Pure-blooded American soil
To me, this is the great part of this job. Look around enough, and it’s astonishing what kind of historical connections can shake loose. Here’s a prime case of what I mean. Joe Macfarlan operates the New Jersey-based historical Web site 3 Wides Picture Vault, which I profiled as a Cyber Cruising feature in Hemmings Motor News.
Joe’s site specializes in Northeast racing history of the oval track variety, much of it from long-gone tracks. These recent posts on the site came from southern New Jersey racing historian Russ Dodge, who submitted these Bob Farlee photos. We share them gratefully with permission from Joe and Russ. They depict an incredible racing program that took place on May 17, 1959, at the deadly Langhorne Speedway in Pennsylvania. It matched old-style Sportsman-Modifieds against Late Models and sports cars in the same feature on Langhorne’s circular mile of dirt. The 1959 Ford, number 72, was the overall winner, driven by Johnny Dodd Jr. The red-and-white number 2 sedan, behind the 1957 Chevy Late Model, won a Sportsman-Modified heat, driven by Don Stumpf. The most significant car, obviously, is the number 12. It’s a Ferrari 121 LM, a one-year-only sports racer built in 1955, with a Lampredi-designed 4.4-liter DOHC straight-six, the first such engine in Ferrari history. Doing some research at www.racingsportscars.com, it appears that this same Scaglietti-bodied rarity was also raced by Katskee at Nassau, and may have been in the very first sports car event held at the new Daytona superspeedway a few months before Langhorne. Loyal Katskee, incidentally, was a real mover in Midwest racing history, having run an MG and Jaguar dealership in his native Omaha. He finished second in the Langhorne sports car heat behind Carroll Shelby, who was driving a Cadillac-powered special that failed to start the feature due to oiling problems. The Nebraska region of the SCCA, which Katskee helped to found, peripherally refers to him running the 121 LM on a dirt track and then having to extensively repair its bodywork. Katskee, who died in 1985, was inducted into the Nebraska Auto Racing Hall of Fame in 2001.
As to the second photo, the Porsche with the horrid bodywork in the foreground appears to be an early 550 Spyder. Either this car, or Katskee’s, would be worth millions today even after getting knocked around by pre-war stock cars. Speaking of which, the number 1 sedan behind the Porsche was driven by a truly great racer from South Jersey named Jackie McLaughlin, who, sadly, died in a brutal crash at Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in 1964.