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.
Scar and Jamesteen too. He plays a part in it. It amounts in his death, that's right, the results in his death.
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.
Yeah, like that was really really low to the ground. I saw that really go right under a railroad arm.
Yeah, if you were crazy.
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 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 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.
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 turn ip Speed right, literally turn up 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
I want to learn a thing or two from josh Am Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right, Okay, Chuck. 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.
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
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 both of them had parts from James Dean's car and thus began this idea that this car was cursed.
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. 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.
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, 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 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 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.
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.
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 nineteen sixty 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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
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 four hundred thousand dollars at auction. I think it was bought by Zach Bagans, the ghost guy who probably has it in his Las Vegas museum.
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.
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 smoking the bandit in my garage for years and years.
Wow, what happened to it? Oh?
I've told the story before who knows.
My dad.
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.
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 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.