Albany to New York

New York farmers last week paused in their ploughing to gaze with mild Dutchess County curses at monstrosities going past them on the country roads: small, flat-bottomed motorboats, inverted and strapped onto trucks. At Albany the trucks stopped and the boats slid into the Hudson River, where their owners began the frantic, jittery tinkering with valves, spark plugs and magnetos which annually precedes the Grand Prix of U. S. outboard motorboat racing, the race from Albany to New York. In Europe, where out-boarding, like auto-racing, is a fashionable pastime, a field of 76 contestants would have included socialites like Jean Dupuy, son of the publisher of Le Petit Parisien, Baron Alain de Rothschild, Marquis Gonzalo de la Gandara, whose father-in-law builds Soriano motors, and Count Theo Rossi de Montelera (vermouth). At Albany last week were two or three eccentric scions, like 17-year-old Gar Wood Jr., accompanied by Orlin Johnson, head mechanic for his famed father's Miss Americas; Joel Thorne, national amateur outboard champion, who inherited a fortune from his grandfather, Manhattan Banker Samuel Thorne. Young Thorne races automobiles at Monte Carlo and plays polo when not fiddling with engines. The majority of the field were young men indistinguishable either by ancestry or appearance from those to be uncovered, pale, prostrate and smeared with grease, on the floor of any cross-roads garage, beneath a 1929 sedan.

Fred Jacoby Jr., national professional outboard champion and the only driver who had completed the course five times, listed the right equipment for the run: several pairs of socks, heavy high shoes, corduroy breeches, a zipper jacket, life preserver, goggles, helmet, mentholated vaseline for use against wind, spray, dizziness from jouncing. "Wild Bill" Feldhusen, who won in 1933, entered his boat the day before the race, broke a bottle of champagne across its bow, christened it Old Faithful. A middle-aged New York outboardist, trying to foil his wife, who had forbidden him to race, entered as "Joe Whoozis." After a final night which most contestants spent trying to adjust their carburetors to the atmospheric conditions or dozing on mattresses next their boats, the yapping whine of the 76 tiny motors reached a sudden horrible crescendo and the race began.

Major hazards of the 129-mi. course which usually prevent 60% of the contestants from reaching the finish are currents, tides, mud flats, fogs, wind and debris, of which the Hudson last week was fuller than usual. Bill Feldhusen failed to get Old Faithful started. Gar Wood Jr. capsized at Barrytown. Chart Johnson, last year's winner, broke down at Kingston. First across the finish line just above the George Washington Bridge last week was Jacoby, in his Flyaway.

Second of the 17 who finished was a boathouse proprietor named Ted Roberts. Third and winner of the Jules Heilner Trophy for the first amateur driver across the line was Sam Crooks, Rutgers senior who, when his boat was swamped in rough water near the start, got it ashore, emptied it, borrowed a dry shirt at Poughkeepsie.

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