Caution: Beware Of Angels At Work

Joie built his first race car out of an old Essex frame, cutting off the nose, and drove it to a second-place finish in a local event when the driver failed to appear. That was in 1935. In 1939 and the following year he was the AAA Eastern sprint car champion and was recognized by the ultimate measure of those times when he was selected to appear in a national "I'd walk a mile for a Camel" ad. He qualified a car in the Indianapolis 500 seven times, and as late as 1950 he finished fifth at the Brickyard behind the winner, Johnnie Parsons.

It was his last chance there, for by then the thrill show business was thriving and Mrs. Chitwood was after him to give up racing. Lovely and petite, Marie had been dancing professionally as Tiny Harris when they met. Her specialty was to dance up a flight of stairs, then lean over backward and, off the top stair, pick up a glass of water in her mouth. Not surprisingly, she hurt her back in this pursuit, and her theatrical career ended with her marriage. Besides, Joie was making up to $40,000 a year as a driver. Only the war, which terminated racing because of gas and tire rationing, and the coincidence that he could not find a buyer for Teter's equipment pushed him into stunt driving.

He was 4-F and teaching welding at defense plants when he decided to buy Teter's equipment himself. He practiced the more prosaic stunts and then set out to perfect a ramp-to-ramp jump. The question, essentially, was how fast to go and how far away to place a landing ramp. Joie proceeded pragmatically, which is to say that he got a bunch of junkers and started running them off the takeoff ramp.

He discusses this with approximately the same sort of emotion that a man might exhibit in describing how he tried various screwdrivers before finding one of proper size. Joie would get in an old car, run it headlong off the ramp and crash 100 feet or so away, the automobile smashing to pieces. He would climb out, have the wreck dragged aside, make calculations and try it again. It took him nine cars to be sure of his measurements. Then he built a ramp—with the beams going crossways. He opened July 4, 1943 at Williams Grove, Pa. It was a year, short one day, to the anniversary of Lucky Teter's death.

At first it was a one-man show, and often Joie had to run it on butane gas and with steel cleats instead of tires. Then, as the war drew to a close, he began to expand, hiring many of Teter's best drivers—Doggie Arthrouph, Lucky Heffelfinger, A. B. Daniels, Rocky Fisher. He was a postwar sensation. Even the movies called him. Clark Gable played a stunt driver opposite Barbara Stanwyck in To Please a Lady in 1950, and Joie doubled for Gable. By the mid-'50s he had as many as six units working, and he would shuttle between them in his own private plane.

The show was still basically Teter out of beam, but Joie tried some new specialty acts, too. For instance, he hired a Captain Frank Frakes, whose role it was to get in a coffin and then have it blown up. Another divertissement featured Captain Tommy Walker, an ex-Flying Tiger. He crashed an airplane in the infield. Chitwood would buy an old plane for $500, and the old China hand would negotiate it over the light stanchions and the concession stands and bring it down between two strategically placed telephone poles. This would rip off the wings, and the bare fuselage would come skidding home. It was very big box office until the CAA said it was giving flying a bad name and ordered a halt.

Crashing remained the rage. Precision hell driving was not yet in its ascendancy. Beam had thought up the head-on crash as far back as the 1920s and this was the staple of any thrill-show diet, though some devotees of the art have traditionally gone for another Beam creation, the Wreck 'em Race, or Demolition Derby as it is known today. At first head-ons were easy to manage since drivers could stand on the running boards and leap at the last moment. When running boards disappeared, the head-on men were ensconced among mattresses in the back seats. The trick—though it really wasn't a trick; it was just a matter of doing the best you could in an imperfect setting—was to make sure you hit absolutely head on with both cars moving at the same speed. This distributed the crunch as evenly as possible. One independent hell driver worked up an even more memorable head-on, perhaps the most dashing of all. He drove a motorcycle full speed into a sedan coming from the other direction. At the last second before impact, the daredevil cyclist would leap forward and go flying over the car as it demolished his cycle. "It was spectacular, really an incredible act," Joie Sr. says. "The only thing was that it had to be done absolutely perfectly every time." One time it was not done in this manner.

The head-on crash has passed from the thrill-show repertoire in the last few years because, despite all the people who kick tires and slam doors at used-car lots and exclaim sadly, "They don't make 'em like they used to," they do, in fact, make 'em stronger. Today's cars are too solid to hit head on, at least as long as any occupants want to escape fatality on a regular basis. In fact, if there is one thing that raises Joie Chitwood's hackles, it is what Ralph Nader did to the Corvair. "He was wrong about that car," Joie says. "That was a tough little car. I know. I jumped it more than 200 times."

Even such a mild outburst is uncharacteristic, for Chitwood is a placid man. Probably this is an essential for survival in the breed; there are, remember, no old, bold pilots. Joie, 57 now, has grown comfortable and serene. He smokes a pipe and wears glasses, regularly misplacing both. He is up at 7 every morning, a man of moderate habits. Fishing is his passion. He will eat anything, so long as it is barbecued. He is church-going, a 32nd degree Mason, happily married and a grandfather. He buckles his seat belt every time. His wife calls him Dad and, after he has had a couple of martinis, she warns him to drive carefully, just like Dad was some insurance salesman, not a man who had made 2,000 death-defying leaps and wheeled his share at seven Indy 500s.

The Chitwoods' new house, which Marie designed herself, sits by Tampa Bay. It has a pool table, a sunken bathtub, a specially lighted palm tree and the first AstroGrass in Tampa. In the marina, directly across the bay, Joie's deep-sea fishing boat tosses on the swells, waiting for him to get back off the tour. He is so tan from using her that the tattoo of his teens is nearly bronzed over. So, for that matter, are most of his scars. His face bespeaks not the glamour of his profession, but the rugged facts of it, for the lesions that remain most visible are the unromantic ones—crescent imprints where clods of dirt drove his goggles into his face, or the slight imperfections made by pebbles flying up from dirt tracks. This is in character. Pressed to recount some of his more spectacular injuries, he dwells only on those touched by humor. He recalls, as the highlight of missing a ramp at Arlington, Texas and taking 50 stitches in his neck from where the glove compartment door almost severed his head, that, in speeding to the hospital, the ambulance driver "burnt his sireen out." And his favorite story of all is about the time in Springfield, Ill. when he jumped out of the car for his introduction, tripped and broke his left wrist in the fall.