Word: oldfield
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...November 1902 Barney Oldfield was a brisk young sport who had made a fair reputation as a bicycle racer and just got a job with Henry Ford. When Ford perfected the automobile named 999, which he thought might become the first in history to go a mile a minute, he set about to select a driver for a five-mile race. Barney Oldfield had never driven a car, only ridden in one twice, but he asked for a chance to drive it. After learning to drive in the morning, he won the race in the afternoon, covered a mile...
...almost every sport there is someone whose nickname is "Wild Bill." "Wild Bill" Cummings got his from his father who was a racetrack driver from 1907 to 1921. Young Cummings was born within earshot of the Indianapolis Speedway, learned to distinguish Barney Oldfield's car by its sound, promised his mother that some day he would win the 500-mile race. He gathered speed slowly, first as a Western Union messenger boy, later as a taxidriver. When he was 16, he began driving in motorcycle races, graduated to automobiles two years later. He finished fifth in the 500-mile...
...duck (put out with no runs) in the second match, but the crack British bowler, Harold Larwood, had consistently shown a distressing disregard for the safety of opposing batsmen. In the third match he had struck and injured Australia's W. M. Woodfull and W. A. Oldfield. The Australian Board of Cricket Control had addressed a protesting cable to the Marylebone Cricket Club in London, governing body of the game. Said the reply...
...drove it sat on a high open seat wearing a heavy double-breasted coat. His face, protected by goggles and deprived, by a windmask, of the cigar stump which was already as much one of its features as a nose, looked like a death's head. Driver Barney Oldfield had left school to be waiter in an insane asylum, left the asylum to be a bicycle racer, left his bicycle to work in the Ford auto factory. Last week Barney Oldfield, now 53, was at Daytona Beach, Fla., as was Sir Malcolm Campbell with his Blue Bird...
...Barney Oldfield, after seeing Blue Bird perform, said he planned to beat Sir Malcolm's record with a 32-cylinder car built like an inverted canoe. Unlike Oldfield, who could not even ride a bicycle until he was 17, Sir Malcolm Campbell learned to drive a car when he should have been in school, learned about motors by tinkering a second-hand motorcycle. When he inherited £250,000 and a seat on Lloyd's (where his life and car are insured for a total of £20,000), he continued to experiment. In 1909 he built an airplane...