Gearhead Guys You Should Know: Erwin Cannonball Baker


Gearhead Guys You Should Know: Erwin Cannonball Baker

Since we just told you about the Motorcycle Cannonball event and Brian Darwas’s film that documents riders dashing (as a figurative term) across country on motorcycles made between 1900 and 1930, we thought we should educate you on the man who first got the name “Cannonball” for taking such crazy trips just after the turn of the century and at the dawn of personalized mechanical transportation.

Did a wanker in a BMW  make the New York to Los Angeles trip in like 30 hours defying traffic laws and endangering the lives of tens of thousands of motorists along the way a couple of years ago? Yes he did, but Baker made the same trip, in a relic of a car, on two-lane roads, in 53 hours back in 1933. That kiddies, is a man. He also did it dozens of times in all kinds of crude equipment.

Erwin Baker was first a motorcycling super hero. Before he attempted any of his more than 143 record driving attempts at all manner of distances, he was tearing up race tracks on bikes back in the early part of the 20th century. He is a member of the AMA hall of fame. Here’s a quote from his AMA hall of fame page: “In 1908, Baker purchased an Indian motorcycle and began entering and winning local races. His most famous victory came in 1909 at the first race ever held at the newly built Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was during this time that Baker began his endurance runs. Most of his early records were city-to-city runs. One of Baker’s well-publicized stunts was racing passenger trains from town to town. These were in the days before well-maintained roads. Baker often encountered deep mud, sand washes, flooded river crossings and snowed-in mountain passes during his long-distance attempts.”

It came from these local style “train races” that Baker would gain his nickname from a New York newspaper man who compared him to the famous Cannonball train commanded by legendary engineer Casey Jones.

Baker gained national fame by trekking across the country in 1911 on a factory stock Indian motorcycle. The journey took him 11 days and in that time it was rumored that he slept less than 5 hours. These were the days before any sort of organized roads, so most of his trip was spent on cow paths and goat trails. There were locations that he had gasoline brought in by mule.

Through his career, the number that is quoted over and over is 5.5 million. That would be the number of miles that Baker drove over the course of his 143 record attempts on behalf of car makers, tire builders, motorcycle manufacturers, and whoever else would pay. Famously, Bakers motto on these trips was, “no record, no money.” If he didn’t beat the recognized mark from point to point, he didn’t take the check.

Of all the trips Baker took it would be the 1933 journey in a Graham-Paige Blue Streak 8 from NYC to LA that would inspire generations after him to do better. Baker, working with an automobile roughly as complex as a claw hammer, made the trip on two-lane roads, most completely unpaved, in 53 hours. The lore of the trip, other than the various mechanical and physical maladies survived by Baker was the fact that he took one solitary half hour nap during the entire ordeal. Whether that’s true or not we’ll never know, but judging by the way Chad and DF looked whist working on some of the projects over at the old apartment, the guy must have looked like warmed over death in LA.

Baker raced in the Indy 500 in 1922, finishing 11th, and he accrued many wins on the motorcycle ovals, but frankly, that’s not what this is about. It’s the ultimate case for mechanical survival when you are traversing country that may have never know automobiles to exist, that’s guts and that’s why Cannonball Baker is a guy we should all know.

It was Baker’s nickname that drove Brock Yates to create the “Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash” back in the early 1970’s to break the record. Reading about those exploits is fun stuff, but seeing others now trying to beat even the “modern” trans-continental runs is bordering on the ridiculous. There is far too much risk to the general public in these days of clogged highways and moribund drivers’ education.

With a long list of insane accomplishments behind him, Baker was slowing down in the late ’40s when “Big” Bill France named him as the first Commissioner of NASCAR. His post was mostly viewed as a PR job, but from all we have read Baker took the job seriously.

The Indiana native (amazing about how many of speed pioneers came from there) died in 1960 and is buried at the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indy. If anyone is close by, please stop in and say hello for us.

Erwin “Cannonball” Baker is most certainly a gearhead guy we should know.
Cannonball Baker

Cannonball Baker


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