A Thing of Beauty....
I made a short day long business trip to Houston on Monday and as I returned home from the airport I phoned Julie from the car to tell her that I was on my way to her loving arms. "Whatever" she said, but added that I'd had a phone call just minutes before saying that an old college frat brother was in town and would like to stop by. You could have knocked me down when she told me his name. Jeremy, a.k.a. "Butch", a.k.a. "The Troll" Cooper. Butch, as I'll always think of him, was an older guy, a senior when I was a freshman, a mean taskmaster when I was a frat pledge and a cool guy to us youngsters. He drove a humongous '58 black Chrysler New Yorker knicknamed, "The Pig". That about says it all.
Adding to his mystique, we knew that he had raced cars and motorcycles and had crashed his fair share of both. He drove The Pig at breakneck speeds around San Antonio, usually with a gaggle of terrified frat pledges as passengers. With all this stuff of masculine legend, what I learned later was that Butch was a terrific, very intelligent and very sensitive guy. I saw him rarely until just this last decade when I learned more about him.
He was born in England where his dad was a senior banker and advisor to the government and had, during WWII, been on the team that cracked the super secret German "Enigma" code. At an early age his family moved to Canada where his dad ran the North American offices of Westminster Bank. Butch had an aptitude for things mechanical and financial and went into banking in New York while building cars and motorcycles as a hobby. He later relocated back to San Antonio in banking but at some point in life decided to follow his heart and worked full time building cars and cycles.
Which brings me to the image of the Chaparral 2H in the photo above. Knowing that Butch would be interested in seeing our new museum dedicated to Midland's Chaparral racing history we paid a visit on Tuesday morning. What I hadn't known about Butch was that for several seasons after college he had worked with McLaren Racing...the prinicple competitor of the Chaparrals in the glory days of Can-Am Series sports car racing. Butch regaled me with first hand racing stories of the Chaparrals along with the awe and respect they were accorded.
The Chaparral 2H is a thing of pure beauty built in 1968 and looking to us to be ahead of it's time still, 36 years later. For all it's beauty however, the car never did perform well and the driver hired by Chaparral to pilot it, John Surtees, refused to race it. I knew the basics of the story, but Butch filled me in on the details of the mismatched front and rear airflow, braking and visibility problems.
What a pleasure to see Butch again, get reacquainted and to have a visitor to our fair city who truly appreciated one of our new attractions!
I made a short day long business trip to Houston on Monday and as I returned home from the airport I phoned Julie from the car to tell her that I was on my way to her loving arms. "Whatever" she said, but added that I'd had a phone call just minutes before saying that an old college frat brother was in town and would like to stop by. You could have knocked me down when she told me his name. Jeremy, a.k.a. "Butch", a.k.a. "The Troll" Cooper. Butch, as I'll always think of him, was an older guy, a senior when I was a freshman, a mean taskmaster when I was a frat pledge and a cool guy to us youngsters. He drove a humongous '58 black Chrysler New Yorker knicknamed, "The Pig". That about says it all.
Adding to his mystique, we knew that he had raced cars and motorcycles and had crashed his fair share of both. He drove The Pig at breakneck speeds around San Antonio, usually with a gaggle of terrified frat pledges as passengers. With all this stuff of masculine legend, what I learned later was that Butch was a terrific, very intelligent and very sensitive guy. I saw him rarely until just this last decade when I learned more about him.
He was born in England where his dad was a senior banker and advisor to the government and had, during WWII, been on the team that cracked the super secret German "Enigma" code. At an early age his family moved to Canada where his dad ran the North American offices of Westminster Bank. Butch had an aptitude for things mechanical and financial and went into banking in New York while building cars and motorcycles as a hobby. He later relocated back to San Antonio in banking but at some point in life decided to follow his heart and worked full time building cars and cycles.
Which brings me to the image of the Chaparral 2H in the photo above. Knowing that Butch would be interested in seeing our new museum dedicated to Midland's Chaparral racing history we paid a visit on Tuesday morning. What I hadn't known about Butch was that for several seasons after college he had worked with McLaren Racing...the prinicple competitor of the Chaparrals in the glory days of Can-Am Series sports car racing. Butch regaled me with first hand racing stories of the Chaparrals along with the awe and respect they were accorded.
The Chaparral 2H is a thing of pure beauty built in 1968 and looking to us to be ahead of it's time still, 36 years later. For all it's beauty however, the car never did perform well and the driver hired by Chaparral to pilot it, John Surtees, refused to race it. I knew the basics of the story, but Butch filled me in on the details of the mismatched front and rear airflow, braking and visibility problems.
What a pleasure to see Butch again, get reacquainted and to have a visitor to our fair city who truly appreciated one of our new attractions!
