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By Gray Baskerville
Photography: The Hot Rod Archives
Thirty years ago, the flavor of the touring professional drag
racer was not soured by corporate correctness, sealed off by an army of
specialists, or overdone by megabuck budgets. Yesterday’s “dragabonds”
sojourned from track to track to match race-jets, rocket-powered go-karts and
fellow stockers, Gassers, Fuel Altereds, and diggers. These sideshows allowed
the racers to recoup some of the loot they lost competing at a “national”
event. Tommy Ivo led this parade of hired guns and was drag racing’s original
touring pro. It was during one of these booked-in shows that the
actor/dancer/singer turned fulltime drag racer pulled one of his patented
Tomfooleries.
“My act (shtick) was that of a spoiled millionaire playboy who
raced for a hobby,” Ivo remembers. “But that image had its drawbacks. No one
took me seriously or gave me credit for the 36 cars I built and drove, and all
the blown, unblown, gas and fuel engines I tuned and maintained during my
30-year drag racing career.” So he got their attention by playing practical
jokes.
“Broadway Bob Metzler booked a bunch of us into Union Grove
(Wisconsin). It was a two-day show that was rained out the first day. All the
guys went back to their motels and went to sleep except for me. I’m a night
owl, a practice I acquired early in my touring career. I would borrow a guy’s
speed shop or garage to work on my car after they closed up and went home for
dinner. There I was, wide-eyed in the rain-soaked parking lot with nothing to
do, so I came up with the great hood switcheroo. Almost all the racers had crew
cab dualies at the time, so while they slept, my helper and I went from truck to
truck exchanging hoods—a red hood for a black one or a green hood for a yellow
one. It took us all night, but it was well worth it. My only mistake was that my
prank had ‘Ivo’ written all over it, so Metzler got pissed at me because all
the racers were putting their hoods back on their trucks and not preparing their
race cars.”
Ivo’s life has been a mischievous mix of warp speed energy
combined with the money and imagination to terrorize or entertain those around
him. At three, Ivo’s innate stage presence and his ability to perform and
entertain emerged in his hometown of Denver—not Burbank, California, where he
has lived all of his adult life. “I could carry a tune like a 10-year-old and
soon found out that my skills as a song-and-dance kid pleased people.
Unfortunately, my mom’s arthritis and Denver’s cold winters were not
compatible, and my folks thought that So Cal’s mild winters would be of some
relief. So in 1943, when I was seven, we left Denver and moved to Los Angeles.
Even after we arrived in LA, my mom continued to drag me to all the talent shows
and people would tell her that I should be in pictures. It so happened that
Republic Studios was casting for a musical and was canvassing the area looking
for a kid who could sing and dance to play opposite Dennis O’Keefe. I fit the
bill, especially since I had lost my front teeth. The studio bypassed the
regular studio/agent drill, and I started making more money than my dad—Hans
Fredrick Ivo, a meat-cutter by trade.”
Ivo’s show biz career—a 19-year-long hurry-up-and-wait
occupation that ultimately featured more than 100 movie parts and 200 TV
appearances—had its perks. He was making plenty of money, and he had enough
time between gigs to spend it on a series of imaginative cars. “I credit the
German in me for my mechanical ability. I just remember taking things apart—in
fact, my bike was continually in pieces because I was always painting its frame
or changing seals, pans, or sprockets. In 1952, my girlfriend who lived across
the street gave me a bunch of new car brochures. The car I liked the best, the
one I thought was the slickest of the lot, was a Buick. I called it a ‘buck’
because I didn’t know how to pronounce ‘Buick.’”
Ever since the ’20s when brothers Bud and Ed Winfield began
manufacturing speed equipment and Indy great Frank Lockhart lived in the area,
the Burbank/Glendale region has been a hot rodding hotbed. One would think that
Burbank’s Burroughs High would reflect the locals’ speed and power history,
but that would be incorrect. “When I was going to Burroughs, the hot cars were
tail draggers, not rods. I did what all the rest of the kids were doing: I had
it nosed, decked, and painted a custom color. I even let a pal talk me into
racing it at Saugus.
Fifty-twos had those straight-eight engines and “Dynaflush”
automatic transmissions, and when I picked up my 66.66-mph timeslip, I sort of
freaked out. I gave up drag racing and concentrated on my acting career and
entering by Buick in local car shows. However, my tinkering tendencies got the
better of me. I overtightened the clear plastic fuel filter and cracked it. The
leaking fuel caught the engine on fire. I eventually sold the ’52 and bought a
’55 Century. The Century was as fast as the ’52 was slow, and I would lie in
wait at Bob’s Toluca Lake drive-in and finally wandered out to Pomona to see
if it was as fast as I thought it was. Not only did I win A/Stock Automatic at
Pomona, I broke the class record, too. Winning two trophies in one day was like
winning two Oscars, and it hooked me on drag racing for life.”
Acting is a feast/famine business even for a busy talent like Ivo.
“Although my work changed from small parts to starring roles, I still had a
lot of time to kill between gigs. I hung out at Bob’s and was there when Norm
Grabowsky would pull up in his T (Oct. ’55 HRM cover subject) and order a Big
Boy combo. I immediately asked myself, ‘Why not put a similar T together?’
Everyone knew that the desert northeast of LA was full of abandoned T bodies
that were free for the taking. All you had to do was to drive up to Palmdale or
Lancaster and start looking for square shapes. I eventually found what as left
of a ’25 touring body, but it had a Yucca tree growing out of the passenger
side. It must have been there for over 20 years. I had to cut the tree down to
get the body.”
Ivo’s drag racing success with his ’55 Buick made the engine
selection for his new T a foregone conclusion: He bought a warmed over nailhead
from a friend’s father. “I didn’t know diddly squat about engines, Ivo
confessed, “but I knew a guy who did—Max Balchowsky.” During the ’50s
and ’60s Balchowsky was a famous So Cal sports car racer who specialized in
building and racing Buick-powered “bitzas”—a bit here, a bit there.
“After I got the nailhead, I took it over to Balchowsky’s shop. He taught me
how to take it apart and put it back together again. He eventually became my
guru, but there were strings attached. The price for his help was that I did all
the porting and polishing on his cylinder heads.”
With the help of Randy Chaddock, Tony Nancy, and Balchowsky, it
took Ivo about a year to complete his T. With the top on it, he felt like he was
in an outhouse—hence the half-moon-shaped rear window opening, another
indication of Ivo’s off-beat sense of humor. “Young actors were really in
demand during that time, but I still found enough time to drive it out to Pomona
where it ran 104 the first time out. (The T appeared on the Aug. ’57 cover of
HRM.) I then smoked Grabowski the next weekend at Saugus and raced the car until
late 1958. It remained unbeaten in class, but it was a hassle to run.” Because
it was so fast (Ivo once won a Top Eliminator trophy at Lions Association Drag
Strip or LADS, later to become LIONS in Long Beach), the strip tech officials
continually hassled him to update the roadster’s safety features. His T was
essentially a show-winning street rod and not a racer, so Ivo fought back.
Throughout his career, his credo was “Do me and I’ll do you
one better.” Ivo’s answer was to build the first rat rod. His second T was
as safe as it was ugly—a former track roadster sporting a pair of huge,
foxtail garnished radio antennas and one of his dad’s meat cleavers
half-buried in the turtle deck. Again it was a prime example of Ivo’s sideways
sense of humor, and it had its intended effect. LADS’ strip manager Mickey
Thompson threw him out, saying, “We don’t allow jalopies in here.”
Ivo didn’t care. He ran the car at San Fernando, retired it,
and then went back to the street prowling the local drive-ins in his show T.
“I was sitting in the car at Bob’s one night when Don (later to be known as
“The Beachcomber”) Johnson came up to me. He said he had a dragster chassis
that Kent Fuller built and asked me if I wanted to put ‘that,’ pointing to
my Buick, in it. I answered, ‘I’ll put my motor in it, but I don’t want to
drive that thing!’ But once I saw it all together, I lost all of my sense of
fear and interest in my personal safety. I was going to drive that car. After my
first pass I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to have me one of those things.’”
Ivo’s first ride soon became the Daddy’s Auto Body Spl, (July ’58 HRM
cover subject), but time would prove that “Daddy’s car” was to be only the
beginning.
The next day, Ivo was camped out on Fuller’s doorstep waiting
for the budding chassis-builder to arrive. “My first question was, ‘How much
will you charge me to build one of those?’ Fuller turned out to be a very
interesting guy, a certified eccentric, but fun to mess around with. If he got
hurt, he went crazy and totally freaked out. I had a knack of making him hurt
himself. Both Don Prudhomme, who I had met though Skip Torgerson, and Tom
McCourry would tag along when I would go to his shop to see if I could foul him
up.”
Prudhomme was building a Buick-powered street roadster at the
time, and Torgerson told Ivo that he was a good car painter. “Prudhomme ended
up painting all my early cars and we became very close during our first tour,
but I’m getting ahead of my story. We finished my single-engine car during
’58 (the car feature was shot on June 9, 1958, by HRM’s ace photog Eric
Rickman), and it was perfect for the time. Rear tires (slicks) were always the
limiting factor, and the Buick developed just enough torque that I could leave
it in Second gear (with a pre-war Cad/La Salle three-speed) without smoking the
tires and run a better e.t. than the guys with the blown engines and direct
drives. C.J. Hart (the founder and manager of the legendary Santa Ana drags, the
country’s first weekly drag race) got pissed at me for doing wheelstands. He
said they were unsafe and threatened me with expulsion if I did it again. I put
some ballast on the front axle and still carried the wheels past the e.t.
lights. I was ordered out before I got back to the pits. The car ran a best of
9.16 at a little over 150, but it would run ‘50’ all day. The old San Gabe
dragstrip had a standing prize of a color TV if a racer could run 150 on gas and
back it up on the same day. Unfortunately, I had joined the Air National Guard
and was doing my three-month basic training stint in Texas when that offer was
made. But while in Texas, I got to stand next to Bobby Langley (the owner and
driver of the Scorpion, a famous ’50s and ’60s Texan Top Fuel racer) and
have my photo taken with him.”
It was during the late ’50s and early ’60s that Ivo earned
the nicknames Instant Ivo, Poison Ivo, and TV Tommy Ivo—the last moniker
signifying his growing fame on the boob tube. “I weighed 115 pounds at the
time and mixed my acting career with casual jaunts to the dragstrip. The studios
were clueless about my hobby, and I didn’t make any waves. I simply played
jerk, geek, or nerd roles and became the all-thumbs dufus who couldn’t walk a
straight line and chew gum at the same time, with names like Herbie or Haywood.
But at the drags, I was a totally different persona. I was Instant Ivo who raced
all the big names at the time—Lefty Mudersbach, Jack Chrisman, Ted Cyr—and
won. We were all competing in the National Hot Rod Association-mandated,
gas-only A or AA gas dragster class.”
Then tire technology took a major leap during the late ’50s
after Marv Rifchin (M&H) began producing scratch-built drag slicks, not
recapped passenger or truck tires. “The guys with the supercharged Chryslers,
Olds, Cads, and Lincolns were getting better, but I still thought a good-running
twin-engine car would be superior to the blown dragsters that were winning all
the big, national drag races.”
Ivo made his “two-motor” decision as early in 1959 and
commissioned Fuller to whip up a double-Buick-powered, gas-burning rail.
“First I made Prudhomme a deal he couldn’t refuse. I sold him my
single-motor car—no down and unlimited time to pay. He started with a Buick
and ultimately ended up with Dave Zeuschel’s blown fuel Chrysler. I had
previously borrowed the Scoville Bros’ blown Chrysler and had made the proper
motor mounts for the Hemi implant. When I talked Zeuschel into putting his
engine into Prudhomme’s car, little did I know at the time that I had opened
up a can of worms.”
The NHRA was still touting its no-nitro ban, so gasoline-burners
were the big thing in 1960. “With the tire improvements brought on by M&H,
we could use more horsepower, and using two motors was one of the ways to get
it. I saw Howard’s ‘Twin Bear’ at Bakersfield in ’59 and decided that a
side-by-side combination would transfer more of the car’s static weight on the
rear tires rather than a tandem design. But I did it differently. Howard had
simply turned one engine around. I reversed the engine’s rotation and ran it
backwards. We simply meshed double-wide starter gears on the flywheels together
and use a multi-disc clutch to directly drive the car through an offset third
member. The engines would torque ‘outside-in’ so the car would go up and
down when I cracked the throttle and not torque steer when I lifted. Better yet,
it ran nine-flat the first time out and then became the first gas-burning
dragster to run in the eights—and the first to run 170, then 180 on gas. Best
of all it handled great and was nearly bulletproof.”
The car was finished during the end of 1959 and raced locally for
about six months before it went on what would become Ivo’s—and possibly drag
racing’s—first, multi-stop tour. Ivo remembers that he got it running in
November and began his 12-stop tour in May (’60) with Prudhomme as his
crewmember. “After all the out-of-state guys like Don ‘the Swamp Rat’
Garlits, Setto ‘Post Toasties’ Postoian, and Chris ‘the Greek’
Karamesines came out to the first Bakersfield Smoker’s meet in ’59, the East
Coast strip promoters wanted the West Coast hot dog cars to do the same.
Unfortunately, guys like Art Chrisman, Gary Cagle, or Ted Cyr had jobs and
couldn’t make the scene. But being an actor, I could. Unless I was actually in
the process of making a movie, I had the time and freedom of choice to become a
touring pro, and unlike Garlits, I didn’t have to return to Tampa (Florida) to
run my speed shop. So I became the first drag racer to stay on the road for
months at a time, making a living going from track to track and earning $500 a
stop. I was lucky because my best friend Prudhomme was my helper and travelling
companion. Moreover the car didn’t need much maintenance, and my TV work
really attracted the crowds.
In fact, all the strip owners were astounded by the draw, when we
would wheel into a track like U.S. 30 or York, Pennsylvania. I was 24 at the
time but looked 16, and Prudhomme was all of 17. People came to see us out of
curiosity and couldn’t believe that these kids were the bad ass West Coast
guys to beat. And beat them we did. But during my 12-stop tour, I saw that there
was going to be a better business opportunity here (in California) and sold my
twin to Ron Pellegrini (Speed Craft Automotive) for $5,000 after I completed the
tour in September.”
There is an addendum to this story. Ivo borrowed his former twin
back when the winter of ’60 overcame the East. “Tony Nancy loaned me his
blown Buick, and we nearly broke the 190 mark on gas, but my heart was
distracted by another project.” One of the first guys he raced on its return
was his crew dude Prudhomme. “It was at LADS, and he was driving my old
single-engine car with the Buick in it. I beat him and he got pissed—you know,
digging his toe in the ground and biting his bottom lip. So I offered to trade
rides—he in my twin and me in my old single-motor car—and we worked it out
with Mickey (Thompson). It was a sucker bet. He got excited and smoked the
tires, and I beat him again because I knew both cars so well.”
What distracted Ivo was another commercial possibility. “I
became aware of the tremendous crowd appeal for the twin, and it got me
thinking: ‘If they like a two-motor car, they’ll love one with four
motors.’ Fuller built one more car and Pellegrini’s $5,000 paid for my
out-of-pocket expenses, less freebies, for the in-progress, $4,000
‘showboat.’” Problems immediately occurred. Fuller couldn’t handle
Ivo’s frenetic work pace and hyper energy. “I would come into his shop while
he was reading comic books and yell, ‘Let’s go!’ I was a slave driver, and
when I would go out chasing parts, he would stop work and return to reading his
comic books. I drove him crazy. This time I built a twin bank, in-tandem,
four-wheel-drive car with the front and rear engines chained together. The two
lefthand side engines drove the front wheels, and the two righthand side engines
drove the rear wheels. This arrangement, pairing what were essentially two V-16
engines, allowed both banks to torque inward and counteract one another.
Unfortunately, what I feared would happen did. Weight transfer from the initial
launch would unload the front wheels, and they would break loose excessively.
The second problem was that it weighed almost 4,000 pounds, so it wouldn’t e.t.
And while it would run upstairs, it was no winner. But the NHRA didn’t know
that before it was done. They were getting nervous. Their thinking was simple:
If my four-motor car ran proportionally as good as my twin, then the other guys
were going to build them. And if that happened, they might not be as well built
as my cars were, and they could start crashing through that era’s flimsy
guardrails. So they said I could only run it as an exhibition car, the first to
be so designated, but it broke my heart. In retrospect, it has became my
signature car.”
Meanwhile, the editors at HRM got a bright idea. Ivo was
co-staring with Cynthia Pepper on a TV sitcom by the name of Margie. In fact,
Ivo played Pepper’s bumbling boyfriend Haywood Botts, and the script called
for a gambling boat setting for that episode, hence the striped outfit and straw
hat. Why not, HRM’s editors reasoned, shoot Ivo’s four-motor car on the
Margie set and entitle the piece “Showboat”? There was a problem. Ivo had
never fully apprised the studio of his quarter-mile exploits. When Showboat
showed up on the Margie set, the fit hit the shan. “The studio bosses got
really pissed and banned me from racing. The ban put my other career on
hold—kind of. I hired Prudhomme at $25 a pop to run the car locally. In fact,
Prudhomme was all set to tour it back east in ’61 when his wife-to-be (Lynn)
said no, and Ron Pellegrini got the job of touring the car, since I was
grounded. I eventually sold it to Tom McCourry. He put a Buick Riviera-inspired,
Tom Hanna-formed body on it and renamed it the Wagon-Master.” But Ivo’s
quarter-mile purr-go-tory was short-lived. The Margie series was eventually
cancelled, and he was a free man again. Ivo was one happy dude. He quickly ended
his 19-year song, dance, and acting career and went drag racing as a
professional.
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