Odds and Ends...

I promised some interesting photos, so I'll just dive right into it.  Here is a really white car.  I mean, look at it! The thing has an aura around it!  As I was scanning this, it occurred to me that there was paint on the chain.  Then I noticed paint on the tires.  They painted almost everything on this car white.  This photo appears directly after the race at Fonda from the last post.  I hope they waited until the paint was dry before changing into their best clothes!

Next in the album is a series of photos of accidents.  This first one is followed by a telegram asking if they should try and save the tires.  Guess it was a total loss.  I was hesitant to examine this photo too closely while scanning it.  Yikes.

The radiator is embossed FEDERAL, on this bus.  Notice the windshield.  Safety glass was available for these cars, as I've mentioned on my Facebook page, but didn't get widely introduced by auto manufacturers until after WWI.  Safety glass was first used on gas masks around 1914.  I'm astonished that the side windows in the second photo are all intact. That's a stiff car!

The next photograph isn't such a disturbing image, but the story is.  Unless there was another accident of this magnitude in 1914, this is actually a photo from the Syracuse fair in 1911.  Lee Oldfield's car blew a tire near the end of this race while he was gaining on Ralph DePalma, and his car careened through the fence.  The crowds were packed around the raceway, shoulder to shoulder it sounds like.  Oldfield was thrown clear of the car, but the car itself plowed through the crowd actually killing six instantly, and three or more later, according to this New York Times article.  Oldfield was reportedly driving a Knox racer, and a brief search seems to corroborate this reference judging by the radiator.  I found another interesting reference on David Greenlees' excellent site in reference to Mr. Oldfield.  Notice the curvature of the frame rails.  That was some impact.  That's Ivan on the left, with his foot up on the car.  He was 17 at the time this photograph was taken, 100 years ago.

Without pausing for breath after that horrible scene, the photos cover another accident of a much greater magnitude, but I did not search for any references to match this train wreck.  Don't worry, we get a brief break from the mayhem soon.

This one seems out of place, but it's arranged carefully in the middle of the train wreck photos.  I'm assuming that folks from town got news of the accident and came with whatever they had to help the passengers back to town.  Or, to gawk.

A couple of photos of the engine.  I found the little boy standing in the right foreground of this photo really curious.  Look at the whole train as a set of perspective lines, and notice how the whole thing opens up to the little boy.  It almost makes the whole photo into a portrait of him.  Incidentally, Ivan is standing behind the little boy.  That pose with his hands on his hips is fairly distinguishable.  I remember it pretty clearly from my childhood.  It will be interesting to see if there are other photos of him in this pose.

There are a dozen of these photos more or less, and they all show pretty much the same thing, except with blurry people scurrying around.  No need to use up your bandwidth on those.


Here's a wonderful pose of a Packard truck and work crew to chill the mood a bit.  Perhaps someone could fill us in on the details of these great cars?

Well, I was wrong.  There is a racing related clipping here at the very end of the scrapbook.  It looks like Ivan cut this up and re-pasted it into the scrapbook.  One of the articles previously mentioned that Gotier was a professional driver, and would race in a Stutz, but I wasn't able to find any sources to provide for him.

And last but certainly not least, we have another truck accident to finish up the end of our first full scrapbook.  Some of the Indy races were taken from other books in the collection, but this is the first one that we have truly exhausted.  This will be all for a few days while I catch up with school.

By the way, I believe that fourth gentleman from the right is Ivan in the last photograph.  Notice his shirt collar is sticking straight out.  Also, the little boy at the rear of the truck is giving us all a smart little salute.  Kids these days.

-kpw