Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

Other Books by Brock Yates

Cannonball!: World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race

The Hot Rod: Resurrection of a Legend

Outlaw Machine

Enzo Ferrari

The Critical Path

Indianapolis Five Hundred

Racers and Drivers

The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry

Sunday Driver

Dead in the Water

The Great Drivers

O N E FATAL S E A S O N I N
RACING'S GLORY YEARS

BROCK YATES

To my beloved wife Pamela,
for her inspiration and
her passion for life.

HISTORIANS TEND TO DISMISS THE FIFTIES AS A
decade of insipid, pastel-colored lassitude. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
described it as a period of "repose" following the cataclysmic decades
of the Depression-ridden thirties and the war-ravaged forties. Yet the
nation was evidencing a latent restlessness, led in part by veterans
returning from World War II and Korea who found the pallid innocence of daily life boring in the extreme. Coffeehouses in the major
cities were filling with angry young men soon to be known as "beatniks" while outside, the streets thundered with newly formed motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels and the dreaded "hot-rodders" and
their wild sport of "drag racing." A new generation of musicians were
combining country music, western swing, and black rhythm and
blues into a new sound called rock and roll. A struggling Kentuckyraised musician named Bill Haley and his new group, the Comets, had recorded "Rock round the Clock" in 1952. It was a modest success until a year later, when it became the theme song for Blackboard
Jungle, Hollywood's first attempt to deal with disaffected youth and
the newly discovered threat of "juvenile delinquency."