A Little Giant Behind Wheel

In the summer of 1946, the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, the Angels were in the Pacific Coast League, the Rams were preparing for their first Los Angeles exhibition game and Primo Carnera was wrestling at the Olympic.

The hottest ticket in town? The mighty midgets, race cars in miniature.

In one week in August, the noisy little thunderbugs drew 65,000 in the Rose Bowl on a Tuesday night, 17,000 at Gilmore Stadium on Thursday night and 65,128 in the Coliseum on Saturday night.

Danny Oakes, Dapper Dan to his legion of fans, was one of the mightiest of the midget drivers. He was second that week at both Gilmore and the Rose Bowl, but had already won the 1945 Turkey Night Midget Grand Prix. And in 1947, he was to become the dominant midget car driver on the West Coast.

Dapper Dan is still dapper. Not on the race tracks -- he is 91, after all -- but on the dance floor.

“I liked being called Dapper,” said Oakes, who once wore silk shirts and pressed white trousers while driving Johnny Balch’s blue and white midget at Gilmore. On one occasion, the team showed up in knickers.

His eyesight is failing, but as he says, a twinkle in his eye, about his weekly dancing at Golden Sails in Long Beach, “I’ve been jitterbugging since the days at the old Palomar and the Palladium. I might not be able to see ‘em like I used to, but I can still feel ‘em.” Oakes is believed to be the only living driver from the era of Legion Ascot Speedway, the “Home of the Grim Reaper,” as John Lucero labeled it in his book, “Legion Ascot Speedway.”

“I started driving [full-sized roadsters] at the old Legion Ascot sometime in 1932 and I raced there until the place closed,” Oakes recalled. “I lived in Santa Barbara and John Gibson, a friend of mine there, put together a Model T chassis and said if we could get a motor, we could go racing at Ascot. That was a long ways from Santa Barbara but I liked the idea.

“We built a Ford flathead with a Winfield head and off we went. I never drove with the big boys at Legion Ascot, I never got past the consies [consolation races]. Most of the time I was a tail-ender in them.”

At Ascot, where the big, lumbering roadsters raced over a pock-marked, five-eighths-mile high-banked dirt oval, all Oakes wore for head protection was a cloth helmet under his goggles.

As old-time driver Peter DePaolo once said, “The only value of a cloth helmet was that when you went by the pits, if you were bleeding, the crew could see it.”

Drivers were so macho that when Wilbur Shaw -- later a three-time Indy 500 winner -- wore a helmet for the first time at Legion Ascot, he was roundly booed by spectators and called “chicken” by his fellow drivers.

There were no roll bars, much less roll cages, as midgets and sprint cars have today.

“If you flipped, you were likely a goner at Ascot,” Oakes said. “To tell you the truth, I never thought I’d live to see 50. Now look at me.

“Worst accident I had there was when the right rear wheel came off on an old Model T Ford and the axle dug in the dirt. The car did a three-quarter spin, but didn’t tip over. Mighty lucky.”

Ascot was closed in 1936 and it was a year or two before Oakes was back in a race car.

“Midgets were just getting hot, but I’d never driven anything but big roadsters,” he said. “I got the itch when I heard an [Offenhauser] engine for the first time. I thought, ‘What the hell is that?’ I tell you, that Offy was a great engine.”

Oakes and a cousin pieced together a midget in Santa Barbara and Oakes drove it for the first time on the horse track at Pomona. Then they decided to tackle Gilmore Stadium, already secure in its reputation as the nation’s premier midget car track.

Gilmore Stadium was a half-mile dirt track built specifically for midget racing, although it also was used for football games. A Thursday night tradition was 18,000 fans filling the stadium for midgets.

“In those days, if you drove a midget you could keep busy and earn a good living,” Oakes said. “There were races nearly every night. We would run at Long Beach, Atlantic, Santa Maria, Huntington Beach and sometimes Balboa in San Diego. That was a long haul from Santa Barbara.

“But Gilmore was the ultimate. It was always the best kept track in the country. The only one that compared with it was 16th Street Speedway in Indianapolis, across the street from the big track. All the hotdogs in the country raced there, because it was close to Indy.”

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The Biggest Win

Winning the 1945 Turkey Night race was the most prestigious accomplishment of Oakes’ career, although at the time he didn’t think it was that big. It was the first major race after World War II, though, and Gilmore and all the other tracks had been closed from 1942 through 1944.

All the equipment was old. Even the race tires had been sitting in garages for three years.

“I got a lot of notoriety out of that win,” Oakes said. “More today than I got back then.

“I started seventh or eighth -- I had a red-hot machine. Our biggest worry was if the tires would last, so they only ran 75 laps that year. I ran fourth for a long time. I kept pouring it on, making sure I didn’t do anything stupid, until the only guy ahead of me was Perry Grimm.

“With five laps to go, I caught him, but I thought it was the next-to-last lap. I didn’t have any pit signs so I tried to watch Perry’s but I couldn’t focus fast enough when I went by the pits. After I passed him, I thought, ‘Finish another lap and I’ve got it made.’ Only they never dropped the white flag [signifying one more lap], so I just kept on going. I had no idea where I was until I saw the white [flag] a couple of laps later and I knew I had it.

“Grimm told me afterward that the crew kept saying, ‘He’s coming! He’s coming!’ but [he] couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

Oakes finished fifth in 1946 and 1947 and fourth in 1955, just ahead of Rodger Ward, in other Turkey Night races.

He was also at Irwindale Speedway two years ago when past winners were honored. Oakes was the oldest.

“That Irwindale, now that’s a pretty place,” he said. “That’s the nicest half-mile track in the country. I’d sure like to have raced at a place like that.”

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The Best Race

Oakes won perhaps 100 other races around the country, but says his best race was a 100-lap main event in the Rose Bowl in November 1946.

“I was fast qualifier in a 16-car race and they made me start last in an inverted start,” Oakes said. “I raised hell about putting the fast cars in the back, but the promoter said the public liked it that way. When I said, ‘This is not right,’ he said, ‘Run it or park it.’ So I ran it.

“Duke Nalon -- he was one of the fastest guys on pavement -- was next to me. He had qualified second. About halfway, Nalon and I were 10th or 11th. We kept passing one another when we were moving up. It must have been a hell of a show.

“I noticed that all the front guys were driving the pole groove, down on the inside. Nalon was down there too, so I decided if I was going to win, I had to drive up right against the fence. I got half the field in one lap and Duke moved right up behind me. It must have been something to watch, two guys going around the pack on the outside. We were taking chances, coming off the corner, but we were not going to back off.”

Norman Holtkamp had led most of the race, and when he saw Oakes’ wheel out of the corner of his eye, he couldn’t believe it.

“You scared the hell out of me when I saw that wheel,” he told Oakes later. “I couldn’t figure out what in the hell you were doing on that side of me.”

Oakes won and Nalon was second.

“Nalon always thought he was the best and he talked the same way,” Oakes said. “One night I heard him telling the story about that race, only in his version he put himself in the lead. ‘The whole crowd was behind us, I think Danny Oakes was right behind me,’ he said.

“I didn’t care if Nalon took the credit. I had the money in my pocket and I knew I had driven the hardest and taken the most chances on the high groove. It was my greatest race.”

There were other nights when things didn’t turn out so well. Oakes estimates he had about 20 racing accidents, some serious, some not, but in those days they were all scary.

One night at Orange Show Speedway in San Bernardino, Oakes’ car flipped end over end about five times, then hit a steel pole and landed upside down in the middle of the track.

“One driver said, ‘That’s the end of Danny Oakes,’ ” Oakes recalled. “Guys getting killed happened quite a lot back then and he was sure my time had come. When he started toward the wreck, he said he damn near fainted when I started to crawl out. He said at first he thought it was a ghost.”

Oakes suffered a broken collarbone and ribs, but managed to walk back to the pits while the crowd went crazy at the sight of him.

“I’ll tell you what saved me,” he said. “I hunkered down in my seat and hugged the steering wheel. I’d seen guys do endos and their arms would fly out and the car would land on them. I just wrapped myself around the wheel. That’s what saved me, I think.”

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No-Win Situation

On July 1, 1947, a 500-lap race was scheduled in the Coliseum on a third-mile track. With 28 cars, it was a scorer’s nightmare. For nearly three hours, the little cars were spinning around inside the huge stadium.

Oakes says he won it. Officials, however, ruled Johnnie Parsons the winner. Then four days later, Duane Carter was awarded the victory -- over protests by Oakes’ car owners, Balch and actress Carole Landis.

“I have no idea where they got Carter from,” Oakes said. “He was never in front of me, he never passed me.

“Gordon Betz, the AAA official [AAA was the sanctioning body], claimed we made two pit stops but we only made one. We had a 24-gallon tank in the tail that Luigi Lesovsky had made special for us. Some officials said Parsons won, but he told Betz that we had passed him and he never got back by us.

“Then Betz announced four days later that Carter was the winner.”

Oakes was placed seventh.

Oakes, who later became a prominent racing mechanic, tried three times to qualify for the Indy 500. In 1954, in Balch’s roadster, he qualified 19th on the first day, but was bumped on the final day.

“I would have made it, but Balch hired a lousy mechanic named Willie -- I forgot his last name,” Oakes said. “We should have been at least 16th [in qualifying] and we wouldn’t have been bumped.

“I told Willie, ‘This thing lost 500 rpm,’ and he was a smart ... and said, ‘You know where that 500 rpm is. It’s right there in your foot.’ ”

Because he was a careful, calculating driver who followed Richard Petty’s mantra, “I want to win driving as slow as I can,” Oakes was often called “Balloon Foot.”

“I always told guys who called me that that you don’t win races the way I did with a balloon foot, and that I had the prize money in my hip pocket to prove it.”

The money in that hip pocket has allowed him to live the last 23 years in Huntington Landmark, a retirement community in Huntington Beach.

“The nicest thing about this place is, it’s close to the dance halls,” Oakes said.