Surviving the 70S: Muscle Cars, Freedom and Fun

By Greg Phillips

Not everyone gets to grow up in a small farming town like Yorktown, Indiana, but Greg Phillips did. Whats more, he made the best of it by never really leaving.

Gregs fate was sealed before his birth, when his father opened his own pattern shop. Phillips Patterns opened for business as a wood pattern manufacturer on a small plot of land that belonged to Gregs grandfather. Decades later, it still remains a family business.

As a boy, along with two friendsBill Webb and Mark ZurlinoGreg began a lifelong love affair with cars. Together, the three boys took risks, raced toward danger, and enjoyed every minute of being pals during the 1960s, 1970s, and up to the present day.

Greg relished working on and racing fast cars, but life would have meant nothing without the love of his wife, Stacy, and the rest of his family. In Surviving the 70s, he recalls sports, pranks, outdoor adventures, cruising streets on summer nights, family tragedies, and living life to the fullest no matter what happens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781475952247

Greg Phillips

Greg Phillips is a lifelong resident of Yorktown, Indiana, a small town fifty-five miles north of Indianapolis. He is the president of Phillips Patterns & Castings, where he has worked for thirty-four years. Together with his wife of twenty-two years, Stacy, he has a son, Garen, who also works for the family business.

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Copyright © 2011, 2014 Greg Phillips.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-5223-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5225-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5224-7 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 02/20/2014

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Ntroduction

1 Early Passions

2 Minibikes And Big Jim

3 A Yorktown Star

4 Yorktown Pranksters

5 From Motorcycles To Muscle Cars

6 Tenacity

7 Fast Starts

8 Mad White

9 Fast Track

10 The Duster

11 Tough Realities

12 The Wilderness

For my late father, Gerald, and for my late son, Nick, you were both men with spirit, and you made the world a better place while you were here

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.

—Mario Andretti

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Writing a book is not easy. It’s not something you just do on a whim, or at least it wasn’t for me. I guess what made me decide to give telling my story a try is that I wanted to present you with a glimpse of life as it was for me growing up in a small Midwestern town in Indiana during the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout my life cars have been a true love, a real passion. Working on and racing fast cars accounts for some of my happiest times. Naturally, I’ll share some of my best car-related adventures when my friends and I were occasionally pretty dumb. We took risks at high speeds that could have gotten us killed, but the risk was more than half the fun. It’s that spirit I wanted to bring out in this book. Life is nothing without taking risks, and it’s worth remembering that none of us get out alive anyway.

I also wrote this book as a sort of homage to friendship. I mean real friendship. Not the kind that comes and goes at the drop of a hat. I’m talking about the kind that sticks no matter what happens. Friendships of the sort I formed as a kid and a teenage gearhead and that still last today are rare. My buddies Bill Webb and Mark Zurlino became pals early on in elementary school, and the rest is history. We’ve grown up together and we’ve never grown apart. They both think the idea of my writing a book is funny, and I can’t say I blame them.

My wife, Stacy, has stood by me through twenty-three years of marriage with all the usual ups and downs that go with a long-term relationship. She supported the idea of my writing down my story. She knew it was more than about my love of cars, and my friendships with Mark and Bill. She knew it was about what made me who I am as a person, and she offered humorous critiques of the book as it came together. Thanks, Stacy!

Thanks to everyone for everything good in my life!

Now, let’s hit the road and get ready for a blast from the past! It’ll be a fun ride, believe me!

NTRODUCTION

When you hit your mid-fifties, it’s pretty common to look back on your life and reflect on the things you’ve done and the people you’ve met along the way. I suppose that’s the main reason why I wrote this book. I just wanted to revel in the past a bit as I move on into the future and whatever it brings, and I wanted to smile as I recalled all the happy days I spent tinkering with muscle cars and racing them on the country roads around Yorktown, a little farming community just south of Muncie, Indiana. But mostly this book is about the people in my life. After all, it’s family and friends that count the most. Without them, a person stands alone, and that’s never a good thing if it can be avoided.

You might say that the general path my life has taken was laid out before I was even born in 1955. I guess it all started with my grandfather, Delbert Gerald Phillips, or DG, as he was called. In 1935, he decided to move his family out of Muncie. He wanted to buy land, and, as luck would have it, he stumbled upon fifteen acres located off County Road 300 that he couldn’t pass up. He purchased the land for forty-five hundred bucks, and soon after that, he built a house on the property. We all called it The Main House when it was newer. It was a fine house. But as time went on we referred to it as The Old House.

For years, Grandpa worked at Muncie Malleable, which was an iron foundry in town. Around this same time, my father, Gerald Phillips, was working at Frank’s Foundry as an apprentice pattern maker for ninty cents per hour. His boss had promised him a pay increase of a nickel after finishing his apprenticeship, and when his boss didn’t honor his word, my dad packed up and left. In his prime, Dad was a strong and tough man. Standing about six feet tall, his lanky build was pretty much all muscle. He had a commanding presence, one that allowed him to lead the men who worked for him without having to resort to any intimidation or bullshit ego crap. He simply set an example by doing whatever it took to get the job done, proved time and again that he was loyal to all the people who worked for him, and did his best to make the company he founded in 1947 a success for everyone associated with it. It’s no surprise, then, that when his boss didn’t keep his word, Dad started his own pattern shop at the age of nineteen. The shop officially opened for business as a wood pattern manufacturer in a twelve-by-twelve-foot chicken coop on my grandfather’s land. Dad called the company Phillips Patterns. Seeing potential in the business, especially in the boom times right after World War II, my grandfather came to work with him.

Both men put plenty of sweat equity into the company to get it going, and they began to see results pretty quickly. The future looked bright for my dad and Grandpa. A year after founding the business, my dad met his true love at a dance at Tippecanoe Lake, a popular spot just east of the little town of Oswego. Her name was Nadene. A feisty blonde originally from Missouri, she was born prematurely in a one-room shack in the Ozark Mountains, and she almost didn’t make it. When she was weighed on a set of chicken scales, she topped just north of two pounds. She was so small the odds of her living seemed very low.

This one ain’t no good, said the Cherokee midwife who was there to help with the delivery. You might as well toss her out the back door.

My grandmother wouldn’t hear of such a thing. Give me that baby, she said, and took Nadene.

They wrapped my mom up in a blanket, put her in a little box, and then stuck her in a cast-iron wood stove that served as an incubator. It’s really amazing that she lived, but, obviously, she did. And my dad fell head over heels in love with her. They were married in 1950, and for the next fifty-eight years of running a company and raising a family they were inseparable, until my dad passed away in 2008 from lung disease at the age of eighty-one.

Today, after sixty-five years of being in business, Phillips Patterns has grown and expanded into aluminum sand casting, permanent mold, die casting, machining, and powder coating. The business was passed down to me after years of working on the foundry floor and learning the ins and outs of everything having to do with non-ferrous castings and pattern making. At this time, our business employs close to forty or so people, including Mom, my son Garen, my nephew Cole, and my niece’s husband Jason. The company exemplifies what a family business is supposed to be, and I am very proud to have been a part of it for the past forty years.

I am lucky enough to have lived a life filled with all kinds of crazy adventures and all kinds of amazing people, including my wife, Stacy, my late son Nick and his brother Garen, my parents and grandparents, and my closest friends. Guys like Bill (Webby) and Mark (Zap) kept life from getting boring, and to this day they still make my life interesting, to say the least. I’ve known them for almost five decades, having grown up together in Small Town USA, except for a three-year stint between eighth and eleventh grade when Mark’s family moved to Texas.

Growing up where I did had a great effect on the type of person I am today. I have met people from all over the world, and I can say with confidence that folks from the Midwest are some of the friendliest and realest people this nation has to offer. Yeah, I know that when some of you think of the Midwest or Indiana, especially back in the good old days, you most likely envision rolling hills of cornfields, lumbering smoke spewing tractors, sweaty and grimy blue-collar guys bailing hay or loading a hay mow for a penny a bail. You got the picture. Now, there was plenty of that to go around, to be sure! But there were a few other things us baby boomers from the Midwest had plenty of in the 1960s and 1970s: freedom, muscle cars, and a whole hell of a lot of fun.

Now, I think that’s a good thing! And that’s what this book is all about! Fun and recollections from a life lived to the fullest.

1

EARLY PASSIONS

It’s intriguing how you find a certain passion in life, whether it’s woodworking, flying a plane, or driving a race car full-out on a straightaway with your closet competitor breathing down your neck. I can tap my dad as the guy who instilled in me the earliest inklings of my lifelong gearhead obsession. Dad was running the family business on my grandfather’s property. The company consisted of a wood and metal pattern shop, and a small sand foundry where we made all kinds of parts for all sorts of applications. Dad was also into go-karts, and the guys working for him built a lot of patterns for them. Those speed machines had sand-cast aluminum gas tanks, brakes, center columns, and butterfly steering wheels with welded steel frames.

For the most part, two-stroke West Bend engines were used for power, though I recall that some of the guys ran McCulloh chainsaw motors on the half-mile dirt racecourse Dad had graded through the five acres of woods behind my grandfather’s house. Sometimes, the guys put together some twin go-karts, and with two ten-horsepower motors on the back those things would fly. As a little kid, I found the entire building operation beyond fascinating. I used to love to watch the go-karts being fashioned out of sundry parts, and then being taken to the races in their completed forms. I strongly believe that my love of the pattern making business grew from those early days when I was first introduced to the ingenuity of skilled metal workers and the rudimentary facets of automotive design. I’m sure Mom felt a little uneasy about it too. Her darling blond-haired kid with flashing green eyes that twinkled with endless mischief even at that age kept her hands full, and her husband seemed to always tease out the best and worst in me at the same time. He always made me a handful for Mom, and I think he really liked it that way.

Gerald! What on earth are you doing with that boy now? she’d sometimes say.

Dad would shrug and say, Oh, just teachin’ him a thing or two.

Like about go-karts!

If the go-kart competitors wanted to get really fancy in terms of a racing venue, they’d head into town and ask storeowners if they could set up a speedway in the parking lot, which I loved because there was the tantalizing possibility of an ice cream cone. Setting up a racecourse in a store parking lot might sound a little weird today. In fact, it could never happen today, what with all the worries about insurance liabilities and getting sued, not to mention the inevitable visitation from the big men in blue. Back then, though, people just figured if you crashed a go-kart during a race and you got hurt or killed it was your own damn fault. The idea of suing never came up. The cops watched and enjoyed the races and said nothing. Picture it. A group of guys wanting to race would stand at the store counter and longingly eye the parking lot.

So can we set up here tomorrow night?

If he or she was smart, and that accounted for most of the merchants in town, the answer would be a resounding yes. Why sure! Go ahead and set it up!

Go-kart racing attracted crowds. Crowds were good for business. Up the cones went to denote the course, and then it was off to the races. I cheered and shouted and whooped as I watched ten to fifteen go-karts going at it. The wipeouts were cool too.

Of course, I couldn’t just sit there and watch the action. I wanted to be a part of it. I just had to race. Dad made me a small go-kart. It was equipped with an electric start and a massive three-horsepower motor. I was only three years old. I don’t remember my first ride all that well, but I’m told I hit our dog, knocking her in the pool, and that I ran into a bush in the first twenty feet. Dad and Mom had a serious discussion about my talents as a go-kart racer after that, and they decided to unhook the starter until I got old enough to handle the spunky speedster. Evidently, I didn’t mind all that much. I was fine with walking around my machine, admiring it and sitting in it for hours on end.

My earliest memories of actually driving a go-kart center on going down the long back stretch on the ½ mile dirt roadcourse on my grandfather’s land, and having two racers split me at five times my speed, zooming by on either side. I remember not liking the feeling at all of being passed at all. It just didn’t seem to feel right. I wanted to be first over the finish line, not last.

More and more racing went on over the next couple years. Evidently, my grandmother figured enough was enough. She put her foot down, and our much-loved Sunday morning two-stroke scream fests came to an abrupt halt. The racing still went on in parking lots in town, though. One pattern maker working for Dad lost it coming out of a turn and hit the curb head on. I don’t remember it, but Dad said it just looked like he stood up and stepped off the go-kart. His pants around his crotch were soaked in blood when he got up. He was rushed to the hospital, having messed up his nut sack on the steering wheel as he was thrown out of the go-kart. In those days, seatbelts weren’t installed in go-karts. People thought it was better to get hurled out in a crash. Well, Dad’s employee was going to be okay, but he was in for some good-natured ribbing. My cousin, who also raced and worked at the shop, went in early the following Monday, got two one-inch nuts, wired them together, and hung them on the injured guy’s bench vise. Of course, all the joking that week involved this poor guy’s messed up balls, and to this day anybody who talks about go-kart racing in our little town inevitably brings that story up.

The bloody balls incident marked the beginning of the end of go-kart racing for me, serving as a good example of how the sport could be quite dangerous. The Sunday races were shifted to the real racecourse at nearby Spring Water Park, and they continued for a while longer. However, one day, a father who wanted to get