Explore the History of Racing at Eastern Museum of Motor Racing EMMR

The Eastern Museum of Motor Racing (EMMR) is built on a wooded hillside overlooking the historic Latimore Valley Fairgrounds and racetrack. The 40 acre fairgrounds and track are restored to their original beauty creating an atmosphere that makes the EMMR a living museum. Several times a year EMMR holds events where these historic cars can be seen on the track!

The Eastern Museum of Motor Racing is proud to be the home of the Chris Economaki collection, a noted motorsports journalist, and editor of National Speed Sport News, The library contains the Central States Racing Association paperwork, the racing columnist Bob Chorpenning’s collection, the collection of noted historian Joe Heisler, while the The Jerry Reigle Research Room contains the EMMR’s vast photograph collection. There are an estimated 20,000 photographs in the EMMR collection, including the large Jack Gunn collection.

And with us for a special guided tour is Dirt Track hall-of-famer and former curator for the Museum, Lynn Paxton.

Tune in everywhere you stream, download or listen!

Spotlight

Located at 100 Baltimore Rd, York Springs, PA 17372

Museum Hours: April-November; Friday, Saturday & Sunday – 10am-4pm
December-March; Friday – 10am-4pm
Admission Fee: FREE, donations welcomed.

Volunteers Needed at the Museum… The EMMR Needs Your Help! They are looking for volunteers to help staff the museum. Please email admin@emmr.org if you are interested in helping!

Notes

This episode is a recording of a live tour of the EMMR, sit back and enjoy the memories, stories and guided behind the scenes of the Museum and 100 years of Dirt Track racing!

and much, much more!

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Grand Touring Motorsports started as a social group of car enthusiasts, but we’ve expanded into all sorts of motorsports disciplines, and we want to share our stories with you. Years of racing, wrenching, and motorsports experience brings together a top notch collection of knowledge and information through our podcast, Brake Fix.

Crew Chief Eric: The Eastern Museum of Motor Racing or EMMR for short, is built on a wooded hillside overlooking the historic Latimer Valley fairgrounds and racetrack. The 40 acre fairgrounds and track are restored to their original beauty, creating an atmosphere that makes the EMMR a living museum. Several times a year, the EMMR holds events where these historic cars can be seen on the track.

The Eastern Museum of Motor Racing is proud to be the home of the Chris Enomaki Collection, a noted motorsports journalist and editor of National Speed Sports News. The library contains the Central States Racing Association paperwork, [00:01:00] the racing columnist Bob Chirpening’s collection, the collection of noted historian Joe Heisler, while the Jerry Riegel Research Room contains the EMMR’s vast photographic collection.

There’s an estimated 20, 000 photographs in the collection, along with a vast variety of vehicles on display to include a great collection demonstrating the hundred years of Dirt Track racing. And with us for a special guided tour is Dirt Track Hall of Famer and former curator for the museum, Dr. J. J.

Lynn, tell us about your racing past. You were in the dirt overworld. Your car’s here on display. Yeah,

Lynn Paxton: I, I was born about four miles from Williams Grove, and my dad had the last garage and auto cart on the way to the Grove. As a boy growing up, I got to see a lot of the early racers from the early fifties coming through and stuff, so it interests me.

So I rode my bike over to Williams Grove to see what was going on, and I got hooked. What else can I say? I don’t know. My career started in [00:02:00] 1961. I got to run a mechanics race at Silver Springs. Once I drove one time I knew that’s what I wanted to do instead of just working on it. So we built an old car in 62 and then branched out in 63 a little bit and then moved up in 64 to the old Supers.

We just went with the flow up until Sprint cars came in in the late 60s. Pretty successful up until then. Last race I ran was 1983. I won the National Open at the Grove. So we had 23 years. Wow. A good career.

Crew Chief Eric: So what then changed? What inspired you to open this museum? I was

Lynn Paxton: always a history buff. Always loved it.

Even while I was racing, my fond memories were of Tommy Hend ships and the fifties when he was very dominant player. And then I got to be racing out in Ohio and all, all-star race or something. And I happened to run into an old Hillas car, which. I happened to recognize they were built in Allentown. And I went over and talked to the guy that had it out there.

He told me it was original to Tommy Henderschütz’s. Wow, [00:03:00] that would have been the car I watched. So I came home and called Henderschütz and asked him, Is it possible? He basically told me the same thing in reverse. And then he told me the one sure thing to look for was the horn steering. That he had bought out of the car, horn was killed in.

And if it was still in the car, it was the car. The next week we went out to Mansfield High to run an all star race. I went over and looked and sure enough it had no orange steering in it, so it was definitely the car. So I negotiated to buy the damn thing and restore it. I just like the old cars. Hillius was quite a mystery.

I have a pretty good register on a lot of the cars that were built in Allentown. He built roughly 200 cars in his career.

Crew Chief Eric: So here we stand amongst all these historic race cars. So why don’t you take us on a tour of the historic race

Lynn Paxton: cars, right, in this room right here, you talk about uniforms. You’ve got Ted Horn, national champion, Tommy Hendershits, Mario Andretti.

You’ve got some pretty dynamite uniforms hanging in here. [00:04:00] Johnny Thompson back there. These are all Hall of Famers. There’s Billy Pouch, Dave Blaney, Smokey Snellbaker. Here you’ve got Wolfgang Kinzer. You know, you can have quite a race by the people represented in this room. I get them to come in. I always try to hit them up for a uniform if we have them here.

Crew Chief Eric: So everything here is donated then?

Lynn Paxton: Yeah, yeah. Same way with the cars. Our signage is very good in our cars. The bottom row will tell you if it’s on loan from or donated by.

Crew Chief Eric: So here we are at the entryway, right? Kind of an eclectic blend of motorcycles.

Lynn Paxton: Our entry is in that kind of a jack of all trades out here.

I try to put something different in here every year. We have a sprint car, we have a midget motorcycle’s engine. The police motorcycle’s in there because Mike Worland was our police chief here and his son was killed with that bike. On a tour about 10 years ago, Mike just bought it from the police deal and [00:05:00] he asked if we could set it in here and I said, yeah, you know, that’s, that’s more of a little local flavor right here.

We do things like that. Like I said, we try to change things in this window tin entice people. ’cause this is always open. Yeah, you can always come in to here, we try to get you to sign in or what have you, and then go from here. Now, this area here, the Latimer Valley Fairgrounds, that preceded Williams Grove.

It was built in 1925 and actually went head to head with Williams Grove in 39. But these are all pictures as we restored the old fairgrounds. We did that first, before we built the museum. So the fairgrounds are restored back to the 20s and 30s. They’re going to be running cars tomorrow, down there, the ARDC reunion.

This area here, we honor somebody for the year. Stan Lovitz is a big supporter of ours from Hazleton. This was his car and his stuff. He raised a lot of money for us over the years. And in our Grand Marshal this year is Kenny Bren. Kenny’s 95 years old. And this was [00:06:00] one of his cars. He was in racing since 1953.

All phases, just a tremendous gentleman.

Crew Chief Eric: So this opening display here changes every year, you said? Do you have a plan?

Lynn Paxton: Yeah, this will change in December.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you have a plan on who’s going to be here next year? I

Lynn Paxton: do not know, I won’t know until I have an idea, but I don’t know until it goes in front of the board.

But we always change for our, uh, December, our Christmas deal. This is always changed for the next year. So this is our midget area. The first car we come on here is a three quarter midget. This was Mario Andretti’s very first open wheel ride. It’s a Hiligas car with a 603 Triumph motorcycle engine. Next car up, very early midget, 1937.

This has a Van Blerk single overhead cam boat motor. You gotta remember, the midgets use a smaller engine. And you’re gonna see about every different type of engine used at that cubic inch rate, okay? Now this next one’s the one I told you has this Alto outboard. And this was the 1941 [00:07:00] 3A Eastern Championship car.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the Gordon Racing team.

Lynn Paxton: Yes, and the name Gordon Racing, they named it after the street that they were on in Allentown. Now this is a 1937 Midget with a little V8 60. Like Henry put in his Fords from 37 to 40 as a economical piece. They weren’t worth a hoot. But in the Midgets, they were, they weren’t good.

This one’s kind of neat. It’s got BMW, World War II BMW motorcycle cylinders, and they made a block and crank back in the 40s. So it’s made much like a Volkswagen, okay. Fritz Meyer and Joe Gertler built the chassis.

Crew Chief Eric: So it’s actually two BMW. Yeah, yeah,

Lynn Paxton: yeah. They just made a common block. Now this has got a Ford tractor engine, little Fergie, which had the right cubic inch.

Of course, the next two are Offey powered in the early thirties. They, they needed a small engine. So they went to Miller. Miller had a straight eight 183 and he whacked. That half and [00:08:00] just use the front half of it became a 97 and then they got larger. But of course they set the standard for years and years.

That’s what the, yeah, the constant hot car. Like I said, that was 1950 championship car. And then the 11 car, that’s the car that Mario Andretti won three races in one day in this car right here.

Crew Chief Eric: And you guys call that the three in one midget.

Lynn Paxton: They call it all their stuff after that three and one, the Mataka brothers, because Mario won three races in one day.

Crew Chief Eric: He’s not a very big guy, you look at him. Mario!

Lynn Paxton: No, he wasn’t.

Crew Chief Eric: So tell us about Tommy’s garage here behind us.

Lynn Paxton: Tommy was seven time Eastern champion. When we did our deal here, Mario called him a giant, Chris Economy called him a star, A. J. Foyt called him his idol. So when you get those caliber of guys talking about Tommy Hendershits, that’s pretty good.

Now, here’s a picture of 1955. of Henderschütz’s garage. What we actually did is went down and pulled all this stuff out of his garage. Everything [00:09:00] works, too. The lathe and everything is operable. And the car, that’s the car I think I told you about. This is the car that I restored. It has the horn steering and stuff in it.

Crew Chief Eric: So as we see it here is exactly how you would have seen it when Tommy was using it at the original location.

Lynn Paxton: There you go. Right there. Very cool. You’re seeing everything right there. So this

Crew Chief Eric: predates when you started racing though, this is still the fifties. Oh my, yes. Oh

Lynn Paxton: yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: I wonder how difficult they were to drive.

Lynn Paxton: Well, I’ve driven a few of them. They were a handful. No protection, skinny ass tires. Back then it took a set of gonads to drive a race car. How much horsepower do you think these made back then? Oh, two hundred. That’s about what these put out. But at the time that was, that was good. And

Crew Chief Eric: probably about a thousand pounds, right?

So power to weight ratio. Uh,

Lynn Paxton: this is probably Closer to 13, 1400.

Crew Chief Eric: Still, that’s a good, good ratio. Oh yeah, oh

Lynn Paxton: yeah, oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Now this is all stuff that we got out of Tommy’s garage and this is all [00:10:00] information on Tommy. This is the guy that did a lot of the motorcycles and stuff. He built everything by hand.

He did a lot of things for us. Everybody likes to sit in that car. There’s Jack Hewitt. There’s Sammy. Doug Wolfgang. There’s Kinzer. Jeff Gordon, a young Jeff Gordon. You know, we’ve had a lot of people sitting in that car. Rico Abreu. And like I said, I had him in, he was sitting in it. This is the Chitwood car.

Actually it was Briggs Cunningham’s. Very first race car, the sports car guy. Money was no object with him, but he kind of fell in love with dirt track racing. And then later on, it was Chitwood car, actually his last sprint car, Chitwood ran until he kind of retired to run his thrill show, the trophies and all that stuff.

So all the horn stuff, Ted horn, I actually had the horn car here. And we rotate it out, but I left all the trophies and stuff. Horn was killed in 48. Up on top of that case is a tail off the car he was killed in. For all his trophies and stuff. We have the largest collection of Ted Horn stuff, the rest. And we [00:11:00] just got more in.

His National Championship shirt. Area right here is Ken Hickey. He was the offie man around here. That was a young Ken, and there he was, 87 years old, still working on him.

Crew Chief Eric: He’s a famed engine builder, he said. Yeah, yeah.

Lynn Paxton: He rebuilt the Oppie engines. He was from Ambler, and I don’t need to tell you where Ambler is.

You know where Ambler is. Matter of fact, this is one of the last engines he did. That’s a Ken Hickey fresh engine right there. We have this Edmunds midget. I like it because the last race it run, it got put away for 36 years. They just never ran it again, and then it’s lucky enough to buy the whole deal.

Yeah. And so it’s exactly the way it won this last race. And this is a

Crew Chief Eric: Volkswagen flat four powered midget car.

Lynn Paxton: Well, it has a Volkswagen in it, which is this is. And of course, this is the sesco flat four. Cesco’s usually were half a Chevy, but he wanted to make it lower. So this has got all Chevy parts in that Ron Hoddles built this out in Wisconsin.

And then [00:12:00] he had two left. So he brought one in and gave one to us.

Crew Chief Eric: So here on the left, it says Hershey stadium. Tell us about that. I don’t think a lot of people realize there was a racetrack at Hershey. Well,

Lynn Paxton: it was built where the Hershey stadium is would built for auto racing and sporting events. And these are all pictures, the first event there was an auto race, same week that Williams Grove opened, May of 1939.

So there’s a picture of them building it, and there it is finished. Of course now it’s concerts and football games and stuff. But at one time, the last race was held there I think in 1983. I got to run there and I won a few features there. Yep, a lot of people don’t know that. Here’s the horn tail, and here was the hub that the spindle broke in Horn’s car.

These goggles went with him on his last ride. Now, here we are at the very early sprint cars. This was called a Bobtail. In the twenties, this thing was unbeatable. John Gerber from down in Port Iowa. There’s John with his helmet, his goggles, and his bow tie. You notice he always wore a bow tie. [00:13:00] I wouldn’t call that much of a helmet.

I wouldn’t call that much of a race car, but it was light, apparently very quick. Yeah, he really went good with it. The car in here, that’s a dryer. It’s one of the first six dryers ever made. Pop started building cars in 1928. That car sat for 84 years in Davenport in the racing shop. Here’s pictures of it.

In October, we went out, and that’s the first time in 84 years it came out of the shop. Well, I have it all on video. Matter of fact, that’s his son. That’s John Gerber’s son, Jim. And he’s 87 years old right now.

Crew Chief Eric: So, is this one of the newest acquisitions in the museum then?

Lynn Paxton: Yes. Yes. This display just got put in, in the spring here.

And then all this stuff right here is stuff we brought home from out there, at the shop. That’s one of the first six built. He actually bought this car. He was running two of these. And he actually was running against this car. And then he ended up buying this because he wanted to make an Indy car. And this was going to be his [00:14:00] Indy car.

He lost Jimmy Snyder, who was supposed to be his driver. He was in the connecting rod business for the Model B Fords. And World War II came around and he got to working for the government stuff. So this thing just sat and sat and sat. So it’s kind of interesting that it stayed, but we were very thrilled to be able to go out and pick that up.

It’s a joint deal we did with the Sprint Car Hall of Fame in Knoxville. We did a display out there. And they have the car that won the opener to Grove, and we rotate displays. It’s better for us to work very well with them than we do. These are their early cars, 20s, okay? And then this car here would be from, actually, the 40s.

And it has a Ranger aircraft engine. It’s an 86, right? It’s an inline six. See the prop went over on here. That would top front

Crew Chief Eric: and

Lynn Paxton: you know, you got to flip it over

Crew Chief Eric: where the propeller is. Right,

Lynn Paxton: right. Thing looks heavy, but only weighed 375 pounds because it’s magnesium. It put out the same horsepower as [00:15:00] the 4, 000 Offenhauser.

But after World War II, they surplused these, you can buy them for 75 bucks. So if you were running IMCA or CSRA, there was no cubic inch limit. Shit, they were buying them and just running the crap out of them, you know? At that kind of money. Now, 3A, you couldn’t run them because of the cubic inch limit.

Crew Chief Eric: They were probably pretty high rev, being in a No,

Lynn Paxton: they were very low rev. Really? Yeah. They put their horsepower out at about 2800 RPMs. Now I asked a couple of the old guys that ran them, I said, how hard did you turn your engine? And the guy said, oh, I turned mine over 4, 000. Was it still, he said they were still strong, but he said, when I couldn’t see out of my goggles from the vibration, that it was too much.

That was the answer.

Crew Chief Eric: I love all the creative ways they did carburation on these motors. Nothing, nothing standard, it’s all very interesting. Well,

Lynn Paxton: it was all homemade, it was no, They finally started making aftermarket stuff for the bees because there was so much of it. But you’re right, this is a homemade for [00:16:00] three twos.

Actually in that one case, there was a set of hillborne injectors for one of these, which is very rare. This has got Solex carburetors on it. These are actually original to this car. The header and stuff, this thing ran a Ranger in it. You know, you looked at the Chitwood car back there with all the chrome and stuff on it.

Most of the cars of the 40s and stuff were just plain James. Painted like this, Ford wire wheels and stuff. Now the exotic cars were pretty like that. 80 percent of them were like this car here.

Crew Chief Eric: The number four car here from the 40s, kind of the tail end of that, we jump to the number 39. So have we moved from the 40s to the 50s?

Well,

Lynn Paxton: we’re actually going up to the 60s. The 50s, I had a car here, it had to leave. You’d have to put like the Miracle Power in here. Gotcha. Okay. In other words, 40s, early 50s. Yep. And then this would be 60s. But you do

Crew Chief Eric: see a radical jump in design from the Oh, absolutely. They got lower centers of gravity, Well,

Lynn Paxton: we’re gonna walk up here.

Now these cars [00:17:00] here would have won a wing or not. I didn’t put wings on them simply because you get to see a little bit better and my car They’re the Boots car. We let anybody who wants to get in and get in it.

Crew Chief Eric: Correct me if I’m wrong But when you kind of transition from these 40s Sprint cars to the 50s and 60s are more like the Indy cars of the time, if you kind of look at them in person, right?

Lynn Paxton: Well, you got to remember something. World War II. Most of the cars prior to World War II were kind of crude. There were some nice cars, but most of them were home built nothings, okay? All the racers went to World War II, and they learned how to work aluminum and use Zeus buttons. And thank God we’re still using surplus from World War II today.

And that’s what spawned racing. After World War II, all of a sudden, the cars, they started using the technology to build aircrafts. Zeus buttons, aluminum and stuff. And that’s when things

Crew Chief Eric: drastically changed.

Lynn Paxton: Absolutely. Why? Technology. Learning how to work aluminum.[00:18:00]

Well, yeah, but all I can tell you is there was a lot of experimentation around here on fuel. If you tell Hendershits, tell them the story about running a Model T, and they didn’t know anything about hopping the fuel up, and they heard that it used mothballs. So he said about, they bought a bunch of mothballs.

The problem was they were only going to put one in. One mechanic put one in, didn’t tell anybody. The other mechanic put one in, and he said, I put one in. He said, man, we took the lead, that thing was really hauling ass. And he said about halfway through the race it slowed down to a crawl. It burnt the thing up.

That experimentation went on for a long time. Talking about that, I could show you the horn pistons over here. He was the first one to experiment with magnesium pistons. They were so much lighter than aluminum that he could turn his engine 2, 000 RPMs more. And I have those, but he had to experiment with the fuel because he kept melting the tops of the pistons.

They weren’t as [00:19:00] strong as the aluminum. He entered into a lot of that too. Now, as far as World War II, you’re right. The Germans were far ahead of everybody as far as that technology. Let’s face it, that’s where the Volkswagen came from.

Crew Chief Eric: On a lot of these, you notice that there’s a lot of armature in the way of levers and things like that to move things around.

It’s all very crude and very simple because they’re race cars. How many of these are, let’s say, manual gearboxes? How many speed are they, and when did they transition to the more, like, power glide type

Lynn Paxton: transmission? There was a rule that they had to be able to back up and stuff, so they had old Ford transmissions in them.

But then finally it got to the point where they were just using them in and out. In other words, they’re just high gear. Got it. Like, if you come up to these, these all have quick changes, nothing but in and out direct drive.

Crew Chief Eric: So you took a couple laps to get up to speed then, to kind of set your pace, because you can’t just go at full power.

No, they would,

Lynn Paxton: they would, uh, no, they would push you off. And if you had heat in the motor Like my mechanic used to tell me, if you don’t have 140 degrees, I don’t care if the green flag’s out or what, you don’t [00:20:00] run the motor, you know, just to protect it. You know, Davey’s still a pretty sharp man, Davey Brown.

Crew Chief Eric: So you definitely see a drastic change in safety in this interior too.

Lynn Paxton: My first ride actually was in the car after this, the Cook car, and I think there’s a picture up front here of the start of the feature, and it’s right there. Here’s my very first sprint car ride. That’s the start of the feature at Allentown.

Wow. I’m in the 38 car. Clear out there.

Crew Chief Eric: Taking the high line.

Lynn Paxton: I didn’t want to, but that 24 car kind of came in and put me over the wall. That was the start. I was running super modifieds and stuff around here. But that was my first sprint car ride.

Crew Chief Eric: So what would you say after all your years of racing, what was your biggest oops moment?

Lynn Paxton: Oh,

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t know. There was

Lynn Paxton: plenty of them. I can’t relate. Pick an oops moment out, uh, other than waking up in the hospital one morning and, uh, not know how I got there. I’ll tell you the story. It, I didn’t realize it, but I apparently [00:21:00] got hurt pretty bad at Hagerstown till I came to. I was in kind of intensive care.

There was two of us in there and I woke up and I, my hand was banished and I had a schmock on it, said Washington County. Well, I was smart enough to know that Washington County was the Hagerstown area, I wasn’t in Pennsylvania. The guy that was in the room with me, he started having a problem. So I, they had a button pinned there.

So I pushed the button, it’s three o’clock in the morning. Nurse comes in and said, are you all right? I said, I’m all right, but this guy’s having a problem. So the next thing I knew. There was people in there working on him and he was gone. Now, I got more questions than answers. I didn’t say a word while that was going on.

And they were taking him out and the last nurse was just getting ready to walk out. I said, ma’am, can I talk to you? She said, sure. I said, what am I doing? She said, don’t you know? I said, no. I said, I just basically woke up. She says, well, I don’t know. My shift changed at one o’clock and you were here. That was it.

She left. Needless to say, I wasn’t [00:22:00] going back to sleep. I’m trying to figure it all out. The next morning, there was a guy coming around selling crap out of a cart. Newspapers and stuff. So I bought a newspaper, went to the racing deal, and there I found out exactly what had happened. I read it in the newspaper.

About a half hour later, the promoter and my wife and the doctor came walking in, and the doctor said, do you remember? I didn’t, but I told him exactly what the newspaper said, and that got me out of the hospital. Probably shouldn’t have because if I’d lean over I’d fall it screwed up my

Crew Chief Brad: Bell helmet

Lynn Paxton: at the time it was as good as it was The problem is once you get your bell wrong once the next ones you get knocked out a whole lot quicker It’s just like quarterbacks.

That’s why you had a lot of guys retired early because Blow to the head, be a headache to you. But a guy that’s had a lot of blows to the head, it can mean paralysis. It can mean every, I don’t know how we get off on that tangent, but

Crew Chief Eric: well, let’s go back to your timeline a little bit. So [00:23:00] you started in the early sixties and you ran all the way up through

Lynn Paxton: 1983.

Well, I won the national open. That’s the last race I ran. I actually won the national open in this car in 1982. It’s restored. This car here, sitting here, we left the wing off and I have the nerf bar off. Anybody who wants to sit in that car is welcome to get in it. So how many championships under your belt?

I don’t know exactly. 9, 10, 11, when I range somewhere.

Crew Chief Eric: So as we get to the early 80s car, this is more like what people are accustomed to seeing, like the World of Outlaws. Well,

Lynn Paxton: well, yes. This, of course, was Steve Kinzer was the multi time World of Outlaws champion. And I like this car. Cause it’s not restored.

It’s all original and it’s just the way he wants Syracuse in 88. So this is covered pretty neat. Then we have a Greg Hodnett’s car. Uh, Greg, of course got killed a few years ago and we did a special display of his cars. We have four of them here.

Crew Chief Eric: Coming up through the era of non aero cars to basically aero cars.

How [00:24:00] did the racing improve? Did you like it better? The more aero they got added, or did you like it in the good? I

Lynn Paxton: think the racing was better without the wings. So. Just by adding a wing and you can gain two seconds a lap just by putting the foil on. It just made it racing so much faster and it made it safer.

The wings would not let the car do anything radical after the wings gone. Yes, I’ve been upside down both ways and that big old thing right there is just like a cushion. I said, one time I hit, I could hear the air going out of the wing. Of course, the guy said, you still got a brain injury, you know, but it’s true.

You could,

Crew Chief Eric: you could hear that. Well, we all got brain injuries, right? We’re race car drivers. I think you’re right. We started with that from the beginning. I

Lynn Paxton: think you’re right.

Crew Chief Eric: So, as you kind of progress here, this takes us into another part of the museum.

Lynn Paxton: Yeah, this is Sprint Car 101, from the very early, boom, boom, boom.

You can get a very good idea of the changes. Now I’m not saying I have every change exactly, but I try to keep it.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s a good [00:25:00] summary of a hundred years of Sprint Cars.

Lynn Paxton: Yes, yes. This is car Freddie Raymer, won a lot of races in. Of course, young Freddie’s winning now, the boy. But this was the old man. This was actually the first car Hamill donated to us.

We have another one over in our storage unit. And this was Greg Hodnett’s car and Raymer. Actually, one in this car, too. Kenny Jacobs drove this. And this is the Hodnett car, the Apple Chevrolet car.

Crew Chief Eric: So did you ever run any late models or anything like that? Yeah. Yeah? What do you think of those compared to the Sprinters?

Lynn Paxton: I can’t speak on today’s late models. They’re such unbelievable. The stuff that we ran were just 55, 57 Chevys, you know, basically with a good motor in. It’s hard to say. I used to do double duty. Run both divisions. And it was at that point, it wasn’t hard, probably harder to do now.

Crew Chief Eric: Probably felt safer in a late model though.

Right? Overall, you’re in a bigger,

Lynn Paxton: if you worry about safety, then you better not get in one. I mean, you don’t want to climb in something that you think [00:26:00] you’re going to get hurt in, but if you think you’re going to get hurt, even goes through your mind, you better not get in one hurt is something that’s always going to happen to somebody else.

That is the mentality that you have to have. It’s part of the game sometimes.

Crew Chief Eric: I do notice that as you get further down in the transition of the sprint cars, a lot of things become more and more inboard. More center of gravity type of manipulation here. The brakes are inboard compared to being on the outside of the car, things like that.

Lynn Paxton: See the tether on the steering arm right there? And that’s all because a goldbrick radio strike came in and that’s what killed him. It wasn’t a bad accident, it’s just he got pierced. So, they started doing things like that, so the pieces didn’t fly.

Crew Chief Eric: The old cars, 200 horsepower or so, and then obviously horsepower increases.

Yeah. When we’re standing here with

Lynn Paxton: these. Come

Crew Chief Eric: on over here. How much are these making?

Lynn Paxton: 700, let’s say? Oh, more than that. This is our engine wall. That’s Henry Ford and the mass production of the Model T. Built 15 million of them between [00:27:00] 1908 1927. Now here’s 100 years. Here’s a small block Chevy, 8 900 horse power.

This is what your basic engine today is. So you’re looking at 100 years. 20 horse power, 8 900 horse power. So here, Model T, there’s the Model T rocker arm, Model T dual overhead cam. This is interesting. Frontenac was the one that built that for the forge, you know, Model T. That’s

Crew Chief Eric: a mechanical turbo?

Lynn Paxton: No, this is a magneto.

Crew Chief Eric: Ah.

Lynn Paxton: And a water pump.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, okay.

Lynn Paxton: Now you’re looking at crude here, don’t get, don’t, you know, you, you know, what you see is what you get here. But what a lot of people don’t know who Frontenac was. Frontenac was the Chevrolet brothers. They had already lost their name to Durant and General Motors. The best Ford speed equipment built for a Ford in the late 20s was built for the Chevrolet brothers.

A lot of people don’t know that, but that’s a fact. You were looking at the solar car. Well, this is the chassis, and of course there’s the body. It doesn’t look right sitting here amongst these old engines, but it’s the only place I had to put it. [00:28:00] I stuck it in here. The colleges, once a year, would race a solar car.

This one raced from St. Louis to LA, I think in 99. Tells you that on the back of it. But they built it and raced it.

Crew Chief Eric: How fast would it go?

Lynn Paxton: 60, 70 mile an hour. That’s quick for a solar powered car. If the sun was out bright. Now I know one thing, those are all solar panels. And we let that thing sit outside.

You go to pick it up, you got to watch. It gets hot. It’ll bite you. Yeah. But then you look at the bobtail, the Gerber, that’s that 490 Chevy that he patterned a single overhead cam for. His stuff was crude, but He put that stuff together and went out and ran with the Offenhausers, the big money stuff, you know, that was the Dave and Goliath.

And his stuff was that way. He just always did it that way. Then you have the Model A, and you do the same thing up to the dual overhead cam. Then the Flatheads, and the Hudsons, and the Buicks, and the Oldsmobiles. Flathead, the Arden Flathead, Ford, Marine Engine. [00:29:00] This is the very first Chevy V8 55. That’s what came in the Corvette, right?

No, they were in the Chevrolet. They did put them in the Corvettes, but not until later on. Actually, in 55, the first ones were all sixes. They actually built a V8 in the late teens. It wasn’t as successful as this one was, you know. And there’s 65 years of small block Chevy from here to that.

Crew Chief Eric: Very

Lynn Paxton: cool. This 1, the all aluminum big block, that’s what we ran in my car.

And then Yanko bought that from General Motors. Same motor, same part number. The only thing, Yanko put his name on the front of it. And then I ran his motors until, uh, he got killed in a, uh, plane crash. So that ended our association. That was 1983.

Crew Chief Eric: So the room we’re standing in here is, now we transition to drag cars.

Drag

Lynn Paxton: cars, yeah. Like this Chevelle right here, this is all fiberglass. Yeah. But you look at it, there’s no engine in the front, got a mid engine HEMI. It’s really a beautiful car. You know, it’s home built. Then we have Stiles [00:30:00] performance, the Hemi drag car, and there’s another Mopar over there. Then we have, of course, Bruce Larson’s match race car here.

They put a century car down in the Smithsonian. This case here is all on Bruce. Then we have the Linwood dragster. This is a Linwood chassis too, an altered, the little altered Bantam. It’s a Jersey Jimmy. It originally had a six cylinder Jimmy engine. Then they put the straight A Buick, and then the last they ran it with that Aston Martin.

Now you talk about light, 900 pounds, that thing is light.

Crew Chief Eric: I love the Aston Martin badge on the front on the grill, that’s great.

Lynn Paxton: Now do you want to walk upstairs? Sure. Okay, let’s go, we’ll go up the elevator.

Here’s the original building that we were just in. Okay, and there’s the road down and the racetrack is down below. Like I said, we’re going to be running the cars tomorrow.

Crew Chief Eric: Are you guys televising the races at all? No. Or is anybody recording them or anything?

Lynn Paxton: [00:31:00] Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. This is basically our stock car area.

We all started with the old coupes like that, with the flathead and then the overhead. And then they started cutting the cars up. They called them bugs. And then the bodies were getting hard to come by, so they called them super modifieds. And that’s what these two are. They didn’t need a body. You just wrapped aluminum around.

They had a 90 inch wheelbase, 30 inch roll cage. And that was it. And then from this, then you went sprint car race and our stock car race. That’s kind of how things went. Of course, here were two Redding stock cars, the Gerhardt number five and the Johnny Botts number two. Now, after Bazzi was killed, I did run this car, and I ran the second car for Gerhardt several times.

When our sprint car season would close, we’d get out and run Redding, run Heavies.

Crew Chief Eric: If I’m not incorrect, the back end of that is a Pinto, and this one looks like part of a Pacer?

Lynn Paxton: Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.

Lynn Paxton: Gremlin. Pintos, Vegas, they were the three. They just used body panels and [00:32:00]

Crew Chief Eric: Nobody wanted them for

Lynn Paxton: anything else, right?

Well, now try to find them in a junkyard. We built this in 2000 and the reason that it’s two story is we got into bedrock back here. We didn’t go far, so we decided to raise and then build off the next level. So that’s why you see what you see. It just keeps going. Yeah, this just came in. This was Charlie Wehrman’s late model.

When I started running late models, I ran against Charlie and he won multi time championships down in Beltsville. He ran dirt and pavement both with this car. And Beltsville and Manassas, Virginia. He was track champion there. Now there he was with his 56. That’s when I ran against him, that’s what I ran against.

This is one of our Grand National cars. We have some more over in the other shed. This is a car that, yes, Elliot, there he was flipping it at Talladega. That is this car.

Crew Chief Eric: Looks like you have some bikes, too.

Lynn Paxton: Yeah, Bowling Green Speedway was around below York and this is the only car that ran Bowling Green still exists.

Let me show you what it [00:33:00] looked like. Yeah, it’s a pile of dirt. He went in, yeah, he went in the side of a building and it was laying in a dirt floor. Also, if you see the, Other Gary car over there. If you go look at that, both of these cars should never have been fixed. The time and effort they went to put them back together is unbelievable.

It’s dedication. This is Ray Tilley’s. Now that would be a good candidate down there right near the 39. Was down there, but we did a special tribute to the owner of the car here and we brought that one in Andretti car upstairs. But this was Ray Tilley. He was about unbeatable with Bud Grimm Ford. This we built in 2011.

That was the car Mario won his very first sprint car race in, out at Salem, Indiana in 1964.

Crew Chief Eric: Has Mario ever come down to the museum?

Lynn Paxton: He is scheduled to be here. He sent us money for a block and stuff, and we have a wall, but we honored him last year, but he has not made it yet. His neighbors all have, but [00:34:00] he has not.

Now this right here is our Bonneville stuff. That bike set records at Bonneville. Bonneville. That’s a tire blown at 400 mile an hour and it held air, thank God. Didn’t kill the guy.

Crew Chief Eric: Have you even got a snowmobile over there?

Lynn Paxton: Yeah, well, AMF, where they build Harleys, AMF owned it. A bunch of us in the wintertime, we signed on and raced snowmobiles in the wintertime all over the country.

Bruce Larson, me. Bob Scholle, Mitch Smith, and Smokey Snellbaker. We all raced motorcycles, er, snowmobiles too. Gettysburg Region, this is their home base too, so we let them have their car in there.

Crew Chief Eric: Looks like you guys have a library as well. Yes, yes.

Lynn Paxton: Steve Bubb’s our librarian. Steve just went in there, he’s always working in there.

That’s Steve in there. He’s our resident expert. When we can’t find anything, we talk to Steve. Do you guys

Crew Chief Eric: take donations for the library? Oh,

Lynn Paxton: sure. It’s stuff coming in all the time. You’ll see when we go over in the new place over here, there’s stuff that they just haven’t [00:35:00] been able to look through. Well, let’s keep

Crew Chief Eric: going.

Lynn Paxton: That’s on the Altoona board speedways. The board speedways were the super speedways back in the teens and the 20s. They were running 140 mile an hour on the boards, and they weren’t running 100 in India. So that’s similar to like the cyclodromes,

Crew Chief Eric: where they did the

Lynn Paxton: Cyclodromes were built just for bicycle racing, okay.

These were actually built for cars. autos and stuff. They were anywhere from a half mile to two miles. Wow.

Crew Chief Eric: All made out of wood.

Lynn Paxton: All made out of wood. Yeah. This is our IndyCar area. That was the start of the first race at Indy. You see it was mostly stripped down stock cars. The winner was Ray Heroon in that 32 back there.

It wasn’t until the 20s when Miller and Duesenberg started building. This is a Miller from the 20s. When they started going away from just the stock chassis to building special built cars. These are the original doors from Indy. They were taken down in 1985. And that’s the last dirt car to run at Indy, right there.

1956. And this [00:36:00] car was a Curtis. And I’m sorry to say it killed three drivers in four years. Killed Dick Linder, Van Johnson, and Hugh Randall. Here’s, uh, That’s Stick Linder, that was Gus’s brother that I raced with. He went over the wall at Trenton. The car wasn’t hurt bad, but it killed him. And there he was going over the wall.

Then they put Van in it. That was a Langhorn, he won that day. There he was at the Grove. The throttle stuck in bars of the car and he got killed. At the Williams Grove. Killed a driver, won a race, killed a driver. And then two years later, that’s Hugh Randall. He got killed at Langhorn in it. Now, this is kind of interesting.

Al Keller drove the car at Indy. Now, he got killed in 1960, not in this car. He had a young daughter. She grew up, moved out to Phoenix and married a Bush. His grandsons, Kyle and Kurt Bush. Now, this is kind of a racing shop. There’s all kind of stuff in there that tells a lot of stories. And also, we use the shop.

That was Mario’s pit board when he ran Langhorn [00:37:00] for the first time right there. Tommy gave us that. That’s Thompson right there in a Dr. Saborian car.

Crew Chief Eric: I love how original a lot of these pieces are. You go to some museums and everything’s fully restored and just beautiful and shiny.

Lynn Paxton: Now, if I had my choice, if we get it in and I don’t care if it’s shop worn, I’d rather see the original piece.

It’s just like that one motorcycle, that hill climber back there. 1936 National Champion, just, it’s so crude, it’s so neat. I think it’s really neat. Now this is one of Mario’s cars, C3 in 1. The Metaka owned it, and they carried that on. But here’s Mario when it was a Dean Van Lines car. Now this car, it was bought out of the Metaka estate.

That’s what it looked like. Now A. J. Watson built that car. That’s Champ’s dirt car. Here’s the baby Bose. This ran Indy. It also won the Indy race at DeGrove in 1950 with Troy Ruttman in it. In 49, Tommy drove. I think Tommy got a fifth with it at DeGrove. There’s Rutman, he ran it also. [00:38:00] There’s uh, Cosworth, actually Al Unser Jr.

That was a block he won Indy with. We got a little of everything. Here we’ll walk out here. That’s Maguire, Andretti, and Foyt’s around the other side.

More displays in this building. It just keeps going. You’re going to see. There’s stuff coming in that hasn’t been sorted yet. So this is the

Crew Chief Eric: prep area, yeah.

Lynn Paxton: Yeah, and we have cars and we have stuff back over there. And then we have another. 50 100 building over in the next property, and there’s about 16 cars over there, but I can’t take you over there because we don’t have an occupancy permit for that yet.

Crew Chief Eric: You’re still acquiring cars from all over the country, right? Or are most of these just east of the Mississippi?

Lynn Paxton: Our interest is east. We don’t want a car that has no history in this area. So we would probably turn something like that down. But, I don’t care where it’s from, if it did well here in the East, that’s, that’s our realm of responsibility.

Most of the [00:39:00] stuff is East.

Crew Chief Eric: So have any of the cars from here, as you said, they go on loan to other locations and back and forth? Yeah, well, Sprint

Lynn Paxton: Car Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Iowa, Speedy Bill’s Place.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you guys do anything with the, uh, IMRRC up in Watkins Glen? International Motor Research? Yes,

Lynn Paxton: that’s more of an informational thing with them.

They’re always interested in what we have. We share documents with them. No,

Crew Chief Eric: this is very cool. So this is pretty much where the tour stops, right? Pretty much. As a caretaker, as a docent for the museum, for those people that are interested in coming out, what are kind of the rules, the fees, the times you can be here, things like that?

Well, we’re

Lynn Paxton: free. There is no charge. We accept donation. We’re open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, 10 to four.

Crew Chief Brad: Do you have a lot of high schools that bring kids in to check this out? Not a

Lynn Paxton: lot. I’ve had more, but Bermuda Springs, my. Daughter’s. The teacher there, she usually wants a year, brings a class over and there’s times that we’ll take a car over there too and do just make

Crew Chief Brad: to go to [00:40:00] Gettysburg and to come here.

If you’ve got a book team,

Lynn Paxton: new Oxford, same thing. You know, we’re open to any organization that wants to come. I’ll tell you what we do get. We get a lot of special need people. They’ll bring a bus here. They enjoy walking around and they use this place quite a bit. Because they can go have a little lunch down here in the picnic tables and what have you.

We’re interested in kids. That’s why we have Pine Box Derby. We’ve got cars for them to sit in. You know, a lot of museums shun the kids. We don’t. We give them race cars and stuff. They’ll show up with their grandparents, with their neighbors, as they enjoyed. The kids are the key to the whole thing. You can’t run them off.

Yeah, every once in a while you get one that’s a little rowdy that you gotta pay attention to. You know, you try to explain it to whoever’s with them. Say, look, there’s certain things. It’s just like, we have cars on loan. What I have to do is, I have to protect that stuff. Yeah, that’s true. [00:41:00] Everybody here is a volunteer.

There’s nobody paid here. Most of the time you have volunteers like that. Their interests are such that they care, you know, and that’s the main thing.

Crew Chief Eric: And I saw the donation box up front. Obviously you guys take donations as part of the exhibits for the museum. But are there other fundraising ways that people can contribute to the museum?

Lynn Paxton: We have blocks that we sell on the wall where people want to memorialize certain people. As a matter of fact, I said Mario and his wife, before she passed away, bought a block on our walls. So, oh, there’s lots of ways. We do raffles and have sales too. Mike, the guy that was running around blowing up the tires, Mike has charge of our raffles and stuff.

And actually, Mike, as of right now, I’m not the curator anymore. Mike is. I resigned. Less past month, but I agreed to do this interview. So I said I would do it and explain that we

Crew Chief Eric: appreciate that. So in closing any like shout outs, promotions or anything else you’d like to share that people should know [00:42:00] about?

Lynn Paxton: Well, it’s just Our website lets you know we have a schedule for the year that we go to different racetracks and do different things here and uh, we’ll be operating right up. I know in December our open house is I think the first Sunday in, in December. And our subject matter is going to be, uh, Bobby Gerhart and Billy Gerhart.

I race with Bobbies. Of course, Bobby won Daytona seven or eight, maybe nine times. And Billy was his mechanic and brother and they got some great stories to tell. I’m going to try to get Davey Brown to come over too. He was a mechanic back then. So yeah, we’ve got something going on all the time through the winter, January through when we opened the beginning of April.

Thursday night we work, we have a work party. So anybody that wants to come out and have a good time, six to nine is our normal work party. It’s not all work, it’s a lot of fun too.

Crew Chief Eric: To learn more about the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing, be sure to look them up on Facebook at Eastern Museum of Motor Racing or visit their [00:43:00] website www.

emmr. org. The museum also needs your help and they are always looking for volunteers, so stop by when you have the chance. The museum is open to the public April through November on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. From 10 to 4 p. m. Well, Len, I can’t thank you enough for doing this for us, taking us on this tour, telling us this story.

And the importance of this is that museums are more than just a bunch of stuff sitting around and people come and look at cars, or especially race cars are more than just objects going around in a circle to your point in which you’ve been telling us this entire time is each one of these pieces from the smallest one to the biggest car yet has a story behind it.

And that’s super important to share. We

Lynn Paxton: don’t put things up to fill a hole. It has to tell a story. Because I get people that want to donate us something because it’s a beautiful race car. And my first question, what’s the history? Well, I don’t know, but it’s a pretty race car. I said, I have no interest.

But it’s pretty. I said, pretty has very little to do with it. Some of the neatest stuff we have is ugly as a sin. Some people think it [00:44:00] has to be pretty to be in a museum. We’re not that way. If it tells a story, then it’s a new museum piece.

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Instagram at GrandTouringMotorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, check us out You can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag.

[00:45:00] For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig newtons, gummy bears, and monster. Consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.