Jack Kelly interview from a few years ago

Jack Kelly passed away recently. As an honor to a departed racer I'll put this Bill Hoddinott interview on the website for your reading - to help you appreciate Jack and his passion for land speed record. The article is in two parts -- I'll put up the other half later on. Jon a/k/a Seldom Seen Slim

Jack Kelly, 71, is well known at Bonneville and El Mirage for his popular, gorgeous and FAST yellow P-38 belly tank lakester. Kelly & Hall has competed for several years in D and E Gas Lakester Class.

In recent times Seth Hammond has been dominant in the gas lakester classes at Bonneville, but at World Finals 2004, Jack achieved a dream by setting a new E/GL speed of 236.431, and being accepted into the Bonneville 200 MPH Club!

Jack has been a friend of Mike Waters of the Wilson & Waters roadster team since school days in Los Angeles. I wanted to ask Jack all about the tank, and Mike kindly put me in touch with him...

Bill: Jack, thank you so much for agreeing to an interview for Bonneville Racing News about Kelly & Hall Racing. People have seen yourbeautiful car around for years, and want to know the story behind it. I'd like to cover your whole hot-rodding life, but first, who's the Hall
in Kelly & Hall?

Jack: Sure, Bill, it will be a pleasure. I married my wife Jerry in 1959, and her family are the Halls. She is a co-driver of the car, and our son Paul is also getting into it. But beyond that, Jerry's dad and I were very close; so much so that when he passed in a car accident, he
had me named in his will. And I put a lot of that money into our first racecar, the '34 roadster. So there are several reasons for "Kelly & Hall Racing".

Bill: Mike Waters told me you and he go way, way back in Southern California hot-rodding.

Jack: Yes, we knew each other in junior high school days in southwest L.A. I took auto shop in high school, crazy about cars you know. I had a '32 Ford roadster, '40 Ford coupe, and a '50 Merc. After graduation, I took a job in the fiberglass department at Douglas Aircraft Co. But
very shortly, I was drafted into the Army. Went off for my infantry raining, and after training they shipped me out to Korea. Just as I got there, the combat part of it ended!

Bill: Your luck was holding! And I see you had all the good cars everybody loved.

Jack: Right. Pretty soon I was discharged. Back home to L.A. and Douglas had to hold a job for me. Returned back into the fiberglass shop, where I stayed for about 18 months. But what I really wanted was to be a fireman, so I looked around for an opening. I obtained one with the City of Vernon Fire Department in the meatpacking district of east Los Angeles, and I stayed there 26 years.

Bill: It seems that quite a few Bonneville racers have a background in the fire departments around L.A. Yourself, Mike Waters, Dana Wilson, my Ardun friend Monte Osborn, and Don Francisco from the old days.

Jack: That's right. But my career was cut short by a heart attack in '83, and I had bypass surgery in '84. But that worked out fine, and in '85 I went to McDonnell-Douglas Helicopters in Culver City as a fire inspector; and stayed there to '94 when I really did retire. All my
life I kept a home shop and did fiberglass work for customers. I specialized in Corvette parts and also did race car and boat pieces, that sort of thing. One thing about being a fireman is that you work several days at the station around the clock, then have several days off. That's why so many firemen have small businesses on the side.Jerry and I have been in the same home in Manhattan Beach for 41 years now.

Bill: Did you get involved in racing early?

Jack: Mike and I both raced boats. I had a crackerbox, and crewed for him when he had his hydroplanes in the '60s. We both did a lot of desert motorcycle racing after that for years.

It happened that Mike and I went to the SCTA 50th Anniversary Picnic in Riverside. All the famous old-timers were there, a lot of well-known cars, and we just had a great time. I think right then and there we decided we wanted to get some of this.

I looked around and found a car that was running in Street Roadster class. It was actually a '34 Ford three-window that someone had cut the top off, and the body was channeled below the frame. It had a gas Flathead in it and did about 120 mph. It really wasn't a legit car for
the class, but it was so slow nobody cared, and they were letting it run.

I worked on this car for a while and turned it into a modified roadster by making a streamlined nose for it. By '90 I had it running, still with the gas Flathead, and got it going 136 mph. In '91 I really finished it, and painted it yellow. Mike Waters was helping with the engine, and after another year or two I went all the way and got Jim Stevens to come on board. Jim is a wizard as everyone knows, and soon the engine bumped me up to 154, only one mph off the record. So we ran this a while, but of course an all-out Flathead is maintenance-intensive. And I was getting a little tired of working on it. I sold the '34 to Bill Carlson in '96 and he ran it for a few more years, later with a GMC engine.

In '94 the idea came to me to build a truly classic, traditional belly tank the way the earliest guys did after WW II. I did some homework and talked to some people, and found out that the P-38 310-gallon tank had been the preferred type. Maybe 15 of them had been made originally as lakesters, and they had been passed through many hands for years. This
tank is 12'6" long, and 36" in diameter. This is the ideal size, and can be used standard length if you really crowd everything in there. But I think it works even better stretched 20" in the middle with matching curvature. This gives you just enough more space to package things inside more easily, and the stretch doesn't spoil the looks.

Bill: Now this is really getting interesting, Jack! I have seen the old photos of Wally Parks and others with their heads sticking out of one. I've heard that it was a ton of work to get the baffling and support structure out of them, before you could use the aluminum shell for a
body.

Jack: Maybe, but you know I never did actually track down an original P-38 tank. So I can't comment about that.

Bill: How did you come up with the tank you have, then?

Jack: For a long time I went around to the aircraft salvage yards, and asked a lot of people. There were plenty of other belly tanks around, but they weren't what I wanted. No others had just the great shape of the P-38.

Finally, I fell in with a man named Dave Teer, who had the old tank known as the Scotty's Mufflers car. It was actually originally built by Jim Harber and Larry Monreal in the late '40s. I want to put that on the record because they deserve the credit. The car had originally been
a sit-up tank with your head sticking out; and by the time Dave got it, it had been converted to lay-down style where you just look out through a window. And according to the stickers on the body it had last been run in 1963.

Bill: Your car today is the sit-up style with your head in a rollcage, and a windshield.

Jack: That's right. From the beginning I wanted to have my head up in the air, even though it means more drag. I wanted to be able to see what was going on, and I didn't like the idea of being buried down inside the thing.

Bill: So how did you actually get your body built?

Jack: Dave had the Harber-Monreal-Scotty's car, and it wasn't exactly in great shape. The body was in a top and bottom half, and that's what I was interested in. Dave and I made an agreement that I could borrow his body to use to make a fiberglass mold, and in return I would make him a fiberglass body. So back I went to my shop with his aluminum shell, and
went through all the steps to make a female mold, then the male mold from that, so you can replicate your original. I did all this, and set things up so that I could make standard shells, or shells stretched 20". The first one I made was for Dave, and I made some extras to sell. I
made a dozen over three years all told.

Bill: Have you made any more since then?

Jack: No, I felt I'd done enough with that. A few years later I sold my molds to a company in NC. I heard later they were sold on to a company in MD, which offers these bodies for sale now. But that's all I know about it.

Bill: Okay, Jack, I guess that gets all the background out of the way; let's go into the full story of how you built the car in the next part!

End of Part 1

ARDUN TECHNICAL - WHAT MAKES IT GO

By Bill Hoddinott

"Ardun Technical - What Makes It Go" is a book of articles reprinted full size with permission from Bonneville Racing News and is a companion to "Arduns At Bonneville - Interviews With The Stars" which is also in print. Content begins with interviews with Zora Arkus-Duntov and George Kudasch, original Ardun co-designers in New York City in 1947; and continues with ABCs of Ardun-Building; Ardun-Building Hints by Clem TeBow and Don Ferguson Jr. on filling block valve pockets for better deck seal; Jack LaMare's home-made "Ardun" heads which set Bonneville records; Low-Bucks Blown Ardun Build-Up; Low-Bucks Blown Ardun Track-Tested. 40 pages, 11" x 13.5".

Author Bill Hoddinott of Chesapeake, Virginia is an Ardun racer at East Coast Timing Association and a journalist for Bonneville Racing News.

$29.95 plus $5 first class mail to the lower 48 states. Overseas mailing anywhere at cost. Checks (must clear) or Money Orders only, pls send to:

Bill Hoddinott
233 Haviland Rd.
Chesapeake, VA 23320
USA

Questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or (757) 547-7738. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

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