Footprints
Charles
Degelman
The Crash*
1953
One spring, Gus and his father built a soap box racer. This was no jalopy. This was a bona fide racing machine, constructed according to official specifications for the National Soap Box Derby, held each year in Akron, Ohio. His entry sported regulation wheels and an innovative brake system specially designed by his old man. Although Gus enjoyed building this racer with his father, he could sense that his old man had another agenda: He had something to prove.
Years earlier, Gus’ mother had grown tired of living with workers in the projects of Jamaica Plain, an ancient Boston neighborhood. She wanted a front porch and her own mailbox. As it turned out, an old buddy from Gus’ father’s maritime past was bulldozing acres of New England woods to build an electronics factory thirty miles to the north and west of Boston. Gus’ old man was a self-taught electrical engineer, a gyro gearloose, an inventor. There was a job waiting for him once the factory was built.
So Gus, his sister Sarah, and their mother and father moved to a rural Massachusetts town before rural Massachusetts was called suburbia. Warrington, Massachusetts boasted a population of 5,000 citizens, a pretty place full of cows and apples, farmers and mechanics.
The FBI called ahead. They wanted the citizens of Warrington to know that a family of Communists had wormed into their midst.
The gentleman who took the call from the FBI was Chairman of the Warrington Board of Selectmen who presided over the town’s quarterly town meeting. He was also a lawyer, the patriarch of a long-reigning, aristocratic family in Warrington with connections to the better banks of Boston and to the gold-domed Statehouse of the Commonwealth. On Saturday morning he came to pay Gus and his family a visit—just thought he’d drop by to get acquainted.
After a pleasant chat full of anecdotes regarding the town’s history (Gus’ dad loved stories), the Chairman of the Board of Selectmen told Gus and his family in no uncertain terms that he didn’t “give a good goddamn what shape or color you folks are, nobody from Washington, D.C. or anywhere else for that matter…” was going to tell him what to think about folks. Just so long as they abided by the principles of common sense, decency, and the statutes of the town charter, Gus and his family was welcome in Warrington, Massachusetts. And, by the way, he’d love to see them all down at the first Unitarian Church on King Street, Sundays at eleven ayem. “Give you an opportunity to meet some damned fine people in town, here,” he said.
Soon after, Gus and his family were invited over to a great white farmhouse overlooking Bear Hill Pond. It was summer and school was out. The two families ate lunch and watched the McCarthy hearings on the tiny, blue screen of a brand-new Zenith television set over at the Channing family farm.
Time was lopsided for a New England dairy farmer. Wilbur Channing was up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows and get the morning chores over with before he drove an early morning milk route for Herpy’s Dairy. By early afternoon, his work was done until it was time for evening milking. Mary Channing was a farmer’s wife for the 1950s: She helped with the chores, could drive a tractor and clear fouled baling twine out of the hay baler, kept the huge, rambling old farmhouse tidy and functioning, was active at the church and with the PTA, and paid a lot of attention to her husband, her kids, and her kids’ friends. Unless there was hay to get in, or a piece of machinery or a fence to repair, mid-days were easy, anarchistic times for them. Hence the lunchtime gatherings around the television set.
The Channings ate lunch as if feasts were an everyday occurrence. Later, I learned they were everyday occurrences: Huge meals, even at lunch, grew like a stop-action marvel of plenty on the great round kitchen table. Mary frequently jumped up from her chair to fetch more dishes full of mashed potatoes and rolls, green peas and squash, all grown in their own garden.
The Channings wanted Gus’ family to know that they thought it was a damned shame, all this witch hunting in the name of communism and the Iron Curtain. Weren’t the Russians our allies during the war? “Why are we suddenly supposed to think they’re our enemies?” Mary asked in her broad New England accent.
Regardless of the support and sympathy Gus and his folks received from townsfolk like the Channings, his old man was determined to show the farmers, plumbers, and mechanics of Warrington that he wasn’t just some citified, egghead, socialist thinker. Nossir, he was salt of the earth, too. Most of his friends back in Boston were either foreigners, immigrants, or American working-class guys—radio and telegraph operators and union organizers and typesetters and merchant seamen—who had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s when it looked like internationalism and labor unions were going to make things all right for the working man and his family.
Despite his brainy reputation, Gus’ old man worked with his hands in Boston-based university hospitals, fabricating instruments that would measure minute electronic pulses in a hamster’s cheek pouch or timers that could trigger a strobe to capture an object in motion at just the right millisecond. At work in his shop (he called it a “lab”) he rolled up the sleeves of his blue oxford-cloth shirts and wore a bow tie that would not get caught in the rotating chuck of a lathe, drill press, or milling machine. He was a clever, ingenious guy and he lived by his wits, but he considered himself to be a worker just the same as the farmers and mechanics in Warrington. So, when he put Gus’ soapbox racer together, he made damned sure it was well- and cleverly built.
Beyond its beautiful, red, Official Soap Box Derby regulation-issue wheels, this buggy-to-beat-all sported a sturdy plywood and Douglas fir frame covered in tempered masonite. Gus and his dad erected a stubborn post of oak to serve as a front frame member and they contoured hard-to-find, state-of-the-art aluminum tubing into an airplane-style steering wheel. At school, Gus surreptitiously compared notes with several other kids who were building racers. According to his calculations, nobody had such a machine as his.
Night after night, the racer took shape under the warm cone of light that separated their work area from the dank recesses of the coal bin and the furnace room. His old man taught Gus as they worked. He learned how to guide a bucking saber saw along a pattern scribed onto a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. He learned how to mix the fine, dry powder of composite resin glue with water in just the right proportions and how to spread the thick, animal-smelling paste over both surfaces before he screwed the masonite skin onto its supporting frame members. He learned how to use a brace and bit to drill the clearance holes for the carriage bolts that would clamp the axle to the floorboard.
At the end of a night’s work, before they shut out the light, Gus and his old man would stand back from the cluttered workbench and admire their progress. Gus loved to inhale the incense created by their handiwork. Pitch from the plywood and doug fir, vaporized by the friction of drill bits, saw blades, and sandpaper, merged with the fishy odor of the glue pot and the molasses sweetness of his old man’s Pall Malls.
Finally they got down to the final touches, the brakes and the steering gear. Here, they ran into “a few snags,” as Gus’ old man described them. They couldn’t get tension in the cable and pulley steering system, and his father’s specially designed brake wouldn’t always snap back from its down position.
While they were trying to work the bugs out of these last phases of construction, his old man began to lose interest in the soap box racer. Something was happening outside the world they had created in the basement, something big and ominous and unreal, something that took place out there, where soldiers marched on the frozen Korean earth, where men in suits and glasses sat at tables covered with papers and spoke into microphones, and where bathing beauties lined up for inspection by car salesmen.
Gus’ old man knew two people who were in prison, in Sing Sing of all places. Sing Sing. It really existed. It wasn’t a movie penitentiary; Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney didn’t spit and snarl through these bars. Sing Sing was a real place, and the people Gus’ father knew were real people, a man and a woman with two kids Gus’ age.
They were supposed to be spies. Supposedly, they had given secrets about the atomic bomb to the Russians, at least that’s what the newspapers said. The kids at school said they were commies, traitors and that they were going to “get the chair,” both of them, the husband and the wife. Gus talked back, the way kids do, armed only with the fragments of information he could salvage from his parents’ conversations.
“They didn’t do anything,” Gus argued. “It’s the government.”
“They’re traitors.”
“We’re just trying to scare people about Russia, so we can make more guns and bombs.”
Paul Delamater, a gangly kid with gigantic red ears and a pink-and-black acetate shirt spread his arms wide and open-throated, mimicked the sound of a dive-bomber, with the accuracy and attention to detail that little boys commit to the sounds of war. “They’re commie spies. The FBI caught ‘em and put ‘em in jail.”
“We shouldn’t be shooting off atomic bombs anyway,” Gus said. “They make poison.”
“Give ‘em the chair,” another patriot advised, underscoring his conviction with the sound of high voltage coursing through flesh, another little-boy favorite.
Gus was hopelessly outnumbered and handicapped. It was like arguing the merits of the Yankees in a Brooklyn school yard, only there, the resemblance stopped. It seemed as if the whole world hated and feared these people and they were going to die. Besides, Gus carried an unrealized, instinctual conviction that, if he tipped his hand, if he spoke out too loudly, something terrible might happen to him and my family.
At home, Gus’ old man couldn’t stop talking about these people, the Rosenbergs. First he got real crabby and wrote a lot of letters. Then he went to meetings in Boston after work and didn’t come home all night. Gus’ mother got mad at that and asked him a lot of urgent whispered questions about where he had spent the night.
Finally, Gus’ old man got very sad. He would lie on the couch after work with his hand over his forehead until it was time to go to bed. Gus knew better than to bother him at a time like this, but he was getting anxious. Race day was approaching, and they still hadn’t worked out the snags in his soap box racer.
Gus couldn’t make the connection, but deep down inside, he must have understood that these people in Sing Sing, this husband and wife, this mother and father who were going to get the chair, they probably thought, talked, and acted a lot like his parents when they had lived in the city, served spaghetti and salad and beer to folks who didn’t shave and had foreign accents, listened to music and drank beer and sang.
In fact, the Sing Sing criminals could have been his parents, but no one was copping to it. There was no explanation, no comfort offered, no distinctions made. No one told Gus and his sister that we would be safe. The evidence at hand bred jeopardy like bacteria in a petri dish: his old man, laid out on the couch in some kind of quiet agony, and his mother, cooking and chatting and straightening up, covering up the shadows, acting as if everything was okay. Gus, he couldn’t get his old man down into the basement to work on the car. Race day was scheduled for the first week of May and they still had to fix the brakes and the steering.
* * *
The soap box derby race course was laid out on Water Tower Hill, the steepest, straightest piece of road in town. In New England, it is no easy feat to find a quarter-mile stretch of road that runs in a straight line, uphill, downhill, or on level ground. Most of the roads in Warrington, Massachusetts were paved-over carriage roads or farming and hunting trails that followed the path of least resistance through the rolling woodlands and pastures. But Warrington was growing. With the growth came a demand for more water. A few years before, the town had erected a water tower on the highest hill on the poor side of town. In order to build the tower, the public works department had cut a road straight up the hill for the trucks that would carry the great, curved sheets of steel to their point of assembly.
One gray, blustery April day, Gus straddled his bike and headed up Water Tower Hill. He wanted to see what it was going to be like to run his newly built soap box racer down that grade. Gus and his friends had all been up Water Tower Hill with their bikes, but they couldn’t use it to get over the ridge to the lake, so it wasn’t a heavily-traveled kid route. Gus could pedal two-thirds of the way up, but the top third was too steep. He couldn’t keep enough momentum going, even when he stood on the pedals and cut back and forth across the road. He had to walk, pushing his bike beside him. He wondered how the construction trucks, carrying those huge metal plates for the water tower, had made it.
At the top of Water Tower Hill Gus turned and looked down the road that would become the track on race day. He was out of breath; his heart pounded in his chest and ears. The road fell away quickly and narrowed into a thin ribbon that played itself out across the pasture below. He stood there alone in the April wind for a long time, exhorting himself to take the plunge. Did he dare? What if he skidded on the gravel? Like all kids who lived on bikes, he could easily recall how it felt to pick sand and gravel out of scraped and bloody arms, elbows, and knees. But he had to practice, didn’t he? So he would be ready for the real thing.
He decided to let fate take its hand: The next time a crow cawed, he would shove off down the precipitous slope. The next time a cloud passed in front of the sun, he would do it. The next time...
“Chicken,” he uttered out loud. Gus knew that would do it. He couldn’t stand being considered a chicken, especially by himself. Resigned to his fate, he pointed the spindly front wheel of my bicycle downhill and took the plunge.
The bike quickly gathered speed on the first pitch. The wind in his ears rose from a flutter to a whistle to a howl. The scenery began to blur and his arms ached with the effort it took to keep the front wheel pointed precisely downhill. One wobble on this gravel and it would be all over. The wind roared in his ears like thunder and buffeted at his chest. He flew down the final pitch and blasted past the muddy foundations and roughed-out framing of the new tract homes being put up on the pasture land at the foot of the hill. Tears whipped back from his eyes. The howl of the wind began to die down and he let himself relax. He didn’t have to pedal once, all the way to the main road.
When Gus stopped at the intersection, his arms and legs felt as if they were going to fall off, and a funny buzzing nattered in his ears. The taunting voice had disappeared; Gus had proven he was no chicken, that was for sure. He promised he he would never coast down Water Tower Hill again, at least not on two wheels. In his own sturdy, four-wheel race car, well, that would be different.
Back home, however, Gus’ old man was still totally caught up in the plight of those two supposed Communist spies, the Rosenbergs. Gus couldn’t understand what they had done wrong—if they had done anything wrong—and, according to his father and his father’s friends, a case against the couple had been built up in court by cowardly and crazy people—turncoat “friends” of the Rosenbergs who would say anything to stay off McCarthy’s blacklist, or to simply to please “the authorities,” whoever they were. The Rosenbergs were about to be executed any day now.
Gus’ schoolmates took to taunting him, saying the Commies were going to get “fried in the chair,” that “they’d get what they deserved.” It all seemed crazy and weird to Gus, but very far away. He wanted his old man to stop being so upset about the whole thing and help him finish his soapbox racer before it was too late.
After failing trying to coax his father off the couch and out of his sadness, Gus announced “Hey, Pop. I’m going downstairs and finishing up the racer himself. See ya.” He plunged down the stairs to the basement and began making chaotic noises with hammers, drills, and sanders. He didn’t care if his old man helped him finish or not. He was going to have that car ready by race day.
Gus’ independent ploy succeeded: Depressed though he might be, his old man wouldn’t let the brainchild of his genius slip through his hands. Down the stairs he came, brusque and grumbling but, in that one night, they tightened the steering, cut and mounted the slab of tire tread onto the foot of the oh-so-clever brake mechanism his father had devised, and painted the car’s fuselage a bright fire-engine red. After his old man went back upstairs, Gus opened a can of yellow enamel and hand-wrote his name just below the rim of the cockpit, the way he had seen it done on the soap box racers that had made it to Akron, Ohio for the Nationals. The yellow lettering ran onto the still-wet red enamel, but he wiped each letter with infinite care, tidying them back with a turpentine-soaked rag.
*
It seemed to Gus as if half the town turned out on race day. At least all the guys his age and their dads were on hand to check out each other’s cars or to feel dumb and out of it because they hadn’t built a racer. Gus felt very important as he unloaded the bright red machine from the trunk of his parents’ Henry J., a lemon of a car that the Kaiser automobile company had come out with the year before. It was supposed to be a people’s car, a practical, no-frills, down-to-earth vehicle for the working guy, but in reality the car was a piece of junk that began to overheat and fall apart about a month after his old man brought it home. It was embarrassing to own one. But there they were, and Gus knew he had one of the best-built soap box racers on Water Tower Hill, so the heck with the Henry J.
Each entrant had to measure and weigh his vehicle in front of the authorities to make sure it fell within the official Soap Box Derby regulations for size and weight. As they jockeyed the racer onto the scale, Gus’ father was busy wisecracking to the other dads about how good the car was. Gus couldn’t tell if his old man pulled too hard, or if Gus stumbled on the edge of the scale, but somehow, he plunged forward and smashed his nose on the car’s plywood backrest.
Gus recovered quickly and yanked his end of the racer off the scales, but his nose stung and the pain made him feel half-blind. A mist formed in front of his eyes. How was he going to see his way down the hill? Gus was terrified, but he kept the pain and fear to himself as they loaded the racer into the back of Johnny Contadini’s dad’s plumbing truck and whined slowly up Water Tower Hill in first gear.
Gus’ old man asked how “we” were doing and Gus said he was doing just fine but he couldn’t understand what “we” had to do with it: He—Gus—was going to take the plunge down Water Tower Hill on his own with a smashed-in nose and mist in front of his eyes. He hunched his shoulders and father and son made the rest of the trip in silence.
A quartet of dads hefted the racer down from the truck and rolled it to the starting line for a practice run. Gus had borrowed a football helmet from my next door neighbor, Franny (for Francis Xavier) Carpenter. He pulled on the helmet and a pair of leather gloves his mom had bought him specially for the race, but he still felt shaky and blinded from the fall on weight scale.
But the top of the hill and the starting line was crawling with kids and their dads and Gus wasn’t going to let anybody see how scared he was. With his old man holding onto the rear axle, Gus wiggled down into the confines of the cockpit. The car was pointed straight down the fall line of Water Tower Hill with two burly adults holding onto the rear axle. The race marshal nodded and dropped a red flag, the two burly men let go, and Gus commenced to roll down Water Tower Hill on his practice run.
The racer began to roar on its hard, rubber-rimmed wheels as Gus and his car vibrated down the steep opening pitch. The car bounced madly over the asphalt, but he kept it on the course. After all, he had made it straight down Water Tower Hill on two wheels, hadn’t he? He knew he could make it easy on four, even if his nose was banged up and he couldn’t see. Then…
Snap!
In the midst of the noise and commotion, the steering cable parted company with its mounting bracket on the left side of the front axle and came whipping back across Gus’ helmet. The steering wheel went loose in his hands and he became a passenger as the car took a hard left off the road, leapt a ditch, plunged through a thicket of underbrush, and smacked into a telephone pole.
The next few moments were fragmented: Gus sat in the cockpit stunned, listening to the silence. He may have hit his head on the steering wheel, but he couldn’t recall any such blow.
He heard voices but they sounded far away, people asking if he was all right.
A lady’s voice was crying “Oh my god, oh my god.”
His father arrived out of breath.
Gus pushed himself up out of the car and crawled through the underbrush onto the asphalt. Everybody was staring at him. He felt private and embarrassed, as if they had caught him going to the bathroom, so he turned around and went back to his racer. Silently, he pushed through the men and boys that surrounded his car and picked up the loose end of the steering cable.
“Are you all right?” his father asked.
Gus didn’t answer.
His father looked Gus up and down, turned him around, and dusted him off.
“Look at that,” his father said to the other men, pointing to the front of the car. “Not a scratch.”
Gus coiled the cable up, stuffed it into the cockpit and began to drag the soap box back onto the road.
One of the burly men slapped him on the back of his helmet and said “attaboy.”
Gus heard cheering and applause as more faceless men pulled his racer back up the hill. As he re-tied the cable to the steering bracket, Gus’ father explained to the assembled males that this was rudder-control cable for airplanes, the real thing; it hadn’t broken, you see, it had just come untied from the turnbuckle.
The practice session was over. It was time for the real thing. One car after another rolled away from the line and disappeared over the crest of the hill only to reappear long moments later, played out at the bottom of the hill. Most of the cars were raggedy little things with wobbly wheels, but they all made it safely down the hill in one swoop.
Gus sat on his car, speaking to no one until it was his turn to race.
His father grabbed him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “You sure you want to go through with this?” he asked.
“If you don’t know, how am I supposed to?” Anger clouded Gus’ brow. Before his old man could answer, Gus climbed into the racer, settled himself into the seat and pushed against the brakes until his feet burned. “If my brake cable snaps. . .” He didn’t allow himself to finish the sentence. If his equipment failed him a second time, what would happen? What if he had been traveling faster, near the bottom of the hill when the cable had snapped. Who would take the blame? Who would decide what to do next?
The questions raced through his head until another person inside Gus raised his hand in the air and—for the second time—the burly men pushed him to the start line. The flag dropped, the burly men let go, and Water Tower Hill began to pull him downward. The rising sound of the wind formed a tube that separated Gus from the people and the foliage at the side of the road; they began blur into elongated splashes of color as he gathered momentum. He was alone with the sound of his car and the rattling vibration of the car at speed. The telephone pole hung over him, frozen for an instant in stop-action against the sky.
Something bitter rose up in Gus’ mouth, something that, later in life, he might recognize as anger, or defiance. He didn’t remember feeling anything at the time, but he hit the brakes. Not for long. Just enough to make an impact in my forward momentum. When he let them off, he could see the finish line, still far away, but crystal clear.
Now, he was in charge. He felt strong, excited. His body strained forward, urging his handicapped racer down the course. He whipped out onto the flats past the newborn suburban homes and flashed across the finish line. He could hear the cheers as he gave the brakes a second push—after he had crossed the finish line.
*
Gus came in second, just behind Johnny Contadini. Johnny’s dad had slipped a flywheel from an old Chevy underneath the seat of his kid’s racer before the little bastard flew down the hill. The added weight gave Johnny the momentum he needed to rattle into first place. Two weeks later, Johnny Contadini and his dad went on to as local champs to the Soap Box Derby Nationals in Akron, Ohio. Johnny finished 137th and Gus stacked his racer on its nose out of the way at the back of our garage.
Two weeks later, on a Sunday, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted at Sing Sing. They said that Ethel Rosenberg didn’t die right away. They had to give her two or three extra jolts of electricity to kill her.
Gus’ father never got the job at his friend’s factory. Their first contracts were to build servo motors for the U.S. government. He couldn’t get a security clearance for government work because he had been a communist back in the 1930s. He had to look for work back in Boston, which was fine with him, because that’s where all his friends were, but he never did land a steady job. And Gus, he never told anybody that he had hit the brakes on that second run down Water Tower Hill. No. He kept that to himself.
# # #
