Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

By Joe scalzo he death by goring of Speedy Babbs, one of the great wild names of early motorcycling, a man who rode the wall of destruction, smashed in to burning board walls and parachuted out of biplanes, blimps and balloons , and who was a doctor of voodoo and a hot-blooded sexual athlete, must have been a case of bad karma. Back in 1933, in Mazatlan, Babbs had engaged in the demented act of fighting a bull while riding a motorcycle. And it was while Babbs was attempting to reenact this performance decades afterward that he got a hom jammed fatally up his ass by what was presumably a distant ancestor of the original bu ll. Babbs died, at age 71, near the broken-down bus he lived in outside the Florida community of Stuart, on January 26, 1976. The fatal goring was by no means Speedy's first wounding. It was a matter of honor with him that in his long career he succeeded in snapping some 56 bones, which averages out to one fracture for every year of his adult life. All of them were richly deserved, too. Years and years earlier, happily predicting that he'd never live to celebrate his 30th birthday, Speedy had composed his own obituary: "Funeral services for Speedy Babbs will be held at 2:30. The public is cordially invited to attend the orgy. Liquor will be served before and after the service. "Guy Lombardo's orchestra will furnish the musical program consisting of 'The St. Louis Blues '... the final selection will be 'The Last Roundup: and the audience is expected to weep loudlyas the last note dies away. "There will be no burial as Mr. Babbs requested that his mortal coil be given to some scientific institution to be forcibly disjointed so that science may learn what made him tick. It is hoped that it will be learned what wires were crossed, or what gears were stripped." Babbs enjoyed sowing confusion about his beginnings. Sometimes he claimed his forebearers were coal miners; other times evangelical ministers. His earliest memory from childhood was of roping an electric fan to a little coaster wagon and not knowing whether he had invented a race car or an airplane. Later he would come close to annihilating himself in both. At five he had his first bicycle, an apparatus he refused to ride any direction but backwards. By the eighth grade he owned his first motorcycle, and got his neck all tangled up in a rope fence. Yet he was pleased instead of perturbed - now he could swivel his neck like a contortionist in the circus. By the age of 15 he was a hated object to agencies of law enforcement, which he deliberately provoked. After stripping bare his Indian of all exhaust plumbing one night, he paraded back and forth before the stationhouse, engine roaring and blasting. The chase was on: Speedy out in front, a squadron of cops pursuing in cars and on foot . Awakened by the tumult, irate local citizens joined in the hunt. Caught, Babbs got the crap beaten out of him, then was flung behind bars. His body was reduced to pulp, but his brain remained warped and fertile . While in jail, the idea came to him to earn his fortune by inventing a motorcycle powered by steam. He failed to T pursue this, however. Upon gaining his liberty, he entered the Targa Florio motorcycle race at the Legion Ascot Speedway in Los Angeles. Hurled skyward for 30 feet, he skidded along on his back for another 300. He then decided to restore his constitution by racing automobiles and flying airplanes, which was no big bureaucratic deal. Plenty of people did it during the '205, and, just like Babbs, without bothering with the formality of a license. Joy to Babbs was the thri11 of Half a year subsequently spent in hospital beds and wheelchairs didn't deter Babbs from continuing his stated ambition of living his entire life without working . To this end, he succumbed to the lure of the circus motordrome, a creation destined to keep him checking in and out of fracture wards for the next 40 years. Seen from the outside, a motordrome - aptly known as a wall of death - looked like an empty water storage tank. From above, it was an open tin challenging his reflexes by zooming a Jenny into a cloud with a mountain inside it. . He really loved flying and parachuting; soon he was using these pursuits to draw screams of horror from paying audiences. At an early air show, he wing-walked to the void, signaled the pilot to flop the biplane upside-down, then began free-falling at a speed of 325 feet per second. Ecstasy! Except that he delayed deploying the rip cord for so long that he reduced himself to a crumpled and bleeding pile of pain upon impacting the runway. Ever a ham, he remarked later that those were the finest crowd screams he ever listened to. Teams of doctors picking over him in relays determined that he had a thoroughly smashed spine, a ruptured liver, punctured kidneys, and was not going to last the night. What's more, if he d id expire, he was going to exp ire penniless. Churlishly, in the general chaos following Babbs' ill-fated leap, the air show's promoter had managed to abscond with every cent of the gate receipts. can perhaps 20 feet tall and wide. Customers standing along scaffolds paid to peer inside at the bizarre spectacle of Babbs whirling 'round and 'round the perpendicular walls; he and his cumbersome Indian Scout climbing ever higher, defying dizziness, vertigo, even gravity. . Let a tire blowout and Speedy would lose contact with the wall and tumble to the bottom, getting crushed by the motorcycle. Let the overstressed engine explode, and disaster would fol- . low. Allow one of the wooden slats to work loose, creating a sudden gap in the wall, and brains and gore would fly. Being a wall of death alumnus permitted Babbs to make common cause with sword swallowers, flame eaters, bearded ladies, and other miscellaneous carnival freaks . His real intimates, naturally, were his fellow wallof-deathers, Prominent among them was Daredevil Terrell, all 245 pounds of him, whose wife was the circus' gluttonous fat lady Jolly Nellie, all 783 pounds of her. Terrell circled while a fully grown male lion growled and paced at the bottom. One fall, and Terrell would be the big eat's dinner. Voluptuous Lillian La France, by comparison, sped her motorcycle across the high walls wearing a halter with the skull and cross bones emblazoned on her bosomy front. And there was Suicide Perry, who set the throttle, released the bars, then buzzed the boards in a look-rna-no-hands posture while his thrill-starved audience stared and didn't believe. Cycle Jimmy actually straddled the handlebars. Getting his trousers caught on the bars one night, he couldn't get loose until the motorcycle ran out of gas and pitched him to the bottom in a heap. Rash White, The Greek Cedora, and Battling Karl were a scream-provoking trio who performed simultaneously, criss-crossing and often having rending pile-ups. And Speedy Babbs? The morbid always picked him to sp li t open his skull because he refused the most rudimentary safety gimm icks such as a catch rail along the rim. He wouldn't use one because he enjoyed getting close to his leering audience; so if the motorcycle conked out there was nothing to grab hold of and absolutely nothing to save him from a long fall. Babbs dared everything - including a strip tease. Zooming 'round and 'round, he'd remove bow tie, silk shirt, trousers, shoes... until, for propriety's sake, all he had on was a pair of tights. And then he'd re-dress himself. Sometimes he had to improvise. One night in South Dakota all the lights in the carnival blew out and he was obliged to ride for 40 minutes in pitch darkness before they flashed on again. Yet another time he circled for three hours and four minutes, refueled en route, and afterward claimed a world endurance record. He swapped insults with those who called him a charlatan or a fake. Some accused him of using magnets to hold himself erect. Others contended he painted glue on the tires . In .Los Angeles, a strange young man grew so hysterical watching Babbs perform that he threatened to go home and hang himself if Babbs continued. But the show must go on. Babbs went on riding, and the young man did go home and put his head in a noose. Babbs was nothing, if not versa tile. Besides the wall of death, he smashed motorcycles through flaming double walls. The movies hired him to ram a rickety old airplane head-on into a fast moving train. Another time he jumped out of a plane and came swinging on an 8OG-foot rope like Tarzan. One Fourth of July evening he was a human bomb: he parachuted carrying 100 pounds of high explosives, including magnesium bombs and 10 sticks of dynamite to set off during the jump. But Babbs was blown off course, landed in the Pacific Ocean ins tead of on the ground, and almost drowned. The adventure of 'his career occurred in Mexico, in sleepy Mazatlan, during 1933. It truly started in the Los Angeles harbor, where an old rum-runner, The Carma, lay rotting at anchor. Its captain had just gotten shot to death by persons unknown, and his widow, needing cash, put the vessel up for lease . It was to sail to South America and from there to Borneo, the Marquesas, New Guinea, and Siam; the scheme was to capture wild beasts - lions, tigers, monkeys - for sale to zoos . Additional profits were to be harvest-

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