A TRIBUTE...
Like many raceways, Dayton Speedway was sometimes the scene of tragedy and misfortune. Between 1936 and 1955, ten people, including six drivers, two spectators, a mechanic and a policeman, lost their lives at the speedway. Remarkably, there were no fatalities after the 1955 death of crewman Dave Ritchie, though the high-speed risks on the banking in Dayton did not change. What did change was the quality and workmanship of the cars, the availability of safety equipment for drivers, and and less frequent racing events as the speedway began to decline in popularity.
OCTOBER 4, 1936:
JAMES L. "JIMMIE" KNEISLEY
James L. “Jimmie” Kneisley, 34 years old and well known to racing fans of the Central States Racing Association, had signed to drive that particular car in the October, 1936, Dayton Speedway event, but now, standing in the pits at the track, he was rethinking that decision. It wasn’t that he was actually afraid; he knew how to confront fear and uncertainty. He’d been a boxer before he turned to auto racing in 1930 and he eventually won the Ohio amateur boxing title in the lightweight division. And he knew auto racing and race cars; in the 1936 season alone he’d already won a number of racing events.
But the other drivers had dubbed that car, the car he was supposed to drive, as “the death car” because another driver had been killed driving it just the month before. Kneisley wasn’t superstitious but at the same time he couldn’t shake a terrible sense of foreboding.
So it was with a great sense of relief that Jimmie hooked up at the last minute with Dayton car owner Johnny Vance and agreed to drive the Vance entry instead of the death car. Bayles Leverett of San Diego, CA, took his place in the death car entry. 
Approximately 3000 Dayton Speedway spectators were watching as Kneisley took the Vance entry to the outside for the lead of the race. Then the car skidded into the first turn of what was then the five-eighths-mile track, slammed into and through the fencing and overturned. Jimmie Kneisley died in the crash.
Kneisley was survived by his widow, Eva, and a sister, Mildred Buckles. His services were held at his home on Scherrer Avenue, R.R. 5, New Troy Pike, on Wednesday, October 7, 1936.
Nineteen year old Lige Jenkins of 1809 E. Fourth Street was also a victim of Kneisley’s fatal crash. The teenager suffered a fractured right leg when he was hit by flying timbers from the fence.
And the death car entry? Leverett qualified the car at better than 90 miles an hour and, after they’d removed Kneisley’s body from the speedway and fixed the fencing, Leverett drove the car to a fourth place finish in the feature event.
[Photo courtesy of Steve Estes of Troy, Ohio.]
JULY 20, 1941:
THOMAS WALTER "TOMMY" LEGGE
After popular driver Everett Saylor was injured at the 1941 running of the Indianapolis 500, Dayton Speedway promoter Frank Funk decided to change the name of his July 20th event to the "Everett Saylor Benefit Sweepstakes" and promised a share of the proceeds to help pay Saylor's doctor and hospital bills. Tony Williams, a driver with 15 years experience, was scheduled to drive the fast Dreyer Riverside Special, usually wheeled by Saylor, in honor of the injured driver.
Tragedy struck during warm-ups when Thomas Walter "Tommy" Legge, 26, of Seattle, Washington, died when his car went out of control, and catapaulted end over end in the south turn before rolling over sideways and coming to a stop. Legge was pinned beneath the wreckage and died 10 minutes after being admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital. Coroner A.P.McDonald said that death was due to a crushed chest.
The accident was witnessed by Legge's pregnant wife June.
Legge had been a star in midgets in the Pacific Northwest area. In 1941 he moved to the Midwest to race the big cars at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Dayton.
Besides his wife, Legge was survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Albert T. Legge, of Seattle.
Legge was buried in Acacia Memorial Park, Seattle, Washington
Tommy Legge is shown behind the wheel of the Wright Brothers D.O. Hal Special at Milwaukee in June, 1941. The photo was provided by Mel Anthony, 85 years young, who actually raced against Tommy on the West Coast before Legge moved to the Midwest to continue his racing career.
(Left) Tommy Legge's marker in Acacia Memorial Park in Seattle, Washington.
---Photo courtesy Don Tash
JUNE 15, 1947:
ELBERT "PAPPY" BOOKER
---Photo from the collection of Karl Brown
Detroit, Michigan native Elbert "Pappy" Booker, a foreman at the Briggs Body Co. in Detroit, at age 45 was among the older active race drivers when the American Automobile Association (AAA) sprint cars rolled into Dayton Speedway in June 1947. Unlike some of the youngsters on the circuit, he'd raced sprint cars both before and after the war. Dayton Speedway had been converted into a high-banked dirt 1/2 mile sometime around 1939, but Booker, who began his racing career in 1931 and had raced with almost every sanctioning group in the country before joining AAA in 1941, knew his way around all the high-banked tracks on the AAA circuit.
He'd won the June 29, 1946, 30-lapper at Dayton, and the August 11 twenty-lapper at Winchester the same year.
According to Buzz Rose in his book Kings of the Hills, "Booker had no illusions about getting a ride at Indianapolis when he signed up with the AAA. He was motivated instead by Frank Funk's circuit of high-banked race tracks. He fell in love with the tracks when they were part of the CSRA circuit and when Funk went AAA, Booker followed. So enraptured with the tracks was he that for a while during WWII he lived on a farm only a few miles away from Winchester!
"Although Booker drove many top-notch cars during his career, his greatest notoriety came at the wheel of the black Lawrence Jewell 183 cubic inch HAL. Like Elbert, the car was small and light and the two bonded almost immediately. Many said that when on the race track Booker and the car were as one. The little HAL would go anywhere Elbert placed it and in spite of its small engine they won several races against bigger machines. Many of his contemporaries have related that while respected, Elbert was not particularly liked by his fellow competitors. He was viewed as arrogant and somewhat of a show-off. That he was beating men ten years and more his junior may have contributed to his attitude.
"Eyewitnesses to his accident have said that it was this combination of arrogance and ultimate confidence in his race car that did him in. Dayton was still suffering from the rain disaster of 1946 and was very rough in spots. Booker won the inaugural race there in 1946 and generally was one of the two fastest qualifiers at the track--he obviously liked the place. Leading the first heat race over Spider Webb, he went to the outside on the back straight while lapping George Metzler. As he went by Metzler, Elbert turned around in the cockpit and looked over his left shoulder as if to needle George. As he did that the Jewell caught one of the ruts in the tracks, bicycled and flew 70 feet through the air, landing upside down on Elbert."
The little HAL shot so high that Spider Webb was able to drive his car under it while Booker was still in the air. Elbert "Pappy" Booker died in the accident.
For more photos of Elbert Booker, visit his DSL page here.
---Photo from the collection of Karl Brown
---Photo of Booker's cemetary marker in Forest Lawn Cemetary, Detroit, Michigan provided by Don Tash.
JUNE 14, 1948:
JOHN H. "JOHNNY" SHACKLEFORD, JR.
Dayton native John H. “Johnny” Shackleford, Jr., at 34 years of age, had twelve racing seasons under his belt and was a nationally known driver. He’d won the 1947 AAA Midwest Championship and was proud of the fact that he’d beaten Bill Holland in a race that same year in Trenton, NJ shortly after Holland had finished second at the Indianapolis 500.
But within the racing community Shackleford was known as “Bolts” because he had so much hard luck with his cars. He was bumped at the 1948 Indianapolis event when later qualifiers beat his speed, but he did see some action during that 500 mile event as a relief driver for Joie Chitwood.
The June 14, 1948 “Big Car” race at Dayton Speedway drew a huge crowd of more than 11,000 race fans. They came to see Ted Horn, the king of the AAA speed demons, and a handful of other Indy 500 stars. Over the previous nine years at Indianapolis Horn had never finished worse than fourth. Spider Webb, Hal Robson, Charley Van Acker, Hal Cole, and Shackleford had all participated in the 1948 500-mile marathon and were determined to try to stop Horn’s sprint to his third straight national AAA title.
Shackleford seemed set to have a great day behind the wheel. He and Spider Webb posted the top two qualifying times. Johnny started on the outside of the first row in the Iddings Offenhauser right alongside Horn who had won the pole by winning the first heat race. Then, while running in second place, Shackleford skidded to the top of the track between turns one and two. According to witnesses, he seemed to regain control of the car in time because the front wheels were seen to be turning away from the wall. But suddenly the right rear wheel caught the fence. Shackleford’s car, which had finished seventh in the 1948 Indy 500, careened back to the wall, smashed through it tearing out 30 feet of fencing, and tumbled down the 40-foot embankment outside the speedway.
Johnny Shackleford was taken from his smashed racer and rushed to the hospital. He was admitted at 4:40 p.m. with injuries that included a shattered right hip, crushed chest, and internal injuries. He died at 6:15 p.m. June 14, 1948.
Funeral services were held at the Morris Sons funeral home on Wednesday, June 17, 1948, with burial in Woodland cemetery
Shackleford was survived by his parents with whom he lived on R.R.6 in Dayton. He was an enlisted man in World War II serving with the field artillery, but was never sent overseas.
When the race was restarted, Ted Horn came home the winner, followed by Walt Ader, of Syracuse, NY; John Frederick, Indianapolis; George Lynch, Chicago; Orville Epperly, Dayton; and Ed Zalucki, Ft. Wayne.
Horn would indeed win his third straight national title, but he would do so posthumously. Ted Horn was killed just a few months after his Dayton Speedway victory, on October 10th, at the Du Quoin fairgrounds track.
---Photo above and below provided courtesy of Buzz Rose
APRIL 20, 1952:
GORDON REID
RUBY ELLEN SHAFFER
GENE LAWSON
ROBERT THATCHER
The single greatest tragedy in the history of Dayton Speedway took place in April, 1952. Before the sun set that day on the AAA Sprint Car Championship race event, four people would be dead, and 48 more hospitalized, nine of them with serious injuries, the result of an accident triggered by the number 7 Engle-Stanke Special sprinter driven by Gordon Reid.
Originally from Portland, Oregon, "Flash" Reid began his career at age twenty-two racing midget cars at the Carrell Speedway in Gardena, Los Angeles, CA. He later moved to racing roadsters with the California Racing Association. In 1949 he moved East with Jack Beckley to join the AAA midget championship circuit. In 1951 Reid tried but failed to qualify for his first Indianapolis 500 in a Chevrolet-engined Silnes, but he was scheduled to make his second attempt just a few weeks after the Dayton sprint car event.
Fourteen thousand spectators were watching as Reid roared into third place in the 10 lap event. Suddenly Reid's car spun wildly on the turn into the front stretch and the right front wheel seemed to lock into the guardrail. The sprint car rode the railing for about 100 feet, plunged under the footbridge that connected the pits with the outside of the track, and hurtled into the crowd of screaming spectators. Reid was decapitated.
Charlie Engle, the builder of Reid's car, told reporters "I could see it coming. Reid was just trying too hard. That's all there is to it. He tried too hard."
The Dayton Speedway crash that killed Reid, two spectators, and a track security guard, might have been caused by a missing steering key pin in Reid's car. A few witnesses said that just before the crash they saw Reid holding onto the steering wheel which had come loose from its column.
Gordon Reid was survived by his wife, Betty Reid; their four children: Marsha, 5; Susan, 4; Betty, 17 months; and Karen, 2 weeks; and his mother, Hazel Reid. All were residents of Burbank, California.
Also killed in the crash were Ruby Ellen Shaffer, a 43 year old resident of Springfield, Ohio; Gene Lawson, 19, of Dayton; and the track security guard, 22 year old Robert Thatcher, also of Dayton. Some witnesses reported that Thatcher was seen pushing a female spectator out of harm's way just before the impact.
FODS George Brose added this first-hand account:
"When Gordon Reid died, in addition to the people killed at the Speedway, there was another fatality from a collision at the corner of Main and Apple Street with a police car and an ambulance taking injured to Miami Valley Hospital. We always sat at the top row at the south end of the mainstretch. When that first heat race was run and Reid’s accident occurred, no one at that end of the grandstand could see it happen. Everything just stopped. The announcer said nothing. Eventually people started leaving from the north end, and many were covered with gray paint, as Reid’s car had hit a couple of 50 gallon drums of gray paint and hosed everyone in the north stands. It was a very surreal experience, with many, many people just going home. I think the rest of the program was run, but we didn’t stay when we found out what had happened and saw so many people in shock. I remember a woman covered in paint buying a souvenir of some sort for her little boy, and then quietly walking up the stairs out of there. It was a climb to get out of the stands as they were well down the side of a hill. It was a wonderful view of the city of Dayton from those stands."
---April 2008
Both of these photos are from the collection of Ray Peterson and are used with the permission of his son, Skip Peterson. In the photo above, a huge crowd of spectators watches solemnly as ambulance attendants load some of the the injured into their van. Reid hooked the guardrail in the fourth corner at the far left of the photo and vaulted into the crowd standing in the open near the grandstand end of the pedestrian bridge. Note how low the pedestrian bridge is and how the access road dips dramatically to clear it at the track entrance.
In the photo below, notice the circular open area at the grandstand end of the pedestrian bridge. I believe that this is where Reid's car landed after he left the speedway. Notice also that the fourth corner of the track is actually squared off and that the fast line in that corner actually required drivers to get extremely close to the outside wall.
National Speed Sport News carried the photo below on the front page of the April 30, 1952 issue. It shows the start of the event in which Reid crashed. Notice how much smaller the Engle-Stanko appears than the other cars in the photo.
(Below) Here's a photo of Gordon "Flash" Reid in his prime, taken at a California event. The photo appears here courtesy the Dick Wallen Collection.
(Above) Gordon Reid rests for eternity in an unmarked grave next to that of his mother, Hazel, at Forest Lawn Cemetary in Glendale, California.
---- Photo courtesy of Don Tash
AUGUST 31, 1952:
JIM RIGSBY
The memory of Reid's fatal crash was still fresh in people's minds when the AAA Sprint Car Championship series returned to Dayton a few months later for the running of the Dayton 100. Jim Rigsby, driver of the number 37 Bob Estes Special, must surely have thought about it before buckling into his sprint car.
Rigsby, a commercial lobster fisherman from Lennox, CA, was at the peak of his career that Sunday afternoon in Dayton. Earlier that year in May, Rigsby qualified for the Indianapolis 500 for the first time driving a Bob Estes-owned Watson - Offenhauser. Starting from the 26th position in the grid, he drove steadily to complete all two hundred laps and to finish an impressive 12th. Then, on June 8, Rigsby set a new track record at the Milwaukee Mile, and he was superb on the mile-long track in Springfield during a race meet the week before the Dayton Speedway sprint race.
At Dayton, Gene Force took the pole with Rigsby alongside him on the front row. Behind them came Joe James and Mike Nazaruk. Also in the race were Bob Sweikert and Bob Scott, Travis "Spider" Webb and Carlyle "Duke" Dinsmore, Jimmy Daywalt, Leroy Warriner, Pat O'Conner and Eddie Sachs.
On lap 5 Gene Force got loose going into the third turn. Rigsby, who was following closely, went low in an attempt to pass him for the lead. However Rigsby's right front wheel clipped Force's left front wheel. Rigsby's car bounced to the left and bottomed out causing the underpan to push up bending the accelerator. With the throttle stuck wide open Rigsby shot up the banking and cleared the wooden guard rail by a reported 20 feet. He landed in a field 200 feet from the track with no chance of surviving.
Jim Rigsby was 29 years old at the time of his death.
It's possible that Jim's real name was "Riggsby." He was survived by his wife Sally of Lennox, California, his mother Mrs. Sleecy Zimmerman of San Francisco, and his sister Mrs. Bernice Houp of Honolulu.
You can read Steven N. Levinson's first hand account of this event here.
In the January 1959 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, Senator Richard L. Neuberger of Oregon argued that auto racing was lethal and should be outlawed. The cover photo showed Rigsby crashing to his death at Dayton. You can see the cover here, near the bottom of the page in the right hand column.
We believe that this photo of Jim Rigsby in the Estes #37 sprint car was taken on the day of and just prior to Rigsby's death at Dayton Speedway.
---Photo from the collection of Gene Ingram
(Left) Jim Rigsby's headstone in Inglewood Memorial Park, Inglewood, California.
--- Photo courtesy Don Tash
JUNE 5, 1955:
DAVID E. RITCHIE
A crowd estimated to be between 12,000 – 18,000 fans was on hand June 5, 1955 for the running of the Metropolitan International 300 at Dayton Speedway. Ernie Derr of Keokuk, Iowa, who finished second in the previous year’s Dayton 500, was one of the favorites, along with Jack Farris of New Paris, Dayton resident Bill Rexford, and Herschel Buchanan of Shreveport, LA. Lloyd Moore, winner of the 1954 running of the Metropolitan 300 event, passed up the 1955 race to be on hand for the dedication of an addition to his church in Frewsburg, NY.
On the 250th lap of the 1955 event, the 1951 Ford driven by Richmond, Indiana’s Clarence “Briar” Johnson was struck from the rear by the 1955 Buick driven by Bill Rexford on the speedway’s front stretch. Johnson’s car went into a long sliding skid and crashed into the crowded pit area.
David E. Ritchie, 31, of Wyoming, a suburb of Cincinnati, a Marine Corps veteran of World War II and a member of Rexford’s pit crew, was killed almost instantly when he was pinned between Johnson’s car and a concrete retaining wall directly in front of the judges’ stand. The force of the impact smashed the abutment.
Ritchie’s wife and two children were present at the track when the accident occurred.
Ritchie was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Elizabeth hospital. Deputies said that he suffered multiple internal injuries, a probable skull fracture, and a fractured and badly lacerated right arm.
The race was won by Ernie Derr, followed by Farris, Buchanan, Rexford, Iggy Katona of Milan, Michigan; Tommy Thompson, Louisville, Kentucky; Bobby Hunter, Indianapolis; Bob Coptcher, Monroe, Michigan; Rex Craig, Richmond, Indiana; and Morris Lamb, Germantown, Ohio, with relief by Harold Smith of Dayton.