INDIANAPOLIS — With March upon us, a St. Patrick’s Day toast to Pat Flaherty, who had a green shamrock painted on his flimsy Cromwell helmet.
Some saw green as a racing taboo. Nonsense. The shamrock rode with Flaherty when he won the 1956 Indianapolis 500 and also the previous May, when he was the luckiest man in the unluckiest 500.
Flaherty’s relationship with Indianapolis had been bumpy. He failed to qualify in 1949 and placed a distant 10th in 1950, both times driving for Andy Granatelli. Then a AAA ban for running “outlaw” events — with Granatelli’s Hurricane Racing Ass’n — kept him out of the next two 500s. In 1953, a crash cracked his skull and he was sidelined for better than a year.
He was back at Indy in 1955, qualifying 12th in the Dunn Engineering Special. On race morning, Flaherty was one of 33 drivers marching toward their cars. In time, more than half of them would die in race cars. Irish Pat, his shamrock guiding the way, was not among them.
First to go was the great Bill Vukovich. Having won at Indy in 1953 and ’54, Vuky was leading again when a tangle with lapped cars sent him tumbling. He never had a chance. Bob Sweikert, driving for wealthy Oklahoman John Zink, won that sad 500. Flaherty finished 10th again.
Six weeks later, Indy polesitter Jerry Hoyt was bitten by a sprint car in Oklahoma City. That fall, in the champ car finale at Phoenix, a flip claimed Jack McGrath.
In April of 1956, at California’s West Coast Speedway, Walt Faulkner roared off to qualify a USAC stock car and never came back; a flip got him. In June, Sweikert’s sprinter jumped the wall at Indiana’s Salem Speedway, and that was that. Just 13 months after Sweikert’s Indy win, five of the 33 starters had died.
In May of ’58, practicing at Indy, Keith Andrews backed into a wall and was killed. And Hoosier hearts broke on Memorial Day, when a first-lap fiasco spelled the end for Pat O’Connor.
Come the last lap of a September 100 at Trenton (N.J.) Speedway, Jimmy Reece was third and hungry for second. His wild lunge past Johnny Thomson carried him through the outside fence. There went Reece.
Ed Elisian sacrificed his race at Indianapolis in 1955, jumping from the cockpit and sprinting to Vukovich’s overturned car in a vain attempt to rescue his hero. Four summers later, in August of ’59, Elisian was lost in a Milwaukee fire.
Jimmy Bryan, the Arizona Cowboy, died in the saddle at Pennsylvania’s Langhorne Speedway on June 9, 1960. Now 10 of the 33 who’d raced at Indy in 1955 had departed.
June 18, 1960: Five midgets got together when the green flag waved at West Haven Speedway, on the Connecticut shore. Dead was Al Herman, the 1955 Indy 500 rookie of the year. Happy Pennsylvanians packed that autumn’s Allentown Fair, but there were tears when Johnny Thomson’s sprint car tore through the inside rail. Johnny didn’t make it.
May of ’61 was Tony Bettenhausen’s best shot at Indy glory. His Hopkins roadster was the star of practice. Then, hoping to solve a friend’s handling issues, Bettenhausen ran some laps in Paul Russo’s car. The next day’s Indianapolis Star headline was blunt: RIDE FOR PAL KILLS TONY.
The 1961 champ car season ended at the Arizona State Fairgrounds. Al Keller started on the pole, faded fast, then flipped to his death. In ’55, he’d been in the tragic Vukovich wreck; now Keller was the 14th man from that race to die.
No. 15 was Shorty Templeman, in a brutal midget pileup at an Ohio fair in August of ’62. Shorty used to quip that he was too tough to die in a race car. Wrong.
Jimmy Davies could drive anything — he’d finished third at Indy in ’55 — but thrived in midgets; he was a three-time USAC champ. But when the Reaper came for him in June of ’66, Jimmy was in one of his beloved midgets, giving it hell at Santa Fe Speedway near Chicago.
The weirdest end was Cal Niday’s. A teenaged motorcycle spill cost him a leg, and an Indianapolis mishap — in ’55, of course — laid him up for months with burns, fractures and a punctured lung. Yet there was Cal in 1988, at 73, dying in a vintage meet on a California road course.
The 17 men erased from the 1958 Indy 500 lineup included the entire top five, and seven of the top 10. Andy Linden, who finished sixth, was wheelchair-bound after a 1957 midget accident. Ninth-place Jimmy Daywalt survived racing, but cancer got him when he was 41.
Pat Flaherty was the luckiest, all right. In the spring of 1956, he changed teams, hopping from the Dunn car to the Zink roadster abandoned by Sweikert. At the end of the 500, Pat and his shamrock were in victory lane.
He didn’t sail through life unmarked. Hard crashes, including one at the Illinois State Fairgrounds weeks after his Indy win, must have kept him aching forever, and in his final years he battled emphysema. But Pat Flaherty got to die in bed. That happened in 2002, when he was 76.
“Do not resent growing old,” says an old Irish proverb. “Many are denied the privilege.”