly. Gordon White, a 29-year veteran reportercorrespondent reportercorrespon-dent with the Deseret News, is an aficionado a race car aficionado. You could see it in his eyes while he was filing and scraping a piece of sheet metal into a custom piece for his 1948 Offenhauser or while he was precisely wiping away any smudges or smears on its body. There's a bond between Gordon and his '48 Offy, a bond that is found between many race drivers and their vehicles. They get to know the auto so well ... the purr of the engine is simply it talking to them, letting them know how it feels. The ride is another form of communicationbody communica-tionbody language if you will. A good driver knows instantly of his car's ills. The car tells him. And Gordon will be in some close communication with his Offy very soon, because in August or early September he will be trying to break the land speed record for Offenhausers at the Salt Flats. He was in Park City several weeks ago attending to his Offy, which was parked at a friend's house in Park Meadows. The formal name for his auto is Tassi Vatis Offenhauser. Tassi Vatis was a Greek shipping tycoon who owned Indy-type racing cars. He bought the car White currently owns in 1952, to go after the AAA midget racing championship. The car was built by Frank Kurtis in 1948 and first owned by Ray Hagedorn of Manchester, Conn. In 1954, No. 9, the first and current number of the car, set a track record and won the "Night Before the 500" competition at the 16th Street Speedway at Indianapolis. It also won the 1960 and 1961 North East Midget Association championships. cham-pionships. Gordon began his admiration for midget races in the 1940s when he lived near a track near Shreveport, N.Y. He said America had a love affair with the sport back then. World War II had ended and towns rallied around the small cars and many adopted the drivers and their machines. "They were as American as apple pie and baseball," said Paul Waterman, another racing aficionado from New Hampshire who was out to assist Gordon in his quest for the speed record. He was denied a try at the record when wet weather made the Salt Flats too dangerous for high speed travel. Gordon bought his Offy in 1978 when he was attending a computer show in Reading, Pa. He stumbled into an old race car exhibit and then one thing led to another and soon he was an Offy owner and one of the happiest men in the world. The car's original number was '9', then it was No. 4 for a year. Then it became No. 21 and then it was No. 19 for awhile," Gordon said. "I restored it to No. 9 partly because that was its original number and partly it was No. 9 when it won the 16th Street. "I've been offered $12,000 for No. 9, but I think this one should be worth $18,000. Kurtis built 382 cars like this and Harry Miller maybe 100," White said. There still are quite a few Offys in the tracks. Kurtis made the cars so well that they ruled all the tracks from the 30s until sometime in the 50s, when interest in midget racing demised. Owners can't walk into any auto store and get replacement replace-ment parts. Gordon has had many parts built in machine shops around Washington D.C. and has replacement parts for almost the entire body. When he has one part r 1 t i 1 ; v. J . I ) vt, ' " " . , . f Gordon White takes a seat in his beloved Offenhauser. made he often orders several more and advertises what he has in a club newsletter, for the "Atlantic Coast Old Timers Auto Racing Club," which he also edits. More than one Offy owner has parts on his vehicle which Gordon has had manufactured. He likes doing that for others. It helps keep the sport going. The fastest Gordon has ever had his Offy traveling was 110 miles per hour around an oval track in Pennsylvania. Penn-sylvania. He said that 110 was too fast for an oval track and the gears he had in the car. He ended up bending a couple of valves in that race. To break the land speed record he will have to go con-siderbly con-siderbly faster than 110147.95 to be exact. "The engine has enough power, but there may be other things that stop us such as will the air lift the front end of the car and make it uncontrollable?" he said. To compensate for possible air pockets in the car's front end, Gordon was bending sheet aluminium which he painted to match the car's red color and then riveted to the front sides. He said he did not plan to go for the record on the first run, but would gradually build speed on runs after listening to the car and then determining what it would do. "I don't see this as any more dangerous than driving on the Washington Beltway. 1 hive 15-20 miles to travel without hitting anything or screwing up," Gordon said. And he'll know if he's pushing the car too much. It'll tell him. Congratulations to Bob Toy who knew Heyduke was the Ski Area's rescue dog and that his name was taken from a character in "The Monkeywrench Gang," written writ-ten by Edward Abbey. Bob wins two day passes to the Park City Ski Area for the upcoming season. Now, this week's quiz: What team did the last .400 hitter hit-ter play for and what team in the American League East will win the pennant and eventually the World Series this October? Whoever answers this question correctly will win a Boston fern and a can of Boston baked beans courtesy of Mary Hogan-Holley of Mountain Floral. by Jim Murray Where the USFL went wrong All right, places, everybody, this is a quiz. One answer and one answer only. Papers will be graded for neatness and originality. No prompting from the audience. Ready? All right, for 100 autographed photos of Harry Usher, who are, or were, the Orlando Renegades and is there a product connected with what they do? Is what they do, or did, done on ice, on roller skates, horseback or under water? How about the Portland Breakers? Care to take a guess as to what they do for a lving? Whats a Baltimore Star? Do you fight the Jacksonville Bulls with a sword and a cape or what? Is Denver Gold subject to London price fixing? Give me a break! These unidentified non-flying objects above are entities en-tities in something called the United States Football League. A collector's item. An endangered species. They have "won" what may be the lowest damage settlement set-tlement in the history of American jurisprudence. Three whole American dollars. They could have taken to it to small claims court. Judge Wagner would have given them more in a suit over a chicken. You know, I always thought when you started a new sports league in this country the old rules of good old American gamesmanship applied. You know, protect yourself at all times. Fight a little dirty, if you have to. Make it on your own. I mean, leagues have been warring since the invention of the ball but one never went to court to get the other to pay its bills before. Established leagues have never welcomed upstarts with open arms before. Why should they? They broke the ground. They pushed into the unknown, fought the Indians, In-dians, so to speak, braved the floods stood the heat, cleared the land. Newcomers can't come in and say, "Excuse me, would you mind moving over?" They have to earn their place too. There's even a uniquely American term to describe them: Johnnies-Come-Lately. Consider the turn of the century, when the National baseball league was the summit of all baseball. An audacious ex-sportswriter, Bancroft (Ban) Johnson dared to form a rival league, the American. He didn't go to court. He fought dirty. He scrapped the so-called so-called "National agreement," which bound players to one club and put a $2,500 cap on salaries. He raided, blustered, moved the Baltimore franchise to New York and made off with immortal National League players like Cy Young and Napoleon Lajoie. The National League, which had scornfully refused a postseason post-season playoff with the upstart league, was forced to capitulate and the World Series was born. I always thought that was the way it was done. Not that the leagues weren't litigious. Lajoie had to be I spirited out of the state of Pennyslvania when he jumped from the National League Philadelphia team to the American League, and he had to be kept out, since a court had ordered his return to the National League club. The outlaw Federal League in 1914 perished because of bad timing. It came into being the same time as World War I. It did go to court to have the entire structure of major league baseball broken up by the courts but it had to strike its colors after losses in the millions. An abortive Continental League was envisioned in the late '50s by the late Branch Rickey but it died on the drawing boards after failing to enlist congressional aid. It did, however, pave the way for expansion. The Mets are Rickey's last legacy to baseball. But the NFL itself moved smugly into the grandfather position when a new league, the All-America Conference, Con-ference, was formed. "First, let them get a football," sneered the then-commissioner of the NFL, Elmer Layden of Four Horsemen fame. They got a football, all right! And the best football team in the universe as the Cleveland Browns proved to be when the NFL cannibalized the junior league and plucked the Browns, San Franciso 49ers and one of the several Baltimore teams known as the Colts out of its bankrupt ranks. It was the public's first lesson that new didn't mean inferior. in-ferior. But it didn't take. When the American Football league came along a generation later, financed by the Texas Big Rich, it took the football fans three Super Bowls to realize that the upstart league was not only equal but superior to the lordly NFL. The AFL didn't sue for parity, it fought for it. It didn't seek subsidy, it sought a scrap. It hired Al Davis, a gut-fighter gut-fighter with a zest for combat, as commissioner, and, before he was through, the NFL was glad to have the referee stop it. They sued for peace terms. Davis didn't want any. He wanted to keep his troops going right into Berlin, so to speak, but his general staff, Paul Brown, Lamar Hunt and others, counseled merger. The next new outfit, the United States Football League, did not fight the good fight. It tried to short-cut its way to legitimacy. You build a franchise in the sports pages, not the courts. You hire Joe Namath, a quarterback, quarter-back, not a lawyer. It took decades for the Chicago Bear to become the Monsters starting out a new league is hard, as George Hallas, Curly Lambeau, Tim Mara, Art Rooney and George Preston Marshall found out all those years ago when they bankrolled the NFL over a lot of losing years. Looks to me as if the jury didn't think they should be required re-quired to do it all over again for another league now. (c) 1986, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate. |