Word: midget
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bronco Bill" Schindler, favorite of eastern midget auto-racing fans, drove his bucking doodlebug in Hinchliffe Stadium at Paterson, N.J. last week, fresh from victory two nights earlier at a track about 40 miles away. The crowd expected him to win again. As king of the eastern doodlebug circuit (53 wins in 1947, 35 so far in 1948), Bill Schindler is one of the sport's big money winners...
Foolishness to the Foolhardy. With the $240 second money snugged away (for less than 15 minutes' work), Schindler went home, ready to drive again at six different tracks in the next seven days. With him, intact, went his reputation as the shrewdest of eastern midget drivers. After 16 years behind the wheel, Schindler knows what can and what cannot be done with the snarling little cars; foolishness he leaves to the foolhardy...
Like most midget men, Schindler does not agree that the crowd's lust for blood is the basis of the sport's popularity. In fact, attendance has been known to drop after a fatal accident. Critics of the sport have overlooked its obvious, uncomplicated charms. It is fast, hotly competitive, requires skill and nerve and, like most crowd-pleasing American pastimes, involves lots of noise. When half a dozen cars whine down the straightaway inches apart and fling into a screeching slide around a curve, the drivers brush lightly against the wings of death...
...Mare's best novels, The Return (1910) and Memoirs of a Midget (1921) are model achievements in mixing realism with a profound sense of the strange. His best stories, especially Seaton's Aunt, have been compared with Henry James's classic Turn of the Screw for their shivery revelation of supernatural influences that might be merely states of mind...
Sweden's Prince Bertil, third in line for the throne, arrived in Chicago for the Swedish Pioneer Centennial, crammed his 6 feet, 200 pounds into a midget racing car for a spin around the track at Soldier Field. He explained why he had not yet married at 36: "I take things very easily...