The Origins of the Demolition Derby -- More from Tom Wolfe's "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby"

More great fun reading Tom Wolfe. See chapter 2, "Clean Fun at Riverhead,"
where we are introduced to Lawrence Mendelsohn, who was inspired one night in August, 1958 to come up with the idea of the demolition derby.

"So why put up with the monotony between crashes?"

As Wolfe describes the scene of a Mendelsohn promotion on Long Island (the 154th in two years!):

"The effect was exactly what one expects that many simultaneous crashes to produce: the unmistakable tympany of automobiles colliding and cheap-gauge sheet metal buckling; front ends folding together at the same cockeyed angles police photographs of night-time wreck scenes capture so well on grainy paper; smoke pouring from under the hoods and hanging over the infield like a howitzer cloud; a few of the surviving cars lurching eccentrically on bent axles. At last, after four heats, there were only two cars moving through the junk, a 1953 Chrysler and a 1958 Cadillac. in the Chrysler a small fascia of muscles named Spider Ligon, who smoked a cigar while he drove, had the Cadillac cornered up against a guard rail in front of the main grandstand. He dispatched it by swinging around and backing full throttle through the left side of its grille and radiator."

And a bit more:

"The unabashed, undisguised, quite purposeful sense of destruction of the demolition derby is its unique contribution. The aggression, the battering, the ruination are there to be enjoyed.. The crowd at a demolition derby seldom gasps and often laughs. It enjoys the same full-throated participation as Romans at the Colosseum."