Maybe it is Wendell McCrady Jr. who best understands the value of the rust-speckled roadster tucked away in a storage shed in this Akron suburb.
Not the monetary value of the car, built by a Brooklyn-born racing driver who some still argue was the actual winner of the first Indianapolis 500-mile competition a century ago this weekend. But what the car meant to people like Mr. McCrady who grew up in Akron, the town that became known as Rubber City.
“I guess,” said Mr. McCrady, a concrete finisher who now lives in Copley, “I might not exist if it hadn’t been for that car.”
The explanation, a tale rich with history, takes nearly as many turns as some races.
The car is a 1917 Mulford Special Roadster. The 10-foot-long, two-seat runabout was built by Ralph K. Mulford, the driver credited with finishing second to Ray Harroun in the 1911 Indy 500.
Mr. McCrady, 56, found the Mulford Special in a barn five years ago and became consumed with lifting the car, its builder and its story out of obscurity.
Mulford was an early racing hero, according to the historian Joseph Freeman. Mulford will be included in Mr. Freeman’s yet-to-be published book, “Second to One” (Racemaker Press, Boston), about the drivers who missed out on Indy immortality in finishing no better than second place.
Mulford was a fierce competitor on the track, twice winning national driving championships. But he was also “a sportsman, a real gentleman away from it, a religious man and a Sunday school teacher,” Mr. Freeman said.
In between, in 1916 and 1917, he built two cars for personal use, a four-seat sedan for his wife and a two-seater with an Opel body for himself, according to a letter he wrote years later. He traveled to Akron and elsewhere looking for proper tires for those cars, he later testified.
Fast-forward to 1925. On May 12, a Michigan inventor, Alden L. Putnam, received a patent for low-pressure balloon tires — larger than earlier tire designs and containing a greater volume of air — similar to those being made in Akron, according to Detroit newspapers. By then, the B. F. Goodrich Rubber Company of Akron was promoting its Silvertown Balloons to “cushion yourself against rough travel.” And after Peter DePaolo won the 1925 Indy 500 on Firestone balloon tires, they became the talk of the industry, Mr. Freeman said.
Almost two decades later, Goodrich workers found the Mulford Special in a plant building in downtown Akron. They were preparing to throw it out when a former Goodrich employee, Rex T. Brown, recognized the car from the trial, The Akron Beacon Journal reported, and bought it. Mulford confirmed in a letter to Mr. Brown in 1953 that the roadster was indeed the car from the 1928 Detroit trial.
Mr. McCrady bought it in 2006. He had never been a collector of antique cars, he said, preferring Chevrolet Corvettes, but he became fascinated by the histories of the car and the man.
Mulford was inducted into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame with the class of 1953-54. He died in 1973 at age 88. According to Mr. Freeman, the historian, Mulford continued to make a steady living with a repair garage in his later years. Neither of Mulford’s grandsons, Ralph Mulford III or Jeffrey Mulford, returned repeated calls for comment.
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