Nanook of the North

 

1994 was a strange year. It was also the year I attended and endured the most extreme motorsports event in my performance marketing career: The World Championship Snowmobile Derby in Eagle River, Wisconsin. 

In January... IN WISCONSIN.

Let that sink in for a moment.

As the Technical and Motorsports Manager at NGK Spark Plugs, I was sponsoring several amateur and pro 'sled' racers with dollars and product. It was decided I'd be on-site to support the competitors and our Regional Sales Rep who wanted a corporate presence for the 1994 event. 

The Plan: I'd fly into Minneapolis to meet with Sales Rep Chris, we'd pick up a rented RV and, after loading it with food, gear and corporate goodies, I'd drive the rig North to Eagle River with Chris leading the way in his company car. We'd park the rig in the race pits as our base camp and spend several days spreading the gospel according to NGK. A typical race event plan, no biggie... except NORTHERN WISCONSIN IN JANUARY.

My arrival in Minneapolis was met with extreme cold and snow, and even though I'd been in town the previous year right before Christmas, I was shocked at the huge snow banks everywhere. I'd already learned about indoor self-service car washes, which seemed strange until my education about how ice, snow and mud can pack a car's chassis and needs to be removed with heated and pressurized water. Otherwise, it can fall off in large chunks on the freeway and impact cars following too closely.

Chris' advice about driving the rented RV on icy roads was very helpful:

1. Accelerate from stops slowly.

2. Never stab the brake pedal.

3. Use the 'thousand-yard stare' while driving.

4. When approaching a stop, begin braking at twice the distance than normal, with half the pressure on the brake pedal than normal.

The trek to Eagle River went well. The weather held off and gave us a clear run, covering the 275 miles without incident. I slid the RV only a couple of times, keeping it nice and straight. We arrived at the track on a sunny and clear zero-degree afternoon, parked the rig in the pits and made our way 20 miles North to the hotel in Land O' Lakes, hard on the border with the Michigan UP. 

Thankfully, I'd borrowed a pair of high-end snow boots and had NGK snowmobile clothing, goggles and other cold weather gear to keep warm. I had no idea how critical this kit would be over the weekend. 

The day we arrived in Eagle River would be the warmest and clearest we'd see for the entire race weekend. Nighttime temps would drop to minus-35 degrees, and I learned that Chris always parked his car with the nose partially buried into a snow bank. This prevented the wind from freezing the engine block solid and allowed the engine block warmer to actually warm the engine enough to start safely.

The next morning, Chris and I headed to the hotel restaurant for a hearty brekkie. We'd just ordered when a guy sat down at a table next to us. I glanced over, then looked again and realized it was Stan Fox, a notable sprint car and IndyCar driver from Janesville, Wisconsin.

Me (whispering): "Chris... do you know who Stan Fox is?"

Chris (whispering): "Yep, sure do... but why are you whispering?"

Me (still whispering): "Well, Stan Fox just sat down at the table next to us."

Chris (still whispering): Oh man... that's so COOOOL."

 

Without missing a beat, I went over and introduced myself to Stan, who couldn't have been friendlier and accepted my invitation to eat with us. It turns out he was a MAJOR sledding fan and attended The Derby every year, was staying at the same hotel, and wound up meeting us for breakfast each of the following mornings before heading to the track (we both loved oatmeal). He also loved NGK spark plugs and used them exclusively in all of his personal toys. 

Snapshot: The Derby track is a self-contained high-banked half-mile oval of snow and ice, where several classes of sleds (snowmobiles) race at speeds of up to 100mph. The 'hot pits' is a Staging area just outside of the track where sleds and riders line up to enter the track and then cool down after each race. During my first walk through the Staging area, I noticed hundreds of small wads of multi-colored tape littering the area and asked Chris what they were. His answer: pieces of duct tape the racers stuck to their faces underneath their head socks, helmets and goggles to prevent facial frostbite while racing, then pulled off and discarded after each race. OUCH.

                  2021 Eagle River Derby Pro-Mod 800 Final Highlights

Snapshot: One evening just before dusk, Chris and I went to dinner at a family restaurant/bar overlooking a frozen lake. Before ordering, we heard what sounded like a flock of angry chainsaws. We looked out the expansive window and watched a group of six sledders speeding across the lake towards the restaurant. They stopped and came into the adjacent bar to tilt a few. After about an hour, the drunk sledders left the bar, mounted their rides and blasted off across the pitch-black frozen lake at high speed. This seemed pretty dangerous to me, but Chris said it was normal Derby-time behavior. "They're filled with anti-freeze and if they crash, they'll feel no pain."

Snapshot: We attended the Friday night grudge match races between the Super Stock and F-1 sleds, a very popular event. With the wind chill, the temperature was about minus-40 degrees and the ground was so cold that I couldn't stand in one place for more than a minute before my feet began to hurt. The solution: bounce back and forth from one foot to another, which everyone standing around the track fence was doing, resulting in a crazy group dance. Every time the sleds raced by, we had to duck below the top edge of the fence or we'd be instantly enveloped in a thick coating of ice dust and wind up looking like a weird snowman. Note: the track fence height has been extended since my visit.

Snapshot:  We spent Saturday morning visiting every race trailer in the pits to hand out spark plugs, contingency stickers and ball caps in minus-25 degree weather. We took a break inside the RV to warm up and have lunch. Without a word, Chris dug out a hibachi and some charcoal, pulled a big pack of bratwurst outta the fridge and started a barbecue outside the RV. I was stunned at the idea of grilling brats in such cold weather but it was normal for him, a Minneapolis native. We grilled brats and shared them with anyone who came walking by. We ran out of brats.

Not the actual brats, but a reasonable facsimile.

When we arrived trackside on Sunday morning, the weather had turned ugly enough that Chris suggested we bug out early or we'd never make it back to Minneapolis before dark. We were soon on the road South in a horizontal snowstorm, and the temperature was still around minus-25 degrees. The RV's heater was useless, and the full-blast defroster kept one square foot of windshield semi-clear. The engine belts kept freezing up with a loud squeal, then would heat up and work only to freeze again, over and over and over. The volt gauge kept bouncing from zero to 18 and back again. I was wearing ALL of my cold weather gear but still froze inside that cavernous RV.

As I carefully drove through the blizzard, the road ahead was covered with icy snow, visible only by two barely perceptible tire track lines. I drove like this for hours, thinking the whole time that I'd skid off into the forest and die, get buried by the snow and be found only after the Spring thaw. Luck was with us and we arrived at Chris' home before dark, so we drank several beers to celebrate not dying in a blizzard.

Epilogue: Stan Fox entered the 1995 Indianapolis 500 and was involved in a truly horrific crash that ended his racing career.

He was severely injured and in a coma for a week but survived. In 2000 he was killed in a head-on road collision while driving to a race meeting during a visit to New Zealand. R.I.P. Stan Fox. So it goes.

By the end of 1994, I'd lost my job at NGK and Mom was rehabbing at our home after suffering an alcoholic coma. 18 months later I was supervising regional personal watercraft (PWC) racing events for the IJSBA all over the country, and my spark plug technical background made me a very popular guy in the pits. So it goes.

I've been incredibly lucky to have enjoyed a long career that was so directly involved with the automotive performance and motorsports industries. I have Dad to thank for my love of racing, which he infected me with at a young age. Many people think race fans only like to watch because of the crashes. They're 100% wrong in every conceivable way.

Motor racing of any kind can be exhilarating and dangerous, and the threat of mayhem, injury and death is always there. However, as Steve McQueen's character Michael Delaney said in the film 'Le Mans': 

"Motor racing is important to men who do it well. For them, racing is life; anything that happens before and after... is just waiting."

All images, Gracias de Google Images; all videos, Muchisimas Gracias de YouTube.

California Dreaming

 

One recent Saturday morning during our bi-weekly visit to the Mother-in-law's house, I walked by several yard sales in the local 'hood before I started my housecleaning chores. I enjoy yard sales and always search for books, music and other items the sellers have decided they can live without.

I bought some cool stickers for $.25 each at one house, shopped a few others and on the way back stopped at the last yard sale between me and the vacuum cleaner.

I knew this house well, as the owner always parked a mid-60's Volvo Sedan out front and a rough-but-very-cool Ford E-100 Van, also mid-60's vintage, normally sitting in the driveway but now gone. I notice these things.

Among the car parts, toys and other items displayed in the driveway was a folding table with several books and magazines. The book pictured above titled 'Early California' was there too, so I picked it up and began to leaf through the pages because I Love History.

The spine was slightly torn, the cover stained with a sticky ring from a cup, and some pages were starting to come loose from the binding. What jumped out at me was the inside cover and first page illustration, repeated on the back cover and last page.

The illustration was a well-designed vertical timeline, starting in the year 1492 and progressing to 1850, with several drawings from each period about key events during that time. It was a simple yet evocative preview of the text to follow.

As I leafed through the book and saw the numerous drawings, photos, maps and illustrations, I had to have it and gave the owner $1.  I also found out he'd sold his beloved Ford van but didn't regret it in the least. I returned to the homestead, showed the booty I'd bought to the girls and began with my Domestic God duties.

A few weeks later, I grabbed the book to read while eating breakfast. I like to read every morning before my 50-foot commute from the kitchen to my desk in our second bedroom, where I've worked remotely since the Year of Covid 2020.

I discovered 'Early California' was a State school textbook published in 1950, originally allocated to the Monrovia (CA) School District with additional markings inside showing it was used in the San Marino (CA) School District. A Google search of author Irmagarde Richards yielded little information, except that she'd written other textbooks and had a 1921 bestseller titled 'Modern Milk Goats'.

Over the following weeks, I read and read and read, captivated by the basic yet beautifully-descriptive writing and the way the author created scenes of life that were easily pictured in my mind's eye. The following is from the first page of Chapter One, titled 'Flying Over California Long Ago' about wild ducks leaving their winter home in Mexico:

"The ducks rose up into the air. They flew in a circle high above the water. Then they turned North in a great flock. They flew away from that beautiful lake in Mexico where they had lived all winter... On the third day they left behind them the land of Mexico. Now they were flying over the California land. The ducks knew that this was where they would find a good summer home. They knew it was a good place to raise their families."

"When they came to California an old duck led the way. Perhaps in their bird way he said 'Let us fly toward the west, toward the ocean. I have been over this land before. Near the ocean it is cool. There are little streams and good places where we can rest. We shall find food there." 

This style of simple, lyrical writing is what hooked from the very start of the book. Every Chapter that followed was filled with descriptions and imagery and illustrations and facts that brought the story of Early California not just to life, but into reality.  More text nuggets:

"Indians came to America from Asia. They did not come in big ships across the Pacific Ocean. They came most of the way by land. A globe shows that Asia and North America came close together in the North. Between these two lands are many islands. The Indians came across these islands to America."

(snip)

"Indians thought boys fourteen years old were ready to be men. They were old enough to do all the things that men do. If they passed the tests, they were called men. They had to show that they were strong and brave. They had to go without food for two or three days. They had to go out into the woods and stay alone through the dark nights. If a boy was not afraid, alone in the dark, the Indians believed some good spirit would come to him. This spirit would be his friend and would help him all his life."

The story of Indian boys in the woods resonated with me. It closely describes a Boy Scout ceremony I went through in the San Bernardino (CA) mountains called an Ordeal. It was required to earn entrance to the Order of the Arrow, an honor camping society based on Indian lore. The Good Spirit that befriended me during the Ordeal still helps me all these years later.

The Author, circa 1969

As I read on, the famous names and events from history kept coming: Cortes, Cabrillo, Drake, Viscaino, Portola, Serra, Anza, Sutter, Bidwell, March. The era of Spanish exploration. The search for a huge mystical bay that eluded the Spanish for years, which they eventually found and named Yerba Buena, later renamed as San Francisco. The founding of the Spanish Missions. The Russian and Yankee foreigners that arrived to trade Asian goods for furs and food, and Spain's loss of the territory to Mexico.

Then came the Americans and the discovery of gold, which brought with it a tidal wave of (mostly) white people hoping to get rich, forever changing the land in just two short years. Eventually, Mexico lost the land when the Republic of California was established in 1846 and became a member of the United States in 1850, where the story ends.

When I finished the the book, it left me wanting to know even more about California history, which is exactly what a well-written textbook should do. I also had questions about the textbook's history. What Grade Level was it written and used for? My best guess would be 4th or 5th Grade. How long was it used as a textbook? What replaced it in State's curriculum, and when? 

I wrote emails to both the Monrovia and San Marino School Districts but got no response. Then I emailed the California Department of Education. Their response was friendly but they found no record of the book or author in their database. I shouldn't have been surprised, because it was published over 70 years ago, and no one keeps records for that long.

I even contacted a university professor with a Ph.D. in California History who runs the California Frontier Project, a website that provides teaching materials and information to state History teachers. He'd never heard of the book but said my email piqued his interest and he was gonna buy a copy.

My takeaway from the book is complex. The stories about the Indians, how they lived and the way their society thrived before the arrival of the Spanish explorers is in stark contrast to their subjugation by the missionary priests, even if their lives became somewhat less difficult.

I enjoyed the stories of how early California trade began to prosper between the Indians and Spaniards and Russians and East Coast Americans, an eye-opener because of how symbiotic the relationship was for everyone involved.

And of course, the stories about how White people came flooding into the State, first to homestead and then to plunder the gold and commandeer the natural resources. It demonstrates how progress can cause history to careen in directions no one could have predicted. Thankfully for the students reading this book in a 1950's schoolroom, the results were left to be detailed later as they got older and better-able to understand the consequences of discovery.

I'm amused to think how this 70-year-old school book would be perceived in today's context of parental rights over educational content and the wildly divergent views on race, culture and diversity we're experiencing. 

I imagine that Irmagarde Richards wasn't worried about context. She simply wrote an excellent Grade school textbook and provided a public service by documenting real California history... supporting education, knowledge and an understanding of how our State came to be. 

I Love History... yard sales, too. Thank you, Irmagarde!

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." - Abraham Lincoln

Historical images courtesy of 'Early California' textbook; lead image by the author; Scouting Ordeal image, Muchisimas Gracias de Manuel A. Macias, Jr.; all videos, Gracias de YouTube.