Jack Mendenhall
By
Gone Racin’…Jack Mendenhall
I met Jack Mendenhall late in his life, when he had developed cancer and was struggling. He was one of those individuals that you wish you had met earlier and spent more time with. A gentle man, but possessing what my grandmother would call “a bit of the devil.” Jack was born to be a racer and he was tenacious about the sport all of his life, although he never made a name for himself. Some men are blessed with talent, money, sponsorship, luck and knowing the right people at the right time. Others have poor equipment, struggle for money and sponsorship and run into the kind of people that we call bad luck. Winning and losing and the statistics that we use to determine who were the best racers, does not tell the whole story. In Jack Mendenhall’s case, winning and losing were only a small part of this man’s life. Jack was born on the West side of Santa Barbara, back in 1929, and grew up with the normal kids, when times were simpler and the town much more rural than it is now. He boasted that he was born in an ice cream store when his mother went into delivery while going for a treat.
His father had left the family, a common occurrence during the Great Depression. Jack was raised by his mother and her family, and grew up using the name Jack Hartley, until he met his father. His boyhood was spent in Santa Barbara and later in the Santa Ynez Valley, and he grew up with a rugged handsome look that was dynamite with the ladies. He had a linebacker’s build, blue eyes and blond hair, with a hint of danger and charisma that beguiled nearly everyone he came into contact with. There were few people that didn’t like Jack, and this caused him a great deal of anxiety. “Why don’t they like me,” he would say to me, as if his total worth in life depended on just that one person. Growing up without a father had made him very sensitive to being rejected and he would do anything within his power to be liked and loved. He excelled at baseball, basketball and football, and anything to do with an automobile. He loved to work with cars, on cars, racing cars and collecting cars. His nickname was “Cadillac Jack” for his love of those sleek finned beauties of the 50’s and 60’s.
He watched the Jalopy races at the Thunderbowl in Carpenteria, and the oval track races at Santa Maria. He participated in the very first organized drag race at Goleta, near the airport, in 1949. He would eventually go oval track and drag racing and develop a sponsorship with the Andersen Split Pea Soup Restaurant in Buellton. He named his dragster the Split Pea Special and that car is now in the Edelbrock Museum in Torrance, California. A replica of Jack’s Jalopy car, built by Pete Van Eiderstein, was in the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, in Pomona, California. Jack loved to attend the reunions promoted by Hila Sweet, Parnelli Jones, Walt James, Carmen Schroeder and others. Jack was talented. He was smart. He could have done just about anything that he set his mind to, but this was the era of the Depression and World War II, and all that he had was his wits and that special charm. He also had that special love for cars, but he would have been a success anywhere. He graduated from high school and went into the Navy where he became an aviation mechanic. Three years later he left the military and married his high school sweetheart.
Jack may not have had much money at the time, but he was blessed with oceans of charm and he made friends with everyone. Bill Olivera of Valley Automotive Service hired him to run the service department. Mendenhall bought a new tow truck, made contacts with the Automobile Club of Southern California and won the rights to tow cars on the long and lonely highways of the Gold Coast. He eventually opened up his own business, the Buellton Garage. He and his wife were the proud parents of two children, Mark and Gloria, and business was booming. He would often say this was the happiest time of his life, as he immersed himself in his garage, built a quartermidget for his son, and started on a second racing career. The early 1960’s brought Jack a great deal of success on the dragstrips and circle tracks. He was doing well on tracks such as Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, San Fernando, Riverside, Bakersfield, Fremont and other California tracks. He won his class at the U.S. Fuel and Gas Championships in 1960. He set a record at the Bonneville Salt Flats driving the Pea Soup Special. In the mid-‘60’s Jack restarted his circle track career, placing 2nd in points for the Championship at Santa Maria. Jack would also go on to race off road in Baja and other areas for many years, forming a partnership with James Garner, the actor.
If the good times had continued there is no knowing just how good Jack Mendenhall could have become behind the wheel of a racecar. But men are measured by how they handle the bad, as well as how they do with the good. In a dispute with the IRS, he lost his business and nearly all of his assets, and his marriage ended. Jack loved his wife until the day he died, but that “little bit of the devil” in him caused him to love too many ladies for his wife to accept. He hadn’t intended to hurt anyone. It was never his intentions to do that, and perhaps if he had set narrower goals none of the failures would have ever occurred. But Jack was driven to do the magnificent obsession. If he decided to do something it had to be Grande, not just ordinary. He ran into opposition everywhere, even from his friends, because he could never quite see things in small terms. He would show his friends his drawings for a ten-mile long race course and sports complex at Stateline, Nevada, which he was trying to get Gary Primm to invest in. All of his dreams were just a little bigger than his friends could accept. He had lost almost everything he ever had in the IRS foreclosure and the divorce. But he still had his dreams. It was strange how he could make friends with people. Rich, famous, poor, unknown, it didn’t seem to make any difference to Jack. He met Wally Parks, founder of the NHRA in the mid 1990’s and struck up a close friendship. He counted Vic Edelbrock Jr, Ed Iskenderian, Andy Granatelli, John Force and a list so long that no article could enumerate them all.
Without his garage, Jack used his people skills and mechanical ingenuity to help a man create and develop a method to make the Open and Closed signs that you see on many small businesses. He loaded up his car and started out across America to redeem himself and see the country. He avoided the large cities and traveled the back roads of the country, and selling his signs in small shops and stores. His love of cars and the car culture was so great that he would re-invest his earnings in old signs, antiques, globe faces and gas pumps and haul them back to Buellton. This was more than a business, it was therapy and it was rebuilding his life in a new way. He now went out more often and boasted that he had been in every state except Alaska and Vermont. He met men and women of the car culture scene and made strong friendships. All that he had left from his many businesses and land holdings was a lot in Buellton overlooking a creek, and it was all but uninhabitable. With the help of his friends and family, Jack began to build up this lot. They brought in old junkers and removed the engines and oil pans, and then placed the cars on top of each other next to the creek. Jack put the word out to builders and county crews that he would welcome any fill dirt that they needed to get rid of. The lot began to look more presentable and Jack purchased an old one-roomed wooden building that had been used as a house of worship. They built fences, walls, garages and a small home above a garage for Jack. The Gas Pump Museum was being created just as Mendenhall had dreamed it.
Jack joined the Gold Coast Roadster and Racing Club and loaned out his new Museum, filled with the treasures that he brought back from him numberless trips to the heartland of America. He went back to dry lakes land speed racing, and to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where he set a record and entered the prestigious 2 Club, for those racers who set records over two hundred miles an hour in their class. He helped to create the Dry Lakes Hall of Fame and Gas-Up Party, which honored those who created the sport in America that we call Landspeed Racing. Each year since 1992, famous and in(famous) racers from around the world show up at his Museum to honor those selected to be that year’s honorees. Jack and his friends and family have been collecting racing and car culture artifacts for a quarter of a century and the Museum is a tribute to the spirit of men and women who feel the need for speed. There are more than 12 garages on the premises, with over 600 globe faces; most of them mounted with lights on the wall. Some are rare, and others are reproductions, but they show the many gas companies that existed during the early part of the last century. Will Scott was Jack’s right hand man and guardian, and Evelyn Roth the creator of the website, www.oilstick.com that portrays the glory of this unique vision of a very unique man and his ideas.
In 1997, Jack approached my father and told him about his upcoming trip to Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada, to help do the security for Craig Breedlove and Richard Noble. My father, who did security patrols at Muroc in the early 1930’s, told him to call me, and see if I would like to find out what it was like to “eat and drink dust like they did in the old days.” Jack called and talked me into it. He could talk the “Devil out of Hell, and God out of Heaven,” as my grandmother used to say, and I found myself on the way to Northern Nevada along with Glen Laabs, Dave Marquez and Don Edwards. There’s something about car racing that is pure addiction and torture that is indescribable and yet sublime. There was no facilities to rent, little food and water, torturous heat, and sudden, bone soaking downpours, and when it wasn’t as hot as a pizza oven, it was colder than a dog’s nose on your hand during a blizzard. Parts broke, the wind blew, dust storms went right through you, and when it wasn’t hectic, it was slow, painfully slow. It took 7 weeks for Noble and Andy Green and the Brits to set the record, while Breedlove’s effort struggled heroically on. The day after the record, everyone was loaded up and ready to depart, and grown men cried. I had the opportunity to drive back with Jack and all the way home he spoke lovingly of the places he had gone and the people that he knew, and the women that he loved, and the cars that he had driven. He knew every mile of nearly every road that he had traveled. Some of those miles were painful and others were glorious and I knew that I was in the presence of one of those great racers that you hear about, and I never enjoyed “eating and drinking dust” with more gusto.