Danny Foster

The First Superstar [Part 2]
Memories From Danny Foster, The Man Who Seemed To Be Everywhere...Part II.
By E.K. Muller

The First Superstar by E.K. Muller [Part 1] The First Superstar by E.K. Muller [Part 2] Danny Foster: the First Superstar by Fred Farley

During the first years after World War II, unlimited racing had three giants: Guy Lombardo, Dan Arena, and Dan Foster. (None is in Seattle's hall of fame.) Lombardo, of course, as a celebrity made boat racing credible to the general public. Arena and Foster, chums since high school, introduced major technical advancements. They both drove well, too. Arena tended toward hull design and construction, while foster became a champion driver and crew chief or team manager. (The terms were not used back then.)

As part two of this interview with Dan Foster begins, he is telling David Speer and E. K. Muller about Miss Golden Gate III — first to use an Allison. The two Dans had brought the boat east in 1946. Albin Fallon bought it and overpainted Miss Great Lakes on the side. He went down to Washington, D.C., where Foster drove to victory in the President's Cup.

The unruly hull, renamed Miss Great Lakes, won the 1946 President's Cup in straight heats. And - move over, Gene Whipp! - it was Foster’s first unlimited race as a driver.

The boat was basically a three-pointer that was trying to surface. I have pictures of it where about every 40 feet it blew the tail out. And you backed off because you just didn't understand what was happening. Nobody was prop-riding then.

After the Washington race, I came back here to Detroit and tried to set a world record with it.

I broke all my ribs, had black eyes and stuff, but other than that I was all right. The boat... I didn't think they'd ever repair it, but Al did. Then he started to drive it himself.

I got one of three Ventnors built before the war. Fageol had one, and George Cannan had another, and there's one other -- My Sin. I put an Allison in it for the Dossin brothers. Went to them with the idea. I'd met them, and they were interested in a boat. When I got the contract, Bob Allinger (who'd built Foster's race cars and the gearbox for Golden Gate III) came back. He built all the cowling and everything. I had an aluminum race-car body out behind the hull -because the hull was only 22 feet, I think.

I drove it as Peps-V, and won the Gold Cup. Hut it was just a morphodite. 'Way too small a boat, 'way too much engine. It got by. It was the only thing available at the time.

If anyone kept track, Foster and Miss Peps-V won the national championship in 1947. The Dossins, looking for better equipment, accepted a proposal from Clell Perry, to build and campaign their next Miss Pepsi. The small hulls and make-shifts that introduced the Allison were about to be displaced by new boats, better suited for the purpose. Foster soon heard from Ventnor boat works.

They wanted to know if I could come to Atlantic City and set an Allison in an order they had for...Dan Arena! and Jack Schafer. I went down, put the engine in, and supplied the gearbox.

We pioneered, Arena and I, I think, all of the gearbox work. Arena made his gearbox for the Gold Cup boats, and I made the gearboxes for mine and Skip-A-Long, That was one design.

I had Charley Volker make me the Rolls-Royce gearbox, which is now the Western. I sold two of them to Sayres for his Slo-Mos.

All that came right here from Detroit. They're still using the same thing today - they might be made by somebody else, but they never change the design.

Stan hired some boat designer, some guy in the East. I was back in Oakland and Stan called me up. He wanted a gearbox. .And I says, "Sure, I'll build you a gearbox, just like the Peps." I came back and got everything started. He called: "How's the gearbox coming?" And I said, "I'm on schedule, how's the boat?" He says, "Terrible. My designer quit me." I said, "What kind of a designer have you got?" And he says, "Well, this guy is a real boat designer, and he built me a four-pointer." And I said, "Well that ought to be novel - I never heard of a four-pointer!"

I went out, and you should have seen it ...it was something else, even then. Quarter-inch aluminum everything: bottom, two sides. And it had demountable sponsons that weighed nine-hundred pounds apiece! We weighed 'em.

He says, "How 'bout you finishing this thing?" I said, "Oh! my god, I don't know anything about it." He says, "You can get it running." And I said, "Well, if you'll let me hire my men, I'll help you with it." So Ollie Meek and Bob Allinger, again, went to work on the Skip-A-Long.

Ollie Meek and Stan are buddies. All through high school, everything. Even in the Army! Ollie - he's one of the neighbors again. Then Ollie Meek married the Hills Brothers Coffee gal and that put him out of our class. He got a promotion. He's up in Dollar's class now see?

But Ollie was a real good worker and a hell of a nice kid.

I asked Stanley, "Do you sit in the back or in the front?" He said, "We don't know. The guy designed it and this is as far as we got." So I put it on a teeter-totter. With those 900- pound sponsons, and the teeter-totter behind the sponson, the damn' boat sat like that. The only place we could put the engine was as far back as we possibly could. And then the damn' thing was nose-heavy.

The boat was originally a round front. None of us knew how to make the front end, so we rolled it up there, to get some of the weight back. We had the first pickle-fork! Not because we knew what we were doing, but because we didn't know how to make it the other way! We couldn't form the metal...

We got the damn' thing so it half-way balanced. So we put the Skip-A-Long in the river, in Martinez, Calif. Fired the engine up, everything worked keen, but you couldn't turn that thing in San Francisco Bay, That four-pointer ran just like it was built, on rails. He and Ollie would pull like this, and the boat went just as straight as a die.

He says, "What are we gonna do now?" The only thing I could think of, I says, "We gotta make a three-pointer out of it:" So we filled the back in, and hung the strut on it, and put the rudder in the back, and by god he could turn it.

We got the thing so it would steer, and we said, "Well, we'll go East." No cowl, no seats, no nothing. Just a big aluminum box with an engine sitting in it and two boards to sit on. And we're going East racing, see?

We were good friends. My wife and his wife. They were good people. We just had lots of fun.

I think the fin was changed when I cracked it up, on the mile trial. Originally we had two fins on the Golden Gate, and it hunted, back and forth. We finally took one off, and eliminated that problem. When Fallon rebuilt it, he put a different fin on it. And it originally had a brass strut. Al's brother was a craftsman when it came to steel, and he made a forged-steel strut that was the most beautiful thing you ever wanted to lay your eyes on. He around it; it was all ground forging. That must have cost him time, three months, but it was a gorgeous piece of work.

Then we put a universal joint between the engine and the gearbox, and we never had any more gear box trouble.

It was just like the ocean. This (wind) was right up the river. Just terrible. Well, in those days they didn't stop the race. They didn't care whether you lost your boat or not.

There was some stipulation that you couldn't win the Gold Cup without going 90 miles! Whether there were any other boats in the race or not. When I was the only one running, I couldn't get it through my thick skull why I had to keep going! I kept asking, give me the flag!

You look around in this ocean and there ain't a soul! The last heat, I was the only one to show up for the start, and I still had to go 30 more miles! ,Up! and down! Ten times around. It wasn't fast. I didn't go any faster on the chute than I did in the corner! It just was chugging! Hell, the dashboard was hanging in the cockpit, the hood was up, the spikes were sticking through the deck!

We stayed below the Belle Isle Bridge, the first boat yard. We had our own crane. I just made it, botted on the slings, and "pfffstt," sunk in the water to here. It would have gone completely under.

Everything mechanically was working and he could get it around, wallow a little bit. We re-did the sponsons, took all that junk off, to turn. I call up my guy at Kay Industries in Detroit, and I said, "Jim Webster, I'm going to send you an all-aluminum box." This guy had a reputation for being a beautiful aluminum-maker. He worked on the aluminum dirigible — did you ever hear about that being made here?

His metal-bangers made this beautiful aluminum cowl that covered the engine. We got it upholstered and everything, all here in Detroit; we didn't finish the boat in California.

I was coming back and forth to Detroit from the West Coast. I did a lot of limited boat racing. We used to come back from the Coast with a double-decker; I'd sell 'em and race 'em all summer. I'm In and Miss Leading and Miss Kress and oh! I had all kinds of them. Whoever bought it, I named it for them and then I just drove it. We furnished this house with prize money that I made in the limiteds. Not the unlimiteds; there was no money there.

I stayed with them. We campaigned, and we won the Harmsworth.

Stan came back, and his dad knew K. T. Keller, so we had the Chrysler boat well. They made us this special place to put the boat. You just open the door and there's the river.

The damn thing didn't run bad, with the wheels we had. It was like a tank — you were safe in it. Stan liked it. "Boy," he said, "this is keen." It was nice and quiet; the engine was way behind!

It wasn't a surface-propper. It would wallow in the corner, but smoke down the straightaway. Just stand on it. That's one time we used everything the Allison had. We put about that much extension on a standard exhaust pipe and gained about 400 r.p.m.

We did all kinds of stuff with that boat. We never had any mechanical failure. Bolted the engine in, and the gearbox; nothing ever moved. We didn't have any crinkles in the deck... ¼", can you imagine? It ran a 100-mile race. Marathon. He won a Chrysler car.

Then we went back to Tahoe. They had their annual race up there. It's a big day.

They put the course at the south and of the lake. Stan lives at the north end.

So we said, "Well, if we run along the shoreline, that'd be the best, because if there's any trouble, we'll be in shallow water."

Ran the race. And, ah...I'm sure we won?

After, we were towing the boat back to Stan's house. The guy with the towboat... it's much shorter to go across the lake than go up the shoreline. And the boat sits very low in the water, with all this aluminum on it.

Up at Tahoe there must be 50 30- or 40-foot Gar Wood runabouts. Every one of those rum-runners came out to look at us. Here's old Skip-A-Long, damn' waves'd come along, 'stead of the boat going like this the wave goes like this and half of it's spilled in the boat, see? It wasn't a quarter of a mile and the damn' thing was so full of water it started this wallowing. And the more it wallowed, the more boats came over to see. And the harder this guy would pull. Pretty soon it backed up and pulled us (the tow boat), and we had to cut the rope. It was 600 feet where she went down.

We'll end our visit with Dan Foster at this point; appropriately, in view of the recent raising of Skip-A-Long after 35 years. While Skip was on the bottom, Foster was on the top. His remarkable career would include many other high spots:

	Starting a business partnership, Boyer-Foster Co.
	Launching young Bill Muncey in limited racing
	Driving the Ventnor Such Crust during 1950 while Arena, in a separate camp, drove his own design, Such Crust II. Foster won the Silver Cup.
	Driving Delphine X, more or less as a lark, at New Martinsville. He won — his only stint in a step boat.
	Installing a Merlin experimentally in Such Crust II, which he took to Lk. Mead at the end of the season.
	Next year, 1951, converting both Schafer boats to Merlin power.
	Relief-driving, on occasion, Hornet (51), Wha Hoppen Too ('54), Miss Supertest II ('56), and Miss U.S. I ('57).
	Driving Gale II while Lee Schoenith was in the army. Foster won the '52 Silver Cup.
	Driving sister-ship Miss Great Lakes II to victory at the 1953 Detroit Memorial.:
	Putting together the Tempo VII package for Guy Lombardo, and driving the boat with flair and great success in 1955.
	Managing J. Gordon Thompson's Harmsworth program: modifying the Griffons and setting up Miss Super Test II, which he test-drove.
	Crashing Supertest II at 200 m.p.h. in the mile trap.
	Now and then taking on a project for George Simon, in or out of the boats. Foster won the '56 International Cup the only time he drove Simon's first U.S. ("best rough-water boat ever built").
	Developing respiratory equipment that led Joe Schoenith to establish Gale Medical..
	Ironing out some bugs in Gale VII, powered by a 16-cylinder, 3300-cubic inch Packard. Foster spun a prop and sank, but Joe Schoenith thanked him for getting rid of the monster.
	Substituting for Bill Cantrell in Miss Smirnoff; Foster won a secondary race at Tahoe.
	Trying another mile, on his stomach in an outboard.
	Overseeing Simon’s effort to turbocharge a Merlin.
	Inventing and patenting an outdrive, which continues its promising development.

Foster was simply excellent. Even more than a great driver, he was versatile, talented, creative. Probably no one else in racing can match his accomplishments overall.

(Reprinted from the Unlimited NewsJournal, January 1985)

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