June 26, 2024 • 13 mins
The story of what happened to the car that James Dean crashed.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Josh here, Chuck here,
Jerry here, let's go short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right, this one is about James Dean.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Scar and Jamesteen too. He plays a part in it.
It amounts in his death, that's right, the results in
his death.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Yeah, that's when he drove that little silver Porsche five
fifty 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, had a top speed
of about one hundred and forty three miles an hour.
Sat how high off the ground like forty two inches
or something.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, like that was really really low to the ground.
I saw that really go right under a railroad arm.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, if you were crazy.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So yeah, And Jamesteen 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
(01:19):
to be his last movie, that he was heading toward
Salinas to race at a sports Car Club of America race,
and he had his mechanic, Ralph Watherich Wortherich, Yeah, in
the seat beside him, and he was going about eighty
five and came upon an intersection that's known today to
(01:39):
still be pretty deadly. It's the intersection of Route forty
six and forty one. And there was a guy named
with the improbable name of Donald turn up Speed who
turned in front of him, and that was that for
James Deen.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah, I've never heard of that name before. I had
not either not turnip Seed, right, That's.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
What I thought. It was a misspelling, but no.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Not turn ip Speed right, literally turn up Speed.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, that was the last name of the guy who
got in the fatal wreck with James Dean. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
It's pretty crazy, and it was very sad. And people
have gone back since then and said, like, you know
that 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 eighty five miles an hour, clearly too fast, and
when the guy turned, they think that James Dean may
(02:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
There's another thread or another camp that says that Ralph
Wilderich later said that James Dean's last words were he's
gotta stop, I think he sees me, and then caboo.
And apparently when they collided, Donald Turnip's speed was driving
a Ford Sedan and when you put an aluminum race
(03:04):
car that's I think thirty nine inches of a meter
off the ground up against the Ford in a t
bone collision, the Ford wins and that little Porsche with
James Deane still in it. Rolf Weatherwich got ejected from it,
which is what saved his life. James Dean was still
in the car when it started cartwheeling, just end over
(03:26):
end over end into a ditch and he broke his
neck while he was doing that, and that's ultimately what
killed him. That in his skull fracture.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
They say, did you see the car after the wreck?
All right, Well, I just texted to you, so sorry,
but that's okay, take another look at it. It's 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
(03:55):
to that car gets a little bit strange from this
point on. So we'll be right back. Well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
I want to learn a thing or two from josh
Am Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right, Okay, Chuck.
(04:25):
So James Deen is dead. But the death of James
Dean is just like the preface to this story. Because
James Den's car, even though it was considered it total,
it was totaled. It had a strange afterlife, and it
ended up taking more lives if you go in for
this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
That's right that it was sent to a salvage art
at first. Of course, then there was a guy who
knew James Dean from the car racing circuit. His name
was William S. Rich. He was looking for this car.
I don't think we said the nickname of the car
was a little Bass. 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
(05:07):
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. Each of them
crashed their car in the same race at the fifty
six Pomona Road Races, which killed McHenry. Esrich survived, but
(05:31):
both of them had parts from James Dean's car and
thus began this idea that this car was cursed.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
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
(06:03):
things went. Yeah, there was 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.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yes, 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,
(06:41):
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'd verify that. I
(07:01):
just take that for what it's worth, right, 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 duy or something
and as a warning signal. Supposedly that was what James
Dean's car was used as in this thing reportedly keep
(07:25):
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 Barcas.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, he was a truck driver who was transporting that
car around from place to place for the National Safety Council.
So James Den's car has now claimed at least one
more life and injured multiple others.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
You believe it.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
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 nineteen sixty and it was again allegedly
(08:13):
in storage with other cars when it caught on fire.
No other car in this storage facility caught on fire,
just James Den'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
(08:34):
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 fellas, he's talented, but he's really playing up this
James Dean death car legend.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
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. Pretty good story. So now
we can go back to the other path, right.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yes, because at that point the Bear's car has suddenly disappeared,
and then we don't know what, Like if the Bear's
car was not the James Deen car, we don't know
what happened to the original.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
One, right, But you told that story about the car
being in storage and catching fire. In twenty fifteen, 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
(09:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, I mean Brian Grahams, 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 one million dollar offer for
James Dean's original car that again had disappeared back in
nineteen sixty, and he said that all the other stories
(10:24):
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 you 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 nineteen sixty. And even
though he passed the polygraph test, this anonymous man who
(10:47):
was trying to collect this million dollars, I feel 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 was no longer there.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
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 twenty twenty that I don't
(11:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
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 four hundred
thousand dollars at auction. I think it was bought by
Zach Bagans, the ghost guy who probably has it in
(11:58):
his Las Vegas museum.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Now, I guess, so, uh, four hundred 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
a not the sexiest part.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
A cursed transaxle.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
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 smoking
the bandit in my garage for years and years.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Wow, what happened to it? Oh?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I've told the story before who knows.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
My dad.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
My dad somehow got it added Chick fil a uh,
and it was just in our garage forever. And I
think it was eventually as I can just get that
thing out of here. Wow, I wish I had it. Man,
that thing would be a coffee table or something.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, or a great Halloween costume.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, or you me would be cursing me because I
would have gifted you that coffee table made out of
a car door.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
That's pretty awesome. That would make a great coffee table.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Chuck, Yeah, and a good wedding gift.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah, for sure. Thank you for the thought. It's the
thought that count. So I appreciate the smoky and the
bandit sheriff's car door coffee table that you thought about
giving you me and I for our wedding. That's right. Short,
Stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
(13:27):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Josh here, Chuck here,
Jerry here, let's go short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right, this one is about James Dean.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Scar and Jamesteen too. He plays a part in it.
It amounts in his death, that's right, the results in
his death.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Yeah, that's when he drove that little silver Porsche five
fifty 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, had a top speed
of about one hundred and forty three miles an hour.
Sat how high off the ground like forty two inches
or something.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, like that was really really low to the ground.
I saw that really go right under a railroad arm.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, if you were crazy.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So yeah, And Jamesteen 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
(01:19):
to be his last movie, that he was heading toward
Salinas to race at a sports Car Club of America race,
and he had his mechanic, Ralph Watherich Wortherich, Yeah, in
the seat beside him, and he was going about eighty
five and came upon an intersection that's known today to
(01:39):
still be pretty deadly. It's the intersection of Route forty
six and forty one. And there was a guy named
with the improbable name of Donald turn up Speed who
turned in front of him, and that was that for
James Deen.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah, I've never heard of that name before. I had
not either not turnip Seed, right, That's.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
What I thought. It was a misspelling, but no.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Not turn ip Speed right, literally turn up Speed.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, that was the last name of the guy who
got in the fatal wreck with James Dean. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
It's pretty crazy, and it was very sad. And people
have gone back since then and said, like, you know
that 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 eighty five miles an hour, clearly too fast, and
when the guy turned, they think that James Dean may
(02:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
There's another thread or another camp that says that Ralph
Wilderich later said that James Dean's last words were he's
gotta stop, I think he sees me, and then caboo.
And apparently when they collided, Donald Turnip's speed was driving
a Ford Sedan and when you put an aluminum race
(03:04):
car that's I think thirty nine inches of a meter
off the ground up against the Ford in a t
bone collision, the Ford wins and that little Porsche with
James Deane still in it. Rolf Weatherwich got ejected from it,
which is what saved his life. James Dean was still
in the car when it started cartwheeling, just end over
(03:26):
end over end into a ditch and he broke his
neck while he was doing that, and that's ultimately what
killed him. That in his skull fracture.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
They say, did you see the car after the wreck?
All right, Well, I just texted to you, so sorry,
but that's okay, take another look at it. It's 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
(03:55):
to that car gets a little bit strange from this
point on. So we'll be right back. Well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
I want to learn a thing or two from josh
Am Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right, Okay, Chuck.
(04:25):
So James Deen is dead. But the death of James
Dean is just like the preface to this story. Because
James Den's car, even though it was considered it total,
it was totaled. It had a strange afterlife, and it
ended up taking more lives if you go in for
this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
That's right that it was sent to a salvage art
at first. Of course, then there was a guy who
knew James Dean from the car racing circuit. His name
was William S. Rich. He was looking for this car.
I don't think we said the nickname of the car
was a little Bass. 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
(05:07):
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. Each of them
crashed their car in the same race at the fifty
six Pomona Road Races, which killed McHenry. Esrich survived, but
(05:31):
both of them had parts from James Dean's car and
thus began this idea that this car was cursed.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
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
(06:03):
things went. Yeah, there was 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.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yes, 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,
(06:41):
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'd verify that. I
(07:01):
just take that for what it's worth, right, 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 duy or something
and as a warning signal. Supposedly that was what James
Dean's car was used as in this thing reportedly keep
(07:25):
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 Barcas.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, he was a truck driver who was transporting that
car around from place to place for the National Safety Council.
So James Den's car has now claimed at least one
more life and injured multiple others.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
You believe it.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
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 nineteen sixty and it was again allegedly
(08:13):
in storage with other cars when it caught on fire.
No other car in this storage facility caught on fire,
just James Den'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
(08:34):
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 fellas, he's talented, but he's really playing up this
James Dean death car legend.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
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. Pretty good story. So now
we can go back to the other path, right.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yes, because at that point the Bear's car has suddenly disappeared,
and then we don't know what, Like if the Bear's
car was not the James Deen car, we don't know
what happened to the original.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
One, right, But you told that story about the car
being in storage and catching fire. In twenty fifteen, 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
(09:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, I mean Brian Grahams, 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 one million dollar offer for
James Dean's original car that again had disappeared back in
nineteen sixty, and he said that all the other stories
(10:24):
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 you 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 nineteen sixty. And even
though he passed the polygraph test, this anonymous man who
(10:47):
was trying to collect this million dollars, I feel 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 was no longer there.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
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 twenty twenty that I don't
(11:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
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 four hundred
thousand dollars at auction. I think it was bought by
Zach Bagans, the ghost guy who probably has it in
(11:58):
his Las Vegas museum.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Now, I guess, so, uh, four hundred 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
a not the sexiest part.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
A cursed transaxle.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
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 smoking
the bandit in my garage for years and years.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Wow, what happened to it? Oh?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I've told the story before who knows.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
My dad.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
My dad somehow got it added Chick fil a uh,
and it was just in our garage forever. And I
think it was eventually as I can just get that
thing out of here. Wow, I wish I had it. Man,
that thing would be a coffee table or something.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, or a great Halloween costume.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, or you me would be cursing me because I
would have gifted you that coffee table made out of
a car door.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
That's pretty awesome. That would make a great coffee table.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Chuck, Yeah, and a good wedding gift.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah, for sure. Thank you for the thought. It's the
thought that count. So I appreciate the smoky and the
bandit sheriff's car door coffee table that you thought about
giving you me and I for our wedding. That's right. Short,
Stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
(13:27):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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