Doyel: From the banks of Fort Branch to the firehouse of the Indy 500
SPEEDWAY – Why is Dave Neufelder, the accidental fireman, still working the Indianapolis 500 at age 85, still making the 40-mile drive from Pendleton, still walking into the fire barn where he once wore that Tweety Bird-looking yellow fire suit? Because he doesn’t know how to stop. Seriously, smart guy and all of that, but he has no idea how to quit.
If he knew how to quit, Dave Neufelder wouldn’t have made it out of Fort Branch in southern Indiana, living in a three-room shack with his teenage mom and good-for-nothing stepdad, watching the world go by from a creek bed. The rest of town was at Holy Cross Catholic Church in its Sunday finest, but Neufelder was sitting by the water – no shoes, no underwear, cloaked in rags and anger.
“I was bitter,” he says. “Very bitter.”
Neufelder sat on the banks of West Forge Pigeon Creek and made a pact with God.
Take away the hurt in my gut, he prayed, and I’ll work my whole life.
True enough, he’s still at it almost eight decades later. Still working the Indianapolis 500, still parking in his reserved spot, checking in with friends like Roger Penske and Johnny Rutherford, making new friends like Mitch Daniels and A.J. Foyt, missing old friends like Bobby and Al Unser.
Most of all he misses the old man himself, Tony Hulman Jr., his boss for so many years at the racetrack, and before that back in Gibson County. That’s where the story of Dave Neufelder, the accidental fireman, really gets going. He’s 12 years old, walking rows of cornstalks on the Hulman family farm – Princeton Farms, they called it – helping grow the seed corn that made Orville Redenbacher famous and helped Hulman purchase a dilapidated racetrack in Speedway, Indiana.
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On a good day, riding with the older kids in that cattle truck up U.S. 41, Neufelder could get from Fort Branch High to Princeton Farms in about 10 minutes. On a bad day, when he’s late and the truck’s driving away without him, the trip’s a little faster. He runs to his grandmother, who has a 1949 Plymouth, and she’s hitting U.S. 41 like it’s the back straight at IMS.
“We tore up 41,” Neufelder’s saying. “I mean, boy, she was up on the wheel.”
That’s how he talks, Dave Neufelder. It’s how he tells his story. He made it off that creek bed with a combination of charisma and hard work, though truth be told, he didn’t quite make good on that prediction by one of his first bosses, the owner of the Emge Packing Company in Fort Branch.
Neufelder didn’t make his first million by age 40, as Mr. Emge had said he would when he was 23. But Emge wasn’t wrong about the rest of his prophecy.
The second and third million do come faster.
Worked since age 9; might've lied a few times
He worked because he had to, because someone had to, and it wasn’t going to be his stepdad. Dave Neufelder, born to a single mom of 15, finally got a father figure when he was 9. But get a load of this guy.
“A no-account,” Neufelder says. “I was so happy I’d have a dad like everybody else, but he was a bum.”
His mom was buying groceries on credit until the bill reached $13 and she said: Enough. The Neufelders were no charity case. A neighbor was growing vegetables, eggplant and okra mainly, and that’s what the family ate. Dave got his first job at age 9, delivering the newspaper for $6 a week. That went to his mom.
Then he was working the projectors at Fort Branch Theater, sitting in that hot booth, switching one reel to the next – in those days, a movie typically came in six reels – by cutting and splicing the film just so.
Dave was a big kid, tall for his age, which is how he found himself on that cattle truck heading to the Hulman farm in 1950. The truck came to the high school every afternoon during the month-long corn season, looking for kids to detassel corn for $2 an hour. Dave was tall enough to do it, walking the rows in long-sleeved shirts – lest those razor-sharp corn stalks slice up your arms – and pulling the tassel from the top of the stalk to the ground, allowing for nature to take its course.
“There are two male rows,” Dave says, trying to explain the detasseling process. “Pollen blows, and that’s what makes seed corn.”
It was hybrid stuff, that seed corn, and it made a fortune for Tony Hulman Jr. and the man he hired to manage Princeton Farms, Orville Redenbacher.
Dave was 12 at the time, though nobody asked. As if he’d have told the truth. Three years later he was looking for better pay and applied as a mechanic in the National Guard. They asked if he was 18. He said he was. That’s how 15-year-old Dave Neufelder found himself driving that six-by-six military truck in 1953, transporting a 105mm Howitzer cannon 400 miles north to Camp Grayling in Michigan.
Didn’t even have a driver’s license.
What makes a man – sorry, a boy – work like this? Anger does. Desperation.
“I was absolutely devastated,” he says of his impoverished situation all those years ago, eventually living with his grandparents, insisting on paying his way. He worked whenever and wherever he could, but mainly for his Uncle Charlie’s filling station, the old Attebury Marathon in Fort Branch. He approached Uncle Charlie when he was 12 and made him a deal:
“I said, ‘I’ll work for you for two weeks, and if you don’t see a need for me, you don’t have to pay me,’” Neufelder says. “He said, ‘Boy, I can’t go wrong with that.’ I worked for him from (age) 12 to 19, and pretty soon I was running the place.”
Around that time, nature was taking it course again. Dave Neufelder was in love, see. And unbeknownst to him, his destiny with Indianapolis Motor Speedway was fast approaching, like his grandmother in her old Plymouth. I mean, it was up on that wheel.
'Say, Dave, I hear you like racing'
We could turn this story into a LinkedIn page, just list every damn thing Dave Neufelder did to pull himself off that creek bed and build a life for himself and his high school sweetheart, Patty Marshall, but suffice it to say: By age 19 Dave owned a grocery story. Bought it off Patty’s old man, paid fair market price and everything, stocking it and making deliveries to folks without freezers, bringing them a quart of milk, a pint of ice cream.
Years later he’d buy (and later sell) two automotive businesses, a body shop and an express lube, both in Anderson, Indiana, but that was well after he’d sold the grocery store and went to work at Oscar Emge’s meat packing plant in Fort Branch. He’d sit around with Emge and talk finance. One day Emge sized up his protégé and predicted he’d have his first million by age 40, and said the second and third million would come faster.
Neufelder left Fort Branch in 1958 after the Emge Packing Co. expanded into Anderson, where Neufelder met the fireman who changed his life. This was 1966. Dave lived down the street from Ed Ballinger, the old fire chief in town, and Ballinger knew they needed help at the IMS firehouse.
“Say Dave,” he was hollering one day, “I hear you like racing.”
“I sure do,” Dave hollered back. “Especially Indy.”
“How would you like to be on the fire crew at IMS?”
“Yeah,” Dave said, “that would be fine.”
Didn’t take long before it was like Uncle Charlie’s filling station all over again. Pretty soon, out there at the IMS fire barn, Dave Neufelder was running the place.
'I hope he’s got good brakes'
He was there in 2002 when Robby Gordon’s car caught fire in the pits at the Brickyard 400, the lid to his fuel tank exploding into the air. Neufelder came flying over the wall in that ridiculous yellow fire suit, his job to stand outside Gordon’s right rear wheel, watching for traffic as one of his men doused the fire and two others used brooms to push the water toward the wall.
“That was a hairy deal,” he says of standing guard there in the pits. “You had to keep your head on a swivel.”
He was there in 1971 when the brakes gave out on the Indy 500 pace car, which went hurtling into the camera stand just past the finish line, a stand – an old farm wagon, really – Neufelder had pulled out there himself, positioning it, even wrapping the checkered cloth around it. Now on pit row, Neufelder saw the pace car driven by local businessman Eldon Palmer scream by at 125 mph. He didn’t see what happened next. Too far away.
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“I remember when Palmer came in, I said, ‘Man, I hope he’s got good brakes,’ because he was on it,” Neufelder says. “The pace car hit that farm wagon and killed the photographer and injured several others, but we didn’t know at the time. There were no headsets back then. We were just working pit row.”
He started in 1966 working the pit fire crew, became a pit supervisor, then manned one of the fire trucks. He wasn’t a fireman, but times were different back then. Years ago IMS made experience a requirement of its fire personnel, but Neufelder has been grandfathered into the system. Shoot, he could probably teach a class on the subject. On a good many subjects, come to think of it.
“I just do anything that needs to be done,” he says. “There’s not much equipment around here that I didn’t perform.”
You know those old dryers they once pulled around the track during rain delays, shooting flames onto the pavement to dry it? Neufelder has done that.
You know how most IMS teams once stocked pit row before the race with their equipment and fuel tanks? Neufelder has guarded it, spending many a Saturday night patrolling the pits, keeping away the looky-loos. Things could get hairy after a concert in the Snake Pit. Neufelder lived on the grounds in those days, spending May in an RV.
When 2006 Indy 500 champion Sam Hornish Jr. needed someone to bring him the Corvette pace car given to the winner, Neufelder loaded it onto a rollback tow truck and took it Defiance, Ohio. When someone needs a radio somewhere on the track, folks look first for Neufelder to deliver it. Big or small, ask Dave. He’ll do it, or he’ll know someone who can.
“He knows his way around the place, right?” says Jason Penix, senior director of track and operations at IMS. “He has as much institutional knowledge as anyone. There’s a place for him for as long as he wants to be here.”
Pay attention to that last sentence.
'Suck it up, Buttercup'
Neufelder’s seen a lot in 57 years, and a lot has seen him. He befriended the Unser brothers, meeting four-time Indy 500 champion Al for breakfast at nearby Charlie Brown's, and taking care of Bobby whenever the three-time winner visited the track after his back surgery in 2017.
“I hate to see both of those ol’ boys go,” Neufelder says of the Unsers, who died seven months apart in 2021. “They meant a lot to me, and they were good to me.”
To know Neufelder is to be good to him. Like Dale Earnhardt Sr., in town for a Brickyard practice back in the day, spotting Neufelder near the garages during a rain delay and inviting him up onto the back of his carrier. Like then-Gov. Mitch Daniels, eyeballing Neufelder in one of those yellow fire suits, and offering him water.
Like this:
“Someone put their arm around me once and said, ‘How many years you been here?’” Neufelder says. “I said 35, or however many it was at the time, and he goes, ‘Hell, I been here longer than that.’
“I look around and it was AJ Foyt. I said, ‘Hell, A.J., there’s nobody alive who’s been here longer than you!”
Neufelder is roaring at that. He has a blunt charm that few can pull off, telling complaining colleagues, “Suck it up, Buttercup.” Years ago he found a discarded pacifier on the pavement, cleaned it good and started offering it up as well.
Neufelder has complained from time to time himself, of course. He’s washed the fire suits of his roughly 100-person crew, and well into the 1970s he was still using these little old washers and dryers, complaining to any Hulman who’d listen. So one winter Tony Jr. calls and asks him to report to the track. Had something for his disgruntled employee.
“Brand new washers and dryers!” Neufelder says. “These were 50-pounders. Industrial. Patty and I were a lot faster with those machines.”
Ah, yes. Patty. His high school sweetheart, business partner, wife of 64 years. Patty’s the reason Dave has sincerely tried to retire after each of the last two track seasons. Health issues, you know; none of us is getting any younger. So why is Dave back at the track this year, same as last year? Because Penix and current IMS fire chief Troy Weber asked.
Next time you’re in in the fire barn and see that sweet woman helping Dave with administrative duties, say hello to Patty.
“I have to be with her, and I signed that contract long before I signed with IMS,” Dave Neufelder says, referring to their 1959 wedding in that charming way of his. “(Penix and Weber) told me, ‘You can come and go as you please. You can keep your personal parking spot.’ They let me bring her with me.”
Neufelder looks around the fire house.
“I love these people,” he says, “and they sure act like they care about me, and they’re awful good to my wife. They go out of their way to greet her, hug her, let her know they appreciate her.”
He may or may not be getting emotional. A boy finds himself without hope or shoes, watching the world pass by, but the man works nearly 60 years at the most famous speedway in the world, rubbing elbows with Penske and Unser, Foyt and Earnhardt. He’s here with friends, he’s here with Patty, and there’s a place for Dave Neufelder as long as he wants to be at IMS.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana man still putting out fires at Indianapolis 500 at age 85
