Alan Bemis’s first competition in a Grand Prix auto race did not go well. Bemis, an MIT professor and an heir to a family fortune, spun out on a nasty bend and ended up in the brush, sitting helplessly in a car that was no longer race-worthy. All of which might have been particularly galling, considering that it was Bemis who had paid $248 to carve the mile-long dirt track through the woods of his Wayland estate. Yet Bemis, whose track sat directly across Route 27 from the Sandy Burr Country Club, took the setback in stride. His true goal was, after all, far more ambitious than winning a race.
Bemis, along with a handful of friends who shared his enthrallment with auto racing, was determined to bring European-style Grand Prix racing to this side of the Atlantic. In that endeavor, he appeared to be off to a good start. Despite the chill of a mid-November sleet storm, his Grand Prix drew 2,000 spectators to the woods of what was in 1935 a distant Boston suburb.
Bemis was not the kind of person who was easily discouraged. He was a 1928 Harvard graduate who had earned a master’s degree from MIT, where his teaching was admired and his research contributed to the development of radar tracking and heat-seeking bomb systems. He also devoted much of his life to running his family’s two businesses, the Bemis Bag Company and the Metritape Company.
In his leisure time, he chased the mobile passions of the moneyed classes, including airplanes, yachts, and vintage cars. It was his passion for vintage cars that in 1930 compelled him to buy a 1913 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost that had once belonged to Alice Longfellow, daughter of the famous poet.
Bemis’s affection for speedy machinery of all sorts led to lasting relationships with similarly minded gentlemen, including Sam Collier, C. Miles Collier, Barron Collier Jr., Briggs Cunningham, and Langdon Quimby, who in 1933 founded the Automobile Racing Club of America and sponsored a Grand Prix at the 1940 World’s Fair in New York. ARCA disbanded in 1941 with approach of World War II, but members regrouped three years later and formed the Sports Car Club of America, which still exists.
To design his winding backyard racetrack, Bemis engaged fellow Harvard man Sidney Shurcliff, who would go on to many notable architectural achievements, including the landscape design of one of the country’s first suburban shopping centers — Shoppers World in Framingham.
The Wayland track would become one node of a small ARCA racing circuit, with similar venues in Marstons Mills on Cape Cod and in Briarcliff Manor in New York, and Bemis would occasionally put its straightaways to good use, towing his gliders into the air.
According to racing historian Thomas Tencer, operations and research technician at Revs Institute, an automotive museum in Naples, Fla., the November 1935 Grand Prix in Wayland was the third of three ARCA racing events held in town. The first took place more than a year earlier, on Oct. 7, 1934, and the second major event was a Boston Regional Championship Race later that month. Other less prestigious races would continue to attract local crowds for years, and the track, launched with great expectations, would eventually fade into the hilly woods of Wayland.
Among auto racing cognoscenti, Wayland’s 1935 Grand Prix remains a historic event. It succeeded in bringing a version of Grand Prix racing to America and it led 2,000 spectators to the wooded hills of Wayland — and for a very reasonable price. The properly mannered sponsors explained in a note about the awkward subject of ticket price: “As Blue Laws prohibit our charging an admission, we propose to sell programs for 25 cents each. You get in free for nothing, but we are banking everything on your sporting instincts being aroused sufficiently to buy one for yourself and for everyone you bring.”
In retrospect, the promoters’ faith in sporting instincts was a given. It was, after all, the driving force behind their effort to bring Grand Prix racing to America, and it was, next to money, their most powerful asset.
Bemis’s 1913 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which he famously drove to the top of Mt. Washington, will be the subject of a Zoom presentation by Toby Stinson, historian at the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum in Maine, from 7-8 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 18. There will be a watch party at the Wayland Museum and Historical Society and it will also be livestreamed on Zoom. Visit waylandmuseum.org for details.
Art Jahnke is a Wayland Museum board member.
