Once a year in this town, Freddie Mohler is king of the hill.
The rest of the time, he is as unsung a hero as you`ll find. Like his father before him, he is a janitor at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., where students hardly suspect they are in the presence of a world champion when they see Mohler pushing a broom. But in 1953, when Freddie was 14, his dad, Ernie, took him to the university`s carpentry shop, and the two built a soap-box racer. Then they took it by trailer to Akron, where Freddie`s car beat all the others to the bottom of the hill at the All American Soap Box Derby. A little more than a week ago, the city once again was the site of the 1988 Grand Prix of Gravity, as this competition for motorless vehicles with youthful drivers is familiarly known.
Not much of note has happened to Mohler since those 27.78 seconds when he was the fastest kid in the world. One of his prizes was a trip to New York with his parents, but he hasn`t been back since. Mohler, who still lives with his mom and dad in the bungalow where he was born, has never been married. He says he just never thought about it. Truth to tell, he looks a little like the ”What, me worry?” kid on the cover of Mad magazine.
Yet during race week in Akron, Mohler is Robert Redford and John Glenn rolled into one.
The derby committee always invites some Hollywood types to lend glamor to the race. This year Soleil Moon Frye, who plays Punky Brewster on TV, actor Chad Allen of TV`s ”Our House” and ”St. Elsewhere” and Junior Miss America Kristen Logan were on hand for the 51st annual Soap Box Derby. In previous years, Dinah Shore, Abbott & Costello, Roy Rogers and Jimmy Stewart have participated in the festivities.
Yet Freddie Mohler is inevitably surrounded by the biggest crowd of autograph hunters. In the 35 years since he won the championship, he has only twice missed the opportunity to congratulate his successors. ”The college is always good about letting me take this week off,” Mohler said, just before starting time. ”This is my whole life.”
Wherever he goes, during the five days of parades and dinners that precede the race itself, Mohler is constantly trailed by fans. Older folks tell Freddie how vivid their memories still are of that long-ago derby he won. Little kids, here to see an older brother or sister race, elbow each other to stand next to Mohler, as if he had some magic that could make them winners.
For even though he keeps an old baseball cap pulled so far down on his head that his ears stick out even more than nature intended-or, maybe, just precisely because of that-Freddie Mohler is a living icon.
Seeing Freddie, they remember when a dad and his son would go out to the garage, look at shelves crowded with jars of nuts and bolts and scraps of lumber lying across the joists and say: ”Why don`t we have a go at building the fastest darn soap-box racer the world`s ever seen? What do you say, partner?”
These days, that scene is played less frequently. In the 1970s, as many as 270 kids entered the derby; this year there were 163. But if anything, it is played with ever-increasing intensity.
Even to have a shot at winning now, a father and his son or daughter
(girls have raced at Akron since 1971-one has won-and accounted for 40 percent of this year`s competitors) have to start working on their cars the previous Thanksgiving. So notes Ken Cline, who was the 1967 champion and whose 10 year-old-son, Houston, placed 5th, representing Chicago in this year`s race. If they stick with the project through lots of winter evenings and weekends, they next have to win their home cities` derbies, most of which are held in spring.
On race day, the kids and their cars were lined up, three abreast, at the top of a hill overlooking the Akron Municipal Airport. An official waved a green flag at the start of each heat, and 27 or 28 seconds later, give or take a few hundredths, two of those young people were already losers.
Of course, one out of every three kids is a winner-or, at least a survivor until the next heat-and they and their cars are hauled back up to the top. The kids whose cars have been eliminated are taken to a special area of the grandstands, where they spend the rest of the day behind a fence, Middle America`s Wailing Wall.
”It`s okay, baby, we know you did your best. It was pretty windy out there, huh?” said Becky Stine to her 10-year-old daughter, Kari, who represented Hagerstown, Md. Then, ”Turn around for a minute.” In an ultimate demonstration of parental absolution, Becky pulled a barrette out of Kari`s hair and combed and recombed it into a braid.
All of this began on a Depression-era day in Dayton, about 186 miles southwest of here. ”Back then we didn`t have any TV,” recalled Bob Gravett, the founder of soap-box racing, ”and in those tough times we didn`t expect our parents to buy us toys.” Instead, Gravett, who was then 13, and five buddies got the idea of building scaled-down, engineless versions of automobiles and racing them down Big Hill Road, just outside of town. Gravett took as his model the round-ended Indianapolis racing cars of that era and scrounged parts at Dutch`s Garage, just across the alley from his parents`
home. For a steering wheel, he picked a baby-buggy wheel out of a trash barrel, and he painted a big 7 on the car`s side.
Gravett`s car became the prototype for the whole first generation of soap-box racers and occupies a place of special honor in the Soap Box Derby Hall of Fame, the exhibit the Akron Convention and Visitors Bureau mounts during race week. It is referred to, in reverential tones, as ”old No. 7.”
”I figgered it was an easy number to paint, not like a 3 or 8, with all those curves,” said Gravett, who retired to Florida and had come back to Akron to see his grandchildren, Christie and Aaron Gravett, race.
A photographer happened to be passing by the June day in 1933 when Gravett and his friends took their creations out to Big Hill Road. When his editor looked at the pictures, he saw a good circulation-building stunt, and the following summer, the Dayton Daily News promoted the first Soap Box Derby, which drew entries from 34 cities. The year after that, the race was moved to Akron, Dayton`s citizens being unhappy with the crowd the event had brought to town. Chevrolet became its corporate sponsor, and the race quickly became part of the American scene.
For the first several decades the race drew entries that kids had actually built themselves, and which, like Gravett`s ”old No. 7,” looked as if they had been hammered together out of crates from the neighborhood grocery store, hence the ”soap box” designation.
At nightly tellings of legend and lore, no first-time visitor to the derby is allowed to leave town before at least twice hearing the story of Joe Lunn.
”Joey didn`t have a choice about building his own car,” Jeff Iula, the derby`s assistant general manager, explained. ”His father had ran out on the family. They were dirt-poor folks from the hills of Georgia, and in 1952, when Joey won his district race, a local paper shipped his car to Akron. His mom put on her only dress, took a cardboard suitcase and borrowed $70 to get him and her here.”
Although Lunn won his first heat, he went out of control after crossing the finish line and smashed up his car. While he was being patched up in the first-aid station, race officials put Lunn`s car back together as best they could. One fellow took the cardboard his box lunch had come in and taped it across a gaping hole in the car`s nose. Lunn won all four remaining rounds and set a world`s record of 27.22 seconds that stood until this year, when it was tied.
Shortly after that Horatio Alger victory, ambitious fathers started going all out in an effort to break Lunn`s record. Derby rules require that the kids build their own racers, with a limited amount of adult help. In fact, the growth of soap-box technology has long since passed the point where most kids can take a major role in the construction.
”Sure, a 9-year-old can do some of the work, like maybe drill a few holes,” said Ken Cline, the 1967 champ. ”But with cars being constructed of fiber glass, and guys researching the scientific literature on `vibration factors,` designing and building winning cars is an adult game.”
In 1969, Steve Souter`s father designed a revolutionary car in which the driver lies flat on his back, head tipped forward only enough to see out over the torpedolike body. Because that design (the Texas Torpedo, as it is called after Souter`s home state) cuts down wind resistance and lowers a car`s center of gravity, it quickly became the standard for the derby`s senior division
(12- to 16-year-olds). Then in 1973, a wealthy Colorado businessman made a Herculean (or rather, Midaslike) assault on Lunn`s record.
”Bob Lange`s son already had won the previous year, so he entered his nephew (he was the boy`s legal guardian), because the rules allow a kid to race only once,” recalled F.A. Wahl, the derby`s chairman, known here as
”Whitey.” ”He must have spent $10,000 to $15,000 on that car, flying previous winners out to Colorado to pick their brains and testing his prototype in an aircraft-manufacturer`s wind tunnel.”
Lange also tried to give his nephew a little something extra. Before a derby heat, Wall explained, a car is kept from rolling down the hill by a metal bar that falls forward at the start of each race. Lange`s car was equipped with a powerful electromagnet hidden in its nose. Just before the start of a heat, Lange`s nephew would press his helmet against the car`s headrest, pushing a switch that connected the magnet to a battery. So as the starting bar fell forward, it pulled the car with it by electromagnetic force, giving Lange`s car a jump on its competitors. It won every heat, but by the end of the day, other parents were carefully filming the Colorado car`s starts and protesting to the officials.
”Two days after Lange`s nephew was declared the winner,” Jeff Iula added sadly, ”we took the car over to the Goodyear plant for X-rays and saw what we were hoping never to see.”
Lange was fined $2,000 for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The adverse publicity Lange`s magnet-car generated almost did in the race. But a group of Akron boosters stepped in as sponsors and has kept it going ever since, albeit with mixed success in promoting the event to a new generation raised on television.
”Staring into the boob tube doesn`t prepare kids to put in the time and effort soap-box racing requires,” Wahl noted.
To prevent a rerun of the 1973 fiasco, the derby`s new sponsors also established a draconian set of rules for the YMCA camp where competitors stay during race week. From the moment they come to town until after the race is over, explained counselor Meritxeu Boquet, the kids are segregated from their parents.
”Parents can see their children only with a counselor present,” the 17- year-old Boquet explained. ”If they bring their kids a sandwich, we take it apart to make sure they haven`t hidden a lead weight in it.”
Weight is a critical factor in soap-box racing, explained Ken Cline, the
`67 champ whose son was in this year`s race. All entries race at the same weight, which is determined by putting a car and its driver on the scale together and adjusting them to that standard (206 pounds for juniors, 236 pounds for seniors) by adding or subtracting from a set of weights bolted to the car`s floor near the rear axle. Obviously, Cline noted, once a car has been officially weighed in, if a parent can slip his child even a pound or two more lead, his car gains an unfair advantage.
Curiously, Cline added, a similar thing holds if a child can be induced to lose body weight.
Evidently, some derby kids take that message to heart. Most competitors, like 13-year-old Jody Engelke, who represented Chicago in the senior division, have long-and-lean body types. Camp counselor Boquet reported that several girls in Boquet`s cabin wouldn`t eat anything until she threatened to take them to the hospital.
Another girl from Boquet`s cabin, 13-year-old Serita McGunia, from Cleveland, made it to the final heat of the senior division in a car whose sides proclaimed: ”I have a dream!” It marked the first time a black competitor had made it to the derby`s last round. Unfortunately for McGunia`s dream, she crossed the finish line second, behind David Duffield of Kansas City, Mo., who won a $5,000 scholarship.
Most of the other kids and their parents had painted the cars with a kind of mirrorlike finish that would be the envy of NASA. Duffield`s car was an unappetizing tint of orange, and it looked like David had slopped the paint on at the last minute.
And Duffield himself is hardly built to lean-cuisine proportions. Yet he not only won this year`s derby, he equaled the long-standing record time of the legendary Joe Lunn.
Freddie Mohler rushed over to shake his hand, just as he has so many of Duffield`s predecessors, and TV reporters shoved microphones into the young man`s face.
To what did he attribute his victory? Duffield was asked. His reply proved anew the adage about wisdom and the mouths of babes:
”Luck!” Duffield said, his broad smile revealing dimples you could have hidden lead weights in.Fred Mohler, janitor-turned-legend once a year: ”The college is good about letting me take this week off. This is my whole life.”
