Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is our good friend, Charles W. Chuck Bryant already, Chuck, your good friend. How are you feeling right now? I'm fine, a little hot, I'm Schwitz. Yeah, Chuck is bright red right now. Everybody, it's kind of weird looking. Thank you, Martin and for that are super fans. Yeah, thank you. But he's not a super fan. He's a buddy. He has been. He he was such a fan that he actually became a friend. He's a friend that we haven't met yet. Yeah, So, Chuck, take us back to in the time machine. Yes, the way back machine. You're ready, Here we go. Okay, all right, Josh, I'm ten years old, knee high to a grasshopper. Disco is dead. Margaret Thatcher is the Prime Minister of England. I take issue with the disco being deadline. I don't know that disco ever died. Man, You cannot make the argument that all modern R and B pop soul is all Disco Disco is alive. Margaret Thatcher is the Prime Minister of England. Ronald Reagan is in office, just as Jimmy Carter has exited. Walter Cronkite resigned from the CBS Evening News desk. That was a said day. The first AIDS case was made public in California. Have you ever seen in the band played on? My brother worked on that. That was a great made for TV movie. It really was. It was really good and he had a great experience working on that. So find people in that movie. Major League Baseball has just gone on strike in the summer for what will be the first of eighty times over the next five years. Right, So America is depressed, but not for long, No, because one Mr Burt Reynolds is about to dash across the silver screen in a little movie called Cannonball Run. Great, great, great movie. It was a great movie. I haven't seen it in forever. I think I probably saw it in like seven. It was one of the first movies we rented, along with Beverly Hills Cop. Very hokey and corny, but still beloved. What's What's Yeah? Everyone takes it as a comedy because it is a comedy. But this is not to say that it started out as a comedy. Actually, it was supposed to be serious and Burt Reynolds part was originally written for Steve McQueen, who died before he could film the movie. It was supposed to be a serious movie and it didn't turn out that way. Why would anybody want The Cannonball Run to be a serious movie? Well, because it was in fact based on a real race. What what true? Based on a real race? As you know? Yeah, I I do know after reading this article. I think I had heard that before, but I had no idea the details. I didn't either until I wrote it. This was really amazing, Like I have. I'm just gonna come out and say I have a man crush on a seventy year old Mr brock Yates. He is a cool dude who I would have loved to have hung out. I bet he's still a very cool dude and hung out with in a strictly platonic sense. Yeah, maybe a little making out, but aside from that, Yeah, I bet he's still away cool guy. I get that impression he is. He Um, this is this is kind of what I gathered about brock Yates. From researching this and reading your article, go and say who he is. He was a pretty much the premier automotive journalist of his age. Eventually. Yeah, but I think he started out as a journalist and something of a gonzo journalist, I take it. Um, But yeah, he he was very well known and respected in the field. Um. And in the early nineteen seventies, America was at a fork in the road, if you will speak, and brock Yates represented one direction and that was the out just go and if you die, that was your number was up. Kind of mentality behind the wheel that is, yeah, you know, damn the torpedoes full steam ahead. Right on the other side of the road. At on the other side of the fork was a guy named Ralph Nader who was still there on that other Um. He for those of you who don't know who Ralph Nader is, he's running for president a couple of times. Um. He got George Bush elected in two thousand four. Yeah. Um. But he's also a very dedicated consumer watchhot He has for many years lived in a tiny, little one room apartment. He uses a hot plate. Um. He just really he lives his very meager life so no one can say you're corrupt because he goes after everybody else. And in the nineteen seventies, in the early nineteen seventies, he was going after the automotive industry, right. He went after He wrote this book called Unsafe at Any Speed and it was basically about have you read it? I've read parts of it through research and stuff. Yeah, okay, Um, so you know then it was basically about how the automotive industry was producing these incredibly dangerous vehicles and at the time, we didn't really have much of a speed limit. So uh as as a result of his book, we like got seatbelts became mandatory, new safety designs had to be instituted by car Manufacturer's a big deal. Um, so America's at this fork in the road brock Yates, Dowle one and and Ralph Nader on the other and America went down the Ralph Nader I think what you're referring to is, uh the national speed limit. That's part of it, definitely, But I think even more than that, it's a more of a you know, the way you and I were raised, where like we could do anything we put our minds to, and we were special. I think that that came out of that collective decision to go towards safety rather than you know, fun at any cost, reckless, abandoned exactly, devil make care sure. But yeah, the national speed limit was definitely one part of that. Yeah, that was which was that has since gone up quite a bit in certain areas, of course, has but even more than safety. Do you know why they set the speed limit at fifty five gas consumption? Yes? Yeah, the the Arab oil embargo had just taken place. OPEC was like, hey, US, we're not real happy with you for siding with Israel during the Yam Kapor War, so we're gonna cut off your oil, and they did, and prices spiked and the US said, okay, we need to rethink our dependence on foreign oil. Had a huge rippling effect. But one of them was setting the speed limit at fifty five mile per hour, which is too slow. It is too slow, especially in the opinion of somebody like Brock Yates. I thought, you're gonna say, Sammy Hagar, Yeah, he can't drive. He's tried, he has, He's made a concerted effort, but it just can't out. He tried. I love that song. It wasn't I don't like to drive fifty five or I would prefer to drive faster. It was I can't d tried and it just doesn't happen. It was very explicit. Yes, so chuck, um, this this is nineteen seventy one. Brock Yates saw the writing on the wall that the speed limit was going to be reduced. America was becoming something of a mamby pamby yes um. And what did he do as a result? He uh, in nineteen seventy one, he took a trip across the country in a Dodge Van with three travel mates and he drove from New York to Los Angeles as a way of proving slash protesting. I believe his quote said something like this, good drivers and good automobiles could employ the American interstate system the same way that the Germans were using their auto bonn Right. So he wanted to prove that you can drive fast if you're safe, if you're a good driver, you can get to point a to point being a car and it's safe. Yeah, and you you said reckless abandoned. There was definitely a certain level of professionalism or um. The people who he considered good drivers were actually good drivers like he had to be good driver to drive fast. In his opinion, it wasn't just like everybody go as fast as you can. That wasn't the point, right, So he did so. He drove a two thousand, eight hundred fifty eight miles from New York to l A in forty hours and fifty one minutes, which is an average of seventy miles per hour. Yeah, which is pretty fast if you're talking about an average speed. Yeah, because that included stops. I think stops, uh you name it. So um, after that happened, I think it got a little bit of publicity, um, by word of mouth maybe the racing world. And there was a famous telegram that came I guess a month or so later. Yeah, I love this. Can I read it? Yeah? Uh. It says this constitutes formal entry by the Polish Racing Drivers of America and the next official Cannonball Baker's Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The drivers are Oscar Kovaleski, bred Nementcheck and Tony Adam Awakes. If we can find California, will beat you fair and square. So basically the gauntlet was laid and the Cannonball run was born, although, like you said, the official name has always been Cannonball Baker s to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy. That right, So who's Cannonball Baker. Cannonball Baker, Irwin G. Cannonball Baker was a He was famous for for pushing the limits limits on a motorcycle. Yeah. So he would drive from Canada to Mexico, from New York to l A on an old Indian motorcycle and we're talking starting in nineteen fourteen, right, So, like the old Indian motorcycle was basically a bike with a motor. Yea, that's exactly what it looks like, you know. Um, he actually had a pretty well deserved reputation for like his nickname and just the stuff he was doing, his endurance level. Apparently on one ride, uh, he came around a curve and was about to barrel into a herd of cattle that was in the middle of the road because it's nineteen fourteen, and um, he swerved to miss him, hit a pothole, flew off of his bike onto the ba back of a cow, which bucked him off and eventually landed in a ditch, got up and drove away. That is the stuff of legends. That's how you get a race named after you, my friend. Uh. And he went on to become the first commissioner of NASCAR, which I thought was pretty interesting. So there you have that. Nothing to do with Moonshine though, or did he I don't know, maybe, ye curious? So yeah, Yates wanted to pay homage to Cannonball Baker, so he named it after him, although he did shorten the name. Cannon Ball was two words for Baker, Yeah, for Baker, but he shortened it to Cannonball to avoid any illegal mess. Right. Lawyers advised him to do that. Yeah, I thought it was kind of weird. Well, anyway, so you have the Cannonball originally called the Cannonball Dash, uh, and then it finally became the Cannonball Run, which is how we know it today. Right. And thanks to the Polish drivers of America who laid down the gauntlet it was a real thing. They didn't They weren't the only ones to participate in the first official Cannonball. That first run he made in the van was considered like a preliminary test ro and it wasn't the first Cannibal because there was nobody competing with him, so this second one. Uh. There was the Polish Racing Drivers of America UM and seven other groups, including three vans. Uh. There was a huge motor home. There was an American Motors, a m x an MGB G T and a Cadillac Sadanderville. And this is probably the coolest part of this entire story. Yeah, I love it. Uh. This Cadillac was UM owned by an old gentleman in New York in Boston, in Boston and he wanted to And this happened back then it may still happen now, where you would contract someone to drive your car from one place to the other case you can't get it there. Richard Pryor contracted Dana Carvey and moving really great movie. Dude, I didn't see that one. I thought it was a stinker. It was good. It was good. So this old man put out an ad in the paper and I need to get my car to Los Angeles. And these guys answered it and said, we'll get your car to Los Angeles. And unbeknownst to him it was it was one of the entries. And UM, I think one of the stipulations was the car not be driven faster than seventy five miles per hour at anytime or in the dark. Oh is that the other one? And clearly they broke both of these because the Cadillac averaged seventy nine miles per hour, right, which means they were driving out a heck of a lot faster than that. I think they came in third to third place. Yeah, not not too bad, but I think they got the car there in one piece, and so good for them. They're like, here are the keys, pal, so, uh, go ahead and start with the first race? Where did it start? Where did it in? Well, it started in New York at the Red Ball Garage at midnight, I believe is when all of them started. Yeah, um, and this is what okay, novembeve uh And the ending place was a hotel in Redondo Beach what is it the Portofino in right, okay, which is from pictures I saw. It was a pretty lux little hotel. Um. And you didn't have to follow any specific route. He just got there any way you could, right. Basically the only rules were, uh, you could have as many drivers as long as the only one car, and you could leave at any point within the twenty four hour window. It wasn't like everyone started at the start line like a typical race, just like in the movie. You would punch a time clock for when you're starting time was, and then punch it again for when you arrived. And whoever won one and I believe there was no trophy at the time. It was only a fifty dollar entry fee. And then they donated two hundred apiece to charity. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. Why not? So apparently two days before the race, brock Yates had managed to finagle a Ferrari daytona brand new Ferrari daytona loner out of a out of an auto dealer. Um. And he had the car, but he only had himself. He didn't have a co pilot or a driver. Uh. And apparently he sent out all these invitations and a lot of two race car drivers, like legitimate race car drivers, and they were like, you know something, if somebody dies or something, that's gonna look really bad for the sport of racing, and I don't want to do that. And then, uh, one guy he had invited, Dan Gurney, who was a professional race car driver, had declined initially. UM. But he apparently UM was told by his wife that his dying father in law said you should go do this. Life is short. So Gurney contacts um Yates the day before the race and says, hey, can I still come? And Yates said heck yeah yeah, And that proved to be fortuitous because they won. They did can run, Yeah they did. They're winning time Josh was thirty five hours and fifty four minutes. Not bad cross country, not bad at all, and not Atlanta to l A, New York l A, which is further Yeah, because I've made it in thirty three hours from Atlanta to l A, have you. Yeah, that's way I've always done it. Three eleven hour days is how I schedule it out. I never time myself, but you know, I went and drove around the West for several weeks and lived in a van with the dogs and all that, and um, I would drive, like I think the longest I drove is a twelve hour stretch. Um that's about all I can mustard. Yeah, that's enough for me. Yeah, depending on how much coffee I drank or whatever, you know, then I could drive you know, six hours or twelve hours or whatever. But it's amazing the toll that just sitting in a car with your foot on the gas has on you, especially when you're driving that fast. Uh. Should we talk about some of the some of the things they preferred to do on the on the first race, please? They One of the common tactics that seemed like was to keep it slow in the Eastern Seaboard. Um, I think New Jersey and Connecticut, in Ohio and Pennsylvania. These states are notorious for for having some pretty hardcore highway patrolman. Yeah, still do. Yeah, Like you'll get pulled over for doing sixty five? Isn't that nuts to you? That is nuts. I can't imagine if you're getting pulled over for anything less than seventy two seventy five. In Georgia, by the way, everyone flies as fast as you can, as fast as you can get away with us. How fast two drives generally. Yeah. Even my my friend Derek used to say that the deal with Atlanta rush hour is everyone drives as fast as they can till somebody recks and then there's a been just stops. Yeah, it's pretty funny to think about that. So the trick was to kind of keep it slow on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Midwest, and then once you got to the Great Plains is when you really opened up, yeah, and made up some serious serious time. Yeah, they got it up to a hundred and seventy two. I think is how how fast they found out the Ferrari would go. Yeah. I think twelve speeding tickets total between all of the all the competitors. Yeah, between four the competitors. Four of them didn't get a ticket at all, So four of them split twelve tickets. And the famous quote l A Times it is like kind of a blurb of an article from Dan Gurney, Right, Yeah, Dan Gurney famously said, at no time did we exceed a hundred and seventy five, which is pretty cool. Yeah, So Chuck, that was the first one. And as with all cool things, uh, that also began. It's co option. News got out, word got out by little Yeah, the Sports Illustrated covered it, uh, and so did the Los Angeles Times. UM. And so when there was a second one, I think the following year there were a lot more competitors, right, Yeah, they had um twenty five entries a second year, and brock Yates finished second place, this time in a Cadillac Um. The third race, they skipped a couple of years, and it was in nineteen seventy five, and they moved it to springtime this time, and if Ferrari won the third race with Yates and Gurney behind the wheel once again. But I didn't know they won the third one. Yes, oh no, no no, no, I'm sorry. They beat Yates and Gurney's record time the third year. Yeah, by a one minute, right, but it was not in them, you're correct. So by seventy five, which is what the third one fourth one third one was invent? Okay, by nineteen seventy five, it's officially co opted. There's actually corporate sponsorship. The Right Bra Company placed three ladies in Pink in a limousine and apparently the driver fell asleep in Texas and rolled the thing and I guess rolled into a porter potty which tipped over and drenched the um the ladies inside with its contents and where exactly So by this time now you can see why Burt Reynolds would have chosen more of a comedic route than the Sharky's machine route. Yeah, well it wasn't Burt's choice. Let's should we move to the final year. Yeah, what happened was Brock Yates was pretty much finished with it, and he said, you know, it's run its course. He said he was worried that somebody was gonna die, although no one ever got hurt. No, but the the the roads in the last eight years had become much more congested. Um. He was ready to scrapped the whole thing. But he had a friend, director Stuntman. Hell need him, Hell need him? Or is it needed him? No, it's need him. And he was. He was famous for a lot of the early Burt Reynolds movies. He hid them Hooper, which is a great movie. Is it? I even seen that one? Are you kidding me? I kid you not, dude. I gotta get Hooper. That was the one about stunt Mean, you have to see My Blue Heaven though, all right, we'll get to that later. So he did Hooper, and he did um, the Cannonball Run and a couple of other of the Burt Renold's films. Yeah, they did a Smokey and the Bandit too. Brock Yates wrote that I'm sorry so uh over the place today we are how Needham says, you know what, Brock, I want to make a movie about the Cannonball Run, And so I think the best way to do this is if we stage another one and I participate with you as my partner, and they did. They did that in nine and they had a record forty six entries this time. And a lot of what happened in this race actually ended up in the movie. Yeah, there's some zany madcap stuff that was going on. Let's hear it. Well, Brock Yates UH and Hew need Him UH actually had an ambulance and Yates's wife, Pamela posed as a woman suffering from a condition and as a result, couldn't fly because of the pressurized cabin, so she had to be zoomed across the country at a hundred miles in the back of an ambulance that was their vehicle of choice. UM. And definitely they modified the engine UH and it killed the transmission, so I had to be eventually towed across the finish line, which I thought was pretty cool, right, And in the film that actually happened. Burt Reynolds and Don Deloise were the Needham Yates characters, and fair Fawcet was the was the wife. Didn't didn't what else happened that was real? Three drivers actually did pose his priests. I remember in the movie. It was awesomely it was Sammy Davis Jr. And Dean Martin drunk priest in the movie. But I don't know that they were posing. They really were. They were probably hammered. What else, Josh, I don't know. I haven't seen the movie in a really long time. All right, well, I got it for you. Then, Uh, there were in fact um scantily clad skin tight jumpsuits on a couple of ladies in a sports car. I read the opposite. I read that that was the right broad company that inspired that part. I read the opposite. We'll have to check that. All right, we'll do it. And then there was a wealthy entrant that had his chauffeur drive him in a Rolls Royce. And in the movie that was Jamie Farr played a middle Eastern chic. That's right, Clinger. Yeah, you know he and I are from the same hometown, Talita Tala. Is that why he always wore the Talita mud hints had and match. Yeah, and well he talked about it incessantly. He really was not. Yeah, and Tony Paco's hot dogs that he talks about all the time, real place best hot dogs. On the planet really had no idea. So those are just a few of the things that actually happened in the final Cannonball Run that ended up in the film. Um and a Jaguar driven by Dave Hines and Dave Yarborough one that year and they obliterated the time period with thirty two and fifty one minute, eighty seven mile per hour average, fifty speeding tickets that year. Well, there were forty two contestants. Yeah, so that was the last one, and it has spawned imitators over the years. Before the before Cannonball Run the movie came out, there were already imitators. Really. Yeah, there was one movie that came out in seventy five and two that came out in seventy six. You want to hear the weird thing about it. David Carriden was in two of them. He was in Uh, Let's see uh Deathmatch two thousand, Death Death Race two thousand, which was set in the future, but he was also in Cannonball exclamation Point, which is a farticle take on the Cannonball Run. And there was a second one that had Gary Busey in it, or third one that had Gary Busey, and it called the Gumball Rally, right, and that's that's a real one. The Gunball three thousand is still in existence. Is that European or in America? Well, they do both, and they're quick to say that it's not a race, it's more like an adventurous road trip. And then the lame tell him, yeah, tell him about the European version of the Cannonball runs actually too, you know why, because they call it the cannonball Run. They use that name, and this thing is not even a race. The goal of the Cannonball Run Europe is to stay as close to a sixty one mile per hour average as you can. And in two thousand and eight, a frigging smart car one Oh, talk about a slap in the face. Were brock Gates steady would have rolled over in his grave, he's rolling over in his Instead, he rolled over a smart car with his bare hand. If anybody could do it, Mr brock Gates could, my friend, So I think cannonball running, how fast have you driven? What's the fastest you've ever driven? Oh? I don't know, a hundred and ten. I actually once got a speeding to or no, you want to hear a weird story let's hear. I don't know if this will make the final cut or not because it's kind of long, but get this. So, my friend and I were driving from Atlanta to Charleston in my old Toyota Corolla. It was an eighty six Champagne colored Toyota Corolla UM and I was doing a hundred and ten on I twenty during a stretch where the speed limit I was doing twice the speed limit. I get pulled over by this guy in this car UM with a little dash headlight on it, spinning around and I pull over and this guy is just like a paramilitary cop and he's like, you're so dead. You're going to jail forever, right, And he goes back to his car and calls somebody, and this other guy comes out and he comes back. He's like, you're at least gonna lose your license. And he goes back and talks to the guy, who he said later was the sergeant on duty. And he comes back and he goes, you're gonna get a ticket of some sort. And he goes back and talks to the guy again and he goes, here's your license back. You guys drive safely now, and let's just go. You're free to go exactly. So what my friend and I are looking at each other like what just happened? But it was so surreal, and to this day, I wonder, have you seen pull fiction? Of course you have remember Zed. Yeah, I have the distinct impression that these guys were into ZED like affairs and something else was took precedent. I think my friend was He's not a good looking guy, so I'm thinking maybe they're like, we'll pass on these two. Oh, I got you. So they were going to get you back to the police station. And I don't think they were cops. Okay, what cop would not give you a ticket when you're driving twice the speed limit? I got you. Yeah, I got a story. Let's hear it. About four years ago, me and my buddy Scotty were doing it was actually the last TV commercial job ever did. It was a six Flags job and six Flags Massachusetts. Whatever that one's called six flags over in Massachusetts? Is it? I think it's a great America anyway. So we go up there to do this job and um, what kind of do it? Was New Jersey? But we have to drive, h yeah, we we we we drive. At one point my friend. We have like two days off while we were up there, and I had a friend in Vermont and the third Star Wars prequel was being released that friday, So I said, hey man, let's go up and see John Pendel and uh rent a car and drive up there because we had a camera truck. He said, cheerless, do it? So we ran. We rented a like a little Geometro whatever, the cheapest little four stroke engine car you could get. And we have a time limit because we have to make the movie. It's like a six pm showing. And so we're speeding through Vermont, like the hills of Vermont's lovely, and this little engine is like and we topped this hill and we see one of those signs that say your current speed, and it said your current speed and it blinked and went one oh two. And I've never seen a triple digit on one of those signs. So we just laughed and blaze right through it and made the movie. It's like call the police, and we literally we made it right as the movie was starting, and you know, the engine was like it was like ticking, it was red hot. And that that's my fast story. Well, if you have a fast story. We'd actually like to hear it. Here's the caveat. Don't go out and commit any kind of crime or act that includes fastness. Now, if it's already happened, then we'll hear about it. We'll tell you the email right after we get to listener mail, right, Chuck, Yes, Josh, all right, let's go, Josh, I'm gonna call this, uh second, the only time we've ever read a listener mail from the same dude. Oh, I don't know about this, Chuck, we have to This is the Hackster, Ryan Hack, my buddy. Alright, Uh, listen to the house History podcast, and I have a creepy story. One of the houses I grew up in as a kid had a hidden door. As you go to the basement, it's more or less just blended into the wood paneling. As you walk through the door, you came to an open area with some shelving and a workbench. There are a couple of old bike tires and some random parts still lying around. A guy names it, and a guy names it. Every once in a while, we'd hear what sounded like people working on their bikes and chit chatting, pounding metal, gears dropping, laughing, chains turning every time we'd go into the room. There was nothing weird weird. Later on we found out the history of the house. Turns out one of the previous owners was a couple that enjoyed by Viking and they died in a Viking accident and forgot to get the memo. So just thinking about it gives me chills. And this is from Ryan and uh, I'm gonna just go ahead and say that Ryan Hack has inspired me to exercise because he has a blog called Hacks first five k dot blogspot dot com where he started running in Lost Weight and is into it now. And he got me listening to another podcast called Two Gomer's Run a Marathon. I don't know that I'm entirely okay with you leading this extra life that I'm unaware of until you read a listener mail I know. But Two Gomers Run a Marathon is actually a really funny podcast. This these two guys that say they're Gomer's kind of nerdy and they're they're completely unathletic, yet they want to run a marathon. So their podcast goes through their trials and travails and it's really funny. They got a website called two gomers dot com. So well, Ryan Hack, since you got all those plugs and because you had to too listener mails read on there, you have to go contribute twenty five bucks to Kiva dot org on the Stuff you Should Know Team Chuck. You want to tell everybody else about that Kiva dot org. Go to the click on community and search Stuff you should Know Team Join our team loans twenty five dollars to a to someone in need. You can now donate two Americans. Yes I've heard. If you're a nationalistic or an isolationist you can still donate. But right now, as a press time, we have raised more than bucks in about ten days. And uh who has seventy Chuck? Uh the lousy cheap fans of the cold Bear quote unquote Nation. You know it's sad that guy's got way more fans than we do, right, way more hundred ten members on his team. We got a hundred and eighties so far already. Yeah, So way to go those of you and the Stuff you Should Know Nation who supported Kiva dot org so far. For those of you who want to get on the trolley, you can go to www. Dot eva dot org slash Team Slash stuff you should know, and you can become a member, and like Chuck said, you can contribute as little as bucks and you actually get that back if you want, sure, you can roll it over again or whatever. Yeah, so Chuck, that's it, right, that's it. If you have a cool high speed story, Chuck and I want to hear about it. Uh. If you have a great unicorn story, you know, we always want to hear about that. Sending in an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot com home page brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is our good friend, Charles W. Chuck Bryant already, Chuck, your good friend. How are you feeling right now? I'm fine, a little hot, I'm Schwitz. Yeah, Chuck is bright red right now. Everybody, it's kind of weird looking. Thank you, Martin and for that are super fans. Yeah, thank you. But he's not a super fan. He's a buddy. He has been. He he was such a fan that he actually became a friend. He's a friend that we haven't met yet. Yeah, So, Chuck, take us back to in the time machine. Yes, the way back machine. You're ready, Here we go. Okay, all right, Josh, I'm ten years old, knee high to a grasshopper. Disco is dead. Margaret Thatcher is the Prime Minister of England. I take issue with the disco being deadline. I don't know that disco ever died. Man, You cannot make the argument that all modern R and B pop soul is all Disco Disco is alive. Margaret Thatcher is the Prime Minister of England. Ronald Reagan is in office, just as Jimmy Carter has exited. Walter Cronkite resigned from the CBS Evening News desk. That was a said day. The first AIDS case was made public in California. Have you ever seen in the band played on? My brother worked on that. That was a great made for TV movie. It really was. It was really good and he had a great experience working on that. So find people in that movie. Major League Baseball has just gone on strike in the summer for what will be the first of eighty times over the next five years. Right, So America is depressed, but not for long, No, because one Mr Burt Reynolds is about to dash across the silver screen in a little movie called Cannonball Run. Great, great, great movie. It was a great movie. I haven't seen it in forever. I think I probably saw it in like seven. It was one of the first movies we rented, along with Beverly Hills Cop. Very hokey and corny, but still beloved. What's What's Yeah? Everyone takes it as a comedy because it is a comedy. But this is not to say that it started out as a comedy. Actually, it was supposed to be serious and Burt Reynolds part was originally written for Steve McQueen, who died before he could film the movie. It was supposed to be a serious movie and it didn't turn out that way. Why would anybody want The Cannonball Run to be a serious movie? Well, because it was in fact based on a real race. What what true? Based on a real race? As you know? Yeah, I I do know after reading this article. I think I had heard that before, but I had no idea the details. I didn't either until I wrote it. This was really amazing, Like I have. I'm just gonna come out and say I have a man crush on a seventy year old Mr brock Yates. He is a cool dude who I would have loved to have hung out. I bet he's still a very cool dude and hung out with in a strictly platonic sense. Yeah, maybe a little making out, but aside from that, Yeah, I bet he's still away cool guy. I get that impression he is. He Um, this is this is kind of what I gathered about brock Yates. From researching this and reading your article, go and say who he is. He was a pretty much the premier automotive journalist of his age. Eventually. Yeah, but I think he started out as a journalist and something of a gonzo journalist, I take it. Um, But yeah, he he was very well known and respected in the field. Um. And in the early nineteen seventies, America was at a fork in the road, if you will speak, and brock Yates represented one direction and that was the out just go and if you die, that was your number was up. Kind of mentality behind the wheel that is, yeah, you know, damn the torpedoes full steam ahead. Right on the other side of the road. At on the other side of the fork was a guy named Ralph Nader who was still there on that other Um. He for those of you who don't know who Ralph Nader is, he's running for president a couple of times. Um. He got George Bush elected in two thousand four. Yeah. Um. But he's also a very dedicated consumer watchhot He has for many years lived in a tiny, little one room apartment. He uses a hot plate. Um. He just really he lives his very meager life so no one can say you're corrupt because he goes after everybody else. And in the nineteen seventies, in the early nineteen seventies, he was going after the automotive industry, right. He went after He wrote this book called Unsafe at Any Speed and it was basically about have you read it? I've read parts of it through research and stuff. Yeah, okay, Um, so you know then it was basically about how the automotive industry was producing these incredibly dangerous vehicles and at the time, we didn't really have much of a speed limit. So uh as as a result of his book, we like got seatbelts became mandatory, new safety designs had to be instituted by car Manufacturer's a big deal. Um, so America's at this fork in the road brock Yates, Dowle one and and Ralph Nader on the other and America went down the Ralph Nader I think what you're referring to is, uh the national speed limit. That's part of it, definitely, But I think even more than that, it's a more of a you know, the way you and I were raised, where like we could do anything we put our minds to, and we were special. I think that that came out of that collective decision to go towards safety rather than you know, fun at any cost, reckless, abandoned exactly, devil make care sure. But yeah, the national speed limit was definitely one part of that. Yeah, that was which was that has since gone up quite a bit in certain areas, of course, has but even more than safety. Do you know why they set the speed limit at fifty five gas consumption? Yes? Yeah, the the Arab oil embargo had just taken place. OPEC was like, hey, US, we're not real happy with you for siding with Israel during the Yam Kapor War, so we're gonna cut off your oil, and they did, and prices spiked and the US said, okay, we need to rethink our dependence on foreign oil. Had a huge rippling effect. But one of them was setting the speed limit at fifty five mile per hour, which is too slow. It is too slow, especially in the opinion of somebody like Brock Yates. I thought, you're gonna say, Sammy Hagar, Yeah, he can't drive. He's tried, he has, He's made a concerted effort, but it just can't out. He tried. I love that song. It wasn't I don't like to drive fifty five or I would prefer to drive faster. It was I can't d tried and it just doesn't happen. It was very explicit. Yes, so chuck, um, this this is nineteen seventy one. Brock Yates saw the writing on the wall that the speed limit was going to be reduced. America was becoming something of a mamby pamby yes um. And what did he do as a result? He uh, in nineteen seventy one, he took a trip across the country in a Dodge Van with three travel mates and he drove from New York to Los Angeles as a way of proving slash protesting. I believe his quote said something like this, good drivers and good automobiles could employ the American interstate system the same way that the Germans were using their auto bonn Right. So he wanted to prove that you can drive fast if you're safe, if you're a good driver, you can get to point a to point being a car and it's safe. Yeah, and you you said reckless abandoned. There was definitely a certain level of professionalism or um. The people who he considered good drivers were actually good drivers like he had to be good driver to drive fast. In his opinion, it wasn't just like everybody go as fast as you can. That wasn't the point, right, So he did so. He drove a two thousand, eight hundred fifty eight miles from New York to l A in forty hours and fifty one minutes, which is an average of seventy miles per hour. Yeah, which is pretty fast if you're talking about an average speed. Yeah, because that included stops. I think stops, uh you name it. So um, after that happened, I think it got a little bit of publicity, um, by word of mouth maybe the racing world. And there was a famous telegram that came I guess a month or so later. Yeah, I love this. Can I read it? Yeah? Uh. It says this constitutes formal entry by the Polish Racing Drivers of America and the next official Cannonball Baker's Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The drivers are Oscar Kovaleski, bred Nementcheck and Tony Adam Awakes. If we can find California, will beat you fair and square. So basically the gauntlet was laid and the Cannonball run was born, although, like you said, the official name has always been Cannonball Baker s to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy. That right, So who's Cannonball Baker. Cannonball Baker, Irwin G. Cannonball Baker was a He was famous for for pushing the limits limits on a motorcycle. Yeah. So he would drive from Canada to Mexico, from New York to l A on an old Indian motorcycle and we're talking starting in nineteen fourteen, right, So, like the old Indian motorcycle was basically a bike with a motor. Yea, that's exactly what it looks like, you know. Um, he actually had a pretty well deserved reputation for like his nickname and just the stuff he was doing, his endurance level. Apparently on one ride, uh, he came around a curve and was about to barrel into a herd of cattle that was in the middle of the road because it's nineteen fourteen, and um, he swerved to miss him, hit a pothole, flew off of his bike onto the ba back of a cow, which bucked him off and eventually landed in a ditch, got up and drove away. That is the stuff of legends. That's how you get a race named after you, my friend. Uh. And he went on to become the first commissioner of NASCAR, which I thought was pretty interesting. So there you have that. Nothing to do with Moonshine though, or did he I don't know, maybe, ye curious? So yeah, Yates wanted to pay homage to Cannonball Baker, so he named it after him, although he did shorten the name. Cannon Ball was two words for Baker, Yeah, for Baker, but he shortened it to Cannonball to avoid any illegal mess. Right. Lawyers advised him to do that. Yeah, I thought it was kind of weird. Well, anyway, so you have the Cannonball originally called the Cannonball Dash, uh, and then it finally became the Cannonball Run, which is how we know it today. Right. And thanks to the Polish drivers of America who laid down the gauntlet it was a real thing. They didn't They weren't the only ones to participate in the first official Cannonball. That first run he made in the van was considered like a preliminary test ro and it wasn't the first Cannibal because there was nobody competing with him, so this second one. Uh. There was the Polish Racing Drivers of America UM and seven other groups, including three vans. Uh. There was a huge motor home. There was an American Motors, a m x an MGB G T and a Cadillac Sadanderville. And this is probably the coolest part of this entire story. Yeah, I love it. Uh. This Cadillac was UM owned by an old gentleman in New York in Boston, in Boston and he wanted to And this happened back then it may still happen now, where you would contract someone to drive your car from one place to the other case you can't get it there. Richard Pryor contracted Dana Carvey and moving really great movie. Dude, I didn't see that one. I thought it was a stinker. It was good. It was good. So this old man put out an ad in the paper and I need to get my car to Los Angeles. And these guys answered it and said, we'll get your car to Los Angeles. And unbeknownst to him it was it was one of the entries. And UM, I think one of the stipulations was the car not be driven faster than seventy five miles per hour at anytime or in the dark. Oh is that the other one? And clearly they broke both of these because the Cadillac averaged seventy nine miles per hour, right, which means they were driving out a heck of a lot faster than that. I think they came in third to third place. Yeah, not not too bad, but I think they got the car there in one piece, and so good for them. They're like, here are the keys, pal, so, uh, go ahead and start with the first race? Where did it start? Where did it in? Well, it started in New York at the Red Ball Garage at midnight, I believe is when all of them started. Yeah, um, and this is what okay, novembeve uh And the ending place was a hotel in Redondo Beach what is it the Portofino in right, okay, which is from pictures I saw. It was a pretty lux little hotel. Um. And you didn't have to follow any specific route. He just got there any way you could, right. Basically the only rules were, uh, you could have as many drivers as long as the only one car, and you could leave at any point within the twenty four hour window. It wasn't like everyone started at the start line like a typical race, just like in the movie. You would punch a time clock for when you're starting time was, and then punch it again for when you arrived. And whoever won one and I believe there was no trophy at the time. It was only a fifty dollar entry fee. And then they donated two hundred apiece to charity. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. Why not? So apparently two days before the race, brock Yates had managed to finagle a Ferrari daytona brand new Ferrari daytona loner out of a out of an auto dealer. Um. And he had the car, but he only had himself. He didn't have a co pilot or a driver. Uh. And apparently he sent out all these invitations and a lot of two race car drivers, like legitimate race car drivers, and they were like, you know something, if somebody dies or something, that's gonna look really bad for the sport of racing, and I don't want to do that. And then, uh, one guy he had invited, Dan Gurney, who was a professional race car driver, had declined initially. UM. But he apparently UM was told by his wife that his dying father in law said you should go do this. Life is short. So Gurney contacts um Yates the day before the race and says, hey, can I still come? And Yates said heck yeah yeah, And that proved to be fortuitous because they won. They did can run, Yeah they did. They're winning time Josh was thirty five hours and fifty four minutes. Not bad cross country, not bad at all, and not Atlanta to l A, New York l A, which is further Yeah, because I've made it in thirty three hours from Atlanta to l A, have you. Yeah, that's way I've always done it. Three eleven hour days is how I schedule it out. I never time myself, but you know, I went and drove around the West for several weeks and lived in a van with the dogs and all that, and um, I would drive, like I think the longest I drove is a twelve hour stretch. Um that's about all I can mustard. Yeah, that's enough for me. Yeah, depending on how much coffee I drank or whatever, you know, then I could drive you know, six hours or twelve hours or whatever. But it's amazing the toll that just sitting in a car with your foot on the gas has on you, especially when you're driving that fast. Uh. Should we talk about some of the some of the things they preferred to do on the on the first race, please? They One of the common tactics that seemed like was to keep it slow in the Eastern Seaboard. Um, I think New Jersey and Connecticut, in Ohio and Pennsylvania. These states are notorious for for having some pretty hardcore highway patrolman. Yeah, still do. Yeah, Like you'll get pulled over for doing sixty five? Isn't that nuts to you? That is nuts. I can't imagine if you're getting pulled over for anything less than seventy two seventy five. In Georgia, by the way, everyone flies as fast as you can, as fast as you can get away with us. How fast two drives generally. Yeah. Even my my friend Derek used to say that the deal with Atlanta rush hour is everyone drives as fast as they can till somebody recks and then there's a been just stops. Yeah, it's pretty funny to think about that. So the trick was to kind of keep it slow on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Midwest, and then once you got to the Great Plains is when you really opened up, yeah, and made up some serious serious time. Yeah, they got it up to a hundred and seventy two. I think is how how fast they found out the Ferrari would go. Yeah. I think twelve speeding tickets total between all of the all the competitors. Yeah, between four the competitors. Four of them didn't get a ticket at all, So four of them split twelve tickets. And the famous quote l A Times it is like kind of a blurb of an article from Dan Gurney, Right, Yeah, Dan Gurney famously said, at no time did we exceed a hundred and seventy five, which is pretty cool. Yeah, So Chuck, that was the first one. And as with all cool things, uh, that also began. It's co option. News got out, word got out by little Yeah, the Sports Illustrated covered it, uh, and so did the Los Angeles Times. UM. And so when there was a second one, I think the following year there were a lot more competitors, right, Yeah, they had um twenty five entries a second year, and brock Yates finished second place, this time in a Cadillac Um. The third race, they skipped a couple of years, and it was in nineteen seventy five, and they moved it to springtime this time, and if Ferrari won the third race with Yates and Gurney behind the wheel once again. But I didn't know they won the third one. Yes, oh no, no no, no, I'm sorry. They beat Yates and Gurney's record time the third year. Yeah, by a one minute, right, but it was not in them, you're correct. So by seventy five, which is what the third one fourth one third one was invent? Okay, by nineteen seventy five, it's officially co opted. There's actually corporate sponsorship. The Right Bra Company placed three ladies in Pink in a limousine and apparently the driver fell asleep in Texas and rolled the thing and I guess rolled into a porter potty which tipped over and drenched the um the ladies inside with its contents and where exactly So by this time now you can see why Burt Reynolds would have chosen more of a comedic route than the Sharky's machine route. Yeah, well it wasn't Burt's choice. Let's should we move to the final year. Yeah, what happened was Brock Yates was pretty much finished with it, and he said, you know, it's run its course. He said he was worried that somebody was gonna die, although no one ever got hurt. No, but the the the roads in the last eight years had become much more congested. Um. He was ready to scrapped the whole thing. But he had a friend, director Stuntman. Hell need him, Hell need him? Or is it needed him? No, it's need him. And he was. He was famous for a lot of the early Burt Reynolds movies. He hid them Hooper, which is a great movie. Is it? I even seen that one? Are you kidding me? I kid you not, dude. I gotta get Hooper. That was the one about stunt Mean, you have to see My Blue Heaven though, all right, we'll get to that later. So he did Hooper, and he did um, the Cannonball Run and a couple of other of the Burt Renold's films. Yeah, they did a Smokey and the Bandit too. Brock Yates wrote that I'm sorry so uh over the place today we are how Needham says, you know what, Brock, I want to make a movie about the Cannonball Run, And so I think the best way to do this is if we stage another one and I participate with you as my partner, and they did. They did that in nine and they had a record forty six entries this time. And a lot of what happened in this race actually ended up in the movie. Yeah, there's some zany madcap stuff that was going on. Let's hear it. Well, Brock Yates UH and Hew need Him UH actually had an ambulance and Yates's wife, Pamela posed as a woman suffering from a condition and as a result, couldn't fly because of the pressurized cabin, so she had to be zoomed across the country at a hundred miles in the back of an ambulance that was their vehicle of choice. UM. And definitely they modified the engine UH and it killed the transmission, so I had to be eventually towed across the finish line, which I thought was pretty cool, right, And in the film that actually happened. Burt Reynolds and Don Deloise were the Needham Yates characters, and fair Fawcet was the was the wife. Didn't didn't what else happened that was real? Three drivers actually did pose his priests. I remember in the movie. It was awesomely it was Sammy Davis Jr. And Dean Martin drunk priest in the movie. But I don't know that they were posing. They really were. They were probably hammered. What else, Josh, I don't know. I haven't seen the movie in a really long time. All right, well, I got it for you. Then, Uh, there were in fact um scantily clad skin tight jumpsuits on a couple of ladies in a sports car. I read the opposite. I read that that was the right broad company that inspired that part. I read the opposite. We'll have to check that. All right, we'll do it. And then there was a wealthy entrant that had his chauffeur drive him in a Rolls Royce. And in the movie that was Jamie Farr played a middle Eastern chic. That's right, Clinger. Yeah, you know he and I are from the same hometown, Talita Tala. Is that why he always wore the Talita mud hints had and match. Yeah, and well he talked about it incessantly. He really was not. Yeah, and Tony Paco's hot dogs that he talks about all the time, real place best hot dogs. On the planet really had no idea. So those are just a few of the things that actually happened in the final Cannonball Run that ended up in the film. Um and a Jaguar driven by Dave Hines and Dave Yarborough one that year and they obliterated the time period with thirty two and fifty one minute, eighty seven mile per hour average, fifty speeding tickets that year. Well, there were forty two contestants. Yeah, so that was the last one, and it has spawned imitators over the years. Before the before Cannonball Run the movie came out, there were already imitators. Really. Yeah, there was one movie that came out in seventy five and two that came out in seventy six. You want to hear the weird thing about it. David Carriden was in two of them. He was in Uh, Let's see uh Deathmatch two thousand, Death Death Race two thousand, which was set in the future, but he was also in Cannonball exclamation Point, which is a farticle take on the Cannonball Run. And there was a second one that had Gary Busey in it, or third one that had Gary Busey, and it called the Gumball Rally, right, and that's that's a real one. The Gunball three thousand is still in existence. Is that European or in America? Well, they do both, and they're quick to say that it's not a race, it's more like an adventurous road trip. And then the lame tell him, yeah, tell him about the European version of the Cannonball runs actually too, you know why, because they call it the cannonball Run. They use that name, and this thing is not even a race. The goal of the Cannonball Run Europe is to stay as close to a sixty one mile per hour average as you can. And in two thousand and eight, a frigging smart car one Oh, talk about a slap in the face. Were brock Gates steady would have rolled over in his grave, he's rolling over in his Instead, he rolled over a smart car with his bare hand. If anybody could do it, Mr brock Gates could, my friend, So I think cannonball running, how fast have you driven? What's the fastest you've ever driven? Oh? I don't know, a hundred and ten. I actually once got a speeding to or no, you want to hear a weird story let's hear. I don't know if this will make the final cut or not because it's kind of long, but get this. So, my friend and I were driving from Atlanta to Charleston in my old Toyota Corolla. It was an eighty six Champagne colored Toyota Corolla UM and I was doing a hundred and ten on I twenty during a stretch where the speed limit I was doing twice the speed limit. I get pulled over by this guy in this car UM with a little dash headlight on it, spinning around and I pull over and this guy is just like a paramilitary cop and he's like, you're so dead. You're going to jail forever, right, And he goes back to his car and calls somebody, and this other guy comes out and he comes back. He's like, you're at least gonna lose your license. And he goes back and talks to the guy, who he said later was the sergeant on duty. And he comes back and he goes, you're gonna get a ticket of some sort. And he goes back and talks to the guy again and he goes, here's your license back. You guys drive safely now, and let's just go. You're free to go exactly. So what my friend and I are looking at each other like what just happened? But it was so surreal, and to this day, I wonder, have you seen pull fiction? Of course you have remember Zed. Yeah, I have the distinct impression that these guys were into ZED like affairs and something else was took precedent. I think my friend was He's not a good looking guy, so I'm thinking maybe they're like, we'll pass on these two. Oh, I got you. So they were going to get you back to the police station. And I don't think they were cops. Okay, what cop would not give you a ticket when you're driving twice the speed limit? I got you. Yeah, I got a story. Let's hear it. About four years ago, me and my buddy Scotty were doing it was actually the last TV commercial job ever did. It was a six Flags job and six Flags Massachusetts. Whatever that one's called six flags over in Massachusetts? Is it? I think it's a great America anyway. So we go up there to do this job and um, what kind of do it? Was New Jersey? But we have to drive, h yeah, we we we we drive. At one point my friend. We have like two days off while we were up there, and I had a friend in Vermont and the third Star Wars prequel was being released that friday, So I said, hey man, let's go up and see John Pendel and uh rent a car and drive up there because we had a camera truck. He said, cheerless, do it? So we ran. We rented a like a little Geometro whatever, the cheapest little four stroke engine car you could get. And we have a time limit because we have to make the movie. It's like a six pm showing. And so we're speeding through Vermont, like the hills of Vermont's lovely, and this little engine is like and we topped this hill and we see one of those signs that say your current speed, and it said your current speed and it blinked and went one oh two. And I've never seen a triple digit on one of those signs. So we just laughed and blaze right through it and made the movie. It's like call the police, and we literally we made it right as the movie was starting, and you know, the engine was like it was like ticking, it was red hot. And that that's my fast story. Well, if you have a fast story. We'd actually like to hear it. Here's the caveat. Don't go out and commit any kind of crime or act that includes fastness. Now, if it's already happened, then we'll hear about it. We'll tell you the email right after we get to listener mail, right, Chuck, Yes, Josh, all right, let's go, Josh, I'm gonna call this, uh second, the only time we've ever read a listener mail from the same dude. Oh, I don't know about this, Chuck, we have to This is the Hackster, Ryan Hack, my buddy. Alright, Uh, listen to the house History podcast, and I have a creepy story. One of the houses I grew up in as a kid had a hidden door. As you go to the basement, it's more or less just blended into the wood paneling. As you walk through the door, you came to an open area with some shelving and a workbench. There are a couple of old bike tires and some random parts still lying around. A guy names it, and a guy names it. Every once in a while, we'd hear what sounded like people working on their bikes and chit chatting, pounding metal, gears dropping, laughing, chains turning every time we'd go into the room. There was nothing weird weird. Later on we found out the history of the house. Turns out one of the previous owners was a couple that enjoyed by Viking and they died in a Viking accident and forgot to get the memo. So just thinking about it gives me chills. And this is from Ryan and uh, I'm gonna just go ahead and say that Ryan Hack has inspired me to exercise because he has a blog called Hacks first five k dot blogspot dot com where he started running in Lost Weight and is into it now. And he got me listening to another podcast called Two Gomer's Run a Marathon. I don't know that I'm entirely okay with you leading this extra life that I'm unaware of until you read a listener mail I know. But Two Gomers Run a Marathon is actually a really funny podcast. This these two guys that say they're Gomer's kind of nerdy and they're they're completely unathletic, yet they want to run a marathon. So their podcast goes through their trials and travails and it's really funny. They got a website called two gomers dot com. So well, Ryan Hack, since you got all those plugs and because you had to too listener mails read on there, you have to go contribute twenty five bucks to Kiva dot org on the Stuff you Should Know Team Chuck. You want to tell everybody else about that Kiva dot org. Go to the click on community and search Stuff you should Know Team Join our team loans twenty five dollars to a to someone in need. You can now donate two Americans. Yes I've heard. If you're a nationalistic or an isolationist you can still donate. But right now, as a press time, we have raised more than bucks in about ten days. And uh who has seventy Chuck? Uh the lousy cheap fans of the cold Bear quote unquote Nation. You know it's sad that guy's got way more fans than we do, right, way more hundred ten members on his team. We got a hundred and eighties so far already. Yeah, So way to go those of you and the Stuff you Should Know Nation who supported Kiva dot org so far. For those of you who want to get on the trolley, you can go to www. Dot eva dot org slash Team Slash stuff you should know, and you can become a member, and like Chuck said, you can contribute as little as bucks and you actually get that back if you want, sure, you can roll it over again or whatever. Yeah, so Chuck, that's it, right, that's it. If you have a cool high speed story, Chuck and I want to hear about it. Uh. If you have a great unicorn story, you know, we always want to hear about that. 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