Max Balchowsky Story

hello and welcome to behind the headlights speed channels groundbreaking documentary series that tells the stories of some very special automobiles these vehicles are so unique that they changed history and impacted the moods and attitudes of generations I'm Bob Varsha and I'll be your host as each episode of behind the headlights examines one extraordinary car in this program we focus on one of the meanest junkyard dogs of them all max belches Keys Old Yeller - this is the story of the American dream of becoming a champion of Max and eine belch hausky and their little yellow car that could it's a story of inspiration and ingenuity as the bell cow skis home-built old yeller - took on some of the most beautiful expensive and sophisticated sports cars of their day and gave quite the performance in the process in the late 1950s old yeller - attracted so much attention that literally tens of thousands of people would go to the races just to catch a glimpse of this mangy American junkyard dog of a car running against the pure-blooded European thoroughbreds Southern California was the mecca for this so-called clash of cultures and Max Belle chaski was more than happy to play the role of the underdog stirring the pot and changing the rules and traditions of sports car racing forever they were called The Fabulous 50's with good reason television had reached into almost 90% of American households the broad interstate highways were weaving their tentacles throughout Southern California especially in Los Angeles and hot rock-and-roll battled cool jazz to be America's favorite musical pastime the british revolution had not yet taken place rock and roll was more primitive Jerry Lee Lewis kind of rock and roll it was still a time where people dress up for the Soul asylum where people drank martinis the national mood was very upbeat fins were in hemlines were rising and everybody wanted to have fun Prince Rainier married Grace Kelly Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller Don Larson pitched a perfect game in the World Series the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the race to space was on New York was growing up Los Angeles was growing out and the sprawl began a trendy new car culture fast home built hot rods sleek customs and the new rage finely tuned expensive European sports cars help define Southern California everyone in Hollywood was into fast and exotic iron this is where the hotrod industry started back in the 30s with Wally parks and and Alex idiots and dick at a bra sports car racing had just really come into vogue especially in Southern California and it was it attracted the glamorous people that was written up not only sports pagers but in a society pages Southern California was really the fountainhead for motor racing because you had cam builders manifold people you had fabricators you had everybody here we used to drag in the streets all the time I mean my first impression of California's is that first I remember this the stoplights were like this it was the best it's a whole era the racing the wonderful friends I can't think of a a more idyllic time to grow up in if you loved cars the new Southern California in particular Los Angeles 1950s GIS returning from Europe after World War two had discovered sports cars small light agile cars that could out corner and outbreak anything from Detroit with the exception of some Corvettes and a few Thunderbirds American sports cars were just not competitive it seemed until the enterprising Southern California hot rodders decided to take on the European elite with their home-built specials world war ii had a massive effect on automobile race in the united states because a lot of young men came home from the war with a massive exposure to machinery that were restless they had a little money in their pocket and they wanted to go racing the ingenuity used to win wars was now being applied to win races one of those mechanically skilled World War two vets was a clever kid from West Virginia named max pelowski soon he would challenge the best sports cars Europe had to offer in a mangy looking race car he built himself and to everyone shock he'd win sports car enthusiasts and hot rodders still love to tell the remarkable story of max Bell chaski and his legendary home-built race car cobbled together from discarded car parts with a rough-looking crudely built body faded yellow paint and a noisy Buick nailhead v8 Old Yeller looked like a junkyard dog on wheels and Max was happy to have people believe that it was Max was really kind of a guy that just created an image of himself and he loved the image he was this amazing guy who could take all these different pieces and put them together into a something that was more than a sum of its parts he did everything that sports car purists believed you didn't do and this thing was very quick Old Yeller was such a phenomenon it was such a wonderfully nutty American looking car you instinctively loved it it was the little guy out there against the big guys it was great fun to watch at racing and see it do so well but old yellers racing competitors driving expensive had agreed often factory prepared Ferraris and Maseratis discovered to their chagrin that Max and his beautiful mechanically minded wife ina had built a race winning automobile with very little money she was dis intrinsically a good mechanic he and his wife just I mean they raised hell with the best sports car races in the country that had beat Maseratis and Ferraris just amazed me knowing that they had built these things on their garage floor yeah I think we were all surprised by by the performance of that old donkey our dog because it would accelerate just leave your standing there and you just couldn't real hard to possibly do that but but it did it consistently how did the Bell Chomsky's do it what made Old Yeller so successful and what was lurking under that crude sheetmetal it's time for the wraps to come off in a moment behind the headlights will take you back nearly half a century to meet max and ina belch auskey as they live the American dream winning against all odds with their unforgettable upstart on wheels the junkyard dog better known as Old Yeller too there came along and old boy named Max bout Chow ski that had come out here from West Virginia and I ran into him first he had these old yellow cars that he built on his garage floor and Hollywood there he had a little boys mischievous thrill out of sort of confounding the experts it turns out that people found out over time you know this guy wasn't just some idiot the threw pieces together he was actually really really talented and could do things that nobody else could do at the time or they didn't think of it at the time and all this from a guy who didn't have any like official schooling what kind of guy was max I don't think anybody really knows for sure he always complained about things seemed to be negative but he was still always willing to help and was bright he knew what he was doing but he worked coveralls he never it was totally unpretentious he wanted to act like a tough guy all the time but max really wasn't tough modest clever down-to-earth inventive and gutsy max Bell shouts key and his wife ina made the perfect team they made a fabulous team you could tell there was a great deal of love between the two of them he was a great great lady and Max and she got along famously max and I know were celebrities and their show was there building a car max bel Chou ski was born in 1924 in humble surroundings he was a Lithuanian American from a town called Fairmont in the coal mining mountains of North Central West Virginia he grew up with his older brother Casper but max was one farm boy who didn't want to endure the rough rural life or become a miner when he was a kid he loved working with bicycles and he worked in a repair shop he also worked in a watch shop but somebody had taught him how to repair watches and so from that point forward he always loved to repair things and and make things work when the war broke out max enlisted had served in one of the most dangerous positions as a ball turret gunner aboard a b-24 bomber his bravery earned him an heroic combat record in his squadron he was known as a guy who could fix anything after the war Max migrated to the west coast to join his brother Casper better known as Belle naturally max became a mechanic in ina Marie Wilson max could not have found a more perfect partner ina Wilson was a high school student and her father had a automotive repair shop nearby and she would walk in front of bowel shop where max was working certainly caught Max's eye and it wasn't too long before max won or over after a brief courtship max asked Dana to marry him she was a good mechanic and she had a head for business which quickly became apparent when they opened their own shop Hollywood motors specializing in enthusiast automobiles well the strongest thing in the max Belle Chasse key organization was I know she was the fabricator she could weld she can fabricate and max really relied on her that's one of the primary mechanics in his shop although she was knowledgeable she was knowledgeable enough of the psychological factors in the relationship to to make max think was all his idea if anybody was more blunt than max it would have been Ida remember if I did like a oil drop on the garage floor of the shop I was in trouble you don't spill a nothing on the floor at the shop max and ina performed tuneups hop ups and engine transplants for their day they ran a very sophisticated shop max liked to say we can swap anything into anything they had a place that was called Hollywood Motors was like a shut down gas station where they worked on these cars all the work was done at night you could never go into Hollywood motors like 9 o'clock in the morning like any other business and so there were guys maybe one of them would hang around and they would sometimes spend 40 minutes max would say 40 minutes standing over the engine compartment will say look just looking like that you know and you don't talk to him with him Max and ina never had children but they adopted a big lovable Golden Retriever named Ted ironically when max built the racing car that would immortalize him it was named Old Yeller after another dog made famous in the Walt Disney movie max ina and their dog Ted soon became fixtures at all the sports car races campaigning and winning in a faded junky looking yellow car that would soon become a legend we bought him at the pound in 1949 and there was such a natural dog never taught him anything that dog could do anything that he could do everything but drive the car I could always tell how fast I was going when the dog was riding with me he always rode outside and right around 90 91 miles in there the air hitting his jaw informant to hit come back in behind the wind cheerful max Bell Chomsky at the speed bug and he had it bad in his shop he studied repaired and improved upon sophisticated expensive sports racing cars from England and Europe and was convinced he could build a faster car using his own ingenuity used parts and very little money but before the most infamous junkyard dog was sired max honed his skills in a channeled 32 Ford Roadster called the Buford special and he dropped a big Buick v8 into a British built swallow'd already max proved he could make any car run faster I remember Bo Chow ski for the first time at Torrey Pines in 52 and he ran in those days a car that he called the Buford special when he got up to speed on the longer straightaways it made this whistling noise through the radiator so you could hear him going by you know or coming down on the backstretch max rode raced his 32 Ford and soon replaced its pre-war LaSalle flathead with a new souped-up overhead valve Buick nailhead v8 he began to get serious about road racing and his weapon of choice was a hot rod the car was really kind of fascinating no a hot was the first hot rod and that actually ran in the sports car races that really looked like a hot rod you know a big high boy so there was some a certain amount of resentment between the hot rod in the sports car camp one of Max's competitors was another builder of hot rod road racing specials dick morganson whose morganson special would come to play a key role in Max's racing career it was pretty rustic it had a 6-cylinder Plymouth six in it two carburetors and it were painted red white and blue the morgenson's special won a lot of races and everyone wanted to drive it sadly the first time that popular up-and-coming racer Margaret Pete Pritchard drove dick morgenson's special she suffered a tragic accident there was an incident at Torrey Pines where Margaret Pritchard was in the ladies race with the morganson special and she was unfamiliar with the car and she was unfamiliar with the power then she rolled the car on the first turn and I didn't I didn't actually see it roll but you know I saw them dragging it back and we all heard and and she was killed in the car that really depressed Dick morgenson so he called his friend max Bauhaus key and said max would you come and pick the car up and sell it on consignment and Max said he'd be glad to do that looking for something faster than his 32 Ford max completely rebuilt the wrecked morganson special then max installed one of his potent Buick v8 in the car and successfully Co drove it with Eric Hauser at that time ole yellow number one had a very prominent reputation in the road racing industry Eric Hauser in particular had won a number of Road races and Max Bao Chau ski was very successful in racing it also and and maintaining the car the problem with it was that it you know that the body work had been done by Morgenson himself you know with a hammer and just bending sheets of aluminum around it except for the rear deck which was made out of parts of an old truck or something why of course max capitalized on that junkyard dog notwithstanding max broke the Santa Barbara track record in Old Yeller one which was formerly held by lance reventlow as high-dollar scarab that's when max knew he could be competitive in sports car racing using his brains is a two--it of mechanical skills and very little money max was a smart son of a gun and and and he was a he was a racers racer this guy was out there who's a great driver Eric and max drove the car quite successfully up until the time my brother got the car it had 16 wins in 1959 Eric Hauser and Max parted ways Hauser took the chassis of the car and max kept the Buick engine and so he built the new car which I thought was uglier than the old one although he did a much better job instead of making the body on a channel look more professional max would soon return in another homely racecar still home built but much faster and more sophisticated in the number-two car was very easy to work on a 12 year old kid could work on in fact all of them were simple after that because I'm you know if you're working on the car and then you have to build one you want to make it easier for you to work on if you can I think if we're going to talk about max Bauhaus key and the old yellers these were cars specials as they were called that max build we have to go back to the situation that existed in Southern California at the time max got started specialty car market was kind of divided into two parts there were the hot rodders and then there were the sports cars unlike hot rods of the day built by young guys often in backyard garages sports cars were more expensive and more exclusive because most sports cars in those days came from England the hot rodders deprecating they referred to the sports car people is teabaggers now the teabaggers had certain affectations they like to wear string back driving gloves and silly little British caps while the hot rodders of course liked to show their working-class origins with Levi's and white t-shirts for car people felt that the hot rodders were greasy fingernail backyard mechanics and the hot rodders felt that these teabaggers were snobs and didn't know how to do anything themselves so they had to go out and spend their money to buy fancy cars and Max of course was in the middle of it because he had a but was essentially a hot rod running in road racing not everyone could afford high-dollar sophisticated imported sports car so a few talented people built their own the special phenomenon started before World War two with Briggs Cunningham and his boomer an old Mercedes with a hopped-up Buick straight-8 his pal miles Colliers ardent alligator was a British Riley with a Ford flathead engine they bothered English cars and put big American engines in them so I thought this was tremendous fun and I admired these guys making the car themselves and using the parts borrowing things and sometimes making stuff work that wasn't supposed to work special building progressed after the war two builders like Phil Murphy with his homemade creation called the boomers holding a Buick v8 ten miles mg specials the r1 and r2 the clever Troutman and Barnes special that anticipated the scarabs and dick morgenson's plymouth powered sports car which became old yeller won the hot rodders made cars that were incredibly fast these were cars used every day by these kids to either go to high school I vote are their jobs these cars could run the standing quarter mile in under 15 seconds the hot rod technology is pretty straightforward but some people do it very well and some people don't in Max's case he did it beautifully they had a race in Santa Barbara where the Ferraris came down Maseratis came down all the Italian cars came down and Max won that race with his old junkyard special and the headlines back in Italy was Italians best racecars beaten by a junkyard special it made for such great press and also it created a fabulous thing for the spectators because if they came out of the hot rod background if they liked American cars they could root for max if they came out of the background of thinking everything foreign was better in foreign product cars versus super they could they could root against Max and it created tremendous interest in the public and really helped sports car racing to grow purists argued unsuccessfully that these roughly constructed specials shouldn't be allowed to run with so-called thoroughbred race cars anybody who thinks that the specials shouldn't have been allowed to run with the other cars is just blowing smoke because to see max Malachowski out there and Old Yeller running against the best road racing drivers in the United States and the best cars available was just a hoot everybody loved it sometimes under that crude sheetmetal of those specials there was some very sophisticated engineering Max and ina Bell Chomsky's Old Yeller was considered one of the best I didn't know the cars would ever be that good or I'd have spent more money on them and went more races you know everybody was bad-mouthing me so bad that ugly feedback don't let it on the track and and I ran into those cases one guy come over to me once in 54 and he says are you planning on running tomorrow and I said yeah why he says not if those guys have anything to do with it and I thought what by qualify I qualify old yellow one I believe was Max's idea of fun I think Old Yeller too was Max's idea of racing max loved fooling people and downplaying his considerable mechanical skill and ingenuity confident of his abilities he built his race car from supposedly discarded parts or at least he made it look that way it may be true that he used old coke signs and it sounds old yellow or to that he bent those around to make the fenders and the hood for the car it may be true that underneath it was a well-built car when I drove it why I realized that from from the standpoint of just appearance it was deceiving because the car was pretty doggone sophisticated he offered me a ride in that car at Santa Barbara his wife did said I want you to meet max so I went over there and took a look at that car I said that's the obvious car I ever saw and I had my little mg special which was beautiful and I said I wouldn't drive that car biggest mistake of my life Max and I know built Old Yeller too in just seven weeks and their strategy was very unique when I saw max kind of build a car what what was happened is there was nothing under Donny on the garage floor wall and they would start putting chalk marks on and then there'd be some tubes laid out and then she bent the tubing and they built the frame right there based on nothing more than chalk marks on the floor of the garage it was like a beautiful show which where there was no other place around where you could see such a thing he would go get good parts from the junkyard not junk they weren't bad parts if you follow me they were good strong stuff and he knew that you could get he'd use a Studebaker or in because I had a big choice of differential gears he used forged off Pontiac stuff he wanted to make sure that he could adjust the suspension in the geometry of the front end so he used a Jaguar 120 upper a-arm which he drilled and the lure was at GM Pontiac which he shortened four inches with that combination he was able to set the suspension and adjusted for his track as long as it was cheap and it would fit in his plans he could make it work and for the most part it would last he just built a car with a big engine and big brakes and hang on one trick I remember he used was he would drill holes in the suspension pieces not to lighten them but so the suspension pieces would collapse if he hit something which he did so the cars frame the ball that stuff would be fine another thing that max figured out was street tires don't blow out on the racetrack till they wear out and everybody thought that he was just being an eccentric nutcase when he took white sidewalls over these cars that he built but he do for a fact that they out stuck the racing tires and they gave that advantage so here you have a car with a Buick engine and a Jaguar transmission and like Lincoln brake pieces and for I just thought that part was all really cool this mishmash of stuff it was just a combination of things that worked max almost always test drove Old Yeller on the street just as if he were driving at the track he was friends with a lot of cops and Old Yeller was a local favorite so he hardly ever got into trouble he would take off at four o'clock in the morning or Garron Hollywood streets to burn rubber pick it up dyno 80 miles an hour but I remember climbing into a small fiberglass bucket seat that he just sat in it wasn't even bolted down and I jumped in and sat down and he said hang on and grabbed onto a water hose that was there and put my head down and he took off down San Fernando Road and when I finally got enough courage to lift my head and look at the speedometer it was going past 170 miles an hour max had found ways to coax impressive horsepower and meaty torque out of his modified Buick engines and he made them reliable on the track not only did it have all these unique appearances and brake quite a few of the rules it did compete with the Ferraris and the Maseratis and the jaguars and it did so very convincingly and what's going for the April Grand Prix at Riverside and gurney come over Dan Gurney and we had a bite to eat so I asked him what he was driving he says nothing I don't have nothing well you won't want to ride my car Nissa don't you want to drive it I said yeah but if you want to drive it go ahead I hate to see a big boy cry so anyway we went out drove it around the street and he couldn't believe it and at that time I'm thinking something I missed he'd been driving for nine Ferraris and he thought my car was great so it may not look great for the dope no max bell Chow ski came to California from rural West Virginia with his own ideas about class warfare he succeeded in breaking down the inherent caste system that existed in road racing between the expensive imports and the home-built racers the Italian coach builders were building a breathtakingly beautiful aluminum bodied Ferraris and Maseratis and like a tall Yeller this clapped out all race car and I'll dented bodywork in kind of that gaping nose flapping fenders I think that happily would have been ignored had it not gone so bloody fast these were big expensive they were technically sophisticated with overhead cam engines and he was a car made of homemade parts maybe junkyard parts with big gummy white walls and it was faster than they were people were insulted the big teams had a superiority complex that was quickly cut down to size by Max and ina and their rude crude but very fast sports car he always bragged about picking out pieces from the junkyard in the fact that he had a $2,000 car he just loved rubbing that in when he could he might have been trying to snub the Europeans to some extent trying to beat them at their own game with a an ungainly mongrel of a car he succeeded most racing cars were not driven on the streets and usually didn't have license plates but Max flaunted convention wherever he could he drove Old Yeller on the street and kept the plates on even when he was racing that kind of stuff is just cool because it's sort of like saying to whoever's behind him like you're being beat by this car that's just like a street car you're a pathetic another way max loved to buck the system was working with his wife ina as an equal partner women simply didn't work on cars in those days especially in the pits but ina did I know was very good she'd set the timing chains of plugs and she would call a new track a track that they hadn't run at and find out how many right-hand and left-hand turns how long the straight was and and certainly this gentleman at the other end was wondering what's his for an ina would reply I'm just setting up the chassis ina maintained her feminine side very well and yet she was also an excellent mechanic probably right there with max in terms of engineering and she she didn't expect any special privileges I was at Pomona when she did apparently Terry site pipe off a car that had gotten not died I don't know max into the hay bale or whatever but I was I didn't see her do it but I heard firsthand reports minutes later was just I guess grab some shop rags and just tore the thing off Buick v8 rarely saw Road racing circuit he did not choose the engine of choice of the hot rodders which was the flathead Ford v8 but instead she chose a Buick v8 out of which he got incredible performance it was a brilliant move because the music was superior to the Cadillacs and the chiles and all the rest of stuff for the very simple reason that had small valves and you could Rev the hell out of them he ended up getting very good performance out of an engine which also super surprised both the experts unquote and so he had even more stirring a pot so to speak nobody knows for sure how much engineering assistance if any Buick provided but it was rumored that Max was Buick skunkworks what I was able to find in some of my research was the shipping Bill of Lading of a couple Buick engines that were shipped out to max at no charge time and time again there'd be at Hollywood motors unmarked crates wood crates and it said industrial use only and it was said General Motors and it was a Buick motor and I guess industrial use may mean for racing I'm not sure there could have been a part of something that Buick was working on for a future engine that they would actually have him put no Yeller and as a way of testing it will so he was fulfilling a service for them some of the no charge invoices from Buick to Mac survived today they're labeled modification for sports cars but Buick had none what is certain is that Max's success with v8 engines spawned a lot of interest in comparatively large displacement American v8 in sports cars I was too stingy I wouldn't spend money you know that's why I know yeah I don't want to spend the hundred bucks for a tire so I didn't go to the races yeah I could have run a lot more when I look back at it instead of running those stock motors I should have run a little more expensive motors and nobody believes I was running stock motors max ina and Old Yeller - were a familiar sight at the racetracks around Southern California including the drag strips he told me this story over and over that many times he wanted to check during an acceleration only and the only place he can do it as a at a drag strip and so he would go to San Fernando and and they just knew him when when the old yeller came they would open the gates and and the announcer would say the Old Yeller - is here and he would rip off a run he would break the sports car racing a category group record and then he would drive home and can he accomplished what he wanted to do but he left the trophies for the other people max loved to drive and he was fast but if he could get a real hot shoot behind the wheel he cheerfully give up his seat to some who would become the most famous drivers of all time he was driven by the need to win although the car look kind of crude it was probably the easiest Road race car I ever drove you can't drive any car with total abandon but you could get closer to some and with others and and the old yeller was very good a lot of torque so he didn't have to shift gears nearly as often the brakes worked and it was fast the most memorable race that I ever drove in Max's old yeller was at Elkhart Lake in 1960 it was a 200-mile race and as I remember ten thousand dollars first prize and I made a deal with max where I've got half of it I won I needed that money all the big names are there and there Ferraris there Maseratis there Jaguars all this stuff and by God if Shelby doesn't lead the race for a while right from the get-go Carroll jumped out into the lead and was cruising it with a 51 second lead over the best competition in the world which included the LeMans streamliner maserati I led that race every foot of the way I'm coming up the last lap just as I turned the pool right-hand corner start up the hill boys in third gear snapped and I never made it up a hill shell comes down the pit road very slowly after the transmission is broken all the reporters are gathered round waiting to hear what Max is going to have to say and Max said said what happened I said I think we're broke our main shaft in the gearbox it won't go out any gear damn it I gave $40 to that gearbox you didn't have to break it on the last lap I said when I needed that $5,000 I didn't break it on purpose right all these reporters are writing this stuff down as fast as they can calling it in to their editors and this was the image max created that's the way max did things he wouldn't anymore go buy a new transmission he wouldn't anymore by doing he wouldn't buy a new part for anything everything came out of the junk pile literally although he liked to make a big deal and let people know that it was a joke and Max wanted to keep it a joke Oh max god bless him wherever he is I really did a did it did a great service to breaking down the barriers in the snobbery that did exist around European sporty cars old yellers 1 & 2 were just the beginning max was relentless and continually improving his cars when they became obsolete he'd built another and another but Old Yeller too would always be the car that he would be remembered for making those independent front ends I did a lot of foreign cars and converted and put my front ends and my differentials in them I converted a lot of Maseratis even some Ferraris I put the first Chevy for speed trances in the Ferraris so much cheaper in fact bill red come over when I want to drive that thing that did been working on Ferraris all the time bill it's a good guy and he says I'll be damned that Chevy really works good in this Old Yeller too was a phenomenon and it enjoyed an incredible two years of crowd thrilling success in 1959 and 60 but every dog has its day and Max Bell Chomsky's Old Yeller too was no exception the technologies that were coming along were independent rear suspension mid engines all kinds of things that that that car did not predict that car harked back to a much earlier period of American car development the other guys were getting sophisticated the other builders foreign and domestic were going to disc brakes space frames and the imported engines were bigger and better to keep up max built a series of old yeller cars renowned filmmaker Haskell Wexler was an unofficial sponsor of many of them I never kept track of which old yellers ruining mine or not I paid for the right to to be the owner and to be around max and Herbie around the cars and to drive the car on the streets although subsequent old yellers were improved the competition was getting better and ever more sophisticated max always had this year horsepower but other developments caught up to him and passed Old Yeller by once he saw the Lotus 19's they were extremely fast rear-engine cars he knew that the technology now has been ratcheted up and he knew that front-engine cars were going to have trouble in the future the state of the art had gone beyond what max was willing or could afford to do after Old Yeller to say day max continued to build and repair cars but he turned to the movies for a big portion of his business using contacts he had made at Hollywood motors during this time max also did a lot of movie cars very special vehicles they used in in the movies you know like the Love Bug and I think the famous one was certainly Bullitt and Steve McQueen who later became a great friend of Max and I think they rented Old Yeller too and Elvis Presley drove it in a really terrible movie the cars had to do some incredible stunts and that was all because of Max carefully planned out how the geometry and suspension should be on those cards the feisty old yeller was a reflection of its creator max belch outski underneath their tough exteriors was something unpretentious unassuming and highly sophisticated both attracted many respectful admirers including actor Buddy Hackett hack has invited him to go to the White House he had a show to do there the only condition that buddy laid on him was you gotta wear a suit so he got a suit and he went with them they're sitting around between with the Prime Minister of Canada Kissinger and present Ford and Ford walked up to him and said to him he goes I hear you build a mean machine today Old Yeller - is a lasting tribute to max and ina thanks to the dedication of vintage racing enthusiasts and automotive historian Ernie Nakamatsu dr. Nakamatsu has carried on with these cars he's fun to be around because you just can't help smiling the way he he so enthused about the car what he's done is to keep this image alive I'm very proud of yearning I used to live about five blocks above the Hollywood motors famous legendary garage and after I got to know max he and I would go out to late-night coffee meetings and he would spin out story after story about his racing and the Old Yeller racecars and that's how I got intrigued and interested in his cars Old Yeller - the meanest junkyard dog of them all will forever be a reminder of the tenacious spirit of Max falkowski I worked on Viva Las Vegas in my thing when the devil was in June 1963 with Elvis Presley and he was a good driver I don't know why people think he can do anything he was a good driver in the car and he was interesting it ask you how's this car and what does it do and he wanted to know some of the points on the automobile max and ina belch oski created a racing legend called Old Yeller - and although these amazing people aren't around today to see their car continue to bring joy to scores of loyal fans it has raced every year since it was built once I had a surprise birthday party for max and Carol Shelby and and Pete Brock and everybody came and he was overwhelmed because everybody for the first time gather around in it and kind of said some funny and great stories about Max but there was really a sincere respect for max and I know we're driving home and and max shook his head and he said I just didn't believe that they had respect for me and so here's a man that finished racing made an impact went on to movie Cars and such and yet all those years it wasn't sure he was a magnet for both young and old amazed at what both he and ina were able to accomplish with next to nothing I loved him he was great many fans come up to me and tell me stories and very personal stories but I think the one that I remember the most is when a fan came up here several years ago and said I've got to tell you that things have changed and I don't think we can ever go back to those days when and I know we're racing and he said at Riverside he was there at the sports car Grand Prix and the Old Yeller too was racing and said at turn six every time the old other came by everybody in the stand stood up and cheery and it wasn't a matter of the old yeller meaning race but they cheered because they had a hero they lived the American dream they were invented resourceful and they left their mark with a loud fast car they built themselves by hand from the ground up and during the golden years of sports car racing they challenged the best the world could throw at them and one to this day the unmistakable Park of that junkyard dog still turns heads wherever it goes Maxon I know belch house key and Old Yeller too will never be forgotten we hope you've enjoyed this edition of behind the headlights I'm Bob Varsha join us again in the future for the story of another extraordinary audible you

Channel: Tim Brandt

Views: 19,105

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: VR, MOVIE

Id: 1ourvuotFuY

Length: 45min 11sec (2711 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2012