Martin Rose, January 28th, 2025

Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo: Alright. I'm Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo. It is January 28th, 2025. And I'm here with, please say your name.

Martin Rose: My name is Martin Rose, and I was with the Miss U.S. V in 1962, ‘63, and I spent about a year and a half, maybe two years with the boat.

DLT: And how did you get involved in the powerboat racing scene?

MR: In the 1950s I had a boyfriend that I was growing up with whose parents belonged to the Detroit Boat Club, and we used to go down in the summer times and we would take his little 16-foot runabout on the Detroit River. And he invited me one time back in the 19 or mid-1950s to watch the Unlimited Hydroplanes. And I was totally enthralled, and I saw all the races from then on. I used to go, for many years I went down there every year to watch the hydroplane races. In 1962, I belonged to a fraternity at Wayne State University, and one of my fraternity brothers was a photographer, and he was doing a special project for someone. And one of the things that he was asked to photograph was the U.S. Equipment Company for— What the U.S. Equipment Company did was they built and repaired, mostly repaired, and maintained industrial machinery. We're talking about huge industrial machinery presses and mills and that sort of thing, and they would drive their equipment right into our shop. I say our shop. The Miss U.S., U.S. Equipment Company. They would drive these huge trucks, flatbed trucks, 18-wheelers, and they would bring us machinery, US Equipment Company machinery to repair. The owner of the shop is George Simon. And George Simon had a racing boat. My friend Phil from my fraternity said, you know, I know you're interested in racing boats. I've got to take some pictures down there is at U.S. Equipment Company. I can introduce you around. And I said, terrific, I’d love that! I mean, I was nuts on the racing boats anyway. So, we went down one night together. He introduced me to Roy Duby, who was the crew chief of the Miss U.S. V and the Miss U.S. I. He was crew chief at U.S. Equipment. And I said, they showed me around and looking at some of the stuff in the shop. And I was, of course, my eyes were big. And I said, you know, Roy, I got some time and I would be more than willing to come down here and volunteer my time. I don't want to get paid. It's not necessary that I get paid. I just want to be around the boats, and I'll do whatever you need to get done. You need to carry grease, I'll carry grease. You need to clean a part, I’ll clean a part. I don't care. He said, great! Come on down after school whenever you have time.

So I did that throughout the winter, the late winter months into spring. And I came down after school about three, four days a week. I’d come down on the weekends, on Saturdays and work in a shop all day. And they taught me everything I needed to know about tearing down engines and putting engines back together. And I started to learn a lot of stuff that I really knew nothing when I first started except I knew which end of the screwdriver to use. Springtime came and a new boat came in. Now, U.S. Equipment Company already had a book. It was the Miss U.S. I. They just called the Miss U.S. at the time. The new boat came in and it was the Miss U.S. V, it was to be designated the U.S. V. And it came in from the paint shop. And it was just sparkling, fresh, brand-new. But it wasn't a new boat. That boat was the old Hawaii Kai that was built by Kaiser Aluminum in Hawaii and was built to race mostly on the West Coast. But it did extremely well. It ran Rolls engines, and it did extremely well as a racing boat, as one of the fastest boats of its time. One of the things you have to remember is that as fast as the Miss U.S. I was, it was 8,000 pounds. Miss U.S. V was only 7,000 pounds. It's a big difference. And as a matter of fact, when the boats started to get a little bit lighter and faster, that's where some of the problems showed up, because now you had to deal not only as they did, really, you had to deal not only with hydrodynamics, all the water, but now the air, because you're going so fast the air would lift the boat right out of the water. So, they had to design the front of the hull, you notice on all these pictures I have here, if you look at the front of the house, they're designed with the nose down. And as they slice through the water, that nose gets pushed down. So, it doesn't kite, it doesn't catch water underneath. The underside of the boat is flat. And it's, and it rides on two sponsons. These sponsons are like skis. The whole idea of hydroplane racing is to get the boat out of the water. So, the less you have in the water, the less resistance you have. Three points: two sponsons, one propeller, and only half the propeller is in the water at any time.

So, we had, this new boat came in and I was there the date it arrived. I just happened to be in the shop and it was in early spring. It was March or April, I forget. And the boat came in and I'm just all excited about it. And I hopped up on the boat and I'm looking at it. Fresh paint. You can smell it. And Duby came out. We were looking down into the cockpit and looking to see what— I don't remember if he even had an engine entered at the time. I'm not sure we had an engine in it. I climbed up on the boat and they’re taking, I have an eight-millimeter movie of me climbing on the boat with the boat just first arrived. I was so excited. We looked at the seat. The seats in those days didn't have seatbelts. None of the racing boats had seatbelts. They had arms that came up over the legs. And the whole idea was that if you hit rough water and you got thrown, you’d get clear of the boat and you'd have a better chance of surviving outside the boat than going down with it if it exploded. At 180 miles an hour, when you hit the water, it's like hitting a brick wall. It doesn't matter. Just doesn't matter. But that's what they thought at the time. Things have changed a lot now. So, we looked down at the seat and there was this pink seat in this beautiful red boat with brand new paint. And I said, jeez, that's ugly. And I looked at it and I said, and Roy looked at and he said, boy, that seat’s kind of small. I said, well, yeah, the guy that drove it before was Jack Regas. He was only 150 pounds, and Roy was about 220 pounds and six foot two or three. He said, I ain’t gonna fit in that. And I said, well, I guess I'm going to have to drive it, Roy. He said, we’ll get a different seat. I said, okay.

So, we fixed the boat up. And one of the first things that happens with the boats is that you have to flood them with water. Some interesting things about the hydroplanes. The boats don't float. They don't float. If they go dead in the water for 10 or 15 minutes or more, they're going to sink. You have to get them out of the water. They don't fill them with a lot of caulking and waterproofing because they're not supposed to be in the water. They're supposed to be on the water. That's the whole purpose. And if you put in all that insulation and caulking and stuff, now you get some additional problems, plus the fact they get really heavy. So what we used to do, I should mention this real quick, because they didn't float we had, when we set them in the water and we took them out of the water, we always lifted them out of the water nose-up. And whenever you see a picture of them coming up on the crane, the nose is always up a little bit. There are two petcocks in the back in the transom. That’s the back edge of the boat. We open those up and drain it. And that was the whole idea was get the water out of there, because otherwise they'll sink. As a matter of fact, you might remember if you ever saw any of the races, if a boat went dead in the water for any reason out on the course, there was a rescue boat that came to it immediately. And we had rescue boats out there. As a matter of fact, some of my ham radio friends—I am a ham radio operator—my ham radio friends were out there in rescue boats and they had a diver on the boat with them. They would be out there and some of the boats had tow ropes. And the whole idea was to get that boat out of the water before it sank. So that was one thing about those. Now, I can't speak for the new boats because I haven't been around any of the new boats. New boats might be a little bit different. There's a whole different technology that's used in the old boats as compared with the new. The old boats we used aluminum, wood and a little bit of fiberglass up on the cowling. The new boats are all made out of Kevlar and exotic plastics, Kevlar and what else am I trying to think of? I can't think of it. But anyway, that kind of material. The new boats are multi-million-dollar-hulls. Extremely expensive. They're made, usually made out of one piece. I can't vouch for all of the parts to it. And they have what's called a pickle fork design. It's still flat on the bottom. The two sponsons are down there, but now they stick out forward of the boat. They stick out in front of the nose. So, they call that a pickle fork design. So, the new boats might that sink. There's another improvement that was made over the years. Because the old boats didn't have any seatbelts, and because the boats were flipping and killing drivers, they decided in the new ones to put canopies in there, they put F16 canopies from the jet airplanes. Those F-16 canopies actually had ejection mechanism so that a driver in high speed, if he saw he was in a lot of trouble, he could get out of there. Now ejecting at 180 miles an hour or 160 or something has its own problems. But going down with an exploding boat is probably not a good way to go. And there's another thing that they did, too, and that was they put a trap door on the bottom of the boat. And the whole idea there was that if you flip over, he's got a way out through the top, bottom, boat’s upside down, the trap door’s down there, they could get out. I don't know if they're still doing that, but that's what I heard that they did.

But in the old days, we had a lot of wood and aluminum. Aluminum cladding mostly, and a lot of wood superstructure. Our boat, the Miss U.S. V, was built by somebody out west, somebody, I think, in Hawaii. And I can't remember if it was an Aaron's[?] design, but it was not Les Staudacher. Les Staudacher was one of the most prolific boat builders back in the 50s and 60. And he's right up here in Kawkawlin, Michigan. And he was building a lot of these racing boats. Our Miss U.S. I was a Kawkawlin, was a Les Staudacher boat. There are a lot of boats that were built right here in Michigan. In the 60s. There was a big conflict, maybe, between Detroit and Seattle, Washington. Those were the two big hotspots in the world for unlimited hydroplane racing. There was a lot of boat racing going on in those days, but the Unlimiteds were a different story. Very limited number of sponsors, very limited number of boats, but they had unlimited restrictions in the way they could design and run the boats. They could run any power they wanted, as much power as they wanted. And as a matter of fact, some of the boats actually ran more than one engine. One of them was the Such Crust. They put twin engines in the Such Crust. And I remember back in 1965 or ‘66, they were trying to get the old Such Crust started up. It wouldn't even start. And they just had all kinds of trouble with that boat. But the twin engines didn't really add anything to it. It added a lot of weight, is what it added. When you're talking about adding all those thousands of pounds, it's about 4,000 pounds or something like that that you're adding in weight. So while it had all the extra power, there may not have been much of an advantage.
In the old days of racing, before the Unlimiteds came around, there was Gar Wood. Everybody remembers Gar Wood as the premiere racer in the 20s and 30s. My dad saw him race in person on the Detroit River and he rode, he drove boats called the Miss Americas. And he ran Twin Packard Liberty Engines. And then at one point, later on, he ran four Packard Liberty engines in one boat. And when that thing started up, you thought the world was coming to an end. It was unbelievable. The noise and the tumult. And when he used to come racing down the Detroit River, at the time he was king, nobody could beat him. And you could hear him coming from miles away. And that was one of the big attractions. People would come down to the river. They would come down by the millions. And I literally mean a million to two million people would come down there to watch the races. Part of it was the spectacle of the boats going so fast. Gar Wood’s boats were only going 100, 110, or 120 miles an hour. But it was a V-bottom boat. A V-bottom boat going 100 miles an hour is like trying to tear itself apart! It was a V-bottom in the front and toward the rear I think it was a little bit flatter, so it actually got up on the flat bottom of the boat a little bit, but it was a V-front. Later on, they got to the hydroplane idea where they got up on the sponsons and get that boat up out of the water. That was the whole thing. But a hundred miles an hour in a V-bottom was, like, unheard of. You know, that's just nuts. And my dad said that when he went down to the water to watch them race, people were standing shoulder to shoulder. The crowd was pushing and pushing. He was on the Detroit side of the Detroit River, not on the Belle Isle side but on the Detroit side. And the crowd, when Gar Wood came, the crowd crushed toward the river to see this boat coming, and people got pushed into the water. He said it was a spectacle like you wouldn't believe.

In the 1970s, the turbine boats came along, and they started using these helicopter engines out of the Huey helicopters, I guess the Vietnam-era helicopters. And they sound like big vacuum cleaners. So they go around the course and everyone’s going whoosh, whoosh. And they're going really fast. There's no question. They’re a lot lighter, they make a lot of power. But people lost interest. People stopped coming. There was no noise. The thunder boats lost their thunder. And that was one of the big things that changed, because after the thunder boats, no matter how fast they went, people lost their interest because part of the spectacle was taken away from them. But I remember, and there are lots of photos here, too. And here's one right here at the starting line. At the starting line, you get five or six boats lined up. And the way they did it was we had two stopwatches up on the cowl, two stopwatches, and one was a five-minute stopwatch and the other was a one-minute stopwatch. They would press them all, they would press the five-minute stopwatch when they got the signal from shore. From shore, there was a big clock up there, a five-minute clock and a one-minute clock. And the drivers would watch for that. When the five-minute clock started, they pressed your five-minute stopwatch and they knew approximately where they had to be on the race course to get to the starting line on time at full speed. And they practice this in practice so they got really good. And then there would be a one-minute gun and a one-minute stopwatch that was, you could see from the boats out on the course. And the one-minute stopwatch that we had was over by the Roostertail, and it would click down and the drivers knew they had one minute left to get to the starting line on time at full speed. Six drivers out there, six boats going hell-bent for leather, 160 to 180 miles an hour, coming from the Lake St Clair. And they all hit the starting line at the same time, going 160 to 180 miles an hour. And they're all aiming for the same point: the inside turn of the first pylon down by the Belle Isle Bridge. And they're all aiming for the same spot. You cannot imagine when you're standing on shore and you see six thunderbolts coming all at the same time going at bat, you cannot imagine the excitement. And the noise was so loud that your ears actually hurt. Your eardrums just throbbed with pain as they went by. These are all fighter aircraft engines that were going full tilt.

What we used to do with these boats, the engine was designed to run at 2500 RPM. and on the airplanes they had a mechanism built to run the propeller at a speed of about 1800 rpm. And the way they did this was to use a reduction gear. That's the gear that I brought. That reduction gear is on the standard aircraft engine. And here's a picture of the Rolls Merlin engine with the front end off. And I can show you right here is the reduction gear. Right there, those circles. And what the reduction gear did was it slowed down the speed of the propeller. So the shaft of the propeller was actually on the reduction gear and not on the main drive gear. The main drive gear was a great big—sorry, the other way around. The main drive gear was the small gear, and the big gear was where the propeller was, and that was all to give it extra power. And they would use what they call a prop pitch motor to change the pitch of the airplane blades to grab as much as they could at that speed. And what happens if you run the propeller too fast is a cavitates, forms an air bubble, and it doesn't grab. So they had to run it at a certain speed in order to get that, and they would change the pitch according to how fast they were going. But the ideal was to run the engine at 2500 RPM., and we had a big chart in the shop, it was sent to us by Rolls-Royce, that showed the amount of horsepower as compared with the RPM. And at 2500 R.P.M., the two of them met. And it was about what they said, about 1600 horsepower was more like 2500, 2500 horsepower or 2500 RPM. That's where they met on the chart. We ran them at 4000 RPM. And we did that for one reason. We made more power, made a lot of power. Secondly, we were able to do it because we didn't have the restriction from air cavitation. We had other things we had to deal with, hydro fluids and all that sort of thing. So, what we did was we didn't run a reduction gear. We ran a step up. So when we ran the boat, it was a direct drive, but it went through what's called a step up gearbox, was no transmission. So, when the boat was running, that propeller was spinning. So no matter how slow that boat was going, the engine, that propellers turning and it's turning at 3 to 1 step up, actually 2.91 to 1 step up. So, if the engine was running at 4000 RPM multiplied by three and you got 12,000 RPM on the propeller. When they set the world's water speed record in 1962, we used a special propeller just to do that. When we were racing, we used what was called a 16/24 pitch and 16/24 pitch means that it was a 16 diameter, 16-inch diameter and a 24-inch propulsion per RPM, 24-inch propulsion. And that gave it really good acceleration out of the turns. It got you up to speeds around about 160, 180 miles an hour on the backstretch. And that was pretty competitive in those days. Most of them ran twin-bladed propellers. But we ran, when we ran for the world record in 1962, they had to design a specific propeller for that, and they ran a 36. It was an 18/36 pitch. And these were built out of billet, a single piece of steel, special steel, a single piece of steel where they actually carved, they actually carved the propeller shape with that pitch that was needed. This was such a sharp pitch, the 36 pitch, that the propeller blades actually wrapped around themselves, that's so much they would scoop on each revolution. We ran that at 12,000 RPM.

You may have seen in the history books, the stories about how that was in 1962. When we went for the world record it was down in Guntersville, Alabama. They had to find the right spot to run this. And one of the reasons that the Detroit River wasn't picked was because it was a little bit unpredictable with current. It was a little bit choppy with swells. And of course, then they also had to seal it off for that particular event, and that meant closing it up to commerce. There's a lot of commerce out there, a lot of private boats, and it was a big thing. In Guntersville they found the ideal place on there was a manmade lake, like Lake Mead, and this was a big reservoir. Big, big reservoir. And when Duby went down there to set the record— I'll tell you the story as he told it to me. We went around a couple of times and they had it set up so they had electronic speed measuring devices along the shoreline. And the whole idea was to go around, get your speed up, and then when you went down the shoreline, you had to sort of see in a box. There was a box where they would measure the speed, the last few hundred feet or whatever it was. They would measure the speed as it went through this box. So that was your measuring box. So you had to go up. You had to go up the lake, turn around, come down in for that box and go through as fast as you could. You got a five-mile headstart way the heck down in the lake there. And he comes back and he's got the thing buoyant and he's looking at his water speed indicator and it’s showing 230. And he says, okay, we got this. Aims for the box. And at the last second he sees, I'm not going to hit that box. At that speed, 230 miles an hour on the water, everything's a blur. You can't see anything except water and land and not even that very well. The boat doesn't turn at that speed. It skips like a stone [Knocks on the table] right across the water. He tried to make a last-minute correction. He skips through the box, through the timing box, and he goes through crooked, diagonally. And they said, hey! Comes in from the pits and they said, Duby, you got the record, 200.419. You had to do it two ways. You had to do it twice. You have to go upriver and you have to go downriver. You have to go against the current and with the current. You have to go with the wind and against the wind. He did it twice. They came in and they said, Duby you got the record, 200.419.

And he bested the old record by something like eight miles an hour and nobody’d even come close. They said, you want to do it again? And he said, hell no. I didn't see it that time. He had great vision. He could see like an eagle. He was like Chuck Yeager. If you ever heard stories about Chuck Yeager in World War II, Chuck Yeager was one of the most famous airplane pilots we had, flew P-51s. And he was always leader of the pack because in those days they didn’t have radar, but his eyes were the radar. He could see stuff nobody else could see. And that's the way Duby was, because he could see a fly at 100 yards, but he couldn't see close up. And he refused to wear glasses. He thought it was emasculating. So, we would go into the shop at night. And we'd be lining up die marks to put the cams and the cranks in, and you had timing chains and everything had to be exact. And he wouldn't put his glasses on. So he would say, Marty, c'mon over here. We’ve got to line up some marks here. So I'd come over there and I would be his eyes and I'd be lining up the die marks and putting on the timing chains and getting everything all in line. And when nobody was around, he'd go like this, and he’d put his glasses on. Yeah, I guess we're okay. And he’d take his glasses right off. He didn't want anybody to see him with glasses. But he had great distant vision. That's one of the things that made him a great race driver.

The thing about Duby— I love talking about Roy Duby. He was a terrific guy, a great character. Duby had a lot of friends. All of the boat racers in those days were friends. They were not enemies. They would go out in, mostly in friendly competition. But they were friends. And when we were working in the shop, people like Bill Cantrell and Freddie Alter and some of these other guys, some guys that he didn’t know who they were. These were all race drivers and crew chiefs from their boats, would come into our shop and they would work with Duby solving their problems. Because Duby was one of the premier guys on the Rolls-Royce engine. Not everybody used Rolls-Royce engines. A lot of people still used Allisons. I think the Roostertails and the Gales were still using some of the Allison engines. I probably have a picture of one of the Gales around here someplace. There it is, that’s a picture of the Gale, circa 1955-ish, ‘64. Okay. This is our Miss U.S. Duby right at the, that's my boss, Roy Duby, right there. And this is Miss U.S. V. So I know when the picture was taken it had to be 1963 because we didn't have that boat before ‘63. So I came in. So Duby was a character and I still to this day say some of the things the way he used to say. If something wasn't the right size or the right fit, he’d say, that’s many too high, or that’s many too small. I still use that. I got that from Duby. We went down to Guntersville for the race in 1963, and he insisted on driving the boat down there himself. So he had a big truck that had two engines on it in it and had all of our tools in it that we would need. And behind it we pulled the boat on a trailer and the boat was tipped up on its side. The boat was 40ft long and about, I don’t know, about 8 or 10 feet wide, I think maybe a little wider. I can't remember. And it was tipped up on its side. And when we, as he was leaving Detroit, I remember going down in Guntersville in ‘63. And he says, I'm having a little trouble with the trailer brakes. I said, Duby, you’ve got a long way to go. We're driving from Detroit down Alabama, and you got to get the trailer brakes working! So he's working on the line. He found out one of the lines wasn't working right or something, so he fixed it and he pulled out of Detroit and everything was fine, until they got down to about Kentucky. Then the line broke again or something and he had no trailer brakes. And he's got to go through the Cumberland Mountains, and whatever else down there, with no trailer brakes. Which he did. But he insisted on driving himself. We think it was because he had a girlfriend along the way and he wanted to visit her. We're not sure, but that's what some of the other crew guys told me.

So, he drove the boat down there himself. And we met down in Guntersville, Alabama, and there were four of us on the crew plus Duby. There was a young guy whose name I can't remember now. I think it, I can't remember. And then there are two guys. One was Frank and there was another guy. And one of the guys, I think it was Frank, who was a Capuchin brother. And he was one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. This guy was just the nicest guy in the whole world. And we were the crew. There were four of us and Duby. And Duby was the expert on the engine. When we were working on engines, I would do a lot of the macro stuff, which had to do with bolting things on and maybe even— Aircraft engines are different than automobile engines. Aircraft engines, every bolt along the way has a little hole in it. Every bolt, and the whole idea was once you got them all tightened up, you wired them in place by running a wire right through them so they wouldn't back out. When you're in an airplane, you don't like bolts falling out. No. You don't like them falling off when you're in a car, either. But everything here was wired. Every bolt on this, especially around the core of the engine on the outside, was all wired. So, wiring took a little time. That was almost like needlepointing. It took a little time to intricately put all those wires in there. But I did all the macro stuff. I liked to help and do all that stuff. When it came to doing the fine tuning, that was Duby, nobody else knew what to do. That was, when he got up there to work on the carburetors— We used carburetors in our boat and that's the way these engines came, with a Bendix, came with a Bendix carburetor. I think I got it written down. Here's a note. Carburetor was a Bendix P-16 carburetor, 16in² of opening. And that's the way those engines were built in the late 40s, early 50s. Duby designed himself and built a fuel injection system. I do not know if he used the fuel injection system on the world record attempt, on the world record. I don't know if he did that. He might have. My guess is it was probably carburetor, but there were always carburation issues, especially the engines were built to run at altitude were running at sea-level. You had to get the right mix of air and gas in order for them to fire up rapidly. Starting them on the ground was always an issue. The drivers had two controls: they had one for air mixture and they had one for choke, I think it was. No, they had one for throttle, one for choke. And they would have to jockey these two controls when they were starting the boat to make sure the boat started. Otherwise, it would just flood. When they started up, all hell broke loose and there was just, you cannot imagine the roar.

One day in the shop, we're working on a Saturday morning, I think it was. And there were other people in the shop working on some industrial stuff. And we had just finished an engine and Duby said, let’s just crank her up. I said, you’re kidding. He says, no, we're going to crank her up. We'll just give it a quick tweak. I said, and they brought a battery over and that thing went whomp. And the noise was so enormous, everybody came running with fire extinguishers. They thought that we’d had an explosion. There's like 16 people around fire extinguishers. Yeah, where's the explosion? What happened? We just cranked her up for a second. God, what were you thinking? Windows broken and all that sort of thing. But we one time went down in the early spring, in March of ‘63, April of ‘63, probably, Detroit River, Saturday morning, really early and—to talk about the noise—and we started the Miss U.S. V up for her first test run on the Detroit River with her new engines. And Duby is the crew chief and whole thing, the old Hawaii Kai. And we started it up at about 7 or 7:30 in the morning. The Coast Guard was out. They cleared the track for us. The entire area between the Belle Isle Bridge and the Roostertail, that was where the course was, on the Detroit side and the Belle Isle side. So we had three-mile, roughly three-mile race course all to ourselves. And we started the boat up and it was probably around 7 or 7:30 the morning. When we first got there, you can hear the birds chirping. You heard the water. You heard nothing. It was beautiful. Coast Guard was out there. They cleared everybody out of there. We started it up and you could hear that echo off the Penobscot building three miles away. It was, hair standing up on edge. And then took it around for— And Duby was our test driver. He was also the crew chief and test driver. The driver was a guy named Donnie Wilson.

There's a little story about Duby also. He used to be a competitive driver, he drove race cars early in his career, and he took a lot of that technology, a lot of that expertise to boat racing later on. And he rode, he drove in several races. I actually think he was a pretty good driver in the early 50s. And then one race, I think, was here on the Detroit River. He, the boat lost control in one spot, and he ended up jumping over a dock over at the Detroit Yacht Club at full speed, he was going like 140, 160 miles an hour. And when he came down, [claps] he came down so hard he broke his back. And he survived, but he couldn't race anymore. Competitive racing was done. That saved his life. And the reason I say that is, and I say this with a little bit of heartache as well, there were 12 or 13 drivers, as I mentioned earlier, in the 60s. And I knew most of them, if not by name, I knew them by, hi, how you doing? They were acquaintances. They weren't really friends. That was for the better part because as the days and months and years went by, I lost them one after the other, after the other, after the other. Six of them were gone in six years after I left boat racing. Six were gone, and they all died the same way: in boat racing accidents. Bill Muncey died in ‘81. He was later. But we lost Chuck Thompson. We lost our driver, Donnie Wilson. He was killed. He had a family. He had a beautiful wife and two lovely kids. Red-haired guy.

Here's a story about that, too, red-haired guy, nice fellow. He owned a car dealership down in Florida and he was a boat racer for a lot of his life. Donnie Wilson, very personable young guy. But he had a red-head’s temper. [Gestures to wife, Susan] She's a red-head, I know. He had a red-head’s his temper. We went down to Guntersville in ‘63 to run in the boat race down there, and the Miss U.S. is running really strong. I mean, she is just really running good. The boat’s doing, on the backstretch, doing easily 180 miles an hour and we're passing boats and we're coming around. We're in the fourth lap of a five-lap race or the fifth lap of the sixth-lap race. I think it was five, four out of five. We’re in the fourth lap. We only had one more lap to go and there was another boat out there called the Notre Dame that was driven by Colonel Warner Gardner, a former fighter pilot. And he threw an oil line. And his boat had slowed down, and it was not running even 100 miles an hour, and he was just barely trying to make it back to course. And he was on the backstretch when the line broke and Donnie Wilson came around and he tried to pass him on the left and Gardner cut him off on the left. And then he tried to pass him on the right and Gardner passed him on the right. He was lapping these guys. I mean, Donnie Wilson was going so fast, he was lapping these guys. And then Notre Dame was last already because she had lost part of her engine. So he's going like this. And then we get washed out in the in the Roostertail from the Notre Dame. We got washed out. We're 100 yards from the finish and we're dead in the water. We finally got the boat started after the race was over, we lost our last heat or we lost the heat. And well, Donnie got the boat started again and he came in and they had these men, these little small wooden docks that were made out there in Guntersville as these temporary docks for the races, and they were all sort of sticking out in the water 20, 30, 50 feet where it was. Donnie Wilson didn't even turn off the engine ‘till he got to the docks. Now, I told you before, when that engine's running, the propellers spinning, there ain't no neutral. Came into the dock probably about 15, 20 miles an hour. Smashed the dock to smithereens. And I'm standing on the end of the dock. And Frank, my Capuchin brother friend, grabs me by the collar and pulls me back as our dock collapsed. And he pulled me back into a surviving part of the dock. And the first part of the dock just collapsed under the boat as it came into shore. Donnie hops out of the boat seething. I mean, he's just delirious. He is so angry about being cut off in the race course, and he comes bouncing off the hood of the, off the bow of the boat, off the deck onto the dock before anybody could stop him, came running up to the desk and he started throwing fists. There was a big fist fight between Donnie Wilson and Colonel Gardner and a couple of the other officials that were there, and they're all trying to pull ‘em apart. He was just furious, livid that he had purposely, eh, purposely cut him off as he was trying to get around them. And we had the race won. I mean, that race was just history. And we didn’t because we went dead in the water.

So those are some of my remembrances about that. Donnie Wilson was a wonderful guy. I met his wife, beautiful, beautiful lady, and he had two small kids. I can remember Ron Musson, Donnie Wilson and Bill Brow. Who drove the Miss Exide. Donnie Wilson drove our boat. And, Bill Brow, Donnie Wilson and who was the third one I mentioned? All three were killed one day in the late 60s. He was in a boat race they were having out west someplace, I think it was in Nevada or Washington or someplace. Two boats collided, killed their two drivers right away, and there was a third accident. So, you're talking about six, there are 12 boats start, three boats go down because the drivers were killed, and they finished the race anyway. The thing about it is that even the drivers knew that it was like driving a flying coffin. And of the people that I knew, even just on smiling acquaintances, like Chuck Thompson, again, one of the nicest people you ever met, Chuck Thompson was killed in the mid-late 60s on the Detroit River. Hit a swell, boat fell into the swell, exploded from the inside. He was thrown out, did not survive the injuries. Here's another one right here, and I labeled it. This one is with us dead in the water in a race back in the late 50s is the Miss U.S. And here's a boat called the Supertest. And you see the number on the Supertest, the CA I. Is it the CA I? The CA III. That's a Canadian boat. And it was driven by a guy named Bob Hayward. This is just before he was killed. And he was killed on the Detroit River, he was one of the first drivers— Right? I think he was the first driver [killed]. This is back late 50s, maybe, maybe 1960. I can't remember exactly. Bob Hayward was killed at the Belle Isle end of the race course when the boat flipped and crushed him. Boat just flipped, caught some waves, went up in the air. [Claps] Air gets underneath the boat like a kite, pushes it right over and it just falls over. This is one of the big—

And this happened to other drivers too, that he was not the only one. Bob Hayward was famous and so was the boat famous. The Supertest, as a Harmsworth winner. It was one of the races that was run as an international hydroplane race back in the 60s. And Bob Hayward was another of the very likable guys. Everybody loved the guy and it was a shame. I think he was one of the first people killed. This book right here will tell you more about that. It might have been 1961. But then there were a whole rash of these guys that got killed. And of the 12 or 13 drivers that I knew when I was in with the Miss U.S., six of them were gone in six years, you know, due to boat racing. And after that I, I started to lose interest because it just terrified me, and I almost thought that, like, I was a jinx. So, I knew all these guys. I mean, even in passing, I knew these guys and they were gone, just that fast. But anyway, some of the other things that happened. We had the Gold Cup here in Detroit in 1963. Here's a picture from the back page of the Detroit Free Press in 1963. We blew up [Laughs] in our first heat. We lost a sponson and you could see all the wreckage on the sponson in there. See the crewman up there? That's me in that uniform.

DLT: Very cool.

MR: That's the back of the Free Press, 1963. And here is the full page. Now, I have the original of this at home. This is a copy of the back page of the ‘63 Free Press in July. And you can see that is a copy of that corner down there with me in it. And that race was consequential for a number of reasons. It was my only Gold Cup in Detroit that I participated in. Some of the boats in that race were the most consequential of all time. There's the Miss Thriftway right there, driven by Bill Muncey. Down here is the Miss U.S. Down here is the, this would be a Miss U.S. as well. I can tell by the tail. And there's the Miss Bardahl right there. A beautiful green boat. Boat was a gorgeous boat. Bardahl was only Bardahl Oil, and they had big, beautiful black and green trailer, mostly green trailer with a full machine shop inside this huge trailer that they pulled. And they pulled the boat separately with a separate truck. They would come with two trucks or sometimes three. They would come with two trucks and this big, beautiful trailer that was a full-fledged machine shop so they could do any kind of work they needed to for the boat right there, wherever it was, on-site. We weren't that fancy. We had all our tools piled on the back of a, like a big truck, and we had two engines on the truck. It was a big truck. And then we had one engine in the boat, and a lot of guys didn't like to drive the boat with the engines in them. They thought that might stress the hull, especially if they got onto rough pavement and that sort of thing and the boat bounced around. But listen, if the boat's running at 200 miles an hour and it's bouncing around out there, it can take it, you know? But anyway, Bardahl came with this beautiful green boat, black trim. And I remember saying hello to Ron Musson, and we’d— And he saw, you know, I had my uniform on, and he would wave and he'd be real cordial. He didn't know me from Adam, but I knew who he was because I’d followed the racing so closely.

And then there was the Gale boats and the Roostertail boats. And they're right down from here in Detroit. Detroit was really the hotbed of hydroplane racing back in those days. And the Gale boats and the Roostertail, they had their own machine shop, too. They had Lee Schoenith, I think it was. Lee Schoenith was the old man and Jerry was the younger one, forgetting now. It’s only sixty years ago. They had this big trailer also, had Gale Electric on the side and Gale racing boats and the whole thing. And that was part of their advertising thing. And as I mentioned, the whole thing for them racing in the 60s, they could put the name of their companies and their sponsorship of the boats right on the boat, and they would get some sort of a tax break, because they had all of this publicity for free just by racing. That changed later on, and I think they took away that benefit and there were very few people left to race because it became unaffordable, really, with the changing technology. For us, back in the day, to build a hull to race, I was told back in the 60s was probably around 100,000. Might not have been that much, but it was around 100,000. In those days. That was a lot, a lot of money. But now the boats are all Kevlar and carbon fiber and they’re multimillion-dollar hulls. I mean, this is, you get into a hull in that category, you got to have some sponsorship behind you to do stuff like that. A number of sponsors came along that were really high profile. One of them was Miss Pepsi. That was Dossin, Miss Pepsi, and you can probably think of a few others. Hawaii Kai was Kaiser Aluminum. Then there was Supertest, that was, I think Supertest was a gasoline company or something in Canada, and there were others I can't think of. Oh, Bill Brow Miss Exide. Batteries, huge company, Exide Batteries. Matter of fact, I think the batteries we used in our boat were Exide.
Interesting, we used 24-volt batteries, big batteries. They weighed 80, 90, 90 pounds apiece. We had two batteries in the boat at the start. I think they use 48-volts, not sure. And we used to put them in a rack that were set behind the driver's seat, and the driver would take the boat out and test, and it would see how it performed out there as it ran around the course. And he'd look, he would look for handling. You really were particular about the handling of the boats in the turns. You didn't want to, I mean, in a straight it was important, but in turns it is a really important thing. And they found that by moving the batteries—and they knew this—by moving the batteries back and forth just a few inches, they could change the weighting in the boat, they could change the center of gravity, and they could change how it handled, and the whole thing. And if they needed some more weight on the propeller, they could just move the batteries back a few inches. And that's all they had to do to make that change. Interesting enough, I think I told you that when Duby setting the world water speed record, and he saw the indicator was running at 230, he says they had tested, and they'd never been up at 230 before. What they found [Laughs] was that there's a pickup tube for the water speed indicator, it’s a tube, and it runs right down the rudder and it runs right along the edge of the rudder. And the rudders on these boats are all offset because the boats are always turning left. So, they're all offset so that they have to turn opposite that left. And they have to offset that left all the time. So, when they set them to the left, the water was flowing over this tube in an angle and it wasn't picking it all up. So, when he was reading 197, he was really doing 220. They corrected that by turning the tube, so. And when he was running the record, they could see the water speed record was showing 230 or thereabouts. But again, the world water speed record at the time was 200.419. That's written right on my shirt there, on my uniform. And that record still stands. The record still stands. And the reason I say that, and the turbine boats are faster, but they're turbines. They're not internal combustion engine. Number two, they're propeller-driven. That jet, her boat was a propeller-driven boat. So, for internal combustion, propeller-driven boats, that's the fastest anybody had ever been on that kind of boat.. And that record still stands today sixty-some-odd years later.

What else can I tell you about these photos? So here's a picture of this. This is the boat, I think that's the book up there. Yeah, this is the Gold Cup up here in this corner. And you can see the boats racing down here. And of course, we lost our sponson. And that was an interesting thing. The reason that this picture was taken in the first place was that the Miss U.S. V ran into rough water. We fell into a hole, caught the sponson, and the sponson imploded. Actually, exploded. Water rushes in, everything goes out. So it imploded, and we lost the sponson. We're done for the day. Actually, we're done for the season with U.S. V. Because they did not repair it that year. But we had a second boat. We had the Miss U.S. I. It was there and we had a separate crew for the boat. I wasn't part of the U.S. I crew, I was part of the U.S. V crew. So what they had us do was we knew that we had our engine running really good. That boat was really running strong before the sponson was lost and they wanted to pull the engine in our boat and put it in the Miss U.S. I. Now, the U.S. I had a good engine in it, we knew it was good. And we ran this boat. We knew that engine was hot. So, I jumped up on the cowl as soon as the boat was brought in, with a wrench in my hand, and some sharp photographer caught me jumping on the hull of the boat with my wrench in hand, ready to take that engine out. They told us afterwards they didn't want it out, but it was on again, off again, on again. Yeah, let's take it out now. Nah, don't take it out. Eh, take it out. We eventually ran the US. I with the original engine, didn't change engines at all. But I was in there with my wrenches ready to go. I was just doing what they told me to do. Race day, 1963. We've been ranked, we've been in Guntersville. We'd raced down there. We'd been on the river testing. We had done some runs. When it comes to the Gold Cup, the owners can give pit passes to, like, anybody they want, and there are probably others, sponsors and so on and so forth, eh, everybody gets a pit pass. We're down on the, around the Roostertail on race day. And I'm not used to seeing all these people in the pit. And there are just people everywhere. Thousands. It was just incredible. And we had, I think, twelve boats.

Interesting story about that, too. We had six cranes and twelve boats, so one crane was responsible for two boats. And we all had different assignments on race day than we did during the week. During the week we would do shop stuff. We would get the boat ready for whatever we were going to do on the weekend. But on race day, we had different assignments, and I had a couple of different assignments. One of them was to help take the boat in and out of the water. As I mentioned, we pulled them in and we always brought them out of the water nose-up and we could drain them and all that sort of thing. And then you make sure you reseal the petcocks after you're done. [Laughs] Thank you very much. So that was one of the things, I helped to drag the boat in and out of the water, and we used ropes to straighten the boat out so we could set it down on two pegs. There were two pegs, one on either side of the trailer, and on the boat there were two metallic flanges with holes in them. And you set it down on those holes, and you could bolt the boat right down on those flanges so that it wouldn’t move. And that was the whole idea with the transporter, that's how you transport it. And we set it down on the pegs, so the crane operator would lift the boat out of the water and he’d move it here and he’d move it there and we would jockey the ropes and there would be one guy on the other side, one guy on this side. We'd be jockeying and we’d finally get it set down on some pegs and it might take a few minutes to get it down. I remember we were down in Guntersville and they had, I guess, six crane operators as well. And twelve boats. And these crane operators down in Alabama in, yeah, and they would pick the boat up out of the water and they’d set it right down to the pegs. No jockeying, no nothing. You’d set it right down on the pigs. I could not believe it. No jockeying around. No steering. They just set it down on the pegs. Unbelievable. They were really good.

But anyway, so we're up here race day. Hot day. Had to be 90, 95 degrees. It was just murder. And even in that cotton uniform, I was boiling. One of the jobs I had race day was fueling the boats. And the fuel, the fuel tanks are right up on the cowl, not far from where I am in this picture, Not far, there's a gas tank opening on that side. Actually, there's two gas tanks. And they each held, I think, fifty gallons. And what we had was a supply of gasoline provided by Mobil Oil. And there were all these barrels of gasoline along the shoreline. I mean, hundreds. [Laughs] It seemed like hundreds of barrels of gasoline along the shoreline. And they all contained 130 octane av gas, aviation fuel. Very, highly volatile, right? And the way we had to pump the gas in, they didn't have any electric pumps or anything like that, we had to do it by hand. We had this, on the top of each of the barrels, there was this screw type cap that fit in. It was called a bung. You took the bung out of the barrel and you opened up a hole. And in the bung hole, you put this long hand pump that we had, which had a crank on it, and you put down into the hole where the spout would go, the siphon would go all the way down to the bottom of the barrel, and then you fastened it on the bunghole, as tight as you could get it, and you pumped it by hand! And you pumped the gas in. But we didn’t have any, like, electric pumps down on the shoreline. We had to bring our own stuff. So that was it. So, you tighten the thing up as much as you could, no matter how much you tighten it, there was some spillage. There was always some gasoline on the barrel, and it was spilling a little bit over the side. And there was all of this. And it's 100 degrees outside, and you could see the fumes in the air. You could just see them. And I'm up there pumping and pumping and we're putting gasoline and fueling the boat. And a guy comes up to me wearing one of those guest tags, and he says, whatcha doing there, son? And I looked over to him and I said, I'm fueling the boat, sir. And he had a lit cigar. And I said, holy crap. And I called the fire marshal over, and I said, hey, here's a guy over here with a lit cigar and we're putting fuel in the boat. He says, [clicks tongue] yeah, that's a problem. And he walked away. And I thought to myself, in an instant, this entire shoreline could have been demolished. It could have been immolated. And he said, yeah, that's a problem. And I thought to myself, I'm lucky to be alive. The guy was within ten feet of me, not even. And fumes everywhere, because everybody's doing the same thing. Well, anyway, that's what I remember about that. And I thought to myself afterwards, maybe it's time that I think about some other career, you know, maybe some other thing to do.

Anyway, let me think what else. So, Duby was a character. I loved working with the guy. He was, he was a real gentleman. And the day— I was working in the shop when they first, it was in the spring, as I said, and they were getting ready to go racing in 1963. And I was still in school. I'm in college and I'm volunteering my time. And I was there, I think it was on a Saturday, and we're working in the shop and some guy comes in and he says, Mr. Simon wants to see all the crew guys in the office. So, I didn't consider anything. I just stayed out there in the shop working. You know, he wants the crew guys over there. I'm just extra help, right? And I’m out there for a couple of minutes and some guy comes running out, grabs me by the collar. He says, he wants you, too! I said, what? Okay. So, I went into the conference room and there was this conference room with about twenty chairs around a big long conference room. And he goes around the table. He says, okay, I need your uniform sizes. And he got to me and I’m breathless. I couldn't speak. He says, what's your uniform size? And I forgot what I told him. I don't even think I was coherent, actually. And he says, well, you are coming racing with us, aren't you? Hubba hubba hubba hubba hubba, uh, yeah, sure! So, I came home that night and I was talking to my dad and I said, Dad, they offered me a chance to go racing with the team, touring with the boat. I don't think this is ever going to happen again in my lifetime. What do you think? And he thought about it. I was going to work for him during the summer and make some money so I could, you know, help to pay for college. And he thought about it and he said, yeah, okay, I think you should do that. [Laughs] I said, okay. So, and I was just flabbergasted. I was utterly flabbergasted that they asked me to be part of the crew. But again, what I did with the crew was I learned a lot of stuff along the way. I didn't really know a lot when I started, but I did learn to do, and follow orders. That was the thing. When you're, when you're on a racing team and a crew, you practice to do certain things a certain way and they tell you what to do. And if you want to stay with the team, that's what you do. Follow your instructions. Try not to screw up. Don't spill the gasoline on a lit cigar. That would be a bad thing. And we went racing. So, and we tested a lot on the Detroit River. We tested and then we ran in the Gold Cup. Again, in the Gold Cup, we didn't finish in ‘63 because we had the blown sponson in the Miss U.S. 1. Did run, I think, in later heats, but I don't think it finished in the money. I don't think it finished at the top. The U.S. V would have been a real contender. She was a really fast boat. As I said, it was the old Hawaii Kai. And that boat, when it was running as the Hawaii Kai, was a really formidable racing boat. The fact that it was 1,000 pounds lighter than most of the other boats.

I remember in ’63, also, some of the other boats that were there. There was a boat there called the Tempo, I think it was called the Tempo IV. And the Tempo IV, it was a beautiful racing boat, and it was owned by Guy Lombardo. Guy Lombardo was a very famous orchestra leader in the 40s and 50s, very famous. Like you would think of champagne music with Lawrence Welk. Guy Lombardo was the same sort of personage. Very famous orchestra, and he liked racing, and he had his own boat. But when he came racing, he came with his own hydroplane and his hydroplane was a four-seater. Ours were one-seaters. And his four-seater had a canvas cover that covered up three of the seats and left the fourth one open for the race driver. But on days when it wasn’t racing, he would uncover the other three seats and he could have passengers with him. And I remember he came too, and it was a beautiful boat. It was just gorgeous. It had a mahogany, like, deck on it. It had beautiful siding and beautiful script. And it said Tempo IV, something like that. And he was a well-known race driver, too, because Tempo had won some races in the early 50s, late 40s, early 50s. And he had a— I'm trying to remember if his was Allison or Rolls and I think his was an Allison engine. And it was considered to be a pretty decent boat. But with passengers, I'm not so sure. [Laughs] But anyway, so he comes to the course that day and he couldn't get the boat started. They could not get the boat started. And Lombardo knew Duby and Duby of course knew everybody there. And he called him over and said, Duby, see what you think. You know, they just— Duby came back to where I was working on the U.S. V. He came back, he says they put the crank in backwards. Put the crank in backwards? How do you do that? They had the crank in backwards and it wouldn't start. It means that the timing was completely off, nothing fired up.

Anyway, I think eventually they did get it running, but there were some other beautiful boats. There were, of course, the Gales and there was another boat called the Roostertail. And there was the Exide and the Miss Bardahl. And the Miss U.S., of course. Supertest, I think was, no, Supertest was gone. She was, she'd already gone under in ’61, so she wasn't there. And I'm trying to think who I might be missing. There was another boat there called Slow Mo-Shun and another one called Nitrogen. Don't ask me who they were sponsored by. I just don't know. But there were a couple of others, but the big ones were the ones that you would— Oh, Miss Budweiser! Don't forget Miss Budweiser. Oh, and Thriftway. Thriftway is another story. Thriftway, you can see here in this picture. Here's a picture of Thriftway. You can always tell the Thriftway because it has stripes on it. And the stripes on the tail and on the cowl as well. There's another picture here, the Thriftway as well, I think. Not in this one, but maybe in my big photo here. My big photo right here, you can see the Thriftway right up here with the stripes on the cowl. See that there? The Thriftway was driven by Bill Muncey. And Bill Muncey, one of the biggest, famous, most famous race drivers of the day, he drove the Thriftway and another one called— I'll think of it. He drove another boat from Seattle. And by the late, by the mid-fifties, Bill Muncey was considered a traitor. He left Detroit, and he went to Seattle to get sponsorship for racing boats. So Thriftway food stores, it was a food chain, supermarkets. And that's what, that's how they advertised, of course. So he drove, he drove the boat for the Thriftway and then there was another one.

DLT: I think it, was it the Atlas Van Lines?

MR: I'm sorry?

DLT: Was it the Atlas Van Lines on the cover?

MR: Atlas Van Lines, there you go. Atlas Van Lines. So, it was either the Atlas Van Lines in this particular photo here. That’s the Miss Madison there, this is a different boat. Where’s the other shot I had here? I had another shot of it. This one here is the, I'm pretty sure the Thriftway in ‘63. Yeah. This is the Miss Thriftway in 50— But the Atlas Van Lines might have been the same boat, I’m not positive about that. That’s probably in the history book there, I can check that. But that boat was extremely, extremely fast, and Bill Muncey was always the guy to beat. And one of the stories about it was that the drivers were all lining up to go to the starting line. Muncey always picked an outside line, and he got out into even into Lake St. Clair on the Detroit River. The Detroit River connects with Lake St. Clair out there, and he'd go out almost as far as Lake St. Clair and then come roaring back from Lake St. Clair to the starting line. And he would time it so that he hit that starting line right. On. The. Money. He would click zero, he was right at the starting line going 180 miles an hour. And that was the whole idea. But he would pick the outside line and then cut in front of the other boats and get to that first turn before they could, because he had it so figured out. He was so good at doing what he did. The other guys were good, but he was just the best. He was like the Chuck Yeager of his time. He was really terrific at that.

One other thing I missed. Oh, I've got some other photos here. Here's a picture of the Nitrogen. And here's another picture of the Maverick, and the Maverick used an Allison engine. And it was a very good, fast, Allison engine boat. These pictures were all taken by a fellow named Jay Jerome Bader. His son, Bob, and I are best friends. He was best man at my wedding. These were taken— Bader worked for one of the newspapers. I think it was the Detroit Times. He was a photographer. And he did other photography as well. But these pictures were taken by him in the late 50s or early 60s, I think. Here's the Nitrogen there. This is the Maverick. This one was taken by I don't know who. And this is our boat in 1963, the Miss U.S. V, and that's Roy Duby at the helm. If you look really carefully, you can read on the side here. It says U.S. Equipment Company, Roy Duby, crew chief. Okay. That's a nice shot here. I like this shot because it shows you, this is the boats just starting up. You see the puff of smoke. When they started up, they had to choke them just right. And there was always a little bit of gas left in those cylinders. And when they finally cut, there’d be a big puff of smoke before they exploded to life. So that's what they did there. Let's see. And then there was some of the things that we did around the shop. My job in the shop basically became disassembling and assembling engines and then getting the boat ready for race day. When it came to the final tuning, as I said, that was all Roy Duby, and guys would come from all over for expertise, his expertise in solving various problems. And that included the Allison as well as the Rolls engines.

That piece that you have right there, that reduction gear, is interesting all by itself. I'm not going to ask you to lift it, but I’ll show you. This weighs about 35 pounds and it weighs that much, well, because it's made out of, this is all made out of billet, one solid piece. And then it has two races of bearings, one on the top and one on the bottom. You can see the bearings here. These are special race bearings that you don't find in your normal hardware store. And it has a spine shaft that goes through the center. Down here, there, on the bottom of the gear, you can see there's the initials GW. And we think that that's a die mark indicating where it was, where this gear was built. Here's the spine shaft. And once I take it out, it's really hard to get it back in. But I'm going to take it out anyway. There's this spine shaft that directly connects to the gear, the shaft propeller that we used. And in here, there's another smooth surface and as time has gone by, it's kind of hard to see through this now because there's a little bit of tarnish on there. But in here are engraved the initials of the guy that did this gear. So, they signed their work. [Laughs] And you knew who it was and where it was made so that they could trace down any issues. Here's another die mark up there. There's a number there that says, I can't read for sure. Looks like 234 or something like that. That has some other designation. But in here somewhere there are the initials engraved in the guy who built this gear. And then there's a die mark up here maybe to indicate at what plant this was made. This very likely was made at the Rolls Packard plant. Interesting story about that comes to mind. The Rolls Packard plant was right across the street from U.S. Equipment Company. We were on Mt. Elliott and Grand Boulevard, East Grand Boulevard. East Grand Boulevard, I think. And that's where the old Packard plant assembly plant, one of the old assembly plants was, right across the street from the U.S. Equipment Company. Very convenient. And I remember again one day in the shop, somebody came in and they said, you know, they were working at that— And you got to remember, Packard closed production around 1957. That was the last year that that plant operated. I was there in 1962, ‘63. So I'm only five years after that plant closed. Some guy comes into the plant, he says, hey, they found some engines across the street. You guys might be interested. They found five brand new or six brand new Merlins in crates. Brand new Rolls Merlins in crates. Anybody want one? I'm going, are you kidding? And they wanted $300 apiece or they were going to scrap them. These engines back in the day when they were built were about 50-grand apiece. This is, we're talking about World War II, and they're giving them away for scrap for $300. Does anybody want one? And I'm a college kid with, I'm driving my old car and I, how do you take something like that home, right? Number two, I didn't have $300. Number three, where am I going to keep it? I didn't know. But if I had thought about it, thinking back over the years, I would have figured something out. I would have figured something out. There is a fellow who— [Adjusting gear] Let’s see if I can get this in here, it's a very tight fit. It's like a 1/10,000th tolerance.

There was a fellow who actually bought one of those Rolls Merlins and put them put one under glass on his lawn in front of his house and bolted the whole thing down, and because they're such beautiful, remarkable, beautiful pieces of machinery, that was his masterpiece. He wanted to have that as a masterpiece. So. But there is one fellow who you may have heard of that actually has a running Rolls Merlin engine on a sled. His name is Jay Leno. And if you go onto Jay Leno’s, if you go on to YouTube and you type in Jay Leno Rolls-Royce Merlin Engine, you will actually see a video piece of him starting it up on the sled, and he'll show you all the different parts of the engine. As he goes around the engine, he'll mention where the supercharger is, and where the fuel injection or where the fuel system is, there's a precooler. There's a precooler assembly in there. He'll show you all the different parts as he walks around the engine. Then he starts it up on the sled. He lets it run. And that's pretty exciting. They did have a propeller on it. Ooh, I got it in there. They did have a propeller on that engine. On that, yeah, they had a propeller in that engine. When he's standing there and he starts it up, everybody's getting blown all over the place. They're holding on for dear life because it's really, beside the fact it's making a lot of noise,it’s blowing a lot of air. So that's what I remember. There were probably a few other things that would come to mind, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

DLT: Alright. Just a few questions. Which Miss U.S. was the one that set the record? Was that the Miss U.S. V?

MR: Miss USA I—

DLT: Ah, okay.

MR: —was the one to set the world water speed record. And she was, she only raced through the ‘63 season and that was only one or two races. And the U.S. V was the major boat after that.

DLT: Okay.

MR: Different boat. And again, the U.S. V was a lot lighter, was 1,000 pounds lighter. Yeah. And the new boats today are even lighter yet. They use what's called an aluminum honeycomb construction. And that allows them to make the hulls much, much lighter than anything we ever had. We used a lot of wood and some fiberglass. And the wood is heavy, you know, and with the aluminum hull construction that they could do along with the Kevlar shells and whatnot, the boats are way lighter than they were. And they're more powerful, because you're using these, they're called Lycoming jet turbine engines. They still drive propellers. That makes them, makes them different from the jet boats. There are jet boats that run only with jet propulsion. This is not that. These are Lycoming jet engines driving a propeller. Different story.

DLT: And just few last details. Where and when were you born?

MR: I was born in Detroit in 1942 at Women's Hospital.

DLT: And what city do you live in now?

MR: West Bloomfield, just north of Detroit.

DLT: Alright. That was everything for now. And let me pause there.

[Recording paused]

DLT: New recording started.

MR: Okay. So here's the thing about boat racing anyway. When they started changing over from the Merlin engines and the Allison engines in the late 1950s, early 60s, in the late 60s, they started experimenting with these turbine engines that came out of the helicopters in Vietnam. And these turbine engines didn't make anywhere near the noise. They were much, much quieter, more powerful. No question about it. Lot lighter. And they can make a lot more power. And that's what they were after, was the speed. But people lost interest partly because the sound wasn't there. Okay. I sort of get that. But when people are watching boat racing, especially, if a boat is going 180 miles an hour, or if the boat's going 210 miles an hour, you can't tell the difference. You're out there as a spectator watching it go round and round. And now what you're interested in is the competition part of it. How close are they together? How exciting is the race? Who's going to pass who? Who’s driving better? Which boat's running better? Which has the prettiest roostertail? There are a whole bunch of facets to all this. The fact that they took away the sound portion is like deleting one of your senses, just like suddenly, you can't hear anymore. And that just took away the whole aura. To me, took away the whole aura. But the turbine engines did give the boats higher speed. Almost all of them, almost all the boats today—if they're still racing someplace, they're not in Detroit anymore—all the boats today are capable of 220. There's no reason they can't run 220 miles an hour. There are some physics limits to anything more than that, because now you're dealing with not only the hydraulic forces, the water forces below you, but the wind above you and how you keep it now from just completely going out of control with some sort of very sophisticated gadgetry. So again, my point is that when people are watching these races, they're not interested in whether the votes are going 180, 190 or 200. They just don't, they're interested in the race part. And they can't tell the difference between this speed and that speed. So, I think that the boat racing—the ABPA, it’s called, the American Powerboat Association—they missed the mark. Missing the mark, meaning that they went for speed, overall speed, which is undiscernible by the public. That's not what they were interested in. They should have been interested in the performance and the competitive part. The competition part. That's my $0.02 worth. I remember hearing a lot of comments from the peanut gallery about that. And they were bemused that the boat, that the unlimited hydroplanes had morphed into something else, and that high tech is not necessarily what people want in everything. Sometimes when the old dial phone, still has its place in history. The old phonograph. I still have a turntable at my stereo, and I can play my old records when I want to. But there's a place for that. As a matter of fact, even if you go to Indianapolis 500, part of the fun of going to any of those automobile races is the sound. And they sort of took that away. Yeah, the boats are fast, but it's like, who cares?

DLT: So you think the sound, the loss of sound is part of what makes powerboat racing less popular than it used to be.

MR: I think that the diminished sound in the powerboats today has made it a lot less popular. When the boats were racing, even if you weren't following the racing, if you drove along Jefferson Avenue, you heard them. And you knew there was something going on, like the world was coming to an end. And that was part of the thrill. Yeah.