Chapter 5 - Pratt & Whitney Millions

CHAPTER 5 PRATT & WHITNEY MILLIONS 1924-1943

After pacing a victorious Kern and a disappointed Schultz, Merkel

James and Ralph Heywood engaged in an animated discussion.

James was livid, owing to a rapidly deflating tire, the king-of-allsplinters lancing its sidewall. Given James’ prompt, Heywood inspected his tires, discovering similarly embedded splinters.

Certainly both splintery surfaces and oiled-slickened patches had challenged the motor-paced finale. Both men sneezed and coughed wood dust.

Twenty drivers and cars, mostly veterans of Indianapolis’ 1924 Memorial Day contest, filtered into Kansas City the week following the Kern-Schultz finale. But eight of those teams withdrew prior to the start flag, citing track safety. Heywood and James’ angst portended an Independence Day - Speedway disaster.

Cars traveling at more than 100-mph rattled surface track boards into objects varying from splinters to spikes. Where was Danforth with his Kanawa tsugi theories when a loose board nearly pogoed a race car into the bleachers. Kansas City’s police stopped the perilous two hundred-lap feature on only its 64th circuit.

Citing numerous inter alia’s, promoters left race car owners unpaid. An unknown track employee, perhaps a Dodson dairyman, chained locked the track’s gate while a shorter man hoisted its emblematic Skill, Nerve & Daring sign into a horse-drawn wagon.

Robert Dodson had retained the deed applicable to his father’s property, apparently unconvinced of parking profitability. Even though attorneys attached liens to track assets, eventually they concluded junk boards weren’t valued.

Belgian-derived laborers who had built the track returned to take it apart. While braces and supports below its surface were mostly intact, the same wasn’t true for exposed lumber.

But creative disassemblers used the original cut-off saws to convert damaged boards into shorter lengths. Despite warnings regarding the use of damaged lumber in new construction, track board discards found their way into expansion of Fairyland Amusement Park and construction of the National Guard Armory at 36th and Main.

Weary of winters shivering in converted tool sheds, Belgians adapted short, even crooked Speedway boards for home construction purposes. Credit and loans for lumber purchases were oddly organized by local a bicycle shop owner. Previously unknown, rumors flew that his mother had surrendered her infant son to an orphanage decades earlier.

Gracious Queen Anne house designs required long beams.

Simple folk house designs required only short equilateral roof triangles, incorporating shorter spans. Across the 1925-26 winter Belgian mule teams repeatedly entered that unsecured lumberyard.

Boards, dowels and even track hardware were subsequently repurposed for house construction purposes.

Grasses slowly repopulated spots where the board track and companion grandstands had obscured the ground’s surfaces although black rings, some several feet in diameter, persisted where fuels and additives had been mixed. Dodson dairymen carefully fenced their herd past such contaminated circles. A fugitive cow, one risking barbed wire cuts, had once broken into a fuel mixing area; she later aborted. Then across 1927’s winter and early spring fresh floods sent the last vestiges of the old track into Indian creek.

A parallel cycle of development, demise and decay occurred one hundred miles south of there. Southeast Kansas’ surface or strip miners rapidly converted a previously wooded countryside into squatty mounds of Ft. Scott limestone adjacent to oddly-tinted reservoirs, curiously labeled as strip-pits. Kansas’ four southeast counties hosting surface mining also recorded high rates of tuberculosis, syphilis and gonorrhea.

Unannounced visitors to the Dodson farm that spring 1937 day did not arrive via LaSalle. By then Billy Dodson’s older son, Robert, had passed away but he was survived by younger brother, Charles who requested nephew, Bobby, Jr., join him to learn what these new visitors needed.

Visitors were siblings, Mack, Burt and Ted Purkey, southeast Kansas mine owners, on their way home to Pleasanton, Kansas.

Using a term unfamiliar to the uncle - nephew pair, the Purkey’s claimed to be scouting the Dodson property.

Southeast Kansas and southwest Missouri lead-rich sites had yielded big chunks of impure lead sulfide, otherwise termed galena.

Regional old-timers claimed surface mining had been as easy as plucking peanuts from partially-buried plants; lead or peanuts, just pluck-and-pick.

Following a short, unhelpful conversation, Charles Dodson informed the Purkey’s their land wasn’t for sale nor were its mineral rights negotiable. Likely accustomed to mixed receptions, these strip-mining Purkey’s anticipated mixed receptions.

Mack Purkey then introduced a fresh topic in the form of a question. Were the Dodson’s acquainted with a midget, by then one nearly forty-years-old?

Ted Purkey drilled. Mother, wedlock, Belgian miner? The two Dodson men reviewed expressions before Charles Dodson curtly announced it was time for the Purkey’s to leave.

Purkey’s were neither the first nor the last miners to visit the Dodson properties. Oklahoma oil & gas men, self-described mineral lease agents, surveyed the dairy-turned-track for expansion of a natural gas distribution system. Humbler Oklahomans piloted a test well but like Speedway parking, it produced no gas revenues.

Even though Billy Dodson’s descendants were weary of fresh entrepreneurial schemes, Wisconsin cousins argued in favor of milk pasteurization hardware, possibly accounting for Missouri dairymen’s search for a second revenue stream removed from parked cars, gassy pilots or even Pb-plucking.

Dairy life become even more difficult following December 7th 1941. In late 1938 Edgar Sengier, the Belgian Union Mine director, had presciently dispatched his country’s Belgian Congolese-mined fissionable material to the United States. Belgian-American sons and daughters rose to the occasion of wartime service, served honorably in both the European and Pacific theaters.

Another war effort arrived on the Dodson dairy doorstep. The Navy Department dispatched Nebraska-native, Rear Admiral Leo Leander Pace, assigning him the task of identifying a location for production of the Double Wasp R-2800 radial aircraft engine.

While other towns stepped forward, Kansas City rose to the occasion, highlighting the availability of Dodson and Grandviewbased skilled workers. Pace’s aides were briefed regarding a resourcefulness that had allowed these first-generation Americans to construct homes and entire neighborhoods beginning with little more than discarded lumber.

The National Aeronautical Administration had quietly finalized on the Dodson site for Double Wasp production before Pace stepped off the train. The sole remaining question, one facing the admiral and Kansas City’s mayor, John B. Gage, was that of naming the facility. Early suggestions stretched from Dairyland Engines to Little Blue Manufacturing although local residents increasingly referred to the dairy-turned-racetrack as the Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp plant.