Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: James Dean's Car

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

The story of what happened to the car that James Dean crashed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. Josh here, Chuck here, Jerry here. Let's go short stuff. That's right, this one is about James Dean's car. And James Dean too, he plays a part in it. It says it amounts in his death. That's right.

It results in his death. Yeah, that's when he drove that little silver Porsche 550 Spider. Man. One of the fastest, it was like a little race car basically, one of the fastest cars in the world at the time. It had a top speed of about 143 miles an hour, sat how high off the ground, like 42 inches or something?

Yeah, like that was really, really low to the ground. I saw that you could go right under a railroad arm. Yeah, if you were crazy. So, yeah, and James Dean was known to be a little crazy. The studios that he worked for were like, you cannot race your car while you're under contract with us or while you're filming a movie. You have to wait until it's in between movies. And it just so happened that, I take it it was in between movies, I think it was after he had filmed Giant, which turned out to be his last movie, that he was heading towards Salinas to race at a sports car Club of America race, and he had his mechanic, Ralph Wurtherich, Wurtherich, yeah, in the seat beside him.

And he was going about 85 and came upon an intersection that's known today to still be pretty deadly. It's the intersection of Route 46 and 41. And there was a guy named, with the improbable name of Donald Turnip Speed, who turned in front of him. And that was that for James Dean. Yeah, I've never heard of that name before. I had not either.

Not Turnip Seed. Right, that's what I thought, it was a misspelling, but no. Not Turnip Speed. Right. Literally Turnup Speed. Yeah, that was the last name of the guy who got in the fatal wreck with James Dean.

Isn't that crazy? It's pretty crazy and it was very sad and people have gone back since then and said like, you know, that intersection there, the sun hits really bright where James Dean would have been at that time. He would have been very low to the ground being in that car, 85 miles an hour, clearly too fast. And when the guy turned, they think that James Dean may not, because of the path of the sun, may not have even seen this car taking a left and it was just lights out for him.

– There's another thread or another camp that says that Ralph Wilderich later said that James Dean's last words were, he's got to stop I think he sees me, and then kaboom. And apparently when they collided, Donald Turnip Speed was driving a Ford sedan, and when you put an aluminum race car that's I think 39 inches of a meter off the ground up against a Ford in a T-bone collision, the Ford wins and that little Porsche with James Dean still in it,

Rolf Wetherich got ejected from it which is what saved his life. James Dean was still in the car when it started cartwheeling just end over end over end into a ditch and he broke his neck while he was doing that and that's ultimately what killed him. That and a skull fracture, they say. Did you see the car after the wreck? Mm-hmm. All right, well, I just texted you, so sorry about that. That's okay.

Take another look at it. It's crazy that anyone survived this crash, but he was the only fatality. And I guess we should take a break a little early here, because the story about what happened to that car gets a little bit strange from this point on. So we'll be right back. Well now when you're on the road driving in your truck why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know!

Alright. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as the physical symptoms. Starting this May, join host, Martín Hackeit for Season 3 of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio Production, and Partnership with Arginics. From Myasthenia Gravis, or MG, to Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy, also known as CIDP, Untold Stories highlights the realities of navigating life with these conditions, from challenges to triumphs. This season, Martine and her guests discuss the range of emotions that accompany each stage of

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betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor? Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown's pen. We're discussing it all. I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season. Watch season 3 of the Shondaland series on Netflix. Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton the Official Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday. ["The Daily Show Theme Song"] Okay, Chuck, so James Dean is dead, but the death of James Dean is just like the,

the preface to this story, because James Dean's car, even though it was considered total, it was totaled, had a strange afterlife and it ended up taking more lives if you go in for this kind of stuff. That's right. That was, it was sent to a salvage yard at first, of course. Then there was a guy who knew James Dean

from the car racing circuit. His name was William Esrich. He was looking for this car. I don't think we said the nickname of the car was Little Bastard. Found the car in Burbank, took out the engine, kind of stripped it for parts, or some of the parts at least. He got the engine, put it in his own race car,

it was a Lotus Nine, and gave the transmission and some of the suspension to a friend named Troy Lee McHenry, another car racer. Eleven months later, both of them crashed their, each of them crashed their car in the same race at the 56 Pomona Road Races, which killed McHenry. Essrich survived, but both of them had parts from James Dean's car and thus began this idea that this car was cursed. Right. So the car itself was pretty much cherry picked by this point. But even after Troy Lee McHenry died, his widow gave some of his racing car parts to other racers, friends of his, and

among them were some of the ones from James Dean's car. So put a pin in that, because that's kind of one direction that these things went. There's another direction that a man named George Barris came along and said, here's where the story really begins, if you listen to George Barris. And we'll just go ahead and caveat this with not everybody believes what George Barris has to say, much like Chuck Barris. For sure. Barris was a pretty famous guy.

He designed the Batmobile. He designed the Munster's car from that TV show. So he's a Hollywood movie TV and movie car guy. I believe he has a museum. If not, he donated some cars to one of the movie car museums, but was pretty famous in entertainment circles for doing stuff like that. He says that he bought the frame and the body from James Dean's family, sold two of the original tires away, which apparently

those tires were blown at the same time in another car. He had verified that. Just take that for what it's worth. And then he lent the car frame to the LA National Safety Council. They had like a traveling display, you know, when they'll show like a mangled car from a DUI or something as a warning signal. Supposedly, that was what James Dean's car was used as. And this thing reportedly, we keep saying all these qualifier words, but reportedly fell off its display on several occasions. One time injuring someone, another time killing a guy named George Barkus.

Yeah, he was a truck driver who was transporting that car around from place to place for the National Safety Council. So James Dean's car has now claimed at least one more life and injured multiple others. If you believe it. It's getting more efficient at it because it's now been taken into pieces and spread out. So now it can become a kill machine more efficiently. So that car that the National Safety Council

had touring around was supposedly put into storage in 1960. And it was again, allegedly in storage with other cars when it caught on fire. No other car in this storage facility caught on fire, just James Dean's car. It melted like a tire and singed, I think, some of the interior. And then after that, it supposedly disappeared.

And George Barris continued on and was like, hey, I've got the chassis still, can you believe it? Like these things just keep coming out of nowhere. Like I'm a magnet for James Dean car parts. And he toured it around and it was around this time, I think, that people really started to be like, this Barris fella is, he's talented but he's really playing up this James Dean death car legend. Yeah. In his book, he claimed that a guy tried to steal the steering wheel and broke his arms trying to steal the steering wheel. Right. Pretty good story. So now we can go back to the other path, right? Yes, because at that point the Barris car suddenly disappeared

and then we don't know what, like if the Barris car was not the James Dean car we don't know what happened to the original one. Right, but you told that story about the car being in storage and catching fire. In 2015 it appeared that they found the frame because a guy got in touch with a museum director for the Volo Auto Museum, Volo, Illinois, his name was Brian Grahams. And he said that this guy told me that when he was a kid, he saw his father and some friends of his hiding the body of that Porsche in a building, in a false wall in the building when he was just six years old. And it looked like that story checked out.

Yeah, I mean, Brian Gramps, who directed the museum, like you said, he believed it enough to ask the guy to submit to a polygraph. And he said that there's been tons of stories over the years because the Volo Auto Museum put out a $1 million offer for James Dean's original car that, again, had disappeared back in 1960. And he said that all of the other stories just never checked out except for one. And he was referring to that one from the guy who said

that he saw his father hide it. And he said that his dad did it with some friends. Among those friends, according to this guy, was George Barris. So all this would have checked out because this would have been the time that the car disappeared around 1960. And even though he passed the polygraph test, this anonymous man who was trying to collect

this million dollars in fuel for him, he couldn't get his hands on the car. I'm not sure at first why, but eventually they found that the building that it was hidden in was no longer there. It had been demolished. That's right. And so they don't really know what happened. It could have been just a part of the overall demolition of that building since

it was supposedly hidden in a false wall and gone down like the telltale heart. But no one really knows what happened to the rest of Little Bastard. Supposedly there was a transaxle in March of 2020 that I don't think supposedly, I think this was actually confirmed to have been a part of the car because it came from McHenry's widow and McHenry was the one who bought those original parts and died in the wreck. Right, that transaxle I guess it combines the differential, the transmission and the axle all into one compartment. If you know what those three things are then you'll know what a transaxle is. It went for I think almost $400,000 at auction. I think it was bought by Zach Baggins, the ghost guy,

who probably has it in his Las Vegas museum now. I guess so. 400 grand for a transaxle. I know it's a famous car, but I don't know. That seems a little, I don't know, it's just not the sexiest part. A cursed transaxle. Yeah, and it was the whole point that it was his car.

I get it, but I don't know. But I mean, this is coming from the guy who had the sheriff's door from Jackie Gleason's sheriff's cruiser from Smoky and the Bandit in my garage for years and years. Wow. What happened to it? I've told this story before. Who knows?

It's hidden behind a false wall at a Chick-fil-A. My dad somehow got it at a Chick-fil-A. And it was just in our garage forever. And I think it was eventually, it was like, just get that thing out of here. Wow. I wish I had it, man. That thing would be a coffee table or something.

Yeah, or a great Halloween costume. Yeah, or you me would be cursing me because I would have gifted you that coffee table made out of a car door. That's pretty awesome. That would make a great coffee table, Chuck. Yeah, and a good wedding gift. Yeah, for sure. Thank you for the thought. It's the thought that counts, so I appreciate the Smokey and the Bandit Sheriff's Car Door coffee table that you thought about giving Yumi and I for our wedding.

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