Steve Smith

Red Wheels Rolling

It’s fitting that nowhere on Amazon dot com can one find the cover image of the story book for boys, Watch Those Red Wheels Roll! Published in 1965 and written by Marion Renick, this book carries with it a meaning consistent with my notion of what makes a good book still today. Its obscurity seems apropos because as I read this book from cover to cover at age 10, it kept me reading simply because it represented a good story. Period. A good story. Neither jaded nor learned, I was simply a poor boy living in the inner city of Akron, attending a newly built school—Clinton D. Barrett Elementary School. This book was about race cars. Make no mistake—I would have surrendered every molar in my head if I could have had only the means necessary to build a race car suitable for competition in Akron’s All-American Soap Box Derby.

Sadly, that dream sprung up in the home of a struggling truck driver with four children. It thrived a bit then died and faded there in the Wilbeth-Arlington Housing Project. The beauty of the book, however, was that it sowed in my mind the first seeds that if my ragged friends and I could not afford to race down the majestic green and white lined hill that stood just two miles from our homes, we might build and race our own. Renick’s book got me thinking that with some stolen lumber, a mix of lawnmower and golf cart wheels, axles and washers, a steering bolt, and a hunk of jump rope, we could race Ericsson Avenue down to Rosemary Boulevard and from there pert near to Arlington Street, wood shop goggles and glory.

How great the story a boy discovers without the educated arm shadowing over him pointing out the recognized and critically reviewed. Better yet, how great the story that illuminates for children the path to ingenuity and fun.