by Paul R. Spitzzeri
We move to the final third part of the post by noting that, as 1924 dawned, George R. Bentel readied to realize his latest and greatest auto racing project, the new Ascot Speedway, situated off Valley Boulevard in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles. After securing a long-term lease at the end of the prior year, as well as announcing am ambitious amusement project to accompany the race track, Bentel pushed for completion of the latter to get races scheduled and presented.
Another area in which he was aggressively moving had to do with race sanctioning, specifically distancing his new facility from the Automobile Association of America (AAA), with whom he worked at the former Ascot Park venue in South Los Angeles, and embracing a relationship with the International Motor Contest Association (IMCA), established in 1915. The New Year’s Day edition of the Los Angeles Times reported on the agreement that the IMCA would begin with the opening day of contests on the 20th, pending a final inspection and license issued by the Association once the track was finished.
Apparently anticipating pushback from the AAA, Bentel told the paper,
All we want is to have those who have witnessed board-tracking racing [sponsored by the AAA in several venues throughout the country] take one look at the brand of competition which will prevail at Ascot. The track, from the viewpoint of the spectacular [spectator?], is far ahead of old Ascot. The races will be closely contested with blanket finishes [involving many entrants at the finish line] the rule rather than the exception. Our prize money for the season will exceed $200,000.
In its edition of the 6th, the Times recorded that the total prize offering was to be an additional $25,000, while noting that the opening day would feature seven contests, including a one-lap “helmet dash up to a 40-lap “motor derby,” as well as two motorcycle races. It was explained that the original opening date of that day was delayed because of work conducted by the Los Angeles and Pacific Electric railway companies to improve access to venue, including tracks entering the grounds, partly through tunnels, and loading platforms, to boot.
With a second grandstand moved closer to parking areas and along the southeast banked turn where the most excitement (and danger) was to be found, Bentel added that “Old Ascot no more resembled the new Ascot track than does a medicine show platform compare with a grand opera stage.” The placement of a grandstand at that turn meant the fans would more easily witness “from a vantage point of just a few feet, the sensational driving feats” not seen at other tracks,” something the impresario deemed “revolutionary.”
With the AAA labeling any racer who entered contests outside their jurisdiction as “outlaws,” Bentel was able to attract some major names early on, including his long-time driver Ralph De Palma, Leon Duray and Tommy Milton among those mentioned in press accounts, to the new Ascot. The Times of the 10th especially highlighted De Palma’s alliance with Bentel and the IMCA, stating the “one of the greatest automobile race stars of all time,” in making his appearance at the track, “will be the kingpin of the field.” It was added that there were just eight AAA-sanctioned races in all of 1923 and that many drivers would have wanted to see the AAA work with Bentel, but the paper reported,
Bentel . . . was refused a sanction by the A.A.A. Contest Board because . . . there was not enough time to investigate the situation (Bentel wanting an immediate “yes” or “no” to his request for a sanction) and because it was further felt that friction might develop between the Los Angeles Speedway Association with its Beverly Hills plant [soon to move to Culver City] and the new [Ascot] project.
Another old tie renewed with Bentel was the hiring of Eddie Pullen, who raced under the impresario during the 1915 season with the legendary Barney Oldfield and others, as the starter on opening day. The Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News of the 16th, meanwhile, published a photo of Bentel, with the caption denoting him as “Fighting George” because of his wrangling with the AAA and reference to potential court battling “to prevent the board track officials from interfering with his effort to have the best drivers in the country compete at the Ascot dirt track.”
In ads just prior to opening day, another prominent racer was announced as entering the lists, this being Fred Horey, who started racing under the AAA in 1912, but switched over to the IMCA, which happened to have been founded by his brother-in-law, J. Alex Sloan, a former promoting partner of Bill Pickens, handling that role as Ascot. Horey was said to be the country’s dirt track champ and his appearance was part of how the “New Ascot represents the supreme effort of the Speedway builder’s art.” An ad featuring Horey from the 18 January issue of the Los Angeles Record noted that there would be a revival of the Thanksgiving Day races held at the old Ascot, with a $30,000 cash prize.
The establishment of the speedway also, as these facilities often do, led at least one local real estate development project to seek to capitalize on its present, as the neighborhood of City Terrace was trumpeted as being close to Ascot and a proposed 40 industrial plants at the “City Industrial Tract,” announced in September 1923 for 200 acres purchased by powerful names among the Angel City business elite including Southern California Edison President John B. Miller; William Gibbs McAdoo, former Secretary of the Treasury; bankers Irving W. Hellman and Motley H. Flint and Fred Baker of Baker Iron Works. Much of this tract lies south of Valley and north of Interstate 10 between Indiana and Eastern avenues.
Among the coverage of the opening day of the Ascot Speedway was that of the Record and Illustrated Daily News of the 21st. Ed Frayne of the former wrote
Dirt track racing arrived in Los Angeles Sunday afternoon, was seen by 35,000 cash customers and scored a tremendous conquest.
There is no doubt in the mind of Promoter George R. Bentel this morning that the sport is here to stay. His venture received a welcome that far exceeded his fondest hopes.
Promoters from every branch of sports sat in the stands and marveled at the turnout. It demonstrated once again that the city is speed crazy. Offer anything on four wheels and it’s a guaranteed success in Los Angeles.
With the specter of death hanging over the track and its notorious banked turns, Frayne commented to Bentel that if a fatality was to occur at Ascot as recently occurred elsewhere (perhaps at Beverly Hills?), it would negatively affect attendance, but the promoter replied, “Not a bit! Not a bit!”
He quickly added that the late death was unfortunate and that “I regret it more than anyone” before he continued that “for every one that stays away because of that incident, three more will come.” He then concluded, “don’t ask me to explain the psychology—I don’t care to.” In fact, the program was such that the 40-lap derby had to be cut short by more than half, to 18, because “it would have been highly dangerous to go further” including dust clouds so thick that drivers could not see one another.
Over at the Illustrated Daily News, Howard Langley covered the inaugural set of contests with the observation that,
Emerging from out of a dense cloud of track dust, the friendly rays of a Southern California sun and the pungent odor of castor oil, like some distorted fantom [sic] resurrected from the past [old Ascot?], Fred Horey, champion dirt track driver of the world, grimly smiled and sent his roaring Duesenberg across the line—twice a winner yesterday—in the opening day program of George Bentel’s new Ascot Speedway nestled in the picturesque hills back of Lincoln Park.
With the motorcycle races, always considered second-tier to the autos, “there was another hero of that opening day affair,” this being Gene Walker, who in February won a five-mile championship, but who died after a practice crash in Pennsylvania in June. The “plucky lad” won two races, a one-lap dash and a ten-lap “Alhambra Derby,” that being the name of Valley Boulevard at the time.
Notably, Langley recorded the attendance as 30,000 paying customers ad 5,000 folks who crowded on the hills to the north “lounging around” in a development “track officials had never expected.” For the one-lap auto race, Horey came out on top and he also took what was called the “Lincoln Park Stakes.” Meanwhile, De Palma was feted for, despite experiencing “his usual strain of track trouble,” establishing a new dirt track record by running the 5/8 of a mile lap in 32 and 4/5 seconds. It was reported that the average speed for the races was 75 mph, which was accounted as “moving some little bit” on the dirt course, while De Palma’s “skids on the turns brought the crowd to its feet.”
As successful as this debut was, trouble soon mounted for Bentel on a few fronts. First, those dangerous banked turns at Ascot led quickly to a fatality, as just two weeks in to the season, driver Jimmy Craft was killed on what quickly became known as the “death curve.” After he crashed and was thrown forward from his vehicle, the racer stood and waved his arms, but then Norris Shears roared into Craft’s car, killing him while Shears avoided serious injury. Just prior, Fred Roberts plowed through a fence nearby, while, later and in the same general area, Frank Wheeler crashed into the barrier.
With the ever-present danger remaining because of the tight turns and the injuries and death that all-too-frequently resulted, there was also a financial problem that arose regarding that Thanksgiving Day program later in 1924. Specifically, Bentel was accused of reneging on the purses offered to racers and a $15,000 civil suit was filed against him. Separately, there was a charge in the county Superior Court of false advertising over how many miles were to be run in that holiday contest—only 160 of 250 were completed—and which brought a conviction to him, his son-in-law, Joseph E. Brown, and Pickens. A $500 fine was handed down as well as 50-day sentences, which were suspended for two years, meaning the trio could have been jailed during that period if the judge felt it was warranted.
This was followed by the suspension by California Corporation Commission of the Ascot’s parent company being able to sell stock “on the statement of witnesses that the financial condition of the company was misrepresented to prospective stock purchasers as well as to a local bank.” James E. Sheehan, hired by Bentel to secure races for Ascot, then joined the Huntington Park Municipal Bank in filing a wage complaint with the state and Bentel was arrested on the assertion he obtained labor under false pretenses and that matter was stil,l being reviewed.
In 1926, Bentel and Brown were charged in federal District Court on a tax evasion rap, technically it was an alleged conspiracy to defraud the government, involving some $12,000 in taxes of 10% due from admissions to Ascot, but which went unreported. After an investigation by a special unit of the Internal Revenue Service, there were “certain irregularities in making tax reports during the period when the racetrack faced financial difficulties,” which was not too far along in its brief history. Notably, when Brown was arrested at the house he shared with his wife and her mother, Harriet Bentel, it was reported that Bentel was otherwise incapacitated. In 1928, Brown and Bentel settled their tax bill by paying a little more than a quarter of the amount and the matter was dropped.
This is because his tenure with the Oliver Morosco project to turn the theater impresario’s many successful plays into motion pictures also took a decidedly illicit turn. As noted before, Morosco teamed with Bentel and others, including Los Angeles acting school head Frank C. Egan, to not only take on the adaptations but to launch a very ambitious real estate development project called Moroscotown near Hollywood that flamed out spectacularly, evidently because of a problem in securing title to the property. Meanwhile, the creation of an Oliver Morosco Holding Company and a Morosco Sales Company engendered a stock offering that was to have raised $2.5 million under the management of Benjamin Leven.
In early August 1924, just seven months after Ascot opened, federal indictments were handed down on Leven, Bentel and five others in which it was alleged by a federal attorney that “Leven employed a lot of gyp salesmen” who sold stock from $100 to $300 for each four-share unit, but, the Times of the 4th reported, “the sales are said to have been made on the strength of false claims and financial statements.” Among the victims was Morosco, whose $5 million empire was assigned to the holding company and who was ruined by the scheme.
The Long Beach Press of the 5th added
In the fall of 1921 George R. Bentel, who was associated with Mr. Morosco in the Morosco Productions Company, a California motion picture concern, came East, got in touch with Levin [sic], who was in charge of the sales organization of the Morosco Holding Company, Inc., and got up all the propaganda, prospectus and literature used in the sale of the stock . . . When Mr. Morosco became aware of the methods employed by Levin and salesmen, he tried to put a stop to the sale.
It took nearly a year-and-a-half for the case to go to trial and, in late November 1925, Bentel was ordered to appear in New York City, but initially sought to have the matter moved to Los Angeles because he claimed injuries from a car accident prevented his traveling east. Doctors hired by the feds, however, determined that he was in a good enough condition to face trial in the Big Apple.
Just two weeks prior, as reported by the Times of the 10th, Dr. Frank Barham, publisher of the Los Angeles Herald, soon to be merged under William Randolph Hearst with the Los Angeles Express as the Herald-Express, with Barham as its head, and his brother Harold, both natives of Anaheim in Orange County, filed suit against Bentel and two others concerning the Ascot lease on the land the Barhams (Barham Boulevard next to Universal City is named for Frank) owned.
The brothers sought a cancellation of the lease, which had three more years on it, and $1,000, charging that Bentel assigned his lease to two other men, J.W. White and Kendrick Johnson, without their knowledge. The article also noted that the $500,000 amusement park hyped up when Bentel signed the lease never got beyond the planning stage, but this paled in comparison to the litany of legal issues that were facing Bentel. As for Ascot, it was operated by a variety of promoters, with varying degrees of success after the end of 1924.
In the Morosco fraud trial, Bentel claimed he had no involvement in stock sales and was only connected to the motion picture portion of the enterprise as general manager. Further, he claimed that the indictment then led to New York politicians eager to snap up pieces of the Morosco empire and who, he insisted, went after him because of “his efforts to hold the real estate for the benefit of the stockholders, of whom he is one.” He also avowed that only $600,000 of stock was handled by Leven and his minions and he asserted that “the Morosco Holding Company would be solvent if properly administered.”
Bentel and Leven were convicted and sentenced to terms of up to four years at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, while a couple of others were handed one-year terms and two more who were indicted were not tried. An appeal failed, though it is not yet known how long Bentel was incarcerated. In 1927, his wife Harriet became executor of the estate of Frank Egan, a Morosco Productions official with Bentel, and she came into a significant inheritance, as well as management of Egan’s acting school and theatre.
When the 1930 census was taken in early April, he was listed in Los Angeles living with his wife, daughter and son and his occupation as a stocks and bonds broker, but, with the Great Depression underway, he soon changed his line of work. This was as an author’s agent, where, in a Hollywood office, Bentel offered his services in “a complete Revision, Editing and Sales Service,” as described in a 1935 ad.
A few years later, he served as an agent to Charmain London, the widow of the famous author Jack London, though he sued her in the 1943 over a commission he was owed for optioning some London works for possible film development (this was settled out of court. Meanwhile, in 1941, Morosco, who declared bankruptcy during the disaster that struck fifteen years before, sued two ex-wives, Leven and Bentel over the rights to his plays, but he was unable to resurrect his career and died a few years later when he struck and killed by a streetcar in Hollywood.
Bentel continued working until the later Forties and died in 1952, with no obituary located for him, despite his remarkable and rocky career in real estate, the automobile industry, film, as an author’s agent and, of course, the early history of auto racing in Los Angeles. The Museum’s holdings have a few other photos of the Ascot Speedway, which, after 1927, sometimes became known as the Legion Ascot Speedway—so, we’ll look to a future post to continue its story until the venue closed in 1936.