From The Vault Of Art Shay: Soap Box

By Art Shay in News on Aug 8, 2012 6:00PM

This is me at 16, camp bugler and bona fide Soap Boxer with a white plastic Chevy safety helmet. I am shown with my kid brother Lenny, who started as my darkroom assistant and worked his way up to \<em\>Sports Illustrated\<\/em\>\'s chief color slide corrector until Photoshop took over. This brotherly snapshot—a frame of the car was lost in WWII—was shot with a 19-cent mini camera that came in a cereal box! \r\n

My hero and role model, the air ace with 26 victoiries over German fighters, Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, who would become the starter of my Soap Box Derby heat at the Long Island Bowl in 1938.\r\n\r\n

The day I soloed my PT 19- a week before I washed out for sloppy landing! On Sept. 27, 1944, as a lead navigator flying in the nose turret of a Liberator named Sweet Sue, I shot down a maurauding Focke-Wulf 190 at 60 yards. The Nazi pilot came out from under our squadron and startedto do a split-ess. I nailed him!. He bailed out too soon for 23,000 feet so I must have injured him. For years I would turn down the opportunity of having dinner in Germany with the crews who shot down 31 of the 35 bombers we took into Kassell, Germany. I didn\'t want the camaraderie of men who would have killed me a) for being a Jew and b) for being a marauding American aviator.\r\n\r\n

At camp I soon began to reap the reward of many a racing driver. That\'s Ruth Benow rubbing against me,with Madeline Kolbe,Gloria Urbach and Harriet Gitlin awaiting their turns. The locale was the campus of Camp Peter Pan, whose owners sold the Armonk, N.Y. camp to IBM to serve as its HQ. A big rock yclept Indian Rock punctuated a hill on the camp site and I used to play Taps at 9 each night, bouncing it off the souls of many Indians, so that the townspeople would pause and listen religiously and vow to clean up their lives one of them told me. Dirty Jeff by nickname. \r\n

\<em\>SI\<\/em\> sent me to cover an Ohio Chevy Soap Box Derby 32 years after I had crashed out of my own heat. If I had won my own race and then the nationals,I woulda ended up with a college education and a completely different life.\r\n

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his archives, Art reminisces about his fascination with soap box racers and airplanes.)

Let me recollect for you one of our first national heroes--certainly my first national hero--Congressional Medal of Honor winner Captain Eddie V. Rickenbacker. When I was 13 I savored his war record as a WWI fighter pilot- 26 victories over Fokkers, Albatrosses, Gothas, Junkers, Hanovers, Taubes, Platzes, a Focke-Wulf and a few Spads captured by the Germans from the French. Of course I wanted to become a fighter pilot, but I had to get Bar Mitzvahed first, then fly in WWII.

I was a competitive kid, adept at building racing wagons- so I entered the New York Soap Box Derby sponsored by Chevrolet (first prize, a free 4 year college education), built a car from a bona fide soapbox-and ended up in the semi finals run in Central Park. Some asshole crashed into me near the finish line and the New York Post quoted me:"’I woulda won,' Arthur Shay said through tears. He vows to repair his racer and enter the finals at the Long Island Bowl next month."

At the Long Island Bowl, Chevy's engineers pulled out a couple of sections of bench seats to make a 45 degree hill. A 12-inch board on two hinges flapped up from a hardwood base. Our starter- handling two ropes, holding back three soapbox racers- was none other than Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, then only nine years out of WWI,-barnstorming real racing cars at tracks all over the country. Pinning down this interest in 1937--I was 15—Captain Eddie bought his own track-Indy car and raced at the Indianapolis Speedway...

First, Captain Eddie shook hands with each of us in the heat then, at "GO!, he dropped the ropes, the slat went flat- and the three cars began their ride to glory or oblivion. Again, despite my commanding lead, another asshole crashed into my orange racer- and I skidded off course and the slowest of the cars won the heat. I vowed never to lose anything again.

I washed out of pilot school (I'd never as much as driven a car) and become a lead navigator. My pilot instructor probably saved my life after I soloed a PT 19 uncertainly and he said, "Shay, if you can't fuck any better'n you can land, you better get some other dude to have your children for you." Even though I'd flunked plane geometry in high school, I graduated 7th in my class of 2,200 cadets. I had learned the knack of acing multiple choice exams. Such was my determination to excel, win, wear wings and pink pants, and date cute shiksas conquering the Germans was a by- product of my ambition. I must not have been a nice person in those days.

One such gorgeous Texas blonde with her own Cadillac convertible that she drove with bare, purple-manicured toes, and lots of gas coupons, invited me to spend the weekend at her family mansion. When I came down to breakfast with the family the father, who was in the midst of a blessing, beckoned me into the prayer. "Oh daddy," Mary Ann said, "Arthur doesn't believe in Jaysus he's a Jeeyou..."

Without missing a beat the old man, in a forgiving voice, said, "That's all right my boy, Our Lord was a Jeeyou." I was forgiven for not having been born a Christian.

In1955, covering Henry Crown and Conrad Hilton for Fortune (they were dedicating their newest hotel, in Dallas), I shared a table with an aunt of Mary Ann who remembered me. " Oh what a lovely couple you made," she recalled. "Too bad about Mary Ann-she married another Air Cadet, settled in Ft. Worth and had three lovely children. He became a hero like she told me you did, but he died over Germany and she died of cancer in her thirties."

Thirty something twenty-nine Crestline Drive, San Antone. That was the address of Mary Ann's mansion, the rich, rambling building in which I was pleasantly forgiven for being born a Jeeyou.

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.