The Vault
REMEMBERING “SMILIN’ CLYDE” SCHUMACHER

Just how he got to that point is an interesting tale in itself.

Schumacher’s first race was in 1957 at Gordy’s Outagamie Speedway in Apple Creek. “I had a 1948 Ford four-door sedan and I had fifty dollars invested in it tops,” quipped Schumacher. “I was running a filling station on Newberry Street between Kimberly and Appleton. Schmidt Oil owned the station. I was leasing it. One of Schmidt Oil’s men, Art Schmidt, stopped in the station one day. He said to me, ‘Firestone store is going out of business over on Wisconsin Avenue. Let’s go look that thing over and see if there is anything you’d like to sell here at your service station.’ I was going to junk out my Ford at Valley Auto Parts.”

Schmidt and Schumacher wound up buying out all of the parts from that Firestone store. “We put up a big sign that everything was for sale for $1,” Schumacher said. “I kept that Ford, and the money we scraped together from that sale helped me turn that Ford into my first race car.”

Schumacher was assigned the number 71 by the track scorers. “There were that many cars back then you got assigned a number,” he said.

Schumacher credits many of his speed secrets to Alan Pingl, a member of another pit crew. “Alan gave me some tips with setting the points on the distributor and she ran just like a charm after that.”

Like many race teams in the late 1950s and 1960s, Schumacher got fast and learned simply by trial and error. “We’d run a fifteen-inch tire on the right rear with forty pounds of air. We’d run a small, seven-inch tire with three pounds of air. We just tinkered with stuff and figured it out after a while.”

Early in his career, Schumacher struggled for a bit in the slower first heat before he got to run with the big dogs in the fourth heat, which normally featured the fastest qualifiers of the night. “After a year or so, I finally got fast enough to get into the fourth heat with guys like Bucky Wagner, Bob Wester, and Don and Bob Bennett. Don was Bob’s brother. I remember Donny had a rear end from a taxi cab in his racer. And thus, he had a huge advantage for the gearing ratio. It took them three nights before they figured it out. They wanted to DQ him and we gave him credit for being that much smarter than
us.”

Schumacher took his racer to compete at 141 Speedway in Francis
Creek and Oshkosh Raceway before getting involved with KK Sports
Arena. “Oshkosh had absolutely huge crowds – I remember that,” recalled Schumacher. “You had to be there two hours early to get a seat. It was a very good deal. I set track records there. I got the fast time thing down.”

“I was racing Gene Wheeler’s car at Oshkosh – it was a Dodge Chrysler product. I got Gene to hold the flag for the national anthem. After the parade lap, we handed off the flag to the pit steward. I took an extra lap afterward at full speed. I about rolled the car and Gene is screaming, ‘Slow down, slow down!’ That was worth the whole ball of wax.”

The fastest car Schumacher ever had was a ’56 Pontiac, which was head and shoulders quicker than everyone else for several weeks in the early 1960s. “This was a car owned by Al Piette, and he bought it from some guy in Wisconsin Rapids,” said Schumacher. “We dusted them at Apple Creek bad.”

As a result, Schumacher’s wife, Joan, and Terry Besaw’s wife went up to talk to the club president, Orv Koury. “They were mad because they were keeping my winning pay from one night earlier. They were tearing us down week after week,” Schumacher explained. Koury wound up sending the wives certified letters banning them from coming into the races. Through it all, Clyde kept on smiling.

With no local track to race at, Schumacher took a ride to visit Connie
DeLeeuw at some farmland he owned near Highway 55 and KK in Kaukauna.

DeLeeuw had the land. Joe Van Daalwyk had the construction company.

Schumacher had the racing plan. In 1962, KK Sports Arena was built out of spite. The track consisted of a quarter-mile, dirt oval in its first season. The crowd seating was built into the hill. Schumacher parted ways with Van Daalwyk and DeLeeuw after just one season. Although Schumacher pulled out of any type of management/ownership role, he continued to race at KK Sports Arena for a few different car owners over the years, including Al Piette, Gene Wheeler and Terry Besaw. Schumacher was the first driver locally to tow his racer on a flatbed-type race hauler. “That was a pretty big deal back then, because pretty much everyone else hauled their race cars to the track with a tow bar,” said Schumacher.

When he wasn’t racing upward of four nights a week at times, he also
helped raise five kids and even played trombone in a five-piece Dixie band called Bob Gordon’s. “We had a blast over the years racing with the guys,” said Schumacher. “Whichever driver got fast time, they had to always buy the first round of drinks for everybody at the saloon afterwards. Then whoever won the feature bought the second round.”

After the bars closed, Schumacher would invite everyone to his humble abode in Kimberly. “Heck, those guys would tow their cars and we’d have five or six race cars lined up and down our street. Even though we’d mix it up on the track, we’d party hard and drink beer a lot of times until the sun came up.”

Schumacher was one of the best when it came to time trials, often nailing fast time and breaking many track records at ovals across Wisconsin. Races were handicapped in the 1960s, and the fast timer usually had to start from “the back of the bus” in the last row. As such, a driver really earned his feature wins. Other drivers would often sandbag, or intentionally qualify at a slower time, in an effort to land a spot in or near the front row.

“Glen Bessette was a nice guy, but was a terrible sandbagger and everyone knew it,” said Schumacher. “I mentioned something to him once and he just laughed about it. So I took extra pride when I’d pass him from the back to beat him.”

With his winning ways, Schumacher had fans who were kids but also
some ladies as well. “Women were always sending him letters in the mail with lip prints and perfume on them,” said Joan Schumacher, Clyde’s wife. “Apparently they didn’t know he was a happily married man with five children. We’d both laugh about it.”

Joan Schumacher once won a Powder Puff race for women in the 1960s. “The prize for winning the Powder Puff back then was a bottle of wine. Problem was by the time I got off the track, they already had the bottle of wine drank! We had more fun than a barrel of monkeys. It doesn’t seem like we ever were home. Looking back I don’t know how we did it.”

The highlight of Schumacher’s career at KK Sports Arena was beating the legendary Dick Trickle in a 50-lap feature in 1968. “They had twin 50s that day,” Schumacher recalled. “I won and then crashed out on the second lap of the second 50-lapper.”

Schumacher won sixteen out of 18 features on the dirt at Shawano one year. He also scored sixteen clean sweeps in one season, netting fast time and winning both the heat race and main event all on the same night. With his success, Schumacher was sometimes a target from drivers who were hot under the collar during the heat of the battle.

“I recall at Oshkosh one night, one Joe Crass from Maribel came after
me,” Schumacher chuckled. “He went after me through the back window of my car. But I grabbed him by the neck and told him he wasn’t in a real good position to do that.”

Compared to the era in which Schumacher found much of his success, the modern era of stock car racing has become very expensive. “It wasn’t much different back then – it was all relative,” said Schumacher. “I do remember breaking even one year. I always split the prize money with my car owners with a 50/50 split.”

Schumacher was out of dough toward the end of his career. “I wasn’t
even going to race my last year, and I went to my buddy Cliff Wydeven – he was an insurance guy. I told him I didn’t have the cash to race. I told him I needed five or six grand just to get a new car built. Cliff opened a drawer, and there were stacks and stacks of 100-dollar bills. Wydeven said, ‘Take whatever you need to get your car on the track.’ He was a great sponsor.”

Following Schumacher’s retirement in 1968, JJ Smith took over the
number 30 car – the Terry Besaw-owned Ford Torino Schumacher helped prepare. Smith won over thirty features with that racer.

Schumacher’s last win was in a Legends race at the then-renamed WIR during the Dixieland Challenge in 1992. He drove Russell Keberlein’s sportsman car. “That was a lot of fun, and I can say I won the last ever race I was involved in,” he said.

Schumacher has fond memories from his fifteen-year racing career. “The camaraderie was great – we had wonderful friends,” he said. “Even though I was a fourth heat guy, I would mingle and talk with the first heat guys. It didn’t matter to me. Some of those faster guys thought they were better than others. Not me. We used to stop at Vic’s all the time in Bonduel after the races. We’d stop there with the Trudell clan out of Appleton. Just fun times all the way around.”

Schumacher was known to bust out his trombone and strike up a few
other pals with instruments. “One Saturday night, we all started playing When the Saints Come Marching In. We walked out on Main Street and the whole bunch of us paraded into another bar across the street. We just had a blast.”

As of this writing, Schumacher remains healthy. His advice? “Keep
smiling and don’t let this world bother you.”