If everyone must wait his turn in life and love, then what put six foot, 190 pound Donald Lloyd “Fritz” Freeland on the championship car map was the death of Bob Estes driver Jim Rigsby on the high banks of the Dayton, Ohio half mile paved track on August 31, 1952. Freeland assisted mechanic Jud Phillips (who later married Rigsby’s widow) in removing Rigsby’s body that was scorched from a fire that erupted off of Dayton’s third turn. A week later he was in the Estes championship car at Syracuse, where he qualified third and finished sixth in the number 29 former “Pots and Pans” low-budget A.J. Watson Speedway and dirt car formerly driven at Indianapolis by Dick Rathman, Joe James and Rigsby. Socially inclined, Freeland became known as “Organizer” because of his fondness for a good party and his insistence upon everyone else’s whole-hearted
participation.
Freeland drove in 64 championship events in the 1950’s, and although he finished among the first ten 55 percent of the time, the wonder is that he never won, since in the 1950’s alone he led 134 laps and started four times on the pole. He pulled seconds at Syracuse (1954) and Sacramento (1956) and claims to have run second at Indianapolis in 1956, where he was scored officially in third position. “The [race team] operations,” Freeland explains, “weren’t running on a whole lot of money. I’d have had a whole different career if I’d had the cars and the money behind them. Absolutely.” But in the 1950’s, racing conditions were not always ideal. At Darlington in 1954 he was running behind Ernie McCoy. “We called him ‘Scarface,’ because he had so many scars on his face. He lost it in some way or other–maybe a tire went down–but he hit the crash wall and the fence went straight up in the air, and he went under it. The fence came back down again, and there wasn’t a yellow flag as we came around to the starter. I’m waving my arm and pointing over in that direction. Of course, they think I’m crazy, and on they go. No yellow ever did come out, but they finally found that he was missing and sent some hound dogs to find him. They sniffed him out on the other side of the wall. It
didn’t hurt him too bad. Very lucky.”
He told the Indianapolis Star that in 1955 “I was running second right near the end and was catching [leader and ultimate winner] Sweikert by about a second a lap. I had him in my sights, but my transmission fell apart.” In August of 1958 Freeland stuffed the Bob Estes Special into a wall at 137 laps. “I ate up the center of the steering wheel without any ketchup, and cut my lip open,” he recalls. “We went to the first aid room there. Roy Rogers was on the fairgrounds show that night, and he said to Jimmy Reece, ‘I missed that. I didn’t see him crash.’ Reece said, ‘That’s all right; he’d do it again for
you.’”
Freeland, born on March 25, 1925 in Los Angeles, is the son of Bakersfield letter carrier Ted Freeland and LaRue (Weisel) Freeland, from near Finley, Ohio. Now and then playing hooky from Polytechnic High School, Freeland congregated before the war with hotrodders at The Frying Pan in West Los Angeles. He was inducted into the Navy on March 24, 1943 and served as a Diesel mechanic and motor machinist third class in the South Pacific, during which time his mother sold his hot rod. Discharged on January 18, 1946, Freeland still recalls his first automobile race, a roadster contest at San Bernardino’s Ash Can Derby in 1946. “I parked my car right behind the fence. I just got it painted, and didn’t have any upholstery in it yet. A guy that called himself Spider Webb –that wasn’t the real Spider Webb, we found out later–lost it and came up through that fence and hit my headlight. Then he put it in reverse and threw gravel all over my new paint job. I wanted to punch him out. Then we found out how to enter. We had just been spectators [but] we found out that you pay $5.00 to enter. We didn’t care. It’d give us something to do on Sundays. That was my very first race. I had a ’29 Model A, and I built every bit of it. I ran there on the Fourth of July, 1946. It was 120 degrees in the shade. We ran a 100-lapper, and I’ll be damned if I know how, but I finished. Hey. The hood flew off the son
of a bitch. Never paid one cent.”
Don Freeland raced at Gardena’s Carroll Speedway with the fledgling California Roadster Association in 1948. He took his first midget ride in one of Bill Krech’s Inglewood Tire Specials at the Los Angeles Coliseum and then at the Rose Bowl board track where he set a 12.50 second one lap record while teammate to Jack McGrath, another roadster graduate. Freeland sustained burns, a severed ear and a broken jaw in a Roy Russing midget at the Rose Bowl (after which the ambulance to which he had been assigned crashed on the way to a hospital), but ventured East in 1951 to run with the Granatelli Hurricane Hot Rod Association, and to join ranks with the AAA. He married Jan Fredendal, a Chicago advertsing agency director, and to them was born a son (Donald Scott, dead in a 1987 California highway accident) and a daughter (Deana, a singer). Freeland, a business associate of lifelong friend and fellow racer Chuck Leighton, is employed as a truck driver at
Leighton’s Torrance, California C and G Mercury Plastics.
Around The BendTerry Reed