One hundred years ago, automobile racing came
to the Illinois State Fair dirt track for the first time when the
Springfield Automobile Club sponsored a meet at which the featured
driver was the famous Barney Oldfield. By the end of 1905, Oldfield
held every dirt-track speed record from one to 50 miles.
Although Oldfield’s name is no longer
known to younger people, it once was the very synonym for
death-defying courage (some would say foolhardiness) and speed,
speed, speed. Forget about these modern-day namby-pamby NASCAR
drivers and their trumped-up “outlaw” images (jeesh,
they wear seatbelts, for crying out loud!): Oldfield was the original bad
boy of racing, living life in the fast lane both on and off the
track. He was a drinker, a brawler, a big spender, a shameless
self-promoter, and a showman extraordinaire. His high-octane
lifestyle helped fuel his advancement from Barney Oldfield the man
to Barney Oldfield the legend. Trouble, excitement and controversy
followed him wherever he went.
He was born Berna Eli Oldfield in Wauseon,
Ohio, on Jan. 29, 1878, and named for his father’s Civil War
army buddy from the 68th Ohio Infantry. At age 15, after moving to
Toledo, he took a job as a bellhop in a local hotel. Like so many
others of that era, he was enthusiastic about the bicycling craze,
but he could not afford a bicycle. He discovered, however, that a
certain hotel resident kept a bicycle in the hotel’s
basement, and he surreptitiously appropriated the two-wheeler for
many midnight rides, through which practice he became an expert
rider and eventually a professional. It was on the pro circuit that
his days of “trading paint” actually began.
Professional riders, vying for cash prizes, employed tough tactics
to scare novice riders such as Barney (the other bellhops called
him that, and it stuck), but he developed a hard-charging style,
and with it came success, self-confidence, and ambition. He also
developed, by necessity, a knowledge of mechanics. Indeed, some of
the best mechanical minds of the day, including Orville and Wilbur
Wright, were intent on creating a better bicycle.
Another cyclist, Barney’s friend Tom
Cooper, had graduated from bicycles to motorcycles and eventually
to a partnership with an unknown mechanic and inventor from Detroit
named Henry Ford. Together they built two high-performance racing
cars (80 horsepower, one forward speed, no transmission, and a
piston displacement of 1,080 cubic inches), but Ford was
dissatisfied with their reliability. They needed another mechanic,
and Cooper recommended Oldfield as “a man who lives for
speed.” Oldfield was offered the job and bought a one-way
ticket to Detroit. Once there, he fixed faulty fuel pumps and, with the help of a
coppersmith, redesigned the “mixing pot” (ancestor of the
carburetor) to deliver the juice needed to win races. Now the team
lacked just one thing — a driver. Oldfield leaped at the
opportunity, and on Oct. 25, 1902, under a gray sky at the Grosse
Pointe horse track, he climbed behind the wheel of an automobile for
the first time. With Ford in attendance, Oldfield defeated the reigning
auto speed champion, millionaire Scotsman Alexander Winton, in his
“Bullet.” Ford sold out of the partnership but, on the
basis of the success of the venture, was able to borrow money, and the
next month he founded the Ford Motor Co.
In the philosophy of, “if you
can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Winton signed
Oldfield to a sponsorship deal. It was eventually terminated
because, as Winton discovered, scandal followed Oldfield just as
surely as the sunrise follows the night. Later on, Harvey Firestone
(of the Firestone Tire Co.) was forced to take similar action to
protect his good name by distancing himself, and his product, from
Oldfield’s rash public pronouncements, barroom brawls,
gambling, and general bad behavior. However, it was
incontrovertible fact that Oldfield was the greatest figure in the
racing game, and he was already known as America’s premier
racer when he visited Springfield in the first week of May 1905.
The car he drove in Springfield, a Peerless, was actually the Green
Dragon II. The first Dragon had been destroyed the previous
summer at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis when a blown
tire caused a crash that sent Oldfield and his car through a fence,
killing a spectator and almost killing him. Besides his many other
injuries, Oldfield chipped several teeth, and thereafter he always kept
a Cuban cigar clenched firmly in his jaw, even while racing. He cut
quite a figure in his specially made driving suit (which was dyed
forest green to match the car), green racing goggles, and green leather
helmet, and he couldn’t resist waving to the grandstand crowd as
he sped down the straightaway. Among his professional accomplishments
were many firsts: he was the first man in America to drive a
gas-powered auto at more than a mile a minute and was the first man to
average better than 100 mph at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. At one time
he held the land speed record of 131.7 mph, which he achieved in a Benz
on the sand of Daytona Beach.
Oldfield was married four times to three
different women (his second wife actually took him back after a
20-year separation). He died peacefully in his sleep on Oct. 4,
1946, in Hollywood, Calif.
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2005.
