Retired Stunt Driver ‘Lucky’ Lott Has Lively Memories of Death-Defying Wrecks

For two decades, Lee (Lucky) Lott and his Hell Drivers thrilled hundreds of thousands of people at state and county fairs across the country with death-defying stunts.

In the process, Lott figures, they demolished 17,981 cars.

Lott and his daredevil drivers jumped cars, drove over burning barrels, smashed into brick walls, did crash rolls, head-on collisions and torpedo driving using dynamite to blow up the jalopy--driver and all.

“You don’t take a chance unless you have one,” says Lott, who is retired but still surrounds himself with jalopies--although now he and his son fix them rather than wreck them.

Parked just off Interstate 275 in Tampa is a 40-year-old relic--a Nash painted orange with his old logo emblazoned on the side.

Across three tree-shaded lots he owns on a dead-end street are a dozen other cars, more than half of them made by Nash.

During the last five years, Lott, 75, and his son, Jerry, estimate that they have worked on 40 cars. They have collected them, traded them, used them for parts, repaired them and taken them to car shows.

Total restoration takes a lot of tools and equipment, says Jerry Lott, 39. “We don’t have all we need yet. We’re still plugging along. Besides, a lot of people can’t afford to put that kind of money into older cars.”

On the small porch of their house are albums filled with faded photographs, folders of articles, flyers and posters, a crash helmet and other memorabilia of the 1935-1955 era.

A native of Pekin, Ill., Lott got his first taste of thrill driving in Muleshoe, Tex., near Odessa in 1934 when he and his brother, Neal, wowed a crowd with a head-on crash in two junk cars. The following year they got a farmer in Kewanee, Ill., to rent them a field, put together a July 4th event and cleared $900, Lott said.

In 20 years, Lott estimates that he played 5,000 fairs, from tiny Midwestern towns to such places as New York’s Polo Grounds, Chicago’s Soldier Field and the Los Angeles Coliseum, where he said the act drew 106,000 people--the biggest crowd of his career. The smallest was 14 people in Gay Mills, Wis., in 1946 when a polio scare closed a number of spots on the circuit, he said.

Although some stunts backfired, Lott said he was only seriously hurt once. In 1941, in Steubenville, Ohio, the throttle stuck on an old Ford as he began a 100-foot jump over a schoolbus.

He sailed a record 169 feet. The landing cracked his spine. He cleared the cars he was supposed to land on--the ones positioned to cushion the shock.

“I couldn’t imagine living those days today. The cars now wouldn’t take what we dealt out to them. We had the protection of steel around us. Today, the cars are too flimsy, too springy.”

He’s been known as Lucky since he was a teen-ager. “I am lucky,” he insists. “I’m still here. I knew what I was doing.”

And he still drives. But now, he says, “I drive cautiously--defensively.”