Clean Fun at
Riverhead
THE INSPIRATION FOR
THE DEMOLITION DERBY CAME TO Lawrence Mendelsohn one night in 1958
when he was nothing but a spare-ribbed twenty-eight-year-old
stock-car driver halfway through his 10th lap around the Islip,
L.I., Speedway and taking a curve too wide. A lubberly young man
with a Chicago boxcar haircut came up on the inside in a 1949 Ford
and caromed him 12 rows up into the grandstand, but Lawrence
Mendelsohn and his entire car did not hit one
spectator.
“That was what got me,” he said, “I
remember I was hanging upside down from my seat belt like a side of
Jersey bacon and wondering why no one was sitting where I hit.
‘Lousy promotion,’ I said to myself.
“Not only that, but everybody who
was in the stands forgot about the race and
came running over to look at me gift-wrapped upside down in a fresh
pile of junk.”
At that moment occurred the
transformation of Lawrence Mendelsohn, racing driver, into Lawrence
Mendelsohn, promoter, and, a few transactions later, owner of the
Islip Speedway, where he kept seeing more of this same underside of
stock-car racing that everyone in the industry avoids putting into
words. Namely, that for every purist who comes to see the fine
points of the race, such as who is going to win, there are probably
five waiting for the wrecks to which stock-car racing is so
gloriously prone.
The pack will be going into a curve
when suddenly two cars, three cars, four cars tangle, spinning and
splattering all over each other and the retaining walls, upside
down, right side up, inside out and in pieces, with the seams
bursting open and discs, rods, wires and gasoline spewing out and
yards of sheet metal shearing off like Reynolds Wrap and crumpling
into the most baroque shapes, after which an ash-blue smoke starts
seeping up from the ruins and a thrill begins to spread over the
stands like Newburg sauce.
So why put up with the monotony between
crashes?
Such, in brief, is the early history of
what is culturally the most important sport ever originated in the
United States, a sport that ranks with the gladiatorial games of
Rome as a piece of national symbolism. Lawrence Mendelsohn had a
vision of an automobile sport that would be all crashes. Not two
cars, not three cars, not four cars, but 100 cars would be out in
an arena doing nothing but smashing each other into shrapnel. The
car that outrammed and outdodged all the rest, the last car that
could still move amid the smoking heap, would take the prize
money.
So at 8:15 at night at the Riverhead
Raceway, just west of Riverhead, L.I., on Route 25, amid the quaint
tranquility of the duck and turkey farm flatlands of eastern Long
Island, Lawrence Mendelsohn stood up on the back of a flat truck in
his red neon warmup jacket and lectured his 100 drivers on the
rules and niceties of the new game, the “demolition derby.” And so
at 8:30 the first 25 cars moved out onto the raceway’s quarter-mile
stock-car track. There was not enough room for 100 cars to mangle
each other. Lawrence Mendelsohn’s dream would require four heats.
Now the 25 cars were placed at intervals all about the
circumference of the track, making flatulent revving noises, all
headed not around the track but toward a point in the center of the
infield.
Then the entire crowd, about 4,000,
started chanting a countdown, “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five,
four, three, two,” but it was impossible to hear the rest, because
right after “two” half the crowd went into a strange whinnying
wail. The starter’s flag went up, and the 25 cars took off, roaring
into second gear with no mufflers, all headed toward that same
point in the center of the infield, converging nose on
nose.
The effect was exactly what one expects
that many simultaneous crashes to produce: the unmistakable tympany
of automobiles colliding and cheap-gauge sheet metal buckling;
front ends folding together at the same cockeyed angles police
photographs of night-time wreck scenes capture so well on grainy
paper; smoke pouring from under the hoods and hanging over the
infield like a howitzer cloud; a few of the surviving cars lurching
eccentrically on bent axles. At last, after four heats, there were
only two cars moving through the junk, a 1953 Chrysler and a 1958
Cadillac. In the Chrysler a small fascia of muscles named Spider
Ligon, who smoked a cigar while he drove, had the Cadillac cornered
up against a guard rail in front of the main grandstand. He
dispatched it by swinging around and backing full throttle through
the left side of its grille and radiator.
By now the crowd was quite beside
itself. Spectators broke through a gate in the retaining screen.
Some rushed to Spider Ligon’s car, hoisted him to their shoulders
and marched off the field, howling. Others clambered over the
stricken cars of the defeated, enjoying the details of their ruin,
and howling. The good, full cry of triumph and annihilation rose
from Riverhead Raceway, and the demolition derby was
over.
That was the 154th demolition derby in
two years. Since Lawrence Mendelsohn staged the first one at Islip
Speedway in 1961, they have been held throughout the United States
at the rate of one every five days, resulting in the destruction of
about 15,000 cars. The figures alone indicate a gluttonous appetite
for the sport. Sports writers, of course, have managed to ignore
demolition derbies even more successfully than they have ignored
stock-car racing and drag racing. All in all, the new automobile
sports have shown that the sports pages, which on the surface
appear to hum with life and earthiness, are at bottom pillars of
gentility. This drag racing and demolition derbies and things,
well, there are too many kids in it with sideburns, tight Levi’s
and winkle-picker boots.
Yet the demolition derbies keep growing
on word-of-mouth publicity. The “nationals” were held last month at
Langhorne, Pa., with 50 cars in the finals, and demolition derby
fans everywhere know that Don McTavish, of Dover, Mass., is the new
world’s champion. About 1,250,000 spectators have come to the 154
contests held so far. More than 75 per cent of the derbies have
drawn full houses.
The nature of their appeal is clear
enough. Since the onset of the Christian era, i.e., since about 500
A.D., no game has come along to fill the gap left by the abolition
of the purest of all sports, gladiatorial combat. As late as 300
A.D. these bloody duels, usually between men but sometimes between
women and dwarfs, were enormously popular not only in Rome but
throughout the Roman Empire. Since then no game, not even boxing,
has successfully acted out the underlying motifs of most sport,
that is, aggression and destruction.
Boxing, of course, is an aggressive
sport, but one contestant has actually destroyed the other in a
relatively small percentage of matches. Other games are
progressively more sublimated forms of sport. Often, as in the case
of football, they are encrusted with oddments of passive theology
and metaphysics to the effect that the real purpose of the game is
to foster character, teamwork, stamina, physical fitness and the
ability to “give-and-take.”
But not even those wonderful clergymen
who pray in behalf of Congress, expressway ribbon-cuttings, urban
renewal projects and testimonial dinners for ethnic aldermen would
pray for a demolition derby. The demolition derby is, pure and
simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times.
As hand-to-hand combat has gradually
disappeared from our civilization, even in wartime, and competition
has become more and more sophisticated and abstract, Americans have
turned to the automobile to satisfy their love of direct
aggression. The mild-mannered man who turns into a bear behind the
wheel of a car—i.e., who finds in the power of the automobile a
vehicle for the release of his inhibitions—is part of American
folklore. Among teen-agers the automobile has become the symbol,
and in part the physical means, of triumph over family and
community restrictions. Seventy-five per cent of all car thefts in
the United States are by teen-agers out for “joy
rides.”
The symbolic meaning of the automobile
tones down but by no means vanishes in adulthood. Police traffic
investigators have long been convinced that far more accidents are
purposeful crashes by belligerent drivers than they could ever
prove. One of the heroes of the era was the Middle Eastern diplomat
who rammed a magazine writer’s car from behind in the Kalorama
embassy district of Washington two years ago. When the American
bellowed out the window at him, he backed up and smashed his car
again. When the fellow leaped out of his car to pick a fight, he
backed up and smashed his car a third time, then drove off. He was
recalled home for having “gone native.”
The unabashed, undisguised, quite
purposeful sense of destruction of the demolition derby is its
unique contribution. The aggression, the battering, the ruination
are there to be enjoyed. The crowd at a demolition derby seldom
gasps and often laughs. It enjoys the same full-throated
participation as Romans at the Colosseum. After each trial or heat
at a demolition derby, two drivers go into the finals. One is the
driver whose car was still going at the end. The other is the
driver the crowd selects from among the 24 vanquished on the basis
of his courage, showmanship or simply the awesomeness of his
crashes. The numbers of the cars are read over loudspeakers, and
the crowd chooses one with its cheers. By the same token, the crowd
may force a driver out of competition if he appears cowardly or
merely cunning. This is the sort of driver who drifts around the
edge of the battle avoiding crashes with the hope that the other
cars will eliminate one another. The umpire waves a yellow flag at
him and he must crash into someone within 30 seconds or run the
risk of being booed off the field in dishonor and
disgrace.
The frank relish of the crowd is
nothing, however, compared to the kick the contestants get out of
the game. It costs a man an average of $50 to retrieve a car from a
junk yard and get it running for a derby. He will only get his
money back—$50—for winning a heat. The chance of being smashed up
in the madhouse first 30 seconds of a round are so great, even the
best of drivers faces long odds in his shot at the $500 first
prize. None of that matters to them.
Tommy Fox, who is nineteen, said he
entered the demolition derby because, “You know, it’s fun. I like
it. You know what I mean?” What was fun about it? Tommy Fox had a
way of speaking that was much like the early Marlon Brando. Much of
what he had to say came from the trapezii, which he rolled quite a
bit, and the forehead, which he cocked, and the eyebrows, which he
could bring together expressively from time to time. “Well,” he
said, “you know, like when you hit ’em, and all that. It’s
fun.”
Tommy Fox had a lot of fun in the first
heat. Nobody was bashing around quite like he was in his old green
Hudson. He did not win, chiefly because he took too many chances,
but the crowd voted him into the finals as the best
showman.
“I got my brother,” said Tommy. “I came
in from the side and he didn’t even see me.”
His brother is Don Fox, thirty-two, who
owns the junk yard where they both got their cars. Don likes to hit
them, too, only he likes it almost too much. Don drives with such
abandon, smashing into the first car he can get a shot at and
leaving himself wide open, he does not stand much chance of
finishing the first three minutes.
For years now sociologists have been
calling upon one another to undertake a serious study of America’s
“car culture.” No small part of it is the way the automobile has,
for one very large segment of the population, become the focus of
the same sort of quasi-religious dedication as art is currently for
another large segment of a higher social order. Tommy Fox is
unemployed, Don Fox runs a junk yard, Spider Ligon is a maintenance
man for Brookhaven National Laboratory, but to categorize them as
such is getting no closer to the truth than to have categorized
William Faulkner in 1926 as a clerk at Lord & Taylor, although
he was.
Tommy Fox, Don Fox and Spider Ligon are
acolytes of the car culture, an often esoteric world of arts and
sciences that came into its own after World War II and now has
believers of two generations. Charlie Turbush, thirty-five, and his
son, Buddy, seventeen, were two more contestants, and by no stretch
of the imagination can they be characterized as bizarre figures or
cultists of the death wish. As for the dangers of driving in a
demolition derby, they are quite real by all physical laws. The
drivers are protected only by crash helmets, seat belts and the
fact that all glass, interior handles, knobs and fixtures have been
removed. Yet Lawrence Mendelsohn claims that there have been no
serious injuries in 154 demolition derbies and now gets his
insurance at a rate below that of stock-car racing.
The sport’s future may depend in part
on word getting around about its relative safety. Already it is
beginning to draw contestants here and there from social levels
that could give the demolition derby the cachet of respectability.
In eastern derbies so far two doctors and three young men of more
than passable connections in eastern society have entered under
whimsical noms de combat and emerged neither
scarred nor victorious. Bull fighting had to win the same social
combat.
All of which brings to mind that fine
afternoon when some high-born Roman women were out in Nero’s box at
the Colosseum watching this sexy Thracian carve an ugly little
Samnite up into prime cuts, and one said, darling, she had an
inspiration, and Nero, needless to say, was all for it. Thus began
the new vogue of Roman socialites fighting as gladiators
themselves, for kicks. By the second century A.D. even the Emperor
Commodus was out there with a tiger’s head as a helmet hacking away
at some poor dazed fall guy. He did a lot for the sport. Arenas
sprang up all over the empire like shopping center bowling
alleys.
The future of the demolition derby,
then, stretches out over the face of America. The sport draws no
lines of gender, and post-debs may reach Lawrence Mendelsohn at his
office in Deer Park.