This message was edited on
January 22, 2010 at
12:18:10 AM by raj
Nine drivers were inducted into the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame last year. The Ripper was surely best known to most of you. Jac Haudenschild, Roger Rager, Freddie Rahmer, too. I doubt many of you recognized the name, Cavino "Kelly" Petillo. But if you'd been around Legion Ascot or Gilmore back when, everybody knew "The Shiv."
Most of those who knew him personally gave him plenty of room. On the track and off.
Jimmie Dunham, 96, an on-board mechanic on the winning car of the 1935 Indianapolis 500, looks at a picture of himself, left, in Victory Lane with driver Kelly Petillo. Len Wood/Staff 3/18/08
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Fred Offenhauser acquired the tools, the dies, the molds, the lathes and pretty much everything else when Harry Miller's lack of business acumen finally laid waste to the most (competitively) successful race car- and engine-building operation in American history. (More successful even than either Ford or Gurney.)
Fred also acquired a draftsman named Leo Goosen who knew about pent-roof combustion chambers, cams and valve guides, and bottom ends that would make power over a wide range and stay together. Goosen had done the drawings for the all of the exotic little Miller straight eights that won pretty much everything everywhere in the '20s at the shop in Vernon. Later on, he'd crank out the Novi's, as well.
But in 1933, Leo and Fred were reworking an earlier Miller-Goosen four-banger that Harry himself had lost interest in. It was a time not unlike the one we live in now. People were out of work, and auto racing had had to step way back from the high-tech clockwork Harry loved. Leo pushed the original 220-cubic-inch dirt track motor up to 270 and re-engineered it to stay together for as long as, say… 500 miles.
Fred went looking for drivers to run the thing. At the time, a new, $3,500.00 "Miller" wasn't an easy sell. Most of the guys were either recycling old, pre-blower equipment from the mid-'20s or making what they could out of stock block motors. Even comparatively well-heeled owners like Harry Hartz and Louie Meyer were sticking with seven- and eight-year-old Millers and all the spare parts they could either rustle up or have Fred knock out.
But there was this hot shoe truck driver from Watts. The guy was a piece of work. Cocky, rude, pushy, hair-trigger volatile and often-as-not liquored up. Plain scary, according my grandfather. But The Shiv knew the old Grapevine better than anyone from his produce-truck-driving days, and he'd won the big road race from Bakersfield to LA in '29 when nobody'd heard of him.
In '32, he started campaigning a Miller-eight dirt car called "Poison Lil" at Legion Ascot on Soto Street near Mission Road, spitting distance from County General. By August of that year he was starting to win. According to my uncle John, he did it by scaring the hell out of people including Wilbur Shaw, Rex Mays, Ernie Triplett and even Chet Gardner.
The wild man's wild rise was meteoric. He won repeatedly in LA and the Midwest in '33. He also went to Indianapolis and put his car on the pole as a rookie, setting a new qualifying record in the process.
By the end of '34, Cavino Michele (pronounced Me-Kay-Lay) "Kelly" Petillo was chauferring famed riding mechanic Chickie Hirashima and winning big shows like the proto-NASCAR 200-hundred milers at Mines Field where LAX is today. He was top ten in both the West Coast and Midwest AAA point standings. In early '35, Petillo hit the dirt running with back-to-back wins at Ascot behind the wheel of Art Sparks's Miller. He won another Ascot A Main in April in Earl Haskell's Miller.
He also co-campaigned the famed (Bud) Winfield Special "giant killer," Ford-powered, Curly-Wetteroth-built, dirt car at Ascot. (The car is still very much in existence, by the way.)
So when he showed up at Fred's with his sexy new Wetteroth-built Gilmore Speedway Special (with its heart-shaped radiator grill), Offenhauser fronted him one of Leo's new toys. Petillo promptly put it on the pole, but was then disqualified. He tried again, but the three-and-a-half-grand toy Fred had consigned to him in return for a share of the proceeds he might win came unglued.
The wild man put it all back together and re-qualified, but started on the seventh row, two thirds of the way back in a very competitive field. Five hours and two-hundred back-hammering laps later (the brickyard was made of bricks then), he was on the first. Kelly the Shiv had become the first driver to win the Indy 500 in an "Offy."
The engine snarled. And it ran and ran, of course. Even Leo himself couldn't out-design it. The boomer made power when and where it was needed (like coming out of the long corners), and it stayed together when more exotic stuff didn't.
Offies won at Indy 26 times from 1935 through 1976 and did so after Louie Meyer and Dale Drake bought the operation from Fred in the late '40s. They won as front-engine / rear-drivers in the "big cigars" from L.A.'s Frank Kurtis, Quinn Epperly and A. J. Watson; as front-engine / front-drivers (in '47, '48 and '49 in Lou Moore's Blue Crowns); and as assorted rear-engine / rear-drivers ('68 and '72-'76).
Mauri Rose won three times with Offy power. Bill Vukovich, Rodger Ward, Bobby Unser and Johnny Rutherford won twice with them. A. J. got two of his four, as well.
But what happened to that first guy to drive an Offy to the flag at the brickyard? Kelly the Shiv went on to become AAA National Champion in 1935, winning half of that year's six national championship events, including those on the old dirt mile at Minneapolis and again at Langhorne. He was a (sometimes terrifying) force throughout the late '30s, but his lifestyle began to catch up with him during the War. Petillo had a bar in southeast LA, but fewer and fewer folks from the racing fraternity were stopping by when he allegedly attacked a Marine there in '44.
He scraped together an entry for the first postwar 500, but even though he was a famed former winner, the AAA stewards turned him down. Petillo moved to Indiana after that just to irritate them. In 1948, the frustrated and impulsive Kelly shived his former secretary's jaw open from ear to mouth and went to the state pen for six years, after which he was expelled from the banks of the Wabash for good.
Drinking like marine life by then, Petillo ignored his parole regulations and came to Indy for the 500 in '56. He did two more years, after which he took another shot at the 500 in '59. This time, it was USAC that turned him down.
Hard-living to the bitter end, Petillo died angry, broke, "excommunicated" by the racing world and forgotten in the flatlands below Mt. Shasta at the age of 66 of smoking-related emphysema and his unduly competitive nature.
(c) 2010 by Raj and Pair.a.Docks Music; all rights reserved.
See http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&rlz=1T4ADBF_enUS304US306&q=Kelly%20Petillo&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi and http://www.thoughtequity.com/video/clip/1617551_018.do.
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