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REX (The King) COLE


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It's time to tell y'all about another of my boat racing buddies from "Back-in-the-day".

 

I met Rex when he called me to ask about race boats. A retired from racing friend, Billy Cartier, that had helped me get into racing, had told him about me. Rex was about 16 years old, and a junior in high school at the time.  He was kinda a cocky kid, so I started calling him the “King”, hence the name “Rex the King Cole”. We soon discovered that we were a lot alike. I visited him at his high school shop class where the kids were helping their shop teacher to build a wooden P-51 Mustang, three quarter scale aircraft. Of coarse, Rex wanted to see my race boats, so he soon, along with his girlfriend Darlene (He called her “Darlenie”), came to visit me.


Those two seemed to go everywhere together. She spent many, many hours at my house and Rex’s garage just watching us tear down and put together engines. She says, “I Got to the point I thought I could put one together with my eyes closed....lol. ! remember practically living on sandwiches and potato chips at the races. My dad had always taken us to the boat races at Lake Maggiore since I was a little kid. Maybe that's how Rex got his interest. Don't remember. By the way, Dennis (Her husband now) always worked in the rescue boats and ambulance at the Lake Maggiore races.....always up to the very last race they had there.”


By now, the poor boy was hooked. He had to have a boat of his own. So we found a Drake A-B-C hydro for sale by a friend of mine named Roy DeWeese. Rex bought it and raced B-stock hydro with it and my motor, and I drove B-stock runabout. He used my motor a couple of times until he could get his own motor. In those days, we scrounged parts anywhere we could, new or used. Rex reminds me that we used to have a name for the parts we would acquire. We used to call them newy-newy (brand new) or newy-to-youey (used). (Quotes from Rex will be in italics.)


       There was one race were you had convinced me to intentionally jump the gun so I could run out front in clean water. And I think that I was able to hold that position to the end. Anyway it was a thrill to be out front. 

 

     Along about that time, the American Power Boat Association was experimenting with some new classes that would use current production motors since the ones we raced were very old and parts were just about unavailable any more. The new class that was equivalent to B stock was, and is now, called 25SS. The rules allowed us to modify the Mercury Quicksilver racing lower units to fit a few modern power heads. One of those was the Johnson/Evinrude 25 hp motor.  Rex had to make all of the adapters to mate the power head to the lower unit. I’ll turn this over to Rex again. Actually, I bought the 25 motor myself.  Its amazing that it all came together considering I had no real metal working tools or measuring equipment. I was dating a girl at the time whose father had a drill press and a band saw that he let me use.  I did race the 25SS several times. I had the only one in our region, so I ran it in BSH. It ran pretty well, I believe I was getting about 62 MPH out of it.

 

    As much fun as he had in the Drake Hydro, it was pretty big and heavy for racing B-stock, so Rex moved on to his next boats. He bought a Marchetti hydro from another racer next. I’ll let him tell you what he remembers about them. Billy Simmons ran right across the bow of my Marchetti in the second turn at the nationals at Lake placid. I was running second in my elimination heat. The right sponson was torn off. Rex was confused about which boat got wrecked, but finally remembers what happened. He continues.


  It sure doesn't seem like something I would never forget. Anyway Toop  (Another boat racer, and also a boat builder. His last name was Toop, and that’s what he called his boats.) said he could repair it but it would be heavy in the front. So I got him to build me one of his Hedlund copy boats. My grandfather helped me buy the Toop hydro after my Marchetti got wrecked. You used to call it the “Super Duper Tooper Pooper”.  
I can’t remember any exciting stories except the one about traveling to Beloit, Wisconsin to the stock outboard nationals. Darlene had somehow gotten permission from her parents to let her come, too. My then-wife, Karen, and I were to be the chaperones. Talk about the foxes guarding the hen house! We loaded up my old International Harvester Travelall, and my boat racing trailer, with my runabout named Gator Paws, his Drake hydro, our  Mercury Mark 20H motors, tools, clothes, sleeping bags, food, and I don’t know what all, and headed out on a 1300 mile trip.


The plan was to stay a couple of days at my parent’s house in Hendersonville, NC. While there, we would do a little testing on one of the mountain lakes, Lake Summit, rest up a bit, and then drive straight through to Beloit. Karen and I stayed in my folks little one bedroom guest cabin, Darlene was to sleep on the enclosed back porch of the cabin, and Rex would sleep in the main house. We had meals with the folks. Rex really liked my Mom’s banana fritters. The boy sure could eat a ton of them! Darlene did a pretty good job of scarfing them up, too. She mainly remembers going to a fair, and an antique shop. She still has …ah, heck, I’ll let her tell y’all, “ I won a tiny glass mug...still have it. We went to an antique store where I bought my mom 2 china cups and saucers like she collected...recently gave them to our daughters.”


I gotta tell y’all that it was a LONG way from Hendersonville to Beloit with Rex sitting in the seat right behind me. He had brought along his 8-track tape player that he’d made a cool custom wood box for,  complete with stereo speakers. He really liked two songs in particular. “Octopus Garden” by the Beatles, and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, also by the Beatles. I’ll NEVER be able to forget those two songs! He played them over and over the whole way, all the time bouncing his big foot in time with the music, on my seat belt. You just can’t imagine how it feels when ya gotta go, and Rex pounds his foot especially vigorously when Maxwell went “bang-bang”. Darlene remembers, too, “I do remember the music. Still play some of them whenever we travel. Good cruising music.”


We must have spread the trip over a couple of days because Rex tells me that he remembers us sleeping in Harvey, the  International Harvester, one might behind some buildings in some town along the way, and an old drunk guy stuck his head in the window and scared us. He also remembers stopping at Karen's grandfather’s house in Wheelersburg, Ohio, and Rex drinking lots of beer with him. Oh, if Darlene’s parents only knew. Not to mention when, and I quote Rex, Darlene and I slept under the boat trailer. Darlene mainly remembers eating beans and cornbread at the house.


As we began getting bored along the way, someone had the bright idea of how to have some fun. I quote Rex again, We  found some interesting ways to pass the time. You were squirting people with water. (from an old squirt bottle) “And then we worked our way up to tossing butter, and finally tomatoes.  We had some tomatoes that we made sandwiches with. Rex started mashing them up without breaking the skin. We began tossing them at street signs, but then…You (or me) lobbed a tomato at a some girls in a phone booth but little did we know that the door was open and our aim was dead on. We heard her scream "Ooh, somebody threw a tomato at me". (Now I'm laughing so hard I've got tears in my eyes.) A little further down the road, a cop pulled us over to tell us that someone had reported that we were spitting out the window at people. Somehow we talked our way out of that one. Needless to say, we didn’t squirt, spit, or throw anything else out on the rest of the trip!


I was messaging with Darlene the other day, and she adds a couple of her memories of the trip that both Rex and I had forgotten. She says, “I remember finding a mangy puppy with absolutely no fur on the side of a mountain road and bringing her home with us. She was named Bogart....because that was the popular term back then when something or someone was treated badly. I remember going to Billy Seebold's (Granite City Boat and Motor In Granite City, Illinois. Billy was a famous boat racer, and also made Seebold racing props.) to pick up a prop you had ordered. You tested it out on the Mississippi River with all the barges and wood and crap floating in the water. I do remember scrounging in junk yards for parts...maybe that's where I got my love for flea markets.”


We eventually arrived at our destination on the banks of the Rock River in Beloit. Neither Rex or I remember much, but I’ll tell y’all what we do remember.


A friend from back home in Florida, Wally Schlipf, borrowed my Drake to run in A stock and it spit him right out before he got very far. (Wally was the son of Pop Schlipf from another story “Pop” that I shared with y’all another time.)


Another Florida friend, Billy Hutchins, wanted to borrow my motor to race in B-stock hydro. I don’t remember what had happened to his motor. That was quite an honor, as Billy was several time national champion in that class. I don’t remember if he actually did race it. Maybe I raced before he did and flipped with the motor. To quote from my story “Flipper”, “Oh boy, did I think I was a big shot! I was the region 5 champion after winning most of my races back home. But now I was up with the big boys. I got a pretty good start and went into the first turn in about the middle of the pack. Oh, was I excited. But---about the middle of the turn---Flipper does it again. Over we went. The boat went that-a-way, I went the other way, and one lonely tennis shoe went yet another!”


To quote Rex again, I don't remember racing in Beloit. Now why would I go all that way and not race? Maybe I got eliminated?” I asked Darlene about this, she says, “Yes, it was the Drake at the nationals in Beloit that he tore up”.  Good grief!  Another wrecked boat? Maybe I should have called Rex “Tyrannosaurus Rex” for tearing up so many boats!!!   Rex says, I never wrecked the Drake.  It was too ornery. You didn't wreck the Drake, the Drake wrecked you.

 

I dunno. Wrecking makes for a better story. Anyway, we had a great, fun trip. It was always fun to get together with the Rex the King.

Edited by Chick Ludwig
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Thanks Alex. Frank's helped in the past. I think that the problem comes from copy and pasting from e-mails from Rex and Darlene, or whomever I'm corresponding with, to write the story on Word. I try to make it right there, but Word won't co-operate totally either. Then I copy and paste from Word to here and just aggravate the issue.

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