Caution: Beware Of Angels At Work

Besides Junior's unit, the Chitwoods have a Western troupe, too, and the two companies will play more than 200 dates a summer before as many as two million people. Promoter Jack Kochman of Paterson, N.J. has three units running in competition with Chitwood, and there are always less established acts performing with varying success. A fellow by the name of Crash Dick pops up sporadically, and an all-girl show also plies the trade.

A thrill show can be thrown together with a few nervy guys and a bunch of junk cars, so there has never been any dearth of imitators, there being plenty of both nerve and junk about. Beam says that in the Depression at least 250 thrill shows tried to make a go of it. In the entire 47-year-history of the art, however, only a handful of organizations have thrived, and to succeed on any permanent basis now it is imperative to be associated with an automobile company. The Chitwoods are affiliated with Chevrolet, driving only Camaros, Corvettes and Vegas; Kochman has a comparable arrangement with Dodge.

Lucky Teter was the first to work out a deal with Detroit for new cars. "We went after the fairs in '33," Beam says. "We were playing on a percentage basis and taking out nothing but money." Horsemen were so jealous of the appeal of the motorized shows that they would throw two-by-fours out in front of the cars. Teter was following Beam around, taking notes. Then he obtained backing from Plymouth, and with the new cars was soon the biggest name in the crash field.

Beam was a promoter; Teter was a showman. "I was a farm boy from Indiana, and I like to tear things up," Chitwood heard Teter say once, but it was more than that, for he was an electric personality. "He could hold up a finger and hypnotize a crowd," Beam recalls. Teter was short and not physically prepossessing, but he was charged with �lan. "He marched out like the American Legion," Joie Sr. says. He strutted in jodhpurs, with a scarf around his neck, and in the driver's seat he would make an ordinary handkerchief into a talisman and wave it like bravery.

Before Teter's jump a special "heat man" would take over the microphone and rouse the crowd into a frenzy. Teter's wife would come out and kiss him, possibly goodby forever. When Teter thought the simple ramp to ramp was getting jaded, he inserted a Greyhound bus between the ramps and started jumping over that, clearing it only by inches.

Teter's personality and the circumstances surrounding his fatal jump on July 5, 1942 have also helped to stock his legend. His mother and sister were in the stands along with his wife and many friends; it was, after all, going to be Lucky's last jump. He had been drafted and, it is said, he had his induction papers in his pocket.

Old Mickey Rieder, who sells programs and builds fire walls and performs other chores for the Chitwoods, was there the day Lucky was killed. Mickey is 68 now, but his age has only sharpened the memory. He says that Teter was flagged down but would not stop. "You get a feeling when someone isn't right on it. You get that feeling," he says. The theory is that Teter was too much the showman or too imbued with fatalism to pull up in his swan song.

His car fell short, crashing under the landing ramp. It had been constructed with the beams lengthwise, which was a fatal error, for in the collison they were thrust forward into the driver. He died instantly. A short time later Mrs. Teter called up Joie Chitwood, who had known her husband well and had often seen him jump, and asked him to handle the sale of the equipment.

Orphaned at 14, Joie Chitwood (which is his full name) left school after the eighth grade to find employment where he could in the Depression era dust bowl of Topeka, Kans. The sere times of his youth still press upon him. Whatever pride he takes that his oldest son chose to follow in his footsteps is tempered by the fact that Junior was so anxious to emulate his father that he abandoned college to accept that challenge. Junior's brother Timmy, 21 now, is in the fourth year of a five-year mechanical engineering course at Florida. Timmy is unlike his older brother in many ways. He is a redhead, of slight build, and retains the hint of a limp from childhood polio. Junior is dark and stocky like his father, and prefers a crew cut. Junior is a businessman; driving is hardly more than a diversion in the day's work. Timmy is more technically oriented. He wants to design cars. But whatever the differences, Timmy is addicted to the driving and the speed, just like his brother and his father, and Joie Sr. accepts this with chagrin. He is a man who has enjoyed a great deal more danger than education, and it baffles Joie that anyone—his sons or anyone—would forgo the latter for the former.

As a 14-year-old dropout in 1930, Joie Sr. turned to shining shoes, supplementing his income as a candy butcher in Topeka's burlesque theater. Then he began hanging around a welding shop and learned that trade. Even now he will say: "I'm a welder by profession," which recalls Ben Franklin, who considered having only PRINTER on his tombstone.