{"id":459991,"date":"2003-08-01T19:00:12","date_gmt":"2003-08-02T02:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportscardigest.com\/\/?p=106146"},"modified":"2024-02-19T13:24:27","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T13:24:27","slug":"like-nobodys-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.supercars.net\/blog\/like-nobodys-business\/","title":{"rendered":"John Edgar – Like Nobody\u2019s Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Life & Times of American Sports Car Racing Entrepreneur John Edgar, Part I<\/h2>\n
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John Edgar poses with his favorite 4×5 Speed Graphic camera. The picture was taken with Edgar\u2019s new Leica M-3 that he had with him. This Labor Day weekend was one of the rare occasions when Edgar was at a sports car racing event and did not have at least one of his cars entered in the program. Les Critchlow\u2019s #199 Jaguar is seen behind him. Before Edgar got into sports car racing in 1948, he was a professional photographer trained in the Edward Weston style and, for a while, shot wartime Hollywood pinups. Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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John Campbell (\u201cJohneegar\u201d) Edgar, age 14, with his father, Edwin Earl (\u201cEE\u201d) Edgar, age 45, at the Edgar family home in Troy.<\/p>\n

Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Edgar was our name. One of my earliest memories of my father is this\u2014tall, bald, glasses, at the wheel of a car with a long blunt hood with fins going around it. I liked to draw pictures of us going fast down our street in Toluca Lake. We sped around the corner where Lon Chaney lived and went over to the big studio by the river where Bing Crosby worked. The car had funny headlights that folded up, and the dashboard was a lot of little metal circles that looked like whirlpools, and the leather seat smelled good when I buried my head in it so the sun wouldn\u2019t shine in my eyes. When my father drove the car, he laughed and I did too. My mother drove it sometimes, and when she did, she looked like one of the movie stars we used to see at Lakeside Market. The top went back and the wind blew in, and we called it \u201cThe Cord.\u201d It was 1938 and I was five.<\/p>\n

John Campbell Edgar, my father, was a star salesman then. He sold commercial kitchen equipment in Los Angeles that was made at a factory his father and some other men founded three decades before in Troy, Ohio. One of them was named Hobart, and that was what they called it. They first manufactured electric coffee grinders and then meat slicers and food mixers, and their consumer machines were called KitchenAid. We had one of the big chrome plated mixers in our house that I used to sit on like it was a horse.<\/p>\n

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John Edgar\u2019s 1937 Cord 812 parked in front of his house in Toluca Lake, near Warner Brothers studio. The front-drive car was built by the Auburn Automobile Company in Auburn, Indiana. Fewer than 150 of these cars were made in 1937, the last year of manufacture. Edgar\u2019s was the prize of this San Fernando Valley neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

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John Cambell Edgar of Troy, Ohio, age 19, as a graduating senior from The Taft School, a college preparatory in Watertown, Connecticut, 90 miles from New York City. His plan was to go to Yale and study literature, but his father intervened, and John instead attended Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where he graduated in 1925 with a BA in Philosophy.<\/p>\n

Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before we moved to California, we lived in Troy where my father grew up. He was a wild sort, the only child of Edwin \u2013 everyone in town knew him as \u201cEE\u201d \u2013 and Bessie, who taught at the old brick schoolhouse. \u201cJohneeger\u201d, as he was called then, loved cars right from the start, being born about the same time they were. His first was a Mercer when he was still in college. And he rode a motorcycle. He always told the story about how he hit a pig with his Henderson and went flying over the handlebars and down a gravel road on his bare palms. Later, he had a hopped-up Model T with a Rajo head that went like a bat out of hell. When he married my mother, GiGi, he bought a Chrysler Crown Imperial roadster and used it to tow the outboard hydroplanes that he raced on rivers all over the Midwest. That is before he drove the car through a farm fence one night after a Roaring Twenties party. He was sharp in the boats and went on the national trail, racking up points towards a championship by the time my brother was born and I was due. The end of his outboards came on Biscayne Bay in Florida. Leading the 1932 speed regatta, a wind gust lifted his hull and blew it high and over, dropping him out to the water. The boat came down on top of him. All of his ribs were broken, and he lost a kidney \u2013 but he would never lose his love for speed.<\/p>\n

After moving to California and buying the Cord, then moving back to Ohio right before the war, then back to California again in 1943, John Edgar, whose father had died two years before and left an inheritance, was one of the first to own an MG TC in 1947 when they started coming over from England. His was red and came from a shipping batch of 20 other red MGs\u2026 all used the same ignition key! And he loved driving it. He was also riding motorcycles again \u2013 this time an Iskenderian-tuned, speed trophy-winning Triumph Tiger that only made him want something faster. The answer came from where his MG did, across the pond. He had Britain\u2019s Vincent HRD factory build him what was to be its first \u201cBlack Lightning,\u201d and John asked American speed traps rider, Rollie Free, to break the record with it at Bonneville. Everyone knows the picture of the guy in bathing trunks laid out flat on the bike \u2013 Rollie\u2019s innovation for setting a world\u2019s flying-mile record 2-way average of 150.313 mph for unfaired motorcycles in September 1948. It was great for my father. He immediately de-tuned the V-twin from alcohol back to gas, slapped on fenders and saddle, and rode the record bike on the street. I got the Triumph, with my brother, Jack, rounding out our riding trio on an Ariel single. What a dad we had.<\/p>\n

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John Edgar, at age 28, in his #S166 hydroplane race boat. Burning methanol and castor oil, these 2-stroke, 4 cyllinder outboard \u201cpowerheads\u201d of 1000 cc were among the first engines used in midget car oval racing, springboard for future race car champions such as fellow Ohioan, Sam Hanks. Edgar piloted these boats, running as many as four separate classes, from 1928 until 1932, when he had a major flip-and-crash while leading a race on Biscayne Bay at Miami, Florida, breaking all of his ribs and causing him to lose a kidney. He was in contention for a national title at the time.<\/p>\n

Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In no time, John Edgar was looking again to four wheels for thrills. He had his motorcycle pal, Ernie McAfee, install an Arnott blower on the TC, making it, in my father\u2019s hands, the fastest MG at El Mirage dry lake in October of 1948 and a feisty demon at local hillclimbs. A year later, John was driving a drophead Bugatti, importing Italmeccanica superchargers from Italy, and \u2013 along with dozens of other McAfee-inspired modifications to the MG \u2013 the Arnott was replaced by an intercooled I.T. blower, and the MG entered in the Santa Ana blimp base road races in June 1950. Two months earlier, at the inaugural Palm Springs Road Races, my father had watched Ernie\u2019s friend, Bill Pollack, drive the hell out of his own MG, so John asked Bill to race his at Santa Ana. The entrant-driver duo of Edgar and Pollack was soon off and running on a string of mighty MG conquests. In the annals of John Edgar\u2019s involvement with American sports car racing in the 1950s, it was only the beginning.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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John Edgar on his 1948 Vincent HRD Black Lightning. Rollie Free set the world unfaired motorcycle speed record of 150.313 mph on this HRD at Utah\u2019s Bonneville Salt Flats on September 13, 1948. Edgar owned this motorcycle for many years, and rode it on the street regularly. Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At this point in his story \u2013 lest we lose sight of the man while seeing perhaps too much of his machines \u2013 John Edgar requires deeper characterization before going further. Although bystanders often saw my father as a joker and wastrel, he was indeed a brilliant thinker able to understand the complexities of mechanics and engineering that escaped many peers who, like he, could afford the cars and costs of amateur competition, which road racing in most of the \u201950s was. Despite what could appear to be a decade-long spree of free-spending on his behalf, my father had to balance the assets of inheritance and his own shrewd investments against galloping expenses of campaigning racecars and winning trophies, and he did it with astounding acumen. In addition, whether by design or not, he was helping build a solid foundation for our sports car racing of 50 years ago that would benefit participants for decades to come, as we will see here in his quality of cars and drivers and, ultimately, his funding of Riverside Raceway. Also, not forgotten by those who knew him well and relayed to those who did not, John Edgar had the fever for racing that makes the sport \u2013 in its best of form \u2013 so enjoyable and rewarding.<\/p>\n

The Edgar MG, with mounting recognition, knocked the socks off California\u2019s sports car crowd. In the hands of Pollack and former dirt tracker, Jack McAfee, MG #88 was pure dynamite, but my father typically tired of it and advertised the car for sale in June 1951\u2019s Road & Track. He asked only $4,500. But buyers were looking for newer stuff, and the lag time was enough for the non-related McAfees, Ernie and Jack, to convince John to go forward with their ultra-modification plan that included special enveloping bodywork by the master, Emil Diedt. Sleek and eye-catching, the result debuted at Palm Springs in October 1951, and \u201c88\u201d quickly gained the reputation as a giant-killer, even racing toward the next decade under new owners. The car was finally crashed and burned for a movie scene in Stanley Kramer\u2019s On The Beach. Like so many outstanding specials of those times, this was a gem lost through hands that knew no future.<\/p>\n

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John Edgar, a new member of the budding California Sports Car Club, in his personal road car, a 1947 1250cc MG \u00d2TC\u00d3 with Arnott supercharger. On this day at El Mirage, Edgar drove it to a 93 mph run through the Russetta Timing Association speed traps, faster than any other MG at the meet, including the TC of Phil Hill. Edgar would later enter this car, prepared and further modified by Ernie McAfee and driven by Bill Pollack and Jack McAfee, in hillclimbs and road races as the famous number \u00d288\u00d3 that eventually carried an all-enveloping body designed by Emil Diedt. Edgar sold the car in 1954, to be raced by new owners. It was purposely crashed in Stanley Kramer\u00d5s movie On the Beach, while filming a race action sequence at Riverside International Raceway in 1958.
Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

In the early 1950s, it can be said of John Edgar that he was \u201cFerrari-driven\u201d \u2013 and he went after those powerful red cars with a craving. In 1952, he bought his first from Henry Manney, a 340 America, and at 4.1 liters, it was the earliest of the large-engine Ferraris to make the racing scene. Manney had brought the ex-factory team car to the U.S., and, with its fancy show treatment around grill and headlights, \u201cSerial Number 0032 MT\u201d was a beauty to behold. As soon as John got his hands on it, he took the 300-horsepower stallion out on Hollywood\u2019s Cahuenga Pass, a section of concrete freeway near Ernie McAfee\u2019s shop, and ran it up to 140 mph. This was exactly what he wanted \u2013 a Ferrari he could drive on the street and still have Jack McAfee race. John immediately built an enclosed hauler for his ruby jewel, got out road maps, and began entering it in races both in and out of California. In March 1953, \u201cBig Jack\u201d McAfee shot down Bill Stroppe\u2019s strapping Mercury-powered Kurtis with Edgar\u2019s 340 and cleaned the field at Palm Springs, then grabbed 2nd at Phoenix in May, and won again at Willow in November. As good as it appeared to be, the 4.1 was already getting race worn, and newer, better Ferraris were coming to the grid.<\/p>\n

With the forming of John Edgar Enterprises in October of \u201953, to umbrella expanding racing affairs, my father\u2019s Ferrari appetite intensified. Sports car competition had become serious business for him, even though the pursuit was still strictly \u201camateur\u201d in support. Through a developing relationship with Luigi Chinetti (Enzo Ferrari\u2019s man in New York), John arranged to buy the 4.9-liter, long-wheelbase, 1954 Le Mans-winning 375 Plus for Jack McAfee to drive in that year\u2019s 5th Mexican Pan-American Road Race, with Jack\u2019s buddy from hot rod days, Ford Robinson, as co-pilot for the 1,908-mile road race. This ex-factory car (s\/n 0396 AM), victorious at Le Mans in the hands of Froilan Gonzales and Maurice Trintignant, was both beauty and beast. Its V-12 power, rated 344 bhp at 6500 rpm, was considered staggering in those days and, unlike standard 375 MMs, the 375 Plus\u2019 transmission was designed in unit with the differential to give the car better overall balance while its de Dion rear axle promised optimum roadability for the major haul. The Mexican race was to be a grand adventure for my father in his 53rd year, and he had long planned for it. Two years before, \u201cto scout the way,\u201d he took my brother, Jack, on a wild 4.1 ride, screaming down the Pan-American Highway as far south as Mexico City before both car and driver were exhausted by the ordeal and too many cantina stops. At one point, they drove under a hay wagon, emerging heads down on the other side\u2026throttle on!<\/p>\n

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Geraldine June (\u201cGiGi\u201d \u201cJerry\u201d \u201cGerry\u201d) Edgar, age 45, standing in front of her husband John Edgar\u2019s Diedt-bodied MG TC Special #88, driven in this day\u2019s Main by Jack McAfee to finish 1st in class and 4th overall. Gerry was well known at the races as social coordinator of John\u2019s racing activities. This was #88\u2019s second outing at Palm Springs.<\/p>\n

Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Working night and day throughout early November 1954, John\u2019s 375 Plus, sporting a factory-mounted extra fuel tank for the arduous 5-day race, was further made ready by McAfee, pumping up muscle to 380 bhp. My grandmother\u2019s adored \u201941 Cad limousine, \u201cTillie\u201d, would serve as conspicuous hauling vehicle for spares, with a spanking new GMC pickup towing the Ferrari to the southernmost point of the race where it would start in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas. Meanwhile, my mother\u2019s powder blue Mercedes-Benz 300S cabriolet was fitted out as John Edgar\u2019s personal chase car. Ford Robinson, McAfee\u2019s co-driver, would shoot in-car film and sound for NBC News. Number \u201c1\u201d boldly adorned the big Ferrari\u2019s flanks while McAfee was named in decal as \u201cLa Bala\u201d (The Bullet) and Robinson \u201cEl Zorro\u201d (The Fox). But this elaborate, favored-to-win scenario had its tragic denouement. On November 19th, moments after running flat out at 208 mph on Day-1\u2019s notorious Tehuantepec Straight, the 4.9\u2019s rear end locked, presumably from an overheated differential bearing, pitching the Edgar Ferrari off the road and into the tangled Oaxacan jungle. McAfee survived with minor injury, but Robinson was killed.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My father was devastated. Death had always been near in racing \u2013 he\u2019d barely escaped it himself in his hydroplane accident. But this was right there, one of his drivers in one of his cars. An intermittently heavy drinker for years, John Edgar now went on a month\u2019s long bender of alcohol and depression that led him close to the grave himself. Why did he torture himself this way? Why did he at times drink to death-defying excess? For answers we invariably look to background and upbringing. My father\u2019s father, a circuit minister\u2019s son, was a severe authoritarian, critical to the point of obsession. Whatever John did, no matter what, was scrutinized and challenged by EE Edgar. Rather than let his son go off with friends to Yale where he might study toward becoming a writer, EE made him attend humble Denison, a short distance from Troy \u2013 so the elder Edgar could maintain a watchful eye. When it was time for John to join the Hobart staff, EE, a director and general manager of the firm, brought him in not as the junior executive he was so well qualified to be, but rather as underling to a clerk a foot shorter than the tall and brilliantly capable young lion. My father interpreted it as an act of meanness that he never forgot.<\/p>\n

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Jack McAfee drives John Edgar\u2019s #98 4.1-liter Ferrari 340 \u201cAmerica\u201d Barchetta (S\/N 0032 MT). This 340 was originally a 1950 factory 275 Sport, raced in 1951\u2019s Mille Miglia (Alberto Ascari\/Senesio Nicolini) where it was a DNF. Transformed into a 340, it then placed 8th at Le Mans in 1951 (Chinetti\/Lucas), 1st at Senigallia (GiGi Villoresi), before being shown at Turin with modified body and extra chrome around the grill. In June 1952, Ferrari sold it to Henry Manney, who brought it to the U.S. and sold it to John Edgar later that same year. McAfee won this 24-lap Main\u2014The Palm Springs Cup\u2014after an all-out battle with Bill Stroppe in the potent Kurtis-Merc, which retired with engine trouble on lap 20.<\/p>\n

Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

John\u2019s eventual breakaway to California in 1935 was to show EE he could sell Hobart equipment and beat his peers hands down at the game, and he did just that, becoming the Pacific Division\u2019s top salesman for 1937. Four years later, struck with pneumonia in his 70th year, EE died at his winter home in Miami Beach. The reality of it was that John would have the freedom and money now to do what he wished \u2013 and it was his task to decide. First it was photography, then investments and importing. Ultimately came the sports car racing scene, a passion spilling over into his business world.<\/p>\n

It was not until six months after Ford Robinson\u2019s death that John Edgar sobered up and came back into racing, buying not another Ferrari, but this time a Porsche 550 Spyder \u2013 one of the first in America \u2013 for Jack McAfee to drive in under-1500 cc races. The little silver car seemed a tonic after the Mexico crash, and Jack described the German speedster as being sheer pleasure to drive compared to wrestling the Italian made brutes through the twisty tests of American road racing. But, the big 4.9 Mexico car also was back again in the Edgar stable, having been in Italy for repair and re-body by Scaglietti. Jack found himself in this 375 Plus once more and making an appearance at Nassau in December 1955, to place only 5th and virtually finish the car\u2019s days under Edgar ownership. Years later, it would be re-bodied back to its original 1954 Pinin Farina silhouette and stand in a collection of revered Le Mans-winners.<\/p>\n

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John Edgar and his 4.1-liter Ferrari 340 \u201cAmerica\u201d Barchetta (S\/N 0032 MT). His elder son, Jack, took this picture during their \u201cscouting\u201d of roads used by the Carrera Panamericana, in which Edgar would enter a car (a Ferrari 375+) in 1954. This Mexico trip was Edgar\u2019s first tour with it. Jack McAfee would win Palm Springs and Willow Springs driving it for Edgar in 1953. Photo: Edgar Motorsport Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Inevitably, then, along came John\u2019s third Ferrari. My father ordered a 3.5-liter 4-cylinder car, convinced it would be one of the new 860 Monzas he could run at the 1956 Sebring 12-Hours. To his surprise the factory sent s\/n 0588 M, a prior design 857 S, reputedly the last one they had. My father was not a bit happy but entered the car anyway at Palm Springs in February. Jack McAfee drove it to 2nd behind Tony Parravano\u2019s latest threat from Maranello, a torrid V-12, 4.9-liter 410 Sport piloted by the 33-year old sensation out of Texas, Carroll Shelby. This mismatch of Ferraris at Palm Springs opened my father\u2019s eyes wide to a need for beefier red stuff than meager four-bangers.<\/p>\n

He also took notice that Shelby shone like a second sun in the California desert.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Life & Times of American Sports Car Racing Entrepreneur John Edgar, Part I Edgar was our name. One of my earliest memories of my father is this\u2014tall, bald, glasses, at the wheel of a car with a long blunt hood with fins going around it. I liked to draw pictures of us going fast down our street in Toluca Lake. We sped around the corner where Lon Chaney lived and went over to the big studio by the river […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":817532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263,18114,18330],"tags":[17152,18435,12006,18107,16791],"class_list":["post-459991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-car-culture","category-people","category-profiles-car-culture","tag-car-culture","tag-people","tag-john-edgar","tag-people-profiles","tag-profiles"],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Edgar - Like Nobody\u2019s Business<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the first of a two-part series, William Edgar explores the amazing life and times of his father, \u201950s sports car racing impressario John Edgar.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.supercars.net\/blog\/like-nobodys-business\/\" \/>\n<link rel=\"next\" href=\"https:\/\/www.supercars.net\/blog\/like-nobodys-business\/2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John Edgar - 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On this day at El Mirage, Edgar drove it to a 93 mph run through the Russetta Timing Association speed traps, faster than any other MG at the meet, including the TC of Phil Hill. Edgar would later enter this car, prepared and further modified by Ernie McAfee and driven by Bill Pollack and Jack McAfee, in hillclimbs and road races as the famous number \u00d288\u00d3 that eventually carried an all-enveloping body designed by Emil Diedt. Edgar sold the car in 1954, to be raced by new owners. It was purposely crashed in Stanley Kramer\u00d5s movie On the Beach, while filming a race action sequence at Riverside International Raceway in 1958. 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