A sunny and warm Saturday afternoon in Indian Head Park was the stage for the arrival of a local icon: the No. 15 Miller 91 Special car Clifford Woodbury once raced on dirt tracks across the country.
Woodbury, a four-time Indy 500 entrant, died in 1984, but his racing legacy lives on through the newly restored vehicle and the memories of his daughter, Jean Culligan, an Indian Head Park resident. It was to her home that owner Rob Dyson brought the car for a one-day visit on July 11.
Dyson, owner of Dyson Racing sports car team, purchased the car for $770,000 at an auction in Amelia Island, Fla., in April, where the antique Indy car attracted his interest.
“I was drawn by the history of the car and the mystique of the Miller brand,” Dyson said. “I went down and saw it, and said, ‘If I can reach and get this car, I’ll do it.’ “
Dyson found a business card from Pat Culligan, Cliff Woodbury’s grandson, in a book of documents when he brought the car up to Dyson Racing headquarters in Poughkeepsie, N.Y .
His curiosity impelled him to reach out to Pat Culligan, who wrote back that his grandfather Cliff Woodbury, who lived on South Stone Avenue in La Grange, drove the car. The two later found out that each attended Cornell, and arranged the visit to Jean Culligan’s home after a phone conversation.
“We had to spiff up the car in some areas,” Dyson said. “It was nicely maintained, but we wanted to take it to another level and get the engine working a little bit better.”
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The high speeds at which these cars traveled, with no enclosure and little safety precautions or modern basics like shock absorbers, made driving to reach the Indy 500 all the more remarkable.
Today’s IndyCars typically have a six-speed gearbox and reach 230 mph and have turbocharged, 2.2-liter V-6 engines.
By today’s standards, the Miller model — featuring a 1.5-liter, straight-eight dual-overhead cam engine and three-speed gear box — is a simple machine. It operates with a hand-crank start and has a top-end speed of about 100 mph.
“There’s nothing exotic about it,” Dyson said. “There’s nothing fancy about it — there’s no fuel injection — except the supercharger is. That was a tweak that they added to get more power out of a smaller engine.”
Woodbury raced the No. 15 car in 1927, finishing 19th at Indy. The year before, he came in third, his best finish in four starts at the Brickyard.
A passionate racer and dedicated craftsman, Woodbury opened an auto repair shop in Chicago at the end of a career that spanned hundreds of races on surfaces that included brick, dirt and pine boards. It was a crash on the Altoona Speedway’s wood track in 1929 that made him decide to end his racing career.
Although he had only a fourth-grade education, Woodbury was an apt businessman who was well received by his customers and his peers in the racing community, his family said.
“He was a very quiet man, and an avid reader,” Jean Culligan said. “He was a peoples’ person in a lot of ways, and he had a good time with them.”
Woodbury’s racing career took off under partner Mike Boyle, head of a Chicago electrical union, who helped build and modify the car Woodbury raced and several others like it.
His climb to the top level of his sport inspired Pat Culligan’s wife, Barbara, to learn more about her grandfather-in-law’s life on the track.
“I started researching (auto racing) to send Jean little clips about Cliff,” Barbara Culligan said. “I became fascinated by it. Here’s this guy with a fourth-grade education, who essentially built all of the cars that he raced in, and he won.”
After paying $50 for a driving lesson, Woodbury first earned a living as a chauffeur in downtown Chicago, which turned into a $300 award after he won the first race he entered in a 1916 Buick.
“It’s like a rags-to-riches story,” Barbara Culligan said. “He was not only driving the cars, but he was building and rebuilding the cars himself.”
Dyson was eager for the opportunity to share a piece of Midwest racing history with the Culligan family and Jean, who is the last direct descendant of Woodbury.
“It started with my basic interest in cars when I was young,” Dyson said. “What interested me is the history of the Indianapolis 500, which I believe is the greatest car race on the planet.”
Dyson was interested in meeting Jean Culligan, and seeing her reaction to the car her father drove.
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said. “The large tires. … It’s so different from what they’re driving today.”
In years past, Jean Culligan and her family traveled to Indianapolis Motor Speedway each May to attend the Indy 500. They also visited the Hall of Fame Museum, which at one time housed the leather helmet and gloves Woodbury wore on the track.
“The name Cliff Woodbury is a venerated name at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,” Dyson said. “Any of the people that are connected with the traditions of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, they knew who Woodbury was, what he had done, and the career that he had.”
Stefan Modrich is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.