Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

continent of Australia or Sprouts be ing driven from Fresno by an angry mob for getting a local girl in trouble. Australia was where England exiled its most dangerous vagrants, misfits, rogues and hardened criminals. Bein g on the fringe of some of these activities himself, Elder, upon arriving in Melbourne on a third-elass ticket, with $20 in his pocket, made common cause with hardy Aussies. They were in the process of inventing their own civiliza tion. Nighttime speedway racing was part of it, and EIder had never imagined su ch racing before. He was accustomed to cannonballing up the face of a perpendicular cliff, or being crushed by a board track's G forces. But these speedway rinks, by comparison, were short and claustrophobic; their diabolic su rfaces were seasoned with cinder, which was like racing on marbles . A scratch race of fou r laps was an explosion. Maneuvering in a perilous d ance, riders circled in out-of-control packs, with barb wire to protect them from being beaned by emp ty whiskey bottles hurled from the grand s tands. . Like the racing, the spectators were rau cous. Elder knew instinctively that he had struck it rich. It was the hottest racing in the world, an d it was his vocation. He wasn' t particularly well equipped for it, because like all male EIders he was tall wi th long and spindly Iirnbs., Bu t hill climbing had taught him to be reckless , board track speeds had drained him of fear, and he knew all the choice tricks: , how to drop the chassis, how to dope the fuel. And he even got around the handicap of having long legs by letting them drag behind him. By no means was hi s racing style conducive to sigh tliness of appearance. Pictu re this - Elder with his p rotruding legs, arms, knees and elbows giving the effect of a maniac centipede. Prize money was his for the pocketing, if he raced enough. So he went to Perth, Brisbane, Syd ney, Adelaide. Soon he was bleeding Australia white. Meanwhile, this new inventi on of speedway was sp reading aroun d the globe. And so b eg an h is extrao rd inary od yssey. For th e ne xt sev eral years, sometimes alone, sometimes with a winsome female companion, Elder roamed the speedway earth. H e showed up in Engl and, find ing the whole island broken out with speedway fever: "...watching these modem centaurs, half-men, half-machines, h urtle aro un d tha t thread of track at seemingly impossible speeds, wave upon wave of cinders fuming from flying wheels, handlebars almost touching, a nd ev er y instant seemingly on the verge of crashing to irretrievable ruin, the worl d and its tr oubles are ren t away and you are whirled into ecstasy..." Elder was in an ecstasy of ma king money. He was earning in the neighborhood of $1000 a night and doing it six nights a week. It wasn't, however, allgravy. One evenin g he hung himself on a crashwall at the cost of several bones, and various molars. But he was ben t on survival He checked himsel f ou t of th e infirm ary an d flew to the conti ne n t for a week's worth of checking out the wine, women, and song of Paris . Gradually it occu rred to EIder, by no means for the first time, tha t speedway opportunities lay elsewhere. He sped across England to Scotland. Then back across the English Channel to France and Germany. From Munich, he wrote a pos tcard ho me to Fresno saying he' d just won a race witnessed by 80,000. On to Denmark, Poland - perhaps even clear to the tips of Afr ica a nd Cape Hom, and to Cairo. A boat took him to South Am erica and citi es all o ver that con ti n ent: Rosario, Cordova, Sao Pa olo, Rio d e Janeiro, Montevideo. Argentina was trouble. In Buenos Aires, EIder decided to punch a taxicab driver on the jaw an d went to jail. Released, he began preying on the local speedway ri d ers, embarrassing them in three consecu tive mee ts, Just when he believed he was the country's new national hero, the grandstands rioted and he was suddenly running for his life. He sett led in for a pair of revolutions. Machine-gun fire crackled in the streets, with rebels mowin g down so ldiers by night. The n so ldiers returned and shot d own the re bels by d ay. Getting from th e hotel to the speedway races meant step ping over corpses. Elder figured that he was amassing another great fortune. When he discovered tha t a reso was worth only half as much as he' d imagined, he evacuated South America in haste. And then he went round once more to Sweden, Finland, Spain, and Germa ny again. This ti me he almost got im paled on the wall by angry Huns who remembered his first visit. Holland. France. England. Ju st for agreeing to become chieftain of Southampton's speedway squad, he was given a contract for $5000. Around 1932, Elder at last returned to America for good, and was passing through Ellis Island with $100,000 in a suitcase. He had four other era tes as well, each one containing a J.A.P ., the firebrand speedway engine invented by th e Brit ish . Elder was going to b ring speedway racing to his own land. Having originally departed Fresno under a cloud of scan dal, he returned as a prodigal - the world's most famous speedway racer. In celebration, he purchased a spiffy Chrysler sport model, which he drove with the top down, and on the wrong side of the Fresno boulevards, just as if he were back in England . Fresno's constabularies, with whom Elder had a love-ha te relationship, persecuted him for it. At firs t he found fami ne. in Fresno. The grea t economic depression was in its fourth yea r, suffocating the life out of the region and racing. There wasn't sufficient wood to even build an economical board track. Elder improvised his old speedway tracks. He rented the foo tball facility of the local college. He and his associates worked deals for use of the dog tracks. He even ha d the local cops selling tickets. Speedway now expan d ed and sped awa y like a sp irit out of a bottle: Fresno, Coalinga, Emeryville, Stockton, Bakersfield, and clear down into southern Californ ia to Los Angeles, Hollywood, and San Diego. With his vast experience and reservoirs of skill, Elder was always the smartest rider on any track an d he knew it. But the Argentine riot had taught him the pitfalls of irritating the rubes in the grandstand by winning all the time. Accordingly, he regularly threw races litera lly. "Pray for me, Ott, because I'm comin g off in th is one," Elder jovially inform ed his old friend and protector Ott Wilson. And then he would involve h imself in the most hair-raising spill imaginable, deliberately throwing away control just so somebody else might occasionally win. His bumps and bruises were alarming. He was in his element, making lots of money. On one rema rkable occasion he d idn't go to bed for a week, staying u p racing, carousing, gambling. The big gamblers from the Armenian district of Fresno welcomed him into their dens. Some of his speedway competition included Earl Farrand, Byrd McKinney and Burton Albrecht. There is nothing like an economic depression to make the tough get goin g. With their do ub le-fisted, go-for-broke constitutions, the two Milne b rothers, Jack and Cordy, along w ith thei r French friend Wilbur (Lammy ) Lamoreaux, were slowly getting the better of Sprou ts, Cordy had the best balance; Lammy the most spirit and worst nerves - vomiting all over himself and his competition on the starting line seems to have been his specialty; and Jack Milne piled up the most speedway victories - better than 6000. Confrontation with Elder, the father of speedway racing, was what Lamoreaux and the Milnes had in mind. At first Sprouts beat them with a 3O-inch engine while they ra ced 21-inchers. Then he unveiled his four J.A.P. thoroughbreds as secret weapons. So Lamoreaux and the Milnes got J.A.Ps of their own. Soon they were overthrowing Elder's drag-leg style with wondrou s techniques of their own invention. And by 1937 they were standing triumphant on the winner's podium at Wimbl edon as the one (lack), two (Lammy), and three (Cordy) finishers in the World Championship of speed way. Elder was no longer racing. The Fresno branc h of the California Highway Patrol had d epu tized him a motorcycle traffic cop. Going after a speeder at top speed himself, Elder neglected to switch on his red lights and siren, and in the process bashed into a second motorist. This crash, unlike his many speedway p ra tfalls , was one he barely recovered from. Up on his d ischarge from the hospital, EIder changed his occupation once again and went in to partnership with his chums the Armenian gamblers; together they moved much money. They also landed in hot water . Elder described what they were doing as check cashing, but his one-time allies, the Fresno cops, called it money-laundering a nd set the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Sprouts. As he invariablydid, he skated through. Now the good times were followed by dwindling times . All his years of living dangerously had not prepared Elde r for the contemplation of endless aches and pains from his wild racing days. In 1957, as a liberating act, he terminated his own life. The big funeral and wa ke in Fresn o was widely and miscellaneously atte nded . Cops mingled with Armenian gamblers and motorcycle racers, and there were speedway representatives from around the world. The city of Fresno stuck Sprouts Elder, its former black sheep, into the sports Hall of Fame. 0'1

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