Thunderboating - A Personal Memoir - Prologue

By Fred Farley - Unlimited Hydroplane Historian

Unlimited hydroplane racing has been a defining part of my life for most of my life. It started as a childhood preoccupation that became an adult avocation. And somewhere along the line, I was appointed as the sport’s official Historian.

The big boats first grabbed my attention in 1951. I was seven years old. The first Unlimited race in Seattle was run on August 4 of that year. I first glimpsed the sights and sounds of hydroplane racing on a small black-and-white television set in my parents’ house on Beacon Hill in Seattle, Washington.

I remember sitting in front of the TV and being mesmerized by those awesome machines--the Unlimited hydros. To me, they were just the neatest things in the world. And they still are.

Nationally prominent sports were a rarity in the Pacific Northwest in the fifties. Seattle was still largely regarded as a sawmill settlement off in one remote corner of the USA. All we had were the Seattle Rainiers Triple-A baseball franchise, the minor league Seattle Americans hockey team, and University of Washington Husky football--but on a much smaller scale, compared to today.

Then Ted Jones, Stan Sayres, and SLO-MO-SHUN IV brought the APBA Gold Cup to Seattle after winning it in Detroit in 1950. Seattle was ready for the big time.

The new Jones-designed SLO-MO-SHUN V and driver Lou Fageol made a shambles of the opposition on August 4, 1951, on Lake Washington. And I was hooked for life.

SLO-MO V would always be “my boat.” Forty-three years later, I got to go for a ride in the restored SLO-MO-SHUN V on Lake Chelan in eastern Washington with Ken Muscatel driving. Who says that dreams can’t come true?

I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if I had never encountered Unlimited racing--if I had never experienced the awe of those majestic roostertails. A lot less exciting, I’m sure. I might have made more money. (I became a school teacher for the express purpose of having the summers off to go boat racing.) But I never would have been as happy.

Being able to watch that first race on live television was a rare privilege. Not that many Seattleites had TV sets in 1951. I was lucky. My Dad happened to be in the electronics business and managed to obtain one of the earliest models. The screen was maybe seven inches wide. It became my window on the world.

I was eleven years old before I ever saw a boat in person. And that was SLO-MO-SHUN IV making a test run on Lake Washington’s East Channel in 1955.

In the early fifties, a terrible polio epidemic swept the Seattle region. I was spared. But infantile paralysis, as it was called, destroyed a lot of young lives. It was commonly believed that polio could be contracted where large crowds gathered. My Mother, God rest her, was a registered nurse. As a health care professional, she kept me away from crowds. I couldn’t go to a circus or a boat race or anywhere else but school until the Salk polio vaccine was introduced in 1954.

What with the polio scare and the Cold War paranoia that ran rampant in post-WWII America, the decade of the fifties was a scary time to be young. I reject as a fabrication the nostalgic glow for that era, generated by the popular HAPPY DAYS TV series of the seventies.

So, I was pretty much of a homebody during the first few years of my life. But I had television. And through the medium of television, I experienced the boats.