The Vanderbilt Cup

by KEN PURDY

1

IN 1904 they were singing “Give My Regards to Broadway” and Jim Jeffries was heavyweight champion of the world. Mrs. Fiske and George Arliss were playing Becky Sharp and New York City was finishing the first subway. The Russians and the Japanese were squared off in one of those nice little opéra bouffe wars, women were beginning to demand the right to vote, and one J. B. Fowler showed the world the first thin threat of television: a gimmick for sending photographs over telephone lines. The Waldorf-Astoria menu listed oysters at 25 cents, caviar canapés at 50 cents, prime roast beef at 60 and English partridge at 75. On Friday, October 7, 1904, the Waldorf kitchens stayed open all night, for fifty-two breakfast parties had been scheduled for the hours between 2 A.M. and 7, and in addition many a cold bird and bottle had to be made ready for picnic baskets. The bloods of the town and their ladies were being provisioned for the long trip to Westbury, Long Island, and the first running of the Vanderbilt Cup Race.

Those who had started early enough were on hand when the rising sun picked out the potato fields blanketing the western reaches of the Island. A few seconds before 6 o’clock A. L. Campbell’s heavy Mercedes clanked up to the starting line, drawn across the Jericho Turnpike near Westbury. The official starter, his hand fisted around a stop watch, yelled “Go!” and Campbell shot into the first of ten laps of the 28.4-mile triangular course. Behind him sixteen of the original eighteen starters — Alfred G. Vanderbilt’s Fiat had broken down — milled around in a thunder of engines, some of them knifing the half-darkness with 2-foot-long flames from their open exhausts. One after another, every two minutes, they banged across the line in Campbell’s wake.

There were 25,000 spectators on the course. They had never seen anything like this before, they didn’t know how to behave, and the only thing that saved a brigade of them from instant death was the constant cry “Car coming!” Car coming!” that swept ahead of the drivers like wind before a storm. At the last moment people turned, flung themselves into ditches as the cars boomed past, then jumped up and scrambled back on the road to watch the speck vanish until another “Car coming! Car coming!” about-faced them into the ditches again.

There was plenty of carnage on the course. George Arents, Jr., driving a Mercedes, blew a tire near Elmont on the Hempslead-Jamaica road. The bare rim caught in a trolley track and the car turned over, injuring Arents and killing his riding mechanic, Carl Mensel. A. C. Webb wrapped his Pope-Toledo around a tree without much harm to himself or his mechanician. A Mercedes stopped for adjustment, the driver forgot where his mechanic was — under the car — and ran over him. But the race went on, for 6 hours, 56 minutes, and 45 seconds, when the American George Heath, driving a Panhard, hit the finish fine to win for France. A minute and a half behind him was Albert Clement in a Clement-Bayard, another French car. Lytle’s 24-horseptnvor Pope-Toledo was unofficially third. The spectators had got completely out of hand at that point, and the race was stopped, lest the course be really bloodied up. Thus the first of the Vanderbilt Cup Races and the beginning of a sporting event that was to top, literally by the hundreds of thousands, any American spectator event before or since.

The race very nearly never happened, for opposition to the idea had been fierce and constant, with press and pulpit in the van. Preached the Reverend Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York: “Men of today are choking themselves with luxuries. Oh, the degradation of such a scene! As foolish as a bullfight; as vulgar as reddening the sands in a gladiatorial contest; as revolting as bartering Christ’s garments for a few pieces of silver.”

William K. Vanderbilt nevertheless prevailed. He had driven in many European road races and he believed that these contests were responsible for the superiority of the Continental automobile. The American Automobile Association looked upon him with favor. In 1902 he had placed third in the Circuit des Ardennes in Belgium and immediately afterward had set up a distance record by motoring from Bastogne to Paris in one day. The same year saw him make now world marks for the kilometer and the mile and in January. 1904, he hung up world’s records at distances from 1 mile to 50 at Ormond Beach in Florida. Mr. Vanderbilt was a driver anti a sportsman, and the A.A.A. was pleased to accept the cup he put up; it stood 31 inches high and weighed 481 ounces of sterling silver.

The rules were simple: cars to weigh between 881 and 2204 pounds, each to carry two persons weighing at least 132 pounds and to run over a route of not less than 250 miles of open road, not more than 300. The race was open to any clubs recognized by either the A.A.A. or the Automobile Club of France, no country to enter more than ten cars, the cup to be hold by clubs only, not by individuals.

The announcement of the race on July 7, 1904, was followed shortly by loud outcries from many quarters. There were public hearings, court orders and counterorders, threats of injunction and other legal ambuscades. There were those who felt that the official notice of the race, posted along the proposed course, was couched in unfortunate terms: — “An automobile race over a distance of between 250 and 300 miles will be held for the William K. Vanderbilt Jr. Cup on Saturday October 8. The start will be at West bury at daylight -

“All persons are warned against using the roads between the hours of 5 A.M and 3 P.M.

“Officers will be stationed along ihe road to prevent accidenls. The Board of Supervisors of Nassau County has set aside the following roads for the use of the racers on October 8.

“Jericho Turnpike, from Queens to Plain Edge; Massapequa Road, Jericho to Plain Edge; Plain Edge Hoad (Bethpage Road), Plain Edge to Hempstead; Fulton Street, Hempstead to Jamaica.

“A reduced rate of speed will be maintained while passing through Hicksville. Three minutes will be allowed to pass through the village. Six minutes will he allowed to pass through Hempstead.

“All persons are cautioned against allowing domestic animals or fowl to be at large. Children unattended should be kept off the roads.

“Chain your dogs and lock up your fowl,

“To avoid danger, don’t crowd into the road.” Said the New York Times on October 1: “The farmers of Nassau County are asking what the common roads are for and who has the right to surrender them for purposes which put in jeopardy all who use them in a legitimate way for intercommunications and the movement of merchandise. To notify those who need to use the roads for the purposes for which they are designed and maintained at public expense to keep off them on a certain day between the hours of 5 A.M. and 3 P.M. that the owners of road locomotives may run at dangerous speed is calculated to start an inquiry as to who has the right to thus devote public property to private use.

“It is to be regretted that those interested in promoting the development of the automobile have a talent for doing things to antagonize public opinion so bitterly.”

On October 4, having presumably heard from its correspondents in the field, the Times offered a sharper warning: “The farmers are not only determined but ‘embattled.’ They announce to their unfaithful Supervisors as well as to the automobilists that it is their fixed intention to use the highways of the counly for their lawful occasions in exactly the same way on the day set for the automobile race as on any other day. We may even expect that they will drive to and from market with even more leisureliness than the air of Long Island commonly induces on the part of its inhabitants, and that they will take the middle of the road like so many Populists, to put obstacles in the way of the octopus. They also announce their intention of carrying firearms to protect themselves in ease their lives should be menaced by the precipitate scorchers. The speed maniac, while he is yet accessible to reason, will probably pay heed to the warning of the farmers of Nassau.”

Apparently the good folk thought better of it, though, for it is not recorded that there was a shot fired in anger during the race. Even the housewives of the Islands, bitier before the race because of the crude oil road-dressing tracked into their parlors, held their peace. The shrewder among them had begun to see possibilities of profit, and when the 1905 races were held, it cost the city slickers $25 each to park their ears in farmers’ yards, and the price of home-brewed coffee, cakes, and soft drinks topped anything ever dreamed of in Gotham’s plushiest pleasure-domes.

2

THE 1905 race was run on October 14 and there were twenty entries. The Host of the European maestri were on hand: the giant Lancia, driving a Fiat; Jenalzy, immortal as the first man to hit 60 m.p.h., on a Mercedes; Nazza.ro, appropriately named Szisz, driving a Renault for France, and Victor Hemery, fresh from winning the Belgian Ardennes race. The great Joe Tracy was favorer I among the Americans, and Foxhall Keene, darling of 1 he Long Island gentry, was rated well up. It was Lancia, though, who really bemused the peasants. A monster of a man. nerveless, forever bellowing with laughter, he had a well-developed flair for the spotlight. His car was the noisiest of them all, and he drove it to the limit of madness. When the Italians left Porrier’s Hotel in Garden City in the darkness before the race, a thousand people gaped as Lancia, standing beside his bellowing racer, emptied a bottle of champagne at a gulp before he climbed aboard.

He drove like a man used to backing up his brags. At the end of the fourth lap he was 20 minutes ahead of the field. He did the first 113 miles at an average of 72 m.p.h., which meant that he was hilling 100 wherever the dubious roadway would allow him to do it with a light ing chance for survival. Tire trouble cost him 4 minutes, but still he led, and “every time he passed the stands he was given a rousing cheer, and he laughed merrily and waved his hands lo the crowd.” But the big Italian could play rough, too. He came in for fuel on the eighth lap and was about to start again when Walter Christie came along flat-out. Lancia’s mechanic screamed to him to wait, but he pulled out straight into Christie’s path. The American refused to give up his right-ofway. Christie’s car was destroyed, his mechanic catapulted into a field like a thrown rag doll. A pair of damaged roar wheels on the Fiat took Lancia an hour to fix, after he had spent a few minutes persuading the crowd not to tear him limb from limb for having wrecked Christie. He was in sixth place when he started again, and drove to such purpose that he finished fourth. Victor Hemery won in a Darracq at an average of 61.48 m.p.h. George Heath was second in his Panhard and Joe Tracy third for Locomobile — the first time an American car and driver had ever placed in international competition.

There were the usual wrecks and derelicts strewn about the course. In addition to Christie’s smashup, Lytle hit a dog at Krug’s Corner and missed the next bend altogether. He ran up the bank and ripped through a fence. Louis Chevrolet wrapped his Fiat around a telegraph pole on Willis Avenue, and Foxhall Keene smashed into a pole near Albertson. The huge crowd showed symptoms of the strange mania, a sort of death-compulsion, that was to reach full flower the next year. Women and baby carriages cluttered the most dangerous point on the course. Men and small boys clung to overloaded trees fringing the roadway, like starlings at roost. Miraculously none of those who fell found themselves in front of cars. Of course no one got out of the way until the last possible instant. Venders sold thousands of sticks with feathers tied to the ends. The sole use for these unlikely gadgets was to tickle the drivers as they sped past. “I tickled Lancia!” a woman would scream. “That’s nothing,” another would answer her, “I got Nazzaro on the last round! ”

The races of '04 and 05 were mere warm-ups for 1906. The running of the Cup that year provided sport on a truly Homeric scale. By this time the race had the impetus of a successful Broadway musical behind it. Elsie Janis, the darling of the age, had opened in The Vanderbilt Cup, a solid hit that ran for two seasons and portrayed the character of Barney Oldfield. The distance was ten laps of 29.7 miles each, and the course had eleven bad corners, including a complete U, numerous curves and S-bends as wadi as two steep hills. As before, it started on Jericho Turnpike, hit Fast Norwich, Bulls Head, then Old Westbury, Roslyn Hill, Manbasset, Lakeville, Albertson, Krug’s Corner.

All the old favorites were back: Lancia, the nowveteran team of driver Joe Tracy and mechanic Al Poole (they had won the American elimination on a wondrous new Locomobile), Jenatzy, Nazzaro, Heath, Wagner, Clement. There were newcomers, too, most picturesque of them one Hubert Le Blon, a Frenchman with a foot-long black beard, driving an American Thomas. The motoring journalists of the day flogged simile to death in describing Le Blon and Tracy: “Provided with a generous beard that overspread his kindly but determined face, the man of France, whose work for nearly a decade has been the driving of speed chariots, might have been taken for Old Father Time in a wild flight to girdle the globe before the rising sun could foretell his coming.”

Of Tracy: “. . . then hurtled into view the pace killer of the age, bounding along with frightful velocity, its pilot releasing all semblance of sanity and caution with the goal in plain sight. None had ever seen Tracy drive in such grand form, sitting erect and awe-inspiring like a Norse sea-king of old for whom the unknown seas had no terrors.”

3

BY LATE afternoon on October 5, Cup eve, spectators were streaming out of New York. They came by train, car, bicycle, and by foot. They stormed into farmhouses, hotels, and taverns, where a “suite” might cost $100 for the night. A reporter for the Sun, stationed along one of the main arteries out of the city, wrote that for six hours an unbroken chain of cars craw led past him. head lamp to Irunk rack. It was estimated, perhaps rosily, that $40,000,000 worth of automobiles were parked along the course, practically all the cars in the Last. By dawn, more than 300,000 people were lining the roads, devouring cold turkey and champagne, or beer and hard-boiled eggs, according to their station. “And if we’re estimating,” an old Cup fan said recently, “I estimate that 90 per cent of them were pie-eyed by 11 o’clock. Why not? None of them had been to bed.”

Le Blon was first off just before 6 A.M., and it wasn’t long before things began to happen. Shephard, driving a Hotchkiss for the French, ran wild at Krug’s Corner and ripped into the crowd, killing a man named Curt Gruner. Tracy got into a skid at East Norwich and tossed one onlooker 15 feet, another 10 feet, and ran over a small boy. He stopped to do what he could. In front of the grandstands, the official announcer, one Peter Prunty, equipped with an oversize megaphone and a voice that could shatter windows a mile distant, relayed the telephone reports as they came into the headquarters shack. “Shephard has crashed at Krug’s Corner! Two men hurt. Tracy skidded into the crowd at East Norwich!”

Just then Tracy himself loomed out of the west, jammed on his brakes, and slid to a stop in front of the Race Committee stand. “For God’s sake,” he shouted, “if the crowd isn’t controlled, a hundred people are going to be killed!” He was off again in a second. Vanderbilt jumped into his white Mercedes and disappeared down the course. He tried to appeal to the crowds but there was nothing he could do. The police were completely ineffectual. There were 20,000 people at Krug’s Corner, 7000 at the U-turn — “The Hairpin” — near Old West bury.

A Dr. Wiellschott, handling a 120-horscpowcr Fiat for the Italians, lost his steering gear at the foot of Manhasset hill. With one foot on the brake, he stood up and wildly gesticulated to the crowd. The people caught his meaning and parted like the Red Sea before the Israelites as the Fiat plowed up a bank into a back yard. Under the car when it stopped lay thirteen-year-old Johnny Brooks. They carried him indoors, and in a few minutes Vanderbilt appeared with a Red Cross doctor. But by that time Johnny was out watching the race again. “Just a bad shock,” said the doctor.

Meanwhile the race slacked not at all. Lancia, as usual, was tearing the course to bits but running into trouble too. Joe Tracy put up the fastest lap of the day: 67.5 m.p.h. Nazzaro and Luttgen came past the stands 6 feet apart at 95 m.p.h. and neither would give an inch. But it was Louis Wagner in a Darracq who won for France for the third time, just ahead of the luckless Lancia. He had averaged 61.4 m.p.h. for 298.1 miles. “I was going nearly 80 near the end when someone threw a bottle on the road and I blew a tire,” he said later. “But I didn’t slow up until I got to a repair station. I was dying of hunger. While they changed the tire I drank a glass of champagne and swallowed two raw eggs. Then I drove on to finish amid an unruly mob. It was the most nerve-wrenching race in motoring history.”

Wagner was probably right, and no one believed that there would ever be another Vanderbilt Cup race. There was none in 1907, but the Cup was put up again the next year. Although the magazine Automobile called the ‘08 race “the best ever run for the Cup and the fiercest fought battle an American road race ever produced,” it seemed a mild affair to those who remembered the runnings of the earlier years. The consumption of champagne per capita, among the drivers was low, and while the crowd was mad enough, the proceedings lacked the old flavor of a Roman holiday gone berserk. Said Auto-mobile: “When the starter, counting off the seconds from a stop-watch, shouted to the drivers ‘Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven!’ instead of the old familiar ‘Deez! Nuff! Wheat! Sett!’ the crowd knew things were different.”

4

THE '08 course was notable for the inclusion of 9 miles of the new Motor Parkway to each lap. The Parkway, one of the first concrete roads in the East, was the creation of a group of wealthy sportsmen headed by William K. Vanderbilt. It had no main crossroads and no speed limit: a play strip for the scorchers of the time.

The fastest man over 258.6 miles would take the 1908 Cup, and that was George Robertson in the famous “Old 16" Locomobile. This was the car that Joe Tracy had driven in 1906. He set up the incredible average of 64.39 m.p.h. and did one lap at more than 69 m.p.h. Excluding the singeing of Foxhall Keene’s mustache, there were no accidents.

Happily, both car and driver still survive. Robertson, a bull of a man still, handled the car in an old-timers’ race at Garmel, New York, a couple of years ago — and won, too. The car, hand-built at a cost of $20,000, belongs now to Peter Helck of Boston Corner, New York, an artist famous for his portrayals of racing cars. As a boy, Helck saw the Loco win in '08 and swore a holy oath he’d own it one day. His insurance company won’t let Helck crank the car, but he has a strong son, and he often drives it, and windows shiver for miles around under the booming of its great pipes.

Robertson remembers every foot of a race that few of today’s drivers would have the stamina to run. The high-wheeled brutes that were the preWorld War I racing cars soon separated the men from the boys. “I was thick in the shoulders in those days, Robertson says. “You had to be. The steering ratio was almost one to one, and it took an ox to turn the wheel. There were 110 pounds of pressure on the clutch pedal and after you’d pushed that down every minute or so for four and a half hours you walked sideways.”

The rules of the road were of a certain flexibility, too, “Near the end of the race,”Robertson says, “I was on the Motor Parkway doing close to 90 when I overtook a Thomas just humming along like a Sunday afternoon drive. The bastard was in the middle of the road and I couldn’t budge him. His mechanic was supposed to keep looking behind but he never did. He might as well have been reading the paper. Finally I yelled to mv mechanic, Glenn Ethridge, ‘Get the tire wrench and throw it at the son-of-a-biteh!’ I held him by the seat of the pants and he put a nice dent in the Thomas’s gas tank. They pulled over; then I got by with maybe a foot to spare.

“On the last lap I passed the stands a minute and 48 seconds ahead of Herb Lytle. Then I blew a tire. Glenn and I leapt out of the car and made what I guess must have been a record for changing a tire: just under 2 minutes. I knew I had to make that up and more — with only half a lap to go. I stood on everything. When we hit the crest of the Meadow brook bridge we sailed 150 feet through the air before we hit the road again. We were going over 90 when I saw the finish line, and 50,000 people swarming all over it. I didn’t see how I could miss them but at the moment I didn’t give a damn. I went up over 100.

“On the right side of ihe radiator I had an iron bar to hold a canvas mudguard in case of rain. It must have stuck out 3 inches beyond the wheel. As I roared into the jam I figured the bar had cut fifty men and women in two. They told me afterward no one had been touched. I still don’t believe it.

“ I won by only a few seconds. I had done the last 14 miles ai an average of 102 m.p.h. People milled around until I thought I’d smother. You see, it was the first time an American driver and car had pulled the trick. It seemed hours before I could get loose and find my own little car. I had a dinner date in New York. I parked the car on 43rd Street and when I got out I slipped on the curb and broke my ankle.”

5

THE '08 race gave the American automobile industry an impetus it was never to lose. Orders were pouring into the Locomobile plant in Bridgeport before Robertson had finished washing his hands, and the first salesman to visit Europe after the race sold 2000 cars.

Only stock cars ran in 1900, divided into three classes according to retail price. The course was twenty-two laps around a 12.7-mile triangle, most of it on the Motor Parkway, since it was becoming increasingly difficult to close off the country roads, even harder to police them. Harry Grant of Boston won at the average of 62.7 on an Alco.

Grant won again in 1910 on the same Alco, pushing the average to 65.18 m.p.h. Although the Vanderbilt was to be run seven times more — in Savannah, in Milwaukee, in San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Mineola, New York — the 1910 race really marked its passing. The crowd was vaster and madder than ever, the pace was faster, and blood flowed like water. By the end of the day four people were dead, twenty-two in hospitals. Not all wore direct casualties of the race itself, of course: some were merely trampled in the mob of 500.000 people that lined the course. The weird blood-fever that attended the birth of US. automobilism peaked in 1910, when ordinarily law-abiding patriots came to the race equipped with cable-cutters to break through the fences bordering the Motor Parkway so that they could surge unrestrained onto the road.

The race was not old when Harold Stone, driving a Columbia, leapt the Meadowbrook bridge and shot into the mob, killing his mechanic and injuring a mixed bag of bystanders. A Lancia, a Fiat, and a Simplex were wrecked at the Massapequa turn, with two drivers, a mechanic, and a spectator hurl. Louis Chevrolet, famous for his crashes, slewed his Marquette-Buick into the porch of a farmhouse. His mechanic, Charles Miller, was thrown 50 foot and killed. The body had barely slopped rolling when souvenir-hunters fell on it, and when the doctor arrived he found a naked corpse.

Long Island was now clearly out of the question as a site, and not until an abortive revival was attempted in 1986, at Mineola, was the Cup driven for on the home terrain. Ralph Mulford won in 1911 when the race was held in Savannah; the greal Ralph Do Palma in '12 at Milwaukee: Earl Cooper at Santa Monica in 1913; De Palma again in 1914 at Santa Monica; and Dario Resta in 1915 at San Francisco and '16 at Santa Monica. Resta’s speed, incidentally, set the all-time record: 86.9 m.p.h.

In 1936 George Vanderbilt reviled the Cup races at Roosevelt Raceway, an artificial road circuit; but beyond demonstrating the virtuosity of Tazio Nuvolari, probably the greatest driver who ever held the wheel of an automobile, the event had little to recommend it. In 1937 the Germans came over and mopped up with Auto-Union and Mercedes-Benz cars. Rex Mays alone of the Americans came close to making a contest of it. The Vanderbilt ended, as it had begun, in a demonstration of the superiority of European racing automobiles.

Road-racing was merely dormant, though, not dead, and a small band of enthusiasts who had never given up revived it after World War II.

But to those who remember the runnings of the old Cup, a modern rare is a pale thin wraith, a parade without music, war without flags. The cabarets stayed open all night, then, and the musicians played “Little Chauffeur” and “Come Away with Me, Lucille (In My Merry Oldsmobile)” until their wrists ached. The really devoted would leave Rector’s or the Plaza at midnight and jam the streets to the East River ferries for blocks. At dawn the dust-parched travelers would stagger into the Garden City Hotel for Martinis, and then on to the course and six hours of happy madness.

Years ago, a New York Times reporter said to Mr. Vanderbilt: “It just didn’t seem like the Vanderbilt Cup away from Long Island, did it?”

“No,” he replied. “It did not.”

Later races notwithstanding, the Vanderbilt Cup era really ended on October 1, 1910, when Harry Grant swept his black Alco across the finish line on the Motor Parkway as half a million spectators ground each other’s faces into the Long Island sod in an earnest effort to lay their necks in front of the flying cars.