The Legend of the Merry Widow

Start here for background on this story, the early days of auto racing, and the birth of the Atlanta Speedway.

By 1909 racing had embraced the concept of the "stock-car," which usually stipulated that the entrants had to be models which were up for sale to the general public with a minimum number of models already manufactured.  The stipulation could vary from race to race, and many races included events for both stock cars and specialized racers. While some drivers owned their vehicles, oftentimes manufacturers would enter races themselves and hire established drivers prior to race day to pilot their machines to victory.

The list of names one encounters when reading about this period in American history contains familiar ones, like Louis Chevrolet, who drove a Buick in what seems like the punchline of an ironic joke in hindsight. Names like Fiat and Renault still exist, but others like Christie, Isotta, Stearns, Simplex, Apperson, Matheson, Marmon, and Pope-Toledo, just to name a few, have faded from common memory. But during their day they were hot contenders for racing titles and highly sought-after by wealthy car enthusiasts.

Pope-Toledo started out as the Pope Motor Car Company. Pope struggled to compete in a hot automobile market and attempted to diversify into a number of lines by acquiring other brands.  They offered the Pope-Hartford, Pope-Robinson, Pope-Tribune, Pope-Waverly, and Pope-Toledo.  The Pope-Toledo was the most expensive of its lines, and was marketed exclusively to the very wealthy, especially those who had a need for speed.

The Pope-Toledo brand was well-respected and the quality of fabrication was undeniable, but there just weren't enough rich playboys to go around. Unable to keep up with the exponentially expanding field of competitors, Albert Pope filed for bankruptcy in 1907 and passed away in 1909. His company limped along for a few more years after his death before closing its doors.  It just wasn't cost effective to produce the way they produced when Ford was cranking out mass-marketed affordable models. But they tried their hardest to make their name, and in 1909 they built a beast of a car that became known as "The Merry Widow."

Based on a profile that appeared in the Atlanta Constitution on July 2, 1909, it appears this vehicle was built especially for the Vanderbilt Cup races. But for some reason it never appeared in a Vanderbilt Cup line-up.  Instead the Pope Motor Car Company gave the car to Buddie, who was by that time a well-known amateur driver. Also in July, Buddie kicked off an ambitious project to build the Atlanta Speedway and hold record-breaking races by November of that year. This Pope-Toledo, valued between $10-35k, was gifted to him as a thank-you for his efforts to support auto racing.  Now, let's split the difference on that valuation and call it $25k.  In 2017 dollars that works out to more than $600k.  That's an expensive racer.  Pope wasn't kidding around, they wanted a win and they wanted it now.

At 136hp, this four-cylinder powerhouse was called a "two-mile-a-minute car" by the press.  Its tank held 36 gallons of gasoline and could go 500 miles without fueling up (for the curious, that's a gas efficiency of about 13.8 mpg).  Described as "nearly all engine" the chassis was stripped down to the essentials. It weighed 2,202 lbs, of which the engine accounted for 1800 lbs.  Painted a color known as "French gray," one fanciful writer described it as a "graveyard rabbit," just one of the many grim phrases used to describe the vehicle during its short life.  The exhaust pipes that emerged from the side of the hood were described as sounding like a Gatling gun when driven at high speeds.  Guaranteed to reach 125mph, Pope's test driver clocked in at 127mph during its maiden drive and claimed it hadn't topped out yet.

No seriously, like a Gatling gun.  Have a look at the Beast of Turin, a rebuild of a 1911 Fiat that's a pretty good comp for the Merry Widow.  Starts up at 1:56.  Warning: It's loud.

Allow me to put this car into context. Some of the biggest names in racing were lined up for the first Atlanta Speedway event in November of 1909.  They brought their biggest and baddest cars.  In reviewing the list of entrants, only three of the competing cars approached the 136hp Pope-Toledo. None exceed it.

Notice you don't see The Merry Widow in that line-up. This is where her story gets fun.

The 1909 Atlanta race was open to professional drivers only, with the exception of one amateur event.  That meant Buddie couldn't drive his own car in the big races.  And although he wasn't averse to driving fast (in my research I've seen him described as "reckless," "fearless," and "one of the worst" to ride with) I doubt he wanted to drive even if he could.  Wealthy men who owned showy race cars liked to hire big names to drive on their behalf.  It was what one did, when one had the means.  This meant the President of the Atlanta Speedway had to find someone to drive his car or he wouldn't be represented at the event.  God forbid.

During an exhibition race on October 23, 1909, which was intended to drum up press for the November event, Buddie hired a young man named Louis Cliquot to drive The Merry Widow in a speed trial. Cliquot was a rookie, totally unknown to the racing world.  If you go searching for his racing record you will come up nearly empty-handed. As it turns out Louis Cliquot was actually a local Atlanta kid named Florence Michael who had chosen Louis Cliquot as his alias. I have only found a single record of Louis Cliquot competing outside of the 1909 Atlanta event.  In 1910 he drove a Knox, led for zero laps, and dropped out due to a broken crankshaft. And then his racing career was over.

Buddie hired Cliquot, a novice in the racing world, to drive his most powerful car at the exhibition race.  I'm making a point of this because The Merry Widow enjoyed a fairly unpleasant reputation among sports journalists who covered the auto racing beat.  Driven to purple prose, writers described the car as ornery, temperamental, spiteful, and my favorite description, "a car of ill-repute and worse manners." Many drivers had passed on the opportunity to drive it, preferring not to run afoul of its fury. But young Cliquot was keen to establish his name in the racing world, and the invincibility of youth probably played a part in his willingness to take on the beast. Fortunately the exhibition went off without a hitch and Cliquot drove the Pope-Toledo without incident, although he kept it well below the two-mile-a-minute mark.

Then the November "Auto Week" arrived.  On the first day of the five-day event Louis Cliquot went into the Pope-Toledo's garage at the track and hand-cranked the engine.  These were the days of turning a rod beneath the radiator on the front of the car, that classic mechanism we've all seen in old cartoons.  Cliquot went to crank the engine, when suddenly it backfired and kicked back, wrenching the crank into a reverse rotation and fracturing his arm in three places.  Cliquot was out, not to race again until May of 1910, and then never again.

Buddie was back to having no driver, and this would not stand.  He approached Charles L. Basle, one of the two Renault drivers, and asked if he would take on the Merry Widow. Mind you, these were professional drivers, so this request came with a paycheck. Given the last-minute urgency and Buddie’s reputation for playing fast and loose with his money, it was likely a hefty offer.  Basle worked on the engine for a day, trying to tune it up to racing condition.  In those days race cars went down in the blink of an eye, setting records one second, rattling to broken bits the next. Frequent tune-ups were part of the game.  Basle put some time in but ultimately decided to politely decline.

He passed the opportunity over to Hugh Judson "Juddy" Kilpatrick, who had arrived with the Hotchkiss that he'd driven in the 1908 Vanderbilt Cup race.  Unfortunately for Kilpatrick the Hotchkiss was dead on arrival and refused to be resurrected. This left Kilpatrick without a car, and without a chance at any of the prize money, much less the cup. He was a racer of great renown, having set the straight-away record at Long Island at 37 seconds for a mile, but now he was out of the running.  Buddie agreed to let him drive the Pope-Toledo if Kilpatrick was willing to take it on.

Kilpatrick took a look under the hood and tinkered around to see what he could do. Walter Christie approached Kilpatrick and advised him not to drive it.  He said it was too dangerous, that its speed was greater than the cylinders could stand.  Christie was an auto manufacturer as well as a racer, so he knew machines.  And he knew 100+hp machines, having brought one himself to the races. His own racer had been speed tested by Barney Oldfield, who later played up its dangerous performance, dubbing it the "Killer Christie." It's telling that Walter Christie was willing to get behind the wheel of the Killer Christie but advised Kilpatrick to give The Merry Widow a pass. Kilpatrick disregarded his warning and agreed to pilot the Pope-Toledo for Thursday's events.

On day four of the five-day event Kilpatrick got the Pope-Toledo up and running. Before the long day of races began he requested a chance to take it around the track and get a feel for it before vying for a win in the 50-mile free-for-all.  At 2 miles per lap, his chosen race would require 25 laps without major incident. A test drive was a fair ask. He and his mechanician, Roland B. Church, climbed in and set off on their first circuit.

He quickly got The Merry Widow up over a mile a minute. Walter Christie manned the stopwatch and clocked her at 85mph as she went into the turn at the south end of the track and accelerated into the back stretch.  That was when something went wrong.

As Kilpatrick and Church flew into the back stretch the engine blew a piston and two cylinders ejected through the hood of the car, shooting high into the air and blowing the hood off. Kilpatrick reached for the clutch but found it frozen.  The engine ignited in a 20-foot sheet of flame as the car veered uncontrollably to the outer fence, where the banked track dropped off sharply on the other side. The fence took the blow and redirected the car back onto the track but the impact bucked Kilpatrick and Church free. Without so much as a safety belt there was nothing to hold them secure, so they flew an estimated 150 feet, over the fence, and down into the ditch on the other side where a pile of brush took the brunt of their fall.

The car hurled itself onto its side and tumbled over and over until it came to rest, "turned turtle,” in the middle of the track.  Then, as one writer of the day described it, "it burst into flame out of spite."

The Atlanta Speedway featured a state-of-the-art track surface, developed in response to an accident at the Indianapolis Speedway's first race where chunks of asphalt broke apart, resulting in the death of a driver (this was just one of five deaths that occurred at that event). Atlanta's track was built on a substrate of red clay, topped with Augusta chirt and coated in a special oil to bind the road surface together.  Unfortunately for The Merry Widow, Asa Candler, Jr., and the 40,000 race attendees, this special asphaltum was flammable.  The Merry Widow and the track beneath her burned furiously for over an hour before crews could extinguish the flame and safely remove her from the track.  They hurled the charred hulk of iron and steel over the fence and then moved on with the day's events.

Ready for some high quality photos of the wreckage?

Kilpatrick and Church were fine, incidentally.  Although they were tossed more than 150 feet over the bank and into a ditch, they both walked away from the accident.  On-scene emergency crews found Church climbing back up the bank to the track, laughing, without a scratch on him.  Kilpatrick had a few minor cuts and bruises, as well as burns on the right side of his face where the flame had blown back from the engine. His right eyelid was burned, and due to concern over the possibility of losing his sight, he was rushed to the hospital.

Christie visited him in the hospital later, and Kilpatrick reportedly said to him, "You were right, Walter, I sure was lucky." Christie responded, "You bet you were."  Kilpatrick fully recovered from his injuries.  The carcass of The Merry Widow was unceremoniously disposed of and never rebuilt. Out, out, brief candle.

As a post-script to The Merry Widow's story I should mention day five of the races.  Now that The Merry Widow was dead, Atlanta Speedway President Asa Candler, Jr. was left without a car to compete. So he did what any wealthy car enthusiast with more pride and money than sense would do. He approached the driver with the best performance over the past four days and offered to buy his car.  That driver happened to be George Robertson, the very same driver who bagged the first American win in Old 16 at the 1908 Vanderbilt Cup.

Robertson had shown up to the Atlanta races with a red 90hp Fiat (sometimes reported as 60hp, but inconsistently so) and set impressive times in event after event.  He had the most solidly winning machine on the track at that point. On Friday morning, the last day of the event, Buddie approached Robertson and offered to buy his Fiat right then and there.  That would make Robertson his driver, and give him the best chance for a win in the hotly anticipated 200-mile race. Robertson accepted and the line-up was set.

Robertson was the favorite to win, and for 163 miles he held the lead.  Then the Fiat's chain gave way and the car ground to a halt. He did his best to perform a fast repair and get back into the race but he was unable regain the lead.  Impressively, he came in second in spite of the breakdown, but the win went to Louis Disbrow in his Rainier.  In third and fourth place both Renaults put in solid times, emerging from the five-day event with the best demonstrations of reliability.  Ray Harroun in a Marmon was a distant 5th, and only did that well because every other car dropped out.

Louis Strang's oil pump broke.  Louis Chevrolet's Buick suffered a total breakdown of its transmission.  Both of the Chalmers-Detroit cars were out at the start.  The Apperton threw a spring.  In the end only 5 cars finished the race out of the 11 that started.

And where was Barney Oldfield in all of this?  It turns out his Benz was outclassed from day 1.  Unable to beat the biggest contenders, he sat most of the races out.  Resigned to his fate, Oldfield told reporters that one car had him beat without ever putting it to the test. He announced, "Louis Strang has the fastest car in the world at present." If only Strang’s oil pump hadn’t failed in the 200.

What Oldfield did with his free time at the track during those five days and the drama that erupted in the months that followed is a story for another day.