Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine Issue 1014 | Page 13

T

he Rock Inn serves no food (just ice-cold beer) so the
group has brought their own roast chicken, mashed
potatoes, white bread and gravy they have cooked on
a faded yellow stove in their “clubhouse,” a converted
repair garage a few blocks away. Once everyone has
settled down with a paper plate and a drink or two,
the fun begins. Tall tales, hunting stories and a form of gin rummy
with unintelligible rules explode into life. The ringleader of this rowdy group is a tall man in his late 70s wearing a grey hat and a large
silver belt buckle. Everyone in the dimly-lit Rock Inn knows him,
although outsiders could be excused for not recognizing one of the
top American racing drivers of the 1950s to the 1970s, Lloyd Ruby.
Ruby is a quiet man with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, born
in Wichita Falls on January 12, 1928. When he was 17 he started racing Harley Davidsons and Indians on the dirt tracks that dotted Texas and Oklahoma. He did well, winning much-needed prize money.
His father owned a repair shop which paid the bills, but left no spare
change for hobbies. Ruby quickly progressed to midget racing, which
was blossoming in the late 1940s. His first car was a homebuilt with
a Ford V8 60 engine owned by local businessmen Abe and Meyer Raben. Ruby remembers his first drive in an Offy midget, “I lucked out.
The first time we ran it was in San Antonio. It was the championship
down there, and I accidentally won it.”

He did well enough to progress to other teams, eventually
landing a ride with Bob Nowicke, who ran a body shop in Chicago. Nowicke plugged Ruby into a Kurtis-Offy and he responded
by winning 91 races and three championships in 1948 and 1949.
“We’d run every night, sometimes twice on Sundays,” Ruby recalls,
“He (Nowicke) would just turn me loose with it. I’d run Indianapolis on Friday night, then I’d tow to Chicago late that night. He
had a garage, and I’d pull in and go to a bedroom in his office and
go to bed. By the time I woke up he and his brother would have the
car completely stripped down and they’d put in a fresh engine every
week. We’d run there in Chicago on Saturday night, then Sunday
I’d take off again.” Ruby towed and maintained the car himself on
the road. Midget racing paid good money, and Ruby ranged from
dirt tracks in Dallas to a board track in New York (and all tracks in
between). He began wearing a yellow straw Resistrol cowboy hat
which became his trademark.
A stint in the Army hampered his career from 1950 to 1952,
but he came back with a vengeance, winning Oklahoma City Fairgrounds championships in 1950, 1955 and 1956. He spent time
in Florida, where there was a lucrative midget circuit, traveling and
sharing lodging with another struggling Texan named A.J. Foyt. “If
I was doing good and he wasn’t, I’d loan him money. If A.J. was doCarGuyMagazine.com

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