Crystal Wise
Admittedly, one feels a change of status, as if having fully arrived in life, standing with Johnny Rutherford in his home exploring all the historic treasure in a trophy case that starts in the living room and extends seemingly to Jacksboro Highway.
“Those three right there,” he says, pointing, with a voice, at age 86, still rich with a timbre that resonates with the power of, say, a McLaren M16C, yet still very much the easygoing and friendly Gentleman John. “Back when I won, they gave those wooden plaques with the Borg-Warner.”
I was looking at the ultimate prize of American auto racing, the Borg-Warner trophy, three of them, in fact, awarded to Rutherford in 1974, ’76, and 1980 as the winner of the most famous, most prestigious of American auto races, the Indianapolis 500, the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”
Crystal Wise
Aside from the trophy case, all around us were mementos of Rutherford’s legendary career, including pictures, portraits, magazines, and even a tire.
In the 107 runnings of the Indianapolis 500, 10 drivers have won the race three or more times. Among them is John Sherman Rutherford III, known colloquially as “Lone Star J.R.” He was the sixth to down the winner’s traditional glass of milk three times when he zipped into the winner’s circle on Memorial Day weekend of 1980.
At one time, certainly all within the boundaries of this city and county, he so closely identified with Indy car racing that he was the face of it. Rutherford’s era was a golden age for the Indy circuit with names like his, A.J. Foyt, and Mario Andretti its rock star power.
Rutherford started in 24 Indianapolis 500 races. He started from the pole three times, including in 1973 when he just missed the first official 200-mph lap with a one-lap record of 199.071 mph. In 1984, he set a new speed record for championship cars by qualifying for the Michigan 200 at 215.189 mph.
He has victories in 24 other races, including the 1974 Pocono 500 in Pennsylvania and the 1986 Michigan 500. In 1980, he was the National Driving Champion as well as the 1965 United States Auto Club Sprint Car Champion.
He also has a body that would make a great show-and-tell at the orthopedic convention. He surmises “all of them” when I ask how many bones he had broken over the years. There’s a famous photo of his Sprint car flying through the air upside down at Eldora. Rutherford is hanging out of the car. Someone was looking after him that day. Instead of landing upside down, the car hit nose first and settled on all four wheels. He broke both arms. He still can’t straighten the right arm completely.
Yet, he remains thankful: “If it had landed upside down, I’d just be a fond memory.”
Rutherford also gained a little notice as a NASCAR driver. There are 63 one-time winners in the stock car circuit. Rutherford is one of those, winning a 100-mile qualifying race at Daytona, back when those counted as races. In Smokey Yunick’s Chevrolet, Rutherford turned in the fastest qualifying lap, eventually finishing ninth in NASCAR’s Super Bowl — the Daytona 500 — in 1963.
That same year, Rutherford made his first appearance at Indy, whose series sanctioning body’s car is an open-wheel, single-seat open cockpit car with the engine in the rear.
At the invitation of Indy 500 brass, Rutherford is traveling to Indianapolis in May, driving there, naturally. He will be honored on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his first championship at the race on May 26.
Rutherford wasn’t born here, but he planted roots long ago. His father — his “hero” — was a master aviation engine mechanic who moved the family here from Tulsa after the war to work at Consolidated Aircraft Corporation — the “Bomber Plant,” as the locals called it. The job kept him stateside during the war, his contributions repairing planes and training aviation mechanics essential to the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.
“He was a smart man,” Rutherford says. “I had guys that worked with him in the business that said he could listen to an engine running and tell you what was wrong with it. My dad was my hero.”
His father, John, was the one who introduced him to cars and auto racing, taking young Johnny, then 7 or 8 years old in 1946, to see the midget car races in Tulsa. That’s no slur or an accessory to slur. Midgets are a class of racing cars.
“Midget racing was really big,” says Rutherford, who remembers thinking after the experience, “Ah, I wanted to be a race car driver.”
He didn’t begin racing until after graduating from Fort Worth’s North Side High School in 1956. He was 21 years old when he truly discovered his joy. Rutherford became hooked while in a hot rod club in River Oaks. One night at a meeting, one of the others announced that he had to leave early to help his brother put the engine in his dirt track car.
“Boy, that set me straight up in my chair,” Rutherford recalls of being introduced to Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Mesquite.
Crystal Wise
He sold off a race car he had built and took off to the Midwest in 1960 with fellow Texan Jim McElreath, the Arlington-born racer going off to race Sprint cars.
Rutherford didn’t finish his first shot at the biggest one of them all in 1963, the first of an 0-for-11 stretch at the Indianapolis 500. An oil leak and transmission problem served as the bogeyman, sending him out of the race before completing all 200 laps. Before 1973, his best finish at Indy was 18th in 1968 and ’71.
“I had always told Betty [his late wife] that if I could find somebody who wanted to race as badly as I did, we’d be winners,” Rutherford says. “McLaren was it.”
McLaren provided the team and machinery, a record-setting pole position the evidence. He finished ninth that year.
Crystal Wise
The next year, he broke through in his McLaren M16C, but rather than the front, he was forced to start way back in the field, essentially the runt of the starting grid. A cracked engine during practice required an engine change and had very little time to do it. The crew completed the job in what Rutherford recalls being 58 minutes, but the delay nonetheless prevented him from getting into the qualifying lineup by the deadline.
That meant Rutherford would start 25th out of 33 entries. His starting position was the worst for any winner since 1932 when Fred Frame won from the 27th spot. But before the race was over, Rutherford had led 122 of the 200 laps.
Rutherford obviously was never discouraged. “I started working forward very cautiously, and everything went well. The McLaren car performed beautifully, and the pit crew did a great job.”
By the fifth lap, he was already in eighth. By the 15th lap, he had moved to third and then to second.
“That’s how good my car was,” Rutherford says. “My car was fast.”
At lap 140, smoke began billowing out of Foyt’s sleek red Gilmore machine. On 142, oil from Foyt’s car started flowing like the water of the Jordan River, splattering all over the windshield of Rutherford’s No. 3.
“It just covered me up with oil,” Rutherford says. “They black-flagged him, and that was, you know, that was the race.”
To the victor went $245,000, or $1.2 million today. It was life-changing.
Not there that day to witness it was Rutherford’s hero, his father. John Rutherford had been in attendance for each of Rutherford’s previous 11 races at Indy. A terminal cancer diagnosis prevented him from traveling.
John Rutherford passed away two months later. The last time he left his bed, Rutherford says, was for the Indianapolis 500.
“My mother said he got out of bed to watch the race in his chair,” Rutherford says. “When we won, she said he got up and made it back to his bed.” That would be the last time he left the bed.
“Obviously my emotions were very mixed,” he says. “I was certainly sad to lose him. You can see it coming, but you’re never ready for it. My dad was my hero. It was not easy to take, but time marches on and you have to face the issues.”
