Discreetly Daring

"Bronco Bill" Schindler, favorite of eastern midget auto-racing fans, drove his bucking doodlebug in Hinchliffe Stadium at Paterson, N.J. last week, fresh from victory two nights earlier at a track about 40 miles away. The crowd expected him to win again. As king of the eastern doodlebug circuit (53 wins in 1947, 35 so far in 1948), Bill Schindler is one of the sport's big money winners.

But at Paterson, Schindler seemed to hold back. Time after time, as Veteran Chauffeur Bob Disbrow* hugged the pole out front, Schindler drove his black Offenhauser up alongside him, stomped on the foot-throttle and seemed about to pass. And each time in turn he eased off, slid back into the second slot again. At the race's end, he was still second man. When Schindler pulled up, swung the stump of his left leg over the side and reached for his crutches, his fans showed their disappointment, but Bronco Bill did not. "There was oil on that track," he explained. "I might have skidded right into heaven."

Foolishness to the Foolhardy. With the $240 second money snugged away (for less than 15 minutes' work), Schindler went home, ready to drive again at six different tracks in the next seven days. With him, intact, went his reputation as the shrewdest of eastern midget drivers. After 16 years behind the wheel, Schindler knows what can and what cannot be done with the snarling little cars; foolishness he leaves to the foolhardy.

Having smashed 24 bones and lost a leg on the race track, Bronco Bill Schindler at 39 has learned to temper daring with discretion. Now president of the American Racing Drivers Club, which controls about 375 chauffeurs, he is a leading advocate of stricter racing rules, better machines, four-wheel brakes.

Like most midget men, Schindler does not agree that the crowd's lust for blood is the basis of the sport's popularity. In fact, attendance has been known to drop after a fatal accident. Critics of the sport have overlooked its obvious, uncomplicated charms. It is fast, hotly competitive, requires skill and nerve and, like most crowd-pleasing American pastimes, involves lots of noise. When half a dozen cars whine down the straightaway inches apart and fling into a screeching slide around a curve, the drivers brush lightly against the wings of death. But as in a tight-rope act, danger is the attraction, not death.

Something for the Girls. "There'll always be risks, and there'll always be accidents, but we can cut out a lot of the harum-scarum stuff without spoiling the thrills," Schindler says. With the development of the brutish little Offenhauser motors, midgets today seldom hide under the cowl outboard motors or souped-up Ford engines. Modern midgets have hit as high as 142 m.p.h. on a straightaway. On the small tracks, the doodlebugs have a ceiling of about 75 m.p.h., since chauffeurs have to negotiate a new curve every four or five seconds.

First-rate men like Schindler can pull down $20,000 in purses in a May-October season, but 60% usually goes to a car owner. Cash, however, is not the chauffeurs' only reward: women of all ages go overboard for the midget sport. They keep scrapbooks, write fan letters, pester drivers for autographs, send them gifts of helmets, goggles, gloves. Once at Danbury, Conn., two elderly ladies bustled down from the grandstand, thumped crack Chauffeur Ted Tappett on the head with their handbags because he had beaten their favorite.

*No kin to Louis Disbrow, dirt-track racing star of the 1920s.

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