Driven by Pioneer Spirit : Few Barriers Eluded Reeves Dutton, Who Surpassed the 100 Mark Twice--First in a Race Car, Then by Living to 101

Reeves Dutton is riding shotgun for Earl Cooper during a road race in the early 1900s. It’s the automotive dark ages. Nobody has broken the 100 m.p.h. barrier. Steering wheels aren’t round. And the rear-view mirror hasn’t been invented--if you want to see behind you, you have to turn your head.

During the race, Dutton gets a stiff neck and an inspiration at the same time.

“Say, Earl,” he shouts to Cooper in the open cockpit. “You know those little mirrors that girls use to powder their nose . . . ?”

The event went unrecorded in the official history of the automobile, and today Dutton isn’t regarded as the father of the rear-view mirror, but that’s the way he wanted it. According to relatives, Dutton also was the first man to crack 100 m.p.h. over a measured mile and to begin using a round steering wheel. But he didn’t promote himself or document his accomplishments, so the world is largely unaware of them.

“Daddy was a genius when it came to cars and motors,” says Sally Joy (nee Dutton), his only child, who lives in Simi Valley. “But he was real unassuming and quiet. He never got the credit he deserved.”

In their heyday, Cooper, the driver, and Dutton, the short, (about 5 feet tall), dapper mechanic who rode beside him, were a famous racing team. Their cream-colored Stutz with its burgundy No. 8 was known throughout Europe and the United States. “People would send them fan mail addressed only to ‘8,’ and they would get it,” Sally says.

In 1913, ’15 and ‘17, the team won the national championship.

When Dutton died last month in Simi Valley at age 101, he had outlived all of his contemporaries, as well as his fame. Today he is remembered as a racing pioneer and an outstanding mechanic, but memories of his innovations live on only through his relatives, an oral history that has become part of the family lore.

“When he drove 100 miles per hour? He was just there to check the tires,” Sally says. “He took the car around the track and when he got finished everybody was looking at their stopwatches and raving, ‘Do you know you drove the first 100 miles-an-hour in history?’ He hadn’t realized what he’d done.”

“Uncle Reeves was a very modest man,” says his nephew, Don Huberty of Santa Rosa. “The only time I can recall him boasting was when he told me about breaking 100. It was very important to him.”

To the family, it isn’t just coincidence that Dutton was born about the same time as the gasoline-powered automobile. The year was 1887. Grover Cleveland was president. Byron Reeves Dutton was the only son of a pharmacist whose ancestors sailed to this country from Yorkshire, England, in 1640. A direct descendant is another inventor--slightly better known--Benjamin Franklin.

“Daddy probably got his inventing talent from him,” Sally says. “He even looked like him--they had the same sharp nose.”

When Dutton was 9, his father died and his mother moved the family--Reeves and two girls--from Henoye Falls, N.Y., to Los Angeles, which at the time had a population of only 100,000. “Reeves said it was a tiny hick town,” says Dorothy Dutton, his wife of 60 years. The Duttons lived in a house with Reeves’ grandmother and great-grandmother.

After working a series of odd jobs to help support his extended family, the young Reeves became an apprentice machinist and worked 10 hours a day, every day but Sunday, for $3 a week. “He was a real perfectionist and naturally handy with engines,” Sally says. In 1905, when Dutton was 18, Cooper, then 19, walked into the machine shop looking for a mechanic to race with him. Race drivers took a mechanic along in case the car broke down, which cars tended to do often back then.

“Uncle Earl had watched daddy work for several months,” Sally says, “and then asked him, ‘How’d you like to go racing?’ In those days, people respected their parents, so daddy asked his mother’s permission.”

Dutton and Cooper took off on the road to adventure. “They lived it up,” Dorothy says. “Money was no object.” They raced before royalty in Monte Carlo and in front of Pancho Villa in Mexico. They raced on a dirt track in Beverly Hills and a brick track at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In 1924, they held the lead in the Indy 500 for 122 laps but wound up second because of a fluke accident.

“A rabbit came on the track and somehow got sucked up into the engine,” Sally says.

The team stayed together for about 25 years, but they were separated in mid-partnership by World War I. Dutton went into the Navy as a chief petty officer, supervising 500 men in San Diego in the production of airplane engines, Sally says. Cooper, she adds, continued racing with another mechanic, but eventually pulled strings with the governor of California to get Dutton out of the service.

But racing was almost as dangerous as war. “Daddy had a lot of friends killed in racing,” Sally says. Dutton and Cooper “never got a scratch,” she says. But maybe they were just lucky. “Daddy once told me that they crashed into a palm tree and he was knocked out. He said, ‘When I came to, all I could see was feet.’ He was upside down in the car.”

Aside from racing, Dutton built racing cars for Harry Stutz--one of them, a 1915 model, is on display today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. In 1927, at Stutz headquarters in Indianapolis, he spotted a new employee, a young secretary who had just quit her job as a school teacher. He began bringing her flowers and candy, and it wasn’t long before he and Dorothy were married. About a year later, he decided to quit racing to “get out alive,” Sally says.

In 1930, after moving to L.A., Dutton and Cooper bought a walnut grove in Encino and each built a house for his family. Dorothy wasn’t thrilled by the location. Before moving to Encino, Dutton had taken her to Mulholland Drive, which presented a panoramic view of the Valley.

“He told me, ‘That’ll be the last place on earth I’ll ask you to live,’ ” she recalls. “Which was fine with me. I didn’t like the Valley. It was too hot. But then Reeves decided he wanted to grow dahlias, so we moved to Encino. But the dahlias didn’t grow. It was too hot.”

Until he retired in 1966, Dutton, at various times, managed an auto dealership, worked in the transportation department at Warner Bros. and at an engineering company in Beverly Hills. He also moonlighted with the Automobile Assn. of America. Eighteen years ago, at 83, Dutton bought a house in Simi Valley. Vigorous and healthy, he passed his days making rugs and Christmas ornaments and tending to his garden.

“Daddy mowed his own lawn until he was 99,” Sally says. “He was always doing something. I think that’s why he lived so long.”

Dutton never smoked, took a drink only occasionally, but loved sweets. “We’d go out to lunch and he’d have a piece of boysenberry pie and a Coke,” his daughter says. “When he worked, he always had a dish of candy next to him. But he hated vegetables.”

“Reeves attributed his long life to not worrying,” Dorothy says. “He let me do it.”

Although Cooper, who died in 1965, was inducted into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame in 1954, Dutton never made it. “He said he was disappointed,” Sally says.

Dutton was in ill health for about a year before he died. “He watched his last Indianapolis 500 on TV in May,” Dorothy says. “But he got tired and had to listen to the last part of the race on the radio.”

Dutton was awed by the speeds of the cars at Indy. “It was difficult for him to believe they went over 200,” Sally says.

That’s because he remembered when 100 was really moving.