By John Sturbin, Raceday San Antonio

RIVER OAKS – The city where Johnny Rutherford grew up thinking he might want to become a race car driver officially honored him recently with a proclamation and a spirited round of “bench-racing.”

Johnny Rutherford was honored and recognized by River Oaks Mayor Darren Houk and the City Council. Rutherford is celebrating his 50th anniversary of winning the Indianapolis 500 in 1974 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Photo by Martha Fairris.

Rutherford spent the Month of May at Indianapolis Motor Speedway celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the first of his three Indy 500 wins with McLaren Racing. River Oaks Mayor Darren Houk and the City Council responded by inviting “Lone Star J.R.” to its monthly meeting at City Hall.

“I can’t tell you how much we appreciate what you mean to this city,” Houk said before reading a proclamation citing Rutherford’s various accomplishments into the official minutes. “He’s not only a fantastic racer but he’s always well-respected by everybody as such a great sportsman.”

The proclamation noted Rutherford’s days with the Idlers Hot Rod Club, his barnstorming the local and national dirt-track circuit with mentor Jim McElreath of Arlington, his brief-but-successful flirtation in NASCAR with famed mechanic Smokey Yunick and his ultimate goal of partnering with a winning team at the Indianapolis 500.

“That was incredible,” Rutheford, 86, said after a ceremony that included a Q&A session with fans. “It’s something to be honored by the place you live. River Oaks has been my home, the place that I call home and lived in all these years. I live on Black Oak Lane and have for years. And I certainly thank River Oaks for this and being the place I call home.” A suburb of Fort Worth, River Oaks boasts a population of approximately 7,500.

Rutherford recalled that his family moved from Coffeyville, Kan., to River Oaks in 1950. His father, John Sherman Rutherford Jr., took a job at Consolidated Vultee in Fort Worth, where he helped build B-36 bombers.

“My dad was an aviation engine mechanic and he had a civil service job at the plant,” Rutherford said. Johnny’s stepmother, Doris Jean Mayfield Rutherford, was an executive secretary at the plant now known as Lockheed Martin. Rutherford attended Castleberry Elementary School, Irma Marsh Junior High and North Side High School.

River Oaks Mayor Darren Houk with Johnny Rutherford and his proclamation. Photo by Don Istook

“I was in the Idlers Hot Rod Club here,” Rutherford said. “One night (in 1958) at a meeting one of the guys came in and said, ‘I’ve got to leave early and go help my brother put the engine in his dirt-track car.’ Well, that sat me straight up in my chair and I wanted to find out more.” Rutherford was informed that dirt-track cars were being raced every Friday night at the Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Dallas.

“I went out with (his buddy) the next day and they let me drive (the dirt-tracker), and as I think back on that, I wish I’d had a tetanus shot before I got in it,” Rutherford joked. “But it was amazing. I had a chance to figure it out and I started looking for something to build my first race car out of, and I found a ’32 Chevrolet coupe in a closed-up service station in Grapevine. Bought it and dragged it back to the Idlers Clubhouse…and we started in. I had a small block Chevrolet V8 engine and built my first race car.”

With the help of his buddies in the Idlers, Rutherford’s racer came to life during the winter of 1958-59.

“I started racing in ’59 at the Devil’s Bowl Speedway _the old Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Dallas,” said Rutherford, then 21, and proud owner/driver of car No. 91. “Drove my car for a year and figured out pretty quick that owning a race car really wasn’t a good thing – you needed to drive for somebody. So I got a ride in another car.

“In mid-season, Jim McElreath and I left (the DFW area) and went up into the Midwest to chase racing. Got my first ride in a Sprint Car at Lacrosse, Wis. They had an afternoon and evening race in Lacrosse. I finished eighth in the afternoon race and fifth in the evening race…and got paid 40 percent of whatever the car made. I made $180 and I thought, ‘How long has this been going on?’

“So, I had a Sprint Car ride for the rest of the season in the International Motor Contest Association and just kept being able to progress – go from different car-owners in IMCA…and it was great.”

Rutherford and McElreath traveled from town-to-town and race-to-race in the latter’s 1951 Ford pickup, powered by a 1950 Oldsmobile V8 engine. The camper on the back housed two bunks, a propane stove and room for their racing gear. When McElreath decided to move from the dirt-track circuit to the U.S. Auto Club in 1962 in pursuit of an Indy 500 ride, Rutherford tagged along.

“I had driven back to Indianapolis with McElreath,” Rutherford said, “and had just enough money in my pocket to get a bus ticket from Indianapolis to make it home and figure out what I was going to do.”

Fate intervened in January 1963, when Rutherford was contacted by Yunick with an invitation to drive his Chevrolet Impala in NASCAR’s Daytona 500 at the 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway. Rutherford drove to Daytona Beach, where Yunick operated “The Best Damn Garage in Town.” Rutherford noted that Smokey’s Chevy was “extremely modified,” as Yunick had earned a reputation for his loose interpretation of the NASCAR rulebook…also known as “fudging” and/or in plain English, cheating.

Rutherford recalled the black-and-gold Impala was fitted with a regulation 25-gallon fuel tank. “Smokey built his fuel tank and the NASCAR official that checked it said, ‘Smokey, it’s perfect. Right-on, 25-gallons,’^” Rutherford said. “And then he got on a creeper with the car up in the air and rolled under the car and came out in a minute and said, ‘Smokey, what is this?’

“Smokey had taken a five-inch piece of tubing and plugged it in and it ran the full length of the car underneath as his fuel line, and carried whatever extra gallons of fuel in that line. He just ‘pushed the issue.’^”

Rutherford surprised NASCAR’s regulars by winning pole for the 1963 Daytona 500 with a closed-course record of 165.183 mph in Yunick’s supposedly unlucky No. 13 Chevy. He also won the ensuing 150-mile qualifying race to become one of six drivers to win their first NASCAR start. Rutherford went on to finish ninth in a race won by Tiny Lund in a Ford Galaxie fielded by the famed Wood Brothers.

“I ran NASCAR at Daytona, Atlanta, Darlington…but I didn’t have Smokey Yunick’s race car then,” Rutherford said. “Smokey asked me before we finished up at Daytona, ‘Would you like to stay with me and run NASCAR?’ I said, ‘Smokey, I really want to go to Indianapolis. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do.’ He knew, because he loved Indianapolis, the challenge of Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

“He was great to drive for. I asked him one time years later why did he hire me? And he said, ‘I had been to a couple of your Sprint Car races and I liked what I saw.’ That was something.”

Indeed, Rutherford’s road to Indy featured a successful stint in USAC-sanctioned Sprint Cars. “I won the national title in 1965 and kept progressing,” said Rutherford, whose first nine starts at Indianapolis beginning in 1963 included a best finish of 18^th on three occasions with various car-owners.

“I always wondered why I didn’t do better all those years before I made the 1974 race (Indy 500) and won it,” Rutherford said.

Rutherford’s open-wheel career-path took a dramatic turn when he was hired by Teddy Mayer, business manager of McLaren Racing, prior to the 1973 season. The team was founded by racer/engineer Bruce McLaren of New Zealand in 1963.

“I had always told my wife, Betty, that if I ever find somebody that wants to go racing as badly as I do we’ll be winners,” Rutherford said. “So I found them – McLaren Racing. Yes, McLaren was what I needed.”

Rutherford was paired with flamboyant teammate Peter Revson – heir to the Revlon cosmetics fortune – at IMS in 1973. Rutherford made headline news via his first Indy 500 pole with a track record, four-lap/10-mile average of 198.413 mph in the No. 7 Gulf McLaren/Offy.

“The M16 McLaren was the best flat-bottomed car to ever run the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,” Rutherford said, “and I took advantage of that.” Rutherford drove to a ninth-place finish in the rain-shortened/133-lap 1973 Indy 500 won by Gordon Johncock in the No. 20 STP Double Oil Filter Eagle/Offy.

The following year, J.R. started 25^th in the traditional 33-car field as a second-day qualifier driving the Papaya Orange No. 3 McLaren, his signature Johnny Rutherford adorning both sides of the cockpit in blue script. The race quickly became a one-on-one with Houston native A.J. Foyt Jr., who had qualified on-pole by averaging 191.632 mph in his No. 14 Gilmore Racing Team Coyote/Foyt.

“They dropped the green flag for the start and in 23 laps I was running third,” Rutherford said. “So my car was definitely very good.”

Rutherford passed Bobby Unser for second on Lap 24 in pursuit of Foyt. J.R. took the lead from Foyt on Lap 65 and held it through Lap 125. The two Texans swapped the lead between Laps 126 and 140, when Foyt’s Poppy Orange car was black-flagged for dropping oil on the track. After a broken oil fitting officially eliminated “Super Tex” on Lap 142, Rutherford led all but one of the remaining 58 laps. He averaged 158.589 mph en route to finishing a comfortable 22.32-seconds in front of runnerup Unser and his No. 48 Olsonite Eagle/Offy.

That win began a stretch at IMS that saw Rutherford finish 1-2-1 through 1976 with Team McLaren, an association with founding partner/chief mechanic Tyler Alexander and Mayer that lasted seven years. The team now competes in the NTT IndyCar Series as Arrow McLaren under the leadership of Californian Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing.

“Had a lot of good times at Indy,” Rutherford said. “I went back this year to celebrate 50 years since that first win at Indy and worked with McLaren, a strong team. Went back this year and saw a lot of old friends, and it was good. Fifty-years since that first win!”

River Oaks resident Don Istook, who has raced Porsches and Audis in various International Motor Sports Association series, recalled a story involving Rutherford’s son.

“John Rutherford IV co-drove with me in IMSA in our Audi S4,” Istook said. “We were at California Speedway and John’s driving the car and he comes into the pits. And he says, ‘Dad, I don’t know what to do. The car is kind of porpoising, kind of going back-and-forth.’ Johnny said, ‘Well, you need to either go up basically with the spring rate in the back or the shocks, the rebound, in the front and that’ll take care of it.

“We did that and smoothed it out and set the track record that day. So not only is Johnny a good race car driver, but a good race car engineer. He knew what to do; he knew how to make the car work.”

A reception featuring more anecdotes, selfies and well-wishes followed the official proceedings.

“The city certainly is proud for me and I’m glad that this is where I live,” Rutherford said before posing with a sign in front of City Hall citing the 50^th anniversary. “I certainly appreciate this and thank you all, very much.”