Nature Done Wright

Several years ago, I wrote a freelance article for The Record about a famous 1938 crash at the Ho-Ho-Kus Speedway.

I thought I would  post it again after a reader inquired about it. 

By Jim Wright

Last weekend’s crash at the Daytona Speedway may bring a touch of deja vu for North Jersey’s history buffs  — especially folks who remember a small racetrack in Ho-Ho-Kus.

    On the last lap of Saturday’s NASCAR race in Daytona Beach, several race cars collided, sending chunks of debris into the stands and injuring 33 fans, several seriously. 

    Nearly 75 years earlier at the HoHoKus Speedway race-car drivers Henry Guerand and Vince Brehm crashed,and Brehm’s open-wheeled vehicle crashed through a guard rail. Before the car finally came to a rest, it had killed two spectators, including a 10-year-old Ridgewood boy, and injured 13 others. 

   The accident, on July 4, 1938, was so horrific that car races were never held there again. All that remains of the speedway today is a street call

Aerial of the track

ed Racetrack Road, those big green exit signs off Route 17, and memories of racing car greats like Ted Hoirn of Paterson and legendary car-racing journalist Chris Economaki of Ridgewood.

     Unlike the Daytona Speedway, a modern 2.5-mile  track built for 200-mph auto racing, the HoHoKus Speedway was a half-mile dirt track designed for horse-racing. 

    According to author Gary Ludwig, who wrote a recent biography of champion race driver Tommy Hinnershitz, safety was a major concern back then — even if precautions were minimal.

    “The circumstances were that people going out like crazy men on a half-mile dirt track,” says Ludwig. “ Someone was bound to get hurt, and a certain amount of people were going to get killed.”

The crash

    Ludwig says the races started out as exhibitions on the horse tracks at county fairs, and when promoters discovered there was money to be made, they turned the exhibitions into pedal-to-the-metal races.
    “Drivers had to accept the fact that the equipment wasn’t the best, that you could get upside-down and lose your life,” he adds. “They didn’t have rollbars, they didn’t have seatbelts.  They wore those leather helmets that football players wore.”    

    Drivers did not want to be strapped into their open-wheel race cars because they believed that if their car flipped, they were more likely to die if  they stayed in the car than if they were thrown clear of it. 

    “What really scared the guys in the thirties was fire,” says Ludwig. “Tommy in particular feared burning to death because when a fire started, you couldn’t control it. No matter how fast the rescue guys got to you, you were gone.”

   Safety measures for fans at many of the tracks weren’t much better. They were, after all, designed for racing thoroughbreds, not flathead Ford V8s.

   Even though watching car racing in those days was dangerous and the Ho-Ho-Kus track was near the middle of nowhere, events there were quite popular.  More than 7,500 spectators were on hand for the races that July 4  — not bad for a town with a population around 1,500 back then. 

    On the same Fourth of July that the two pedestrians were killed at the track, a driver broke his right leg and suffered possible internal injuries after his car overturned.  

  “That’s why we went we went othe races  — in hopes of seeing accidents  – but they were usually minor,” says my friend and fellow Allendale resident Stiles Thomas, who grew up four miles to the north and went to the racetrack by train as a teenager in the 1930s. 

   “When the winds were right, you could hear the race cars in Allendale and smell them, too because they added castor oil to the gasoline,” he recalls.  “We could get into the racetrack free if we were accompanied by an adult, or we would climb trees on the peripheral part of the track. All the trees at the track were filled with boys watching the races.”

Ted Horn

  One of the top draws at the speedway — and in sprint car racing — was Ted Horn, a California driver  who relocated to Gasoline Alley in Paterson.   

    Taurtoisemotorsports.com recounts one of Horn’s races at Hohokus, when “before the race …, he walked the track, studying every inch.  Handsome, disciplined, well-dressed, and mostly fast, Ted was an instant crowd favorite.  … Horn won the first heat and the 30-lap feature, almost lapping the field.  It was a new track record.” 

  Horn came to embody that dangerous chapter of American open-wheel racing. The three time national driving champion who crashed in his very first race in 1926 , and died behind the wheel of a race car 22 years later. He is buried in Paterson’s Cedar Lawn Cemetery  — 10  miles south of the old Hohokus Speedway.

   The racetrack also launched the career of one of the most-celebrated names in auto racing, Chric Economaki.   As a young teenager in Ridgewood, he sneaked under the fence at the speedway to see the car races. He started selling a new weekly newspaper called National Speed Sport News there, and earned a  penny for every copy he sold. 

   Soon after, Economaki began writing for the publication, and eventualy became the publisher — and “the "dean of American Motorsports."

    With the rise of television, he became the nation’s leading commentator on auto-racing, appearing regularly on “ABC Wide World of Sports,”  and covering the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500. 

   Economaki died last September, at the age of 91.  Asked by a reporter one time if he raced a car, he replied he had — once, at age 16.

     “It wasn’t for me. It was a really frightening experience.”

Jim Wright writes often on a variety of subjects. His ghost story is “Phantoms of the Ramapos,” took place (among other locales) at the HoHoKus Speedway. 

The racetrack