[Capt Spaulding]

We lost my dad a little over a year ago. My kids were disappointed that they know so little about his life. They made me promise to write down some of the stories I'd told them. This is one of them. This may be of interest. Or not. If not, I apologize.

____

I grew up in Northwest Houston, inside the 610 loop just off I 10. Just west of the neighborhood was a pretty large industrial area with a couple of large steel plants, a number of small machine shops, industrial supply houses, a couple of warehouses and, Mecca. Mecca for a 10 year old petrol head who didn’t know what a petrol head was (or what/where Mecca was) was a nondescript white building next to the Armco plant with a large orange sign over a large rollup door on which white letters spelled out “A. J. Foyt Enterprises.” ‘

I must have been 10 or 11 when I heard the engine for the first time. From 50+ years in the future it’s hard to describe. To a prepubescent fledgling gear head it was spine tingling. In 1964, Foyt had switched from using a 4 cylinder Offenhauser power plant to a double overhead cam V-8 built by Ford. To call the sound it made intoxicating doesn’t do it justice. If the Sirens had sung that song, Ulysses would have cut the ropes and dog paddled to shore.

I don’t recall what year it was, but one day, the song became too strong and I hopped on my bicycle and set out in search of the singer. After a half an hour or so during which the sound would vanish, then re-emerge I found the source. Out in front of that white building with the orange sign a group of men were clustered around a car. What passed for its body was painted bright orange, it had no fenders, and the engine was in the back. A short, relatively stocky guy had a knee on one rear tire and was leaning over operating the linkage for throttle bodies. From the center of the V, eight tubes converged into two tapered pipes and from those pipes came the most awesome sound I have ever heard. A P51 Mustang in flat pitch doing a high speed, low altitude pass at full throttle is close, but only close.

There was not much to do but stand there slack jawed and gape at it. Foyt would push the linkage with his thumb and the engine would instantly spin up to a scream and just as quickly drop back down to what must have been a damn high idle. I didn’t know much (probably less than nothing) about angular momentum at the time, but the thing must have had next to no flywheel mass at all. It seemed to pick up and lose rpm faster than Foyt was moving the linkage.

They would run if for a few minutes and shut it off and piddle around with screwdrivers on one thing or another. Then they would plug the starter motor into the rear end, spin it for several seconds and make more music. If they had kept at it, I think I’d still be standing there today. After about 20 minutes they started pushing the car back through the rolling door. An older guy, he must have been in his 50s (LOL), came over and said hello. I don’t recall the exact words, but he indicated that the car and everything associated with it must really seem like something. I’m sure I stammered out something like, “Y Y y y es sir, it s s s sure is.” He said, “My name’s Tony. What’s yours?” “J J Jimmy.” “Well, J J Jimmy, if you want to, come by the shop sometime and I’ll show you the inside.” I was a convert, only the site I worshiped was in the west.

I would ride or walk over to the shop as often as I could, walk in the door and into the shop and ask if Tony was around. One of the mechanics would point me in the general direction and I would shadow the poor man for hours. AJ was the definition of Type A, but I don’t remember his dad ever telling me I was a bother. Now and then, he’d offer me a broken or discarded piece of one of the cars. I still have a piston from one of the V8 Ford/Foyt engines on my book case and somewhere, I think I have a connecting rod and wrist pin.

Eventually, they quit running the cars in the parking lot and installed an impressive (to my eye) engine dyno. You could still hear it though. From February until April they would run an engine two, three, sometimes more, nights a week. They would almost always shut it down before 10 but, when the weather was nice, I’d open my bedroom window, lie in bed and soak up the sound. If Mozart had been able to create music like that, he’d still be famous.