Sport: Doodlebug Derby

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The Indianapolis classic of U. S. auto racing was eight months away last week. But on a ramshackle half-mile dirt track on the outskirts of Detroit 33 chugging, sputtering little cars lined up before 10,000 spectators to run what the track's owner Don Zeiter, at least, regarded as Indianapolis in miniature. Its qualifying races had already been run off exactly like those at Indianapolis. Chief differences were the length of the race (150 miles instead of 500), the size of the track (½ mile instead of 2½), the size of the prizes ($5,000 instead of $20,000), the length of the cars (6 ft. instead of 12). But to the midget racers, who call their cars "doodlebugs," last week's race was the longest and most important so far run in the U. S.

No sooner had the doodlebugs rolled out of their pits and roared across the starting line than the spectators were dramatically reminded of Indianapolis. Rounding the first of the 300 laps, Marshall Lewis' car skidded, overturned. Driver Lewis scrambled out unhurt. Later Johnny Ritter, smallest but reputedly most "heavy-footed" of doodlebug racers, did the same thing. After 2 hr. 18 min. of noise, flying dirt and squirting oil, Los Angeles' Ronney Householder flashed across the finish line, followed by Detroit's Glenn Meyers and Indiana's Ted Hartley. Winner House-holder's average speed was 65.2 m.p.h. To dapper, mustached 29-year-old Ronney Householder, who grew up with the sport and has been carrying his doodlebug around to races in a specially built truck for four years, his $1,500 share of the prize money was the biggest he had ever won. To his colleagues it was conclusive proof that their diminutive sport was rapidly coming of age.

Doodlebugs first appeared in the U. S. in Los Angeles in 1919 when a group of rich youngsters built midget cars to race around the Junior College Stadium, but midget racing as a recognized U. S. sport is less than five years old. In 1932 a field of eight midgets raced 20 laps around the football field of Los Angeles' Loyola High School. In 1934 Oilman Earl Gilmore built a stadium for midgets at a cost of $134,000. The Gilmore track was soon drawing crowds as large as 9,000, and shortly thereafter a onetime Hearst cameraman named Norman Alley opened a track in Chicago. Although Promoter Alley at first claimed that there was no money in the sport, the following year he proceeded to sign up on long-term contracts most of the leading drivers appearing on a mushrooming series of Midwest tracks. Madison Square Garden, prime barometer for new U. S. sporting crazes, held its first doodlebug race in its outdoor bowl last year. A midget race in Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium last summer drew 53,000 customers, largest professional sport gate that city had enjoyed since the Dempsey-Tunney fight of 1926. Today there are profitable tracks in scores of U. S. cities, fly-by-night ventures in a hundred more. The sport has been roughly organized into Midwest, Pacific and Atlantic associations, but as yet has no national championship.