ARIZONA'S JIMMY BRYAN-KING OF THE SPEEDWAYS

20th century passion for automobiles. He built his first one when he was thirteen years old. The body was the steel frame of a bed. The motor, a one-cylinder job, came off a water pump. The wheels were from a wheelbarrow. It could go thirty-five miles an hour, and it had no brakes. All he could do to stop it was turn off the switch and let it coast to a stop, or run it into something.

Jim Bryan was born in Phoenix thirty-one years ago and graduated from Phoenix Union High School. His father, R. L. “Pete” Bryan, who is assistant chief of a suburban fire department, remembers that nobody taught him how to drive. He taught himself, as kids often do. “When he first started racing,” says Jim's mother, “it was mostly for fun. Then he really got into it and decided to head for the top.”That was right after World War II. Jim had spent two years in the Air Force and had completed his pilot training when the war ended. But now his mind was on automobiles, not airplanes.

There was another young fellow in the town who was crazy about automobiles and crazy about speed. His name was Bobby Ball, and he was a scholarly-looking youngster who wore glasses and had bushy hair. He and Jimmy Bryan were good friends. They both wanted to race midgets, but nobody who owned midgets would let them drive because they'd had no experience. So they built a roadster. That was the class below the midgetabout as far down the totem pole of racing as you could go. A typical roadster would be a 1927 Model T body with a Mercury engine. It looked like a fugitive from the county dump but it traveled one-hundred-thirty to one-hundred-forty miles per hour. Jim would take the headlights and windshield off, drive out to the Phoenix Speedway on East Thomas Road, run his race, put the windshield and lights back on and drive home. He raced against California hot-rodders with souped-up engines and fancy roll bars. But he won as often as not because he knew the track and they didn't, and also because he was learning his craft.

Bobby Ball was learning it, too, and in a short time he and Jim worked their way into the midgets. And it was in a midget race one day at the Carroll Speedway in Gardena, Calif., that luck ran out on Bobby Ball. He and Jim were running side by side, coming out of the first turn, when two cars ahead of them crashed into each other. Jim managed to slither around them, but Bobby spun into them. His car flipped into the air and, as it came down, one whirling wheel struck Jim's shoulder and gouged into his flesh.

The pile-up was appalling. Seven cars hit Bobby Ball. He was taken off the track unconscious, and he remained unconscious for fourteen months. Then he died. Jim Bryan was saddened by his friend's death but he didn't for a moment consider giving up racing because of it. He'd reckoned with the hazards of the business when he went into it. In fact, he'd already had a goodlynumber of accidents himself. Once, at a dirt track on the West coast, a car ahead of him kicked a rock back into his face and it knocked out three of his teeth. His legs were burned time and again by oil lines breaking and water hoses tearing open. And there was one very bad spill which came close to crippling him.

It happened during a midget race at Fresno, Calif. At the south end of the track, as he was starting to make his turn into the straightaway, his right front wheel hit a mushy spot and the car skidded into the wall and turned over twice. Bryan was pinned in the cockpit. His left shoulder was broken in four places and he had a long, narrow, horseshoe-shaped cut in his right forearm that took fifty stitches to close.

Bryan's injuries were a long time healing. He had little or no feeling in his left arm and hand. "I'd see him pick up a glass," says his mother, "and break it right there in his hand. He had no idea how hard he was gripping it, because he had no feeling." "When he was out in the garage," says his father, "I noticed that he'd hold back his left hand. I'd say, 'Get that hand back in action. Use it all you can.' For awhile there it was kind of white and shriveled, but it came back."

Jim's first race after the accident was at Tucson about a year later. He made a clean sweep of it, winning the main event and the trophy dash (a matched race between the two fastest cars) and also turning in the fastest qualifying time.

Afterward, as he and his dad were driving back to Phoenix, Jim broke a long silence. "How'd I drive?" he asked. "You're not kidding me," said "Pete" Bryan. "You came down here to see if you'd lost your nerve. Right?" "Right," said Jim quietly. "How'd I do?" "Fine," said his father. Jim Bryan was back in business again.

And a demanding business it was. When the midget season was in full tilt on the West coast, Bryan raced seven nights a week. Between times, since his winnings still didn't add up to a livelihood, he worked as an automobile mechanic and a welder of ditch-lining equipment.

Gradually he pushed his way into bigger cars-first the so-called "sprint cars" and then the full-size racers or, as they're sometimes called, the "Indianapolis cars." Finally, in 1951, he got his first crack at the big Indy racethe Memorial Day classic.

Beyond question this is one of the most colorful as well as one of the most hazardous sports events conducted anywhere in the world. Upwards of 100,000 people jam the huge stands as the racing cars whine and roar and scream their way around the 21/½-mile oval. Pit crews wait tensely for their drivers to roll in, knowing that tanks must be filled and new tires put on in little more than a half-minute, else the race might be lost right there in the pits.

It's the toughest kind of driving. Race cars are powerful, with engines generating up to 350 horsepower. But that's all they are-just powerful. They're not built for comfort, with nice, soft springs like passenger cars. They bump and jolt and slither and yaw. "It's like being dragged along the road in a box," a race driver once said.

You're belted into a bucket seat, with a plastic helmet on your head and goggles over your eyes. And for three hours and forty-five minutes, more or less, you sweep around and around the track, breathing gas fumes and oil smoke, fighting your way through the turns, pelting down the straightaways, hoping you can win, sometimes just hoping you can live through it. Says Jimmy Bryan, veteran of seven Indianapolis races-six times as an also-ran, once as a victor: "What's it like? The vibration is terrible. Your hands and legs go numb. Everything gets hot. Even the rubber steering wheel gets hot. You're shaken up and bruised and blistered, and, even though you have cotton in your ears, you can't hear for an hour or two after it's over, and it takes one or two days to get your normal hearing back.

This is Indianapolis. This is the Speedway. Here, in its most spectacular form, one may witness what somebody once described as "the paradox of men going too fast, yet unable to slow down."

That first year at Indianapolis--1951-Jimmy Bryan drove a car owned by a manufacturer of house trailers in Los Angeles. It was only a slightly refined clunker, far outclassed by its competitors and not even very safe. Bryan spun it a couple of times, trying to qualify, and when the 33 chosen drivers roared off on the afternoon of May 30, he wasn't among them.

He came back to Indianapolis the next year, this time driving for a St. Louis wholesale meat dealer named Peter Schmidt, and placed sixth. In 1953 he drove for Monroe Blakely, who owns a string of Arizona filling stations. It was a hot, humid day--the brand of weather that makes driving at the big speedway a kind of hell. One driver died of heat exhaustion. Bryan lost eleven minutes in the pits with ignition trouble and finished 14th. It was in 1954 that he won his first national championship by amassing more points on the nation's racetrack circuit than any other driver. That was also the year of the big heart-breaker at Indy.

Jim had signed up to drive the Dean Van Lines Special for Al Dean, a Los Angeles trucker. It was a good car-fast, well-built, well-balanced, Bryan gave it every.. thing it would take and was running near the front of the pack, with 130 laps behind him and you to go, when his shock absorbers broke down.

You can drive the family baggy from your house to the corner garage without shock absorbers and be none the worse for it, except that you'll feel the bumps. But it's quite a different cup of tea driving a race car around the Indy track at speeds close to 200 miles an hour without shocks. It's the next thing to bailing out of an airplane without a parachute.

Bryan could have quit, and most drivers probably would. But there was a chance to win and he hated to lose it. So he stayed in the race. For seventy laps he ran without shock absorbers, taking punishment such as few race drivers are ever called upon to take. Skidding through the turns, bumping down the brick-paved straightaway in front of the grandstand, Bryan was tossed around inside the cockpit like flotsam in a heavy surf.

Then, as if that weren't trouble enough, his acceler ator spring gave way several laps before the finish. He had to run the rest of the distance working the gas pedal up and down with his toe.

And still he didn't win. Bili Vukovich, a melancholy young man from Fresno, won the race, exactly one lap ahead of Jim. Vukovich took only two pit stops. Jim had to take three.

When the race ended, he was at the point of passing out. His right side was a mass of bruises and skinned flesh, from rubbing and jouncing against the side of the cockpit. He was sick and he was tired all the way to the marrow of his bones. He'd always said that being a race driver beat working for a living, but there were times, like this, when he wasn't so sure.

That wasn't Jim Bryan's only encounter with Vukovich. They had a brush once on the coast. It was an odd one. Vukie was running in the No. 1 spot, with Jim right on his tail and Vukie's brother, Eli, a close third. On the last lap Eli made a wild, surging try to pass them both. He miscalculated and clipped Jim's tail. The blow flipped Bryan's car into the air and sent it sailing neatly over Vukie's car, to land wheels down and practically undamaged-in first place. 'Twas said later that along the top of Vukie's car could be seen the tire marks of Jim's.

Bill Vukovich was killed in the 1955 Memorial Day race. Jim Bryan had engine trouble that year and placed 24th. In 1956 he hit an oil slick and spun into the infield, but he did so well on the other tracks that he won his second national championship.

The next year-1957-proved to be his best so far. He took third at Indy and won his third national championship. Then he went on to cop the foo-miler at Monza in Italy-a race so tough, on a track so treacherous, that many European drivers won't compete in it. He was the first American to win a major European racing event since Jiminy Murphy won France's famous Grand Prix at LeMans in 1923, and the Italians fairly flipped over him. Hundreds crowded around him after the race, shouting for his autograph, trying to get bits of his cov eralls for souvenirs. Once, when he was driving in his pickup, a man on a motorcycle pulled alongside and yelled something in unintelligible Italian. Turned out he wanted the stub of Jim's cigar. Jim gave it to him, and the fellow with a happy smile, wrapped it in a clean handkerchief and went put-putting off.When Jimmy came home to Phoenix, the Thunderbirds threw a smoker for him and Mayor Jack Williams proclaimed Jimny Bryan Day. All in all, these were heady experiences for a young man who, not too many years before, had been working as a welder to keep body and soul together between races.

But he still hadn't beaten his Indianapolis jinx. And in the racing business, no matter how close to the top of the heap you may be, you aren't really on top of it until you've won at the "Brickyard."

Then, in December, 1957, something significant happened. George Salih of Whittier, California, asked Bryan to drive his golden-yellow racing car, the "Belond AP Special," in the next Indianapolis race. Salih was a mechanical genius who had worked for the manufacturers of the famous Offenhauser racing engines for fourteen years. He'd mortgaged his house to build the car, and Sandy Belond, a Los Angeles manufacturer of automobile parts, sponsored it.

The "Belond Special," worth something like $25,000, had an odd design. Its engine lay almost on the side, canted to within 18 degrees of absolute horizontal, Salih liked to say that he made it that way because "I built it in a very small garage. One end of the car was under the bench." Actually it provided a lower profile, better streamlining and lower center of gravity. The car also had its drive shaft routed around the left side of the driver instead of underneath him, shifting considerable weight to the left side. This reduced wear on the right tires and increased traction on the left, allowing for higher speeds on the turns.

The Salih-Belond car had raced just once. Sam Hanks drove it in the 1957 Memorial Day race. He won the race and then retired.

Several times Jim Bryan had turned down offers from various race-car owners, but he couldn't turn down this one. He signed on with Salih and Belond. (He has never divulged the terms of his contract, although he says that most drivers pocket 40 to 45 per cent of their winnings, with the rest going to owner, sponsor and crew.) Salih made a few changes in the "Belond Special" to meet Jimmy's particular needs. Since Bryan was a a bigger man than Hanks, he enlarged the cockpit. And because Jimmy was an incorrigible cigar-smoker, he sewed cigar pockets around the upholstery. There were four of them --three for normal-sized cigars and one for a king-sized victory cigar.

And so, in May of this year, Jimmy Bryan went back to the "Brickyard" for the seventh time.

It was a fast field of cars and drivers that lined up that afternoon, waiting for the loudspeakers to bring the traditional command: "Gentlemen, start your en-gines!"

And it was an anxious field, On the very first lap the anxiety burst its bonds. Ed Elisian of Oakland, California, spun out of control on the third turn. Cars skidded and ducked and crashed into each other. Fifteen cars were involved in the tangle, eight were knocked out of the running and Pat O'Connor, a good-looking lad from North Vernon, Ind., flipped over and was killed. Never in its 42-year history had the Memorial Day race seen a worse pile-up. "It was like driving through a wrecking yard that was afire," said another Phoenix racer, Art Bisch.

Jim Bryan isn't sure to this day how he survived that meleé. "I was down in the infield grass, I know that, and going sideways," he said later. "But nobody touched me and I didn't touch anybody and I got our clean."

When the mess was cleared and the yellow lights went off, Bryan slammed down on the throttle and pulled out ahead of the herd, or what was left of it. At the half-way point he held a narrow lead over Tony Bettenhausen, Johnny Boyd and George Amick. Gradually Bettenhausen fell back. Boyd hung on until he had to make his third pit stop. Then he fell back, too. Amick, a rookie from Venice, California, was Bryan's closest competitor, but he was running a good 27 seconds be-hind as Jimmy Bryan flashed past the finish line and thrust his arms skyward in the now-famous Bryan "victory pass."

When Jim came home to Arizona, there was con-jecture that he might quit, now that he'd won just about everything in sight. But he said he didn't figure on quitting, and his pretty, red-haired wife, Luella (they've been married 11 years and have a year-and-a-half-old daughter), said she wouldn't ask him to quit. "Jim's young," she said. "He's got at least ten years left."

That's the way it goes with many race drivers. They fall in love with speed and they never fall out. One of Jim's friends says that, while Jim may have gone into racing for thrills, he stays in it because it's a darned good business. But Jim himself says he still gets a big thrill out of racing. It's the thrill that every driver experiences all over again as the loudspeakers rumble, "Gentlemen, start your engines." And he feels the surge of 350 horses beneath his throttle foot. And he sweeps down the straightaway, his speedometer inching toward 200, the roar of his engine beating against his ears, the grandstand and the crowd a great gray blur swarming past him. This is the thrill of auto racing, and it's something that gets into your blood and you can't get it out. And besides, as Jimmy Bryan has often been heard to say, it sure beats working for a living.

THE OVERLAND MAIL

As one sees jets zooming through Arizona skies, it is difficult to realize that one hundred years ago, an average of five miles per hour was considered fast time for the Overland Mail. Junior would really be bored today at this breakneck speed. With the rapid expansion of California and its fabulous treasures, both political and material, which were coveted alike by the North and South, demands were made for a faster and more dependable means of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It remained for John Butterfield to complete the first so-called transcontinental stage line, The Overland Mail. In 1856 the government initiated negotiations with Butterfield and his associates, for a line to carry the mail from the Mississippi to California. On September 16, 1857, a contract was signed with the Butterfield company. The men agreed to carry the mail twice a week and to cover the distance in twenty-five days. Under the agreement the first mail had to be carried over the route within a year from the date of signing the contract. The Butterfield crowd set to work at once. The line which they had contracted to establish was the longest stagecoach run in the world. It was approximately 2800 miles, through Indian territories, across rivers, plains, deserts, over mountains and a large part of the run without roads, relay stations or settled towns of any kind. An exploring party had to be sent out over the proposed route to lay out the details of the line. This phase consumed nearly eight months' time. Also during this interim over one hundred wagons and coaches had to be built, nearly fifteen hundred mules and horses purchased and distributed, corrals and station houses built and men employed. The matter of these relay stations appeals to the imagination. In the beginning there were one hundred forty-one stations reported, but early the next year, the number was increased to nearly two hundred. These averaged about twenty miles apart, but varied from nine to thirty miles. On long hauls, mules were driven along with the stage to be used in changing teams every twelve to fifteen miles. At each station were from two to four employees (in Indian country eight to ten) whose duty was to look

the first Butterfield stages came whooping West OVERLAND MAIL SCHEDULE