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Kenyon: Hero in racing, hero in life
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By GALE PIFER, Motorsports Editor
| 11/27/2009 |
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People magazine has just announced its "heroes of the year," a collection of very special people who have done extraordinary things. But there is one name missing -- an omission which I hope to correct here.
Let's go back to the beginning. I've been around auto racing for more than 50 years. My father was a racer, and I grew up among the men and machines that found a relief from their work-a-day problems by building, racing and sometimes destroying a variety of racing machines.
It was on one of those trips to a small dirt oval speedway in Iowa that I met him. I was just a kid. So was he.
But let's fast forward and let Max Helton take up the story.
"Stooped and gray-haired, the man used his burned stump of a left hand to help him push the wheelchair of his seemingly catatonic wife around the roller rink's glossy wooden floor. He smiled, swaying the chair to the music, as if they alone were dancing under the swirling stars cascading down from the rotating mirrored ball on the ceiling."
As Helton wrote in his "From The Heart of Racing" book, nobody recognized Mel Kenyon, although this former Iowa native whom I visited with prior to a modified stock car race in the early 1950s had gone on to become an Indianapolis 500 driver, a 10-time national champion and today is still considered the "King of the Midgets."
Mel Kenyon is no small person. He is larger in life in my eyes. Not because of his on-track accomplishments -- which are huge -- but because of who he is as a man. The woman in the wheelchair was his wife, a former blonde, blue-eyed beauty who was an accomplished artist. Mel married her in 1963, although at 30 he was a decade older than Marieanne. They met at a skating rink in Illinois. "She smelled good," Kenyon remembered.
What made this union so special to Kenyon was that Marieanne liked auto racing. And Kenyon was a racer. Their first date was to an auto race, much the same as my wife and I spent our first night out together.
Racing is often a brutal sport. On a hot, dusty June afternoon at the famed and feared Longhorne Race Track, the racing gods turned their backs on Kenyon. He was running good when on the 27th lap his engine blew; the car spun and bounced off the wall. Mel was knocked unconscious. Two other cars slammed into the car, and an explosion turned Kenyon's racer into an inferno. A fellow racer, Joe Leonard, braved the flames and helped haul a critically injured Kenyon from the wreckage.
But Kenyon was badly burned.
"I was in the fire for three minutes before a jeep got there with fire bottles," he said.
Kenyon, who refers to the accident as "the bonfire," had burns over 40 percent of his body, including his face, chest and legs. His left hand was burned to a stump.
Back home, Marieanne got the phone call that racing wives always fear.
"We had been married only a year and two months," Kenyon said. "When she saw me, she didn't recognize me. I was all wrapped up in bandages from head to foot, like a mummy. Doctors had put my nose back on and rearranged by face."
What followed were 17 operations and months and months of physical therapy. Along the way, a special mitten with a socket built in was invented that would allow Kenyon to grip a steering wheel. There was never a question whether he'd drive again. Kenyon was a racer.
As Jack Albinson wrote in his book, "Only Seconds" and as he related the story to a group of women at Madison's Elks Club many years ago, "If a person is not religious when he goes into a burn hospital, he may not come out at all -- or he may come out a great believer. It would seem unusual to me to get through such an experience without having or finding faith in the Lord," Kenyon was quoted as saying.
Marieanna had been encouraging Kenyon to find God.
"It wasn't until I was in the hospital that I turned over my life to the Lord," Kenyon said.
A dozen doctors told the couple that Kenyon would be confined to the hospital for nine months or better. Three months later, he left the hospital. In February 1966, he was back behind the wheel of a race car. He'd make his first appearance in the Indianapolis 500 that same year. Marieanne was there to cheer him on.
"When I was injured in 1969 in Michigan, she made a crutch for me. Then she -- with me directing her -- took the bent race car apart," he said.
Kenyon concentrated on racing the powerful midget race cars. On the way, he not only won races but dominated the sport.
But troubles weren't over for the Kenyons. In 1991, the day before Kenyon was to run in a midget race at the Indianapolis Raceway Park, a race named in his honor, he was working on his racer at their Lebanon, Ind., home. Marieanne was an avid bicyclist, routinely riding 15 to 20 miles a day. Just a mile from their home, a dog ran at her bike. Marieanne swerved, lost control of the bike and hit her head against the pavement. Although she wore a helmet, the fall had twisted her neck and spinal cord. The injury was serious.
The love of Kenyon's life was nonresponsive. Kenyon stayed with her night and day, touching her and recalling the many times she'd been there for him when he'd been injured in a racing crash. Marieanne couldn't walk, talk or move. After six months, an MRI confirmed the worst: there was no hope of recovery.
Again we'll let Helton, who is the senior chaplain of Motor Racing Outreach, take up the story. Despite the demanding health care Marieanne now required, Kenyon refused to put her in a nursing home. He cared for her himself, in their home.
While some people may have wondered when they saw the couple at the roller skating ring, her in a wheelchair and him pushing her along to the music, Kenyon knew the love of his wife was still with him. He noticed how she could move her left leg and foot in time to the music. He saw how she followed conversations, blinking her eyes -- one blink for no and two blinks for yes. And, yes, those trips to the roller rink were just as good for her as him.
In December 1966, Kenyon began making arrangements to take Marieanne to her parents' home in Illinois for Christmas. Two days before their Dec. 16 departure, he awoke next to his wife.
"I cleaned her up. Then I got back into bed with her. We held hands; I told her how good she was doing. Then we went back to sleep. I woke up to feed her at 8:30 a.m., but she was already gone."
Helton tells how Kenyon bathed his 56-year-old wife, washed her hair and dressed her before taking her body to the funeral home. During the past eight years and four months, this racing champion had cared for his wife.
"It was a pleasure doing it for her because she had done it for me," Kenyon said. "It was just love."
That's why, to me, Kenyon -- auto racer -- deserves to be a real hero. He is for me.
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©Madison Daily Leader 2010
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