By Joe Scalzo

When it came time to enlist in the Second World War, Phil Walters (1916 – 2000) chose one of the most dangerous of all assignments — pilot of an unarmed and unshielded Waco glider. He survived the invasion of Sicily without a wound, but when the gliders went airborne a second time, in the Netherlands, German ground troops were waiting for them and picked them off one by one.

Badly wounded and taken prisoner, Walters had so many holes shot in him that medics from the German field hospital were withholding plasma, which was in short supply anyway, because Walters seemed a dying cause. But Walters’ life was unexpectedly saved because one of his captors was an English-speaking doctor who, it seemed, had never gotten over the excitement of a prewar visit to the Philadelphia, where he had attended his first, and surely only, buzz-bomb midget car match, and been struck spellbound by an amazing driver named Ted Tappett, who had swept every race on the card. It took some time to convince this doctor that Phil Walters, near-death glider pilot, was also Ted Tappett, amazing race driver. But after he was, Walters received the best emergency care available, including the delicate removal of a damaged kidney and half a lung. 

Walters came out of the war well-decorated with the Purple Heart, the Air Medal, seven Bronze Stars, and the rank of Flight Officer. He next went into partnership with Bill Frick inventing a hybrid named the “Fordillac”— a sleeper mating Cadillac’s largest overhead-valve V8s to innocuous 1951 Ford sedans. And this wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing brute became an instant hit not only with the whiskey-runners of the Carolinas but by the fabulous dilettante Briggs Swift Cunningham.

Buzz-bomb racing was almost played out, and amateur sports car racing was just beginning to emanate near New York’s center at Watkins Glen. Having broken out with a resounding case of sports car-racing fever, Cunningham decided that he and Walters must co-drive a Fordillac in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But after the French said, “No way,” Cunningham was obliged to do the next best thing and enter two Cadillacs just off the showroom. And despite Cunningham going off the road and getting stuck in a sandpit for half an hour, one of the Caddys, the one the French called “the Monster,” finished 11th – not too bad.

Back in the U.S., Cunningham, by now building his own cars, put Walters in charge of the program, including four more visits to Le Mans, with a best third in 1953. Along with all his hundreds of buzz-bomb scores earlier, Walters twice won the 12 Hours of Sebring, twice won the Grand Prix of Watkins Glen; won the Floyd Bennett Cup; plus the perpendicular hillclimb called Giants’ Despair. Under the white-and-blue Cunningham colors he raced Oscas, Porsches, Coopers, Ferraris, Jaguars and, of course, all those Cunninghams. He might well have gone on racing forever, except the scores of spectator fatalities at the 1955 Le Mans turned him against the sport.

He’d changed his name to “Ted Tappett” when he was just starting out, correctly believing that a whiz-bang name would get him into the fastest buzz-bombs.

Former motorcycle racer Scalzo has authored definitive biographies of inductees Gary Nixon, Dick Mann, Bart Markel, Clint Brawner and the Unsers. Other titles include City of Speed: Los Angeles and the Rise of American Racing, Indianapolis Roadsters 1952-1964 and The American Dirt Track Racer.

Fred Walters

(Brian Cleary/bcpix.com)