The Soap Box Derby
by Barry Bauer
I got interested in the Soap Box Derby when I came across some negatives taken of the 1964 Derby race in St. Johns. Turns out I was a fan of it way back then as a picture of my car showed up on one negative. There’s no mistaking that ’57 Chevy convertible with a black top. It had to have been the only one in the country.
I knew that Bee’s Chevrolet had some Derby cars mounted on a hallway wall but they had disappeared. I inquired about them last year and learned they still had them but they were in storage upstairs. I learned that Bee’s would be remodeling their showroom and would be moving the cars out. I not only got pictures of the cars in storage but Jeff Feldpausch also let me get pictures of them after they got them down. He even offered to have them washed which was great. I wanted to show them at their best.
Jeff also had the equipment board which was a kit containing a helmet, toggle bolts, angle brackets, and should have had a steering wheel but was missing. Jeff and his dad, Bernard, handcrafted the steering wheels in a jig they made.
A telephone call to Bernard Feldpausch, one of the original organizers, gave me more information. He said one of the reasons for the Soap Box Derby was to teach boys how to work their hands and with tools such as a square. The majority of the car was supposed to be built by the boys
The weight limit was 250 lbs for car and driver and one year a boy had to go with a sheet covering for his car and that plus some dieting got him in under the limit.
One of the stipulations for entering the Derby was that if they won they couldn’t keep their cars. The Derby committee didn’t want a winning car to be entered into the next year’s Derby.
Bernard got a call one year from a mother asking him how she could get fiberglass off the kitchen floor. They built these cars wherever they could.