Thunderboating - A Personal Memoir - Chapter 2

By Fred Farley - Unlimited Hydroplane Historian

The chain of events that ultimately led to my 1973 appointment as APBA Unlimited Historian began when I purchased a publication at a Limited race on Green Lake in the summer of 1957. The publication was called the UNLIMITED HYDROPLANE NEWS, edited and published by Seattleite Bob Brinton. This was the so-called “Gold Cup Edition” with a photograph of SLO-MO-SHUN IV on the cover that I obtained for all of twenty-five cents.

Upon discovering that the UNLIMITED HYDROPLANE NEWS was a periodical, I promptly sent off a couple of dollars for a subscription. What impressed me about the HYDRO NEWS was the depth of the reporting. Clearly, this fellow Brinton had a lot more to offer than the local newspapers did.

I later learned that Brinton’s father had been a co-designer of STANDARD, the original Gold Cup winner back in 1904. When Unlimited racing replaced the rain as a conversational topic in Seattle, Bob was one of the few Northwesterners with an extensive frame of reference where the boats were concerned.

It wasn’t long before I tracked down his telephone number. Soon, I was pestering poor Mr. Brinton on a regular basis, bombarding him with questions. To Bob’s credit, he was unfailingly polite and did his level best to answer my queries. The man truly had the patience of a saint.

(What goes around comes around! A generation later, I found myself playing the Brinton role with an eager youngster named Skip Young, whom I dubbed “The Nightly Caller.” Skip is an adult now and still a very good friend. He has edited a couple of first-rate hydro fanzines and even persuaded me to contribute occasional guest columns.)

When the local media started cutting back on Unlimited coverage, I depended on Brinton’s UNLIMITED HYDROPLANE NEWS even more for “inside information.” Brinton had an associate named Phil Jursek who lived in Detroit and reported on the eastern races. It was through Jursek that my interest in Unlimited history came into focus.

Phil was only about four years older than I was. By age 20, he had already made significant inroads into sports broadcasting in Detroit and was one heck of a good announcer. I listened with rapt attention to his in-depth play-by-play of the 1959 Detroit Memorial, the 1960 Silver Cup, and the 1961 Gold Cup.

Jursek also had easy access to the APBA national office. In the late fifties, Phil painstakingly copied from the APBA summary sheets the results of almost every significant Unlimited race. These included the Harmsworth Trophy since 1903, the Gold Cup since 1904, the President’s Cup since 1926, the National Sweepstakes since 1930, the Silver Cup since 1946, and the Detroit Memorial since 1947.

It was a good thing that Jursek copied the data when he did. A year or so later, many of the pre-war summaries were thrown out in an office cleaning move.

In 1960, Phil and I became pen pals. I asked him the questions that Brinton was unable to answer. In response, Phil sent me a copy of his record book. When that arrived in the mail, my life was changed forever. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

In my possession was information that the APBA national office didn’t have! How many other 16-year-old hydro fans could make that claim? Phil’s record book was truly manna from heaven. To this day, it remains the cornerstone of my historical collection and the starting point for everything that I’ve been able to accomplish in the sport.

My friendship with Phil Jursek was one of the most pleasant of my life--even though I only met him in person twice. (That was when he flew out to Seattle for the Gold Cup races in 1962 and 1965.) I learned an awful lot from him.

Unfortunately, Phil’s love for the boats did not survive the rash of fatalities that shook the sport to its foundation in the late sixties.

He had been a close friend of both Bob Hayward and Chuck Thompson. Seeing Hayward killed in the 1961 Silver Cup took a lot out of Jursek. As a fan, he was never the same. His radio broadcasts of the 1963 and 1964 Gold Cup races were not on a par with his earlier efforts.

His letters became less frequent. Then, when Thompson died in the 1966 Gold Cup, that was the final blow. Phil walked away from the sport and never returned. He decided to make “a clean break” and sold me his button and program collection in 1968. And then we lost touch.

In the 1990s, I tracked him down in Columbus, Ohio, where he ran an ad agency. He still hadn’t seen a heat of competition since the day Thompson was killed. I offered to fix him up with pit passes for the races in Madison or Evansville. But he wasn’t interested.

The APBA did not have a designated Unlimited Historian in the sixties. But if there had been, Phil Jursek would most certainly have been given the job. In essence, Phil did unofficially what I started doing officially in 1973.

Everything I am in the sport, Phil could have been--because he was there first.

Having made the acquaintance of Brinton and Jursek, I started gathering historical information on my own. I would send away to the APBA for a photocopy of the summary sheet after every Unlimited race. And in 1963, I became an APBA member.

I had accumulated a formidable amount of knowledge about the sport in a rather short period of time. Indeed, most of the people associated with the sport didn’t know as much about Unlimited history as I did.

But I was still on the outside looking in, as far as getting close to the boats was concerned. Somehow, I had to get a pit pass.

But that was easier said than done, because passes were next to impossible to obtain. In those days, one had to know someone who had connections. The person who had helped me in 1957 had retired from the Seattle race committee. So, I didn’t know anyone.

Throughout the fifties and sixties, the Seattle Yacht Club looked upon the Seafair Unlimited race as its own peculiar fiefdom. Even though the yacht club ceased to be a co-sponsor (with Greater Seattle, Inc.) after 1960, the SYC’s influence was keenly felt. All of the top committee officials were yacht club people. And the monthly meetings were still being conducted at the Seattle Yacht Club as late as 1970.

Non-members were barely tolerated by the ruling SYC clique. In all fairness to the yacht club people, there were many loyal members who labored long and hard for many years to make a success of Unlimited racing in Seattle. But the SYC’s collective attitude toward “the great unwashed” could be one of cold indifference at times. One could even use the word snobbish.

But I was determined to gain access to those hallowed “hot pits.” And in 1962, I found a way.

With the information that I had gleaned from Jursek’s record book, it was easy for me to spot factual errors in the program books of that era.

I had just graduated from high school and was set to start college in the fall. One day, I called the editor of the Seafair Regatta program, a man named Clyde Robinson, and politely informed him that I had found 44 mistakes in his previous year’s book. Fortunately for me, he took it in good humor. He laughed and said, “Well, why don’t you help me whittle it down to 43.”

Mr. Robinson then invited me to lunch. We talked for several hours and he ended up asking me to proofread the text and to write a short column for the 1962 book.

This was all heady stuff for me. I wasn’t yet eighteen. I had never before been involved with a publication. And I didn’t know the first thing about journalism. (I was unaware, for example, that a manuscript is supposed to be typed in a certain way--not on two sides but on only one side of a piece of paper.)

Clearly, I had a lot to learn. My earliest writing efforts were incredibly inept. When I re-read them today, 40 years later, I cringe. All I had going for me was my knowledge of the boats. I was at least able to guarantee the accuracy of what I wrote.

Mr. Robinson was a nice man. But he gave me too much responsibility too soon. I didn’t really hit my stride as a writer until the seventies.

I worked on the Seafair program for nine years. From 1963 onward, although terribly inexperienced, I wrote practically the whole book. Not until 1967 did I ever get paid. My fee for scripting the Unlimited portion of the program helped to pay my way through the University of Washington.

Most of the programs of the fifties that I had read were very skimpy in terms of information on the boats and drivers. And more often than not, the same boat pictures were used over and over again.

At the 1962 Seattle race, I persuaded Mr. Robinson to let me sell programs at the Sayres Pits. When I would sell a program, the first thing that a customer would do was turn to the boat section. People clearly wanted more information than what they were given. They wanted something more than just a picture book.

For 1963, I suggested that we beef up the program considerably with more in-depth commentary, more statistics, and a better balance between text and photography. As badly written as the 1963 edition may have been, it was the closest thing to a textbook on Unlimited racing that had ever been published up until that time.

I wasn’t too happy with the 1964 and 1965 Seafair programs. They were essentially watered-down versions of 1963, but they were nevertheless learning experiences for me. I was slowly mastering the tricks of the journalistic trade.

Over the years, a lot of my writing has appeared in programs. Programs are the one thing that everybody collects. They stand the test of time, unlike newspapers. Even periodical magazines--as good as some of them are--usually don’t last long. This is why I’ve focused so much on programs.

Clyde Robinson retired after 1965. For 1966, Greater Seattle, Inc., the Seafair management group, was in turmoil. There were financial problems. The Walter Van Kamp administration was phasing itself out and the Arden Aegerter administration hadn’t yet phased itself in. Things were so bad that Greater Seattle didn’t even have a PR Director in 1966.

When it came time to put the program together, much of the responsibility ended up in my lap. I was pretty much left to my own devices. I had more authority in 1966 than in any of the nine years that I was involved with the Seafair book. I even designed the cover, which featured a classic photo of SLO-MO-SHUN IV.

For the most part, it was just the printer and me. A couple of times a week, I would stop by Metropolitan Press in downtown Seattle, explain what I wanted done, and then go back home to my Underwood portable typewriter. (This was in the days before word processors, e-mail, and fax machines.)

I worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for five weeks on the program, during the months of June and July 1966. And all for no pay. I asked only for a pit pass and a race day seat on the official barge. (In three of my first four years on the committee, I had been unable to obtain credentials for the barge on race day.)

Despite an impoverished budget and a frantic production schedule, the 1966 Seafair Program turned out rather well, despite a few glitches. I’m quite proud of it. The layout was a bit stilted in places, but everything that I wanted in there got included. It was my one and only chance to be my own editor on a major publication. And I didn’t blow it.

But what the officials at Greater Seattle and Met Press didn’t know is that I was one of the walking wounded in 1966.

A variety of health problems and a series of personal setbacks in other areas of my life all combined to exact a heavy toll on my psyche. It was not a good time for me. I waged a daily battle with chronic depression. 1966 was truly not a vintage year for me.

When the program editorial meetings began in the spring, a heavily tranquilized Fred Farley went through the motions of business as usual. But the Seafair book was something positive to focus upon. I really gave it my all. Writing that program helped a great deal in exorcising my personal demons.

But for a while, there was doubt if there would even be a Seafair race, let alone a program book to publicize it.