Boy watches 1950 race from tree, has been in love ever since then
LEBANON – That old elm tree is gone, now. Must have been 50 years ago that Indianapolis Motor Speedway purchased the last of the land north of the track, putting another grandstand on the spot where a boy named Jot once climbed 25 feet up that tree, crawled out onto the sturdiest limb and watched the rest of his life start to unfold in long, mesmerizing ovals.
Until someone got the bright idea to climb the tree, Jot and his brothers could only hear the cars of the Indianapolis 500. They grew up within earshot of the track, back when Lynhurst Drive was farmland and Offenhauser and Novi engines were revving Indy cars around the track. In those days a kid on a farm on Lynhurst could tell the difference between an Offy and a Novi, just from the sound of it, and when that unmistakable rumbling started up, the boys would start shouting: “Novi !!!! ” There were three boys in all, spaced 15 months apart: Bill and then Carleton and finally little Dale. He grew to 5-10, a three-sport athlete at Speedway High, but he was several inches shorter than Carleton, which is how he got his nickname. Back then, and we’re talking just before Hitler started his European rampage, Dale’s great-grandparents lived on a farm in Fountain County, west of Crawfordsville. They had a team of horses, and the biggest horse was named Lug. The smaller horse was Jot. Well, it was a large family, and the way Tom and Carson Toole kept popping out a kid every 15 months, Dale’s greatgrandmother couldn’t keep up. She took to calling Carleton, the bigger boy, “Lug.” Which means little Dale must be “Jot.”
So anyway, back to the tree. Back then, a board fence surrounded the track on the north end. Wasn’t much of a fence, maybe 10 feet tall, but stretch a few strands of barbed wire across the top and it did the trick. Turns out, Lug and Jot knew a girl whose family lived on a farm at 25th and Georgetown, down a cinder alley near the north end of the racetrack. Big old farm, and at the very end, butting up against those board fences, was an elm tree. And one of the branches of that elm tree, if you can believe this, it extended out the fence, so close to the track you could feel the wind as the cars sped past.
Hammer a few 2-by-4’s onto that tree, and voila: a stairway to heaven. Day before that race in 1950, Lug and Jot – Carleton and Dale – spent the night with a cousin who lived on 16th Street. Jerry Dotson was the cousin’s name. In the early morning hours of May 30, 1950, the three boys walked down Georgetown to 25th Street, found the tree, climbed that 2-by-4 stairway.
Jot was 13. He was exhausted. And he remembers sitting on that tree limb, waiting for the sun to rise.
“It doesn’t happen that way anymore,” Dale Toole was saying a few days ago, and isn’t that the truth? The bird poop, for example. Back then, a boy who used a stiff aluminum pole to clear 11 feet could win the 1955 Marion County pole vault and a halfscholarship to Butler. He’d land in a pit of sand – “And sand hurts!” Dale is remembering – and then have to work for his scholarship. At Butler, Dale’s job was to grab a bucket of warm water and a putty knife and walk the bleachers at Hinkle Fieldhouse, whose beautiful windows broke from time to time, allowing birds to roost in the rafters. It was Dale’s job to scour the bleachers for bird poop, pry it off with a putty knife, and scrub the bleachers clean with warm water.
Birds in the fieldhouse at Butler, boys in a tree at IMS … what a world, right? But it changes, and after watching three races in that tree – that first one was a real pip, a 60-second deluge of rain drenching Lug and Jot, canceling the 1950 Indy 500 at the 345-mile mark and making a winner of Johnnie Parsons – Jot came down from the tree and started to make some money on race day. In those days commerce wasn’t so regulated at the speedway, and a man could make a pretty penny renting cushioned seatbacks to fans sitting in those unforgiving old bleachers. A job like that, it required cheap labor to walk the grounds, hawking chairs, and Jot was willing. It got him out of that tree and into the speedway, didn’t it?
In 1958 the man with the chairs decided he was finished with the business, but Dale Toole figured: I can do that. For 36 years, until IMS realized it was missing out on a revenue stream, Dale Toole rented those chairs. But first, he had to make them – and he made hundreds, starting with 12-foot lengths of metal rod he purchased by the ton from Holiday Steel, which drove the rods to his home on the back of a flatbed and dumped them onto his driveway. Dale is telling me how he’d get a bolt-cutter and clip each metal rod in half, because each seatback required 6 feet of that 3/8-inch rod, and then he’d head to a local welder where …
“Hang on,” I’m saying. “You made those chairs by
“Well sure,” he says. “Me and a few friends.”
That was the world in 1958, a world where Dale rented 500 of those chairbacks for 50 cents each and did so well that he made more chairs, and more, and more, finally boasting a collection of 3,500 seats he stored in an old school bus, which he’d drive to tracks in Terre Haute and Salem and Winchester, and then to Dayton and Milwaukee and even Minneapolis-St. Paul. He worked about 100 races each summer, and his biggest money-maker was the Indy 500, where ol’ Jot met the demand by getting, shall we say, creative.
Dale Toole would tell those kids, maybe 30 of 'em, as he snuck them onto the grounds at IMS.
Renting out 3,500 chairs at a 21⁄2-mile track demands bodies, lots of them, and kids in Speedway knew: Night before the race, be at the high school at 10. Meet at the flagpole out front. Bring a bedroll and a baseball glove.
Gates opened on race day at 5 a.m., and to rent all those seats all over that track, Dale needed his army in place by 4. This is how he did it:
He rented a box truck – picture a long U-Haul, with the door in back that slides open – and picked up a few dozen kids at the high school, shutting them into the back of that truck and locking the doors and telling them to hush up in there as he drove his credentialed truck past the guards at Gate 9. Once on the infield near the second turn, kids were streaming out of that truck like clowns from a clown car, one after another after another, and they were good kids but Dale knew he better keep them busy. So he’d tire them out with a game of softball before telling them to get a few winks. Most slept in the back of that truck. Some slept under it.
On race day, after renting out the seats, the kids came back to the second turn and watched the race from the top of the truck. Those box trucks weren’t designed to hold dozens of kids on the roof, so Dale Toole would rent two basement jacks – the kind used to prop up a sagging house – and position them inside the box, under the ceiling.
Times were different. Back then, for example, it was nothing to be set up on a blind date. Driving his dad’s Pontiac, Dale Toole picked up a Hanover coed named Carole Hoshour at her parents’ home in Broad Ripple and took her to a movie, then to the bowling alley on 38th Street for a beer. That was 1961. They’ve been married 54 years, since shortly after Dale returned from a stint with the U.S. Army at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, back when there was conscription – what we call a “draft” – for military service. From there Dale worked the floor as a hog buyer at the Indiana Stock Yards near Kentucky Avenue and Harding Street, then got out of that business and into pharmaceuticals, retiring from Dow in 1996. In all this time he has missed just one Indy 500, the 1959 race won by Rodger Ward, when Dale was in California, where he’d transferred for his final three years of college and had finals that week.
These days, Dale and Carol have two kids and six tickets to the 2018 Indianapolis 500. A man gets to know a speedway after decades renting chairs and walking the grandstand after races, making sure he’s picked up every last one of those hand-made suckers. And in that time, Dale Toole came to decide the best spot to watch the 500 is high above Turn 1, five rows from the top of the Southwest Vista, where a ticket goes for $109.
Dale purchased those six tickets, knowing he and Carole would be there, and figured the rest would go to some combination of his two sons and five grandchildren. But what have I been telling you? The world keeps changing. Those Stock Yards where he once worked are gone, replaced by an Eli Lilly Plant. IMS shut down his chair rental business. Pole vaulters? Today they use sticks of fiberglass that bend nearly in half, rocketing them over the bar and onto 4 feet of gloriously soft foam below.
So, the world. It changes. The Indy 500 still draws a crowd, but doesn’t necessarily get into the blood of the younger generation like it did when Jot and Lug were boys. Dale has those six tickets for Sunday’s race, remember. Turns out, his kids don’t want to go.
“Well, whatever you want to do,” Dale says, and he’s smiling about it. He’s 81 now, and life’s been good to him. Go to the race, don’t go, it’s fine. He has a nephew in Kokomo who’ll be happy to attend, and anyway, Dale Toole knows what nobody else knows, what nobody else will ever know: The best seat in the house is gone, gone the moment IMS chopped down that old elm tree.