Interview with Johnny Rutherford THREE TIME WINNER of the Indianapolis 500 and Hearing Aid Wearer
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Topic: Winning, Racing and Hearing Aids
Beck: Good Morning Mr. Rutherford. It is an honor to meet you.
Rutherford: Thanks Dr. Beck. It's a pleasure to meet you too.
Beck: I'd like to start by mentioning a few milestones from your career, if that's OK?
Rutherford: Sure, that's fine.
Beck: You won the Indy 500 three times, and that's amazing...winning one time is extraordinary, but three times is almost unimaginable. I grabbed the following facts from your bio, and they are simply amazing...You started driving modified stock cars in Dallas in 1959, and joined the IMCA sprint car circuit in 1960, and joined USAC in 1962. You were the fastest qualifier in the 1963 Daytona 500 and earned a world record the first time you competed in a stock car. Your first start in the Indianapolis 500 was in 1963. Your first win in an Indy car was the Atlanta 250 and the USAC National Sprint Car Championship in 1965. You were the Indy 500 pole winner in 1973, 1976 and 1980 and the Indy 500 winner in 1974, 1976 and then again, in 1980. Your qualifying lap speed of 215.189 mph at the1984 Michigan International Speedway was the world record, and in 1986 you won the Michigan 500, and in 1994, you retired from Indy car racing. You have had an amazing career Mr. Rutherford!
Rutherford: Thanks Dr. Beck.
Beck: And if I recall, you sort of grew up in a race car family in Texas?
Rutherford: Well, in some respects, yes. I was born in Kansas, but I was pretty much raised in Fort Worth. It's like the old saying, "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got there as fast as I could."
Beck: Now that I live in San Antonio, that means a lot more to me! Did your dad race cars too?
Rutherford: When I grew up, my dad was into aviation as his career, but his hobby was race cars. I grew up with airplanes, boats, and anything else that moved fast. I learned to go to the edge and look over, just like my dad. One Saturday night, when I was 9 years old, he took me to a "Midget Race" and something clicked. I saw it once and wanted to be a race-car driver. After that, everything was racing-related. I took wheels off this toy and put them on that toy, built race cars out of blocks of wood.
Beck: So whenever the wheels were missing from the baby-buggy your mom knew to look on the soap-box derby car? I guess you must've actually built your early race-cars yourself?
Rutherford: Yes, more so in the early days. I was in a hot-rod club right after high school too, so I've been involved since I was pretty young. One night I was at a meeting and one of the guys told me he had to leave early to help his brother put an engine in his "dirt track car." I remember I heard that term and I asked him about it. He said, "Sure, the dirt track races run every Friday night over in Dallas at the Devil's Bowl Speedway." With the help of the guys in the hot-rod club, I found a 1932 Chevy Coupe, and I bought a Chevrolet V-8 engine and installed it into the Coupe.
Beck: Was that the small block back then?
Rutherford: Yes, it was a 265, and that was back in 1958, and I started racing in 1959. My goal was to get to the Indianapolis 500.
Beck: Well, you got there pretty quickly, and the rest is history. One thing that fascinates me about the early "Ground Effects" race cars is the weight distribution and the center of gravity issues. Can you address those a little?
Rutherford: Sure...if you "freeze framed" the car in the middle of the turn at Indy, and then you put it on a scale and weighed it, you'd see the car weighs some 4000 pounds more on the scale, than it does sitting statically in the garage.
Beck: And I guess that's because the aerodynamics of the car are designed so that at near full speed, the wind pushes it downward into the track, increasing the friction and the grab of the wheels on the track?
Rutherford: That's right - it's the opposite of wing lift on an airplane. I had one of the first Ground Effects cars, and it was thrilling to drive that car. It was very stable and very fast. My Pennzoil Chaparral from 1980, the one I won my third Indy in, was the prototype Ground Effects vehicle for what we see today.
Beck: What was the fastest speed of a qualifying Indy car?
Rutherford: I think it was probably 238 miles per hour.
Beck: That is simply amazing. In fact that would be a pretty good clip for a small plane! Nonetheless, perhaps we'd better focus this discussion a little on issues related to hearing....I presume your hearing loss has to do with noise exposure?
Rutherford: Yes, I think so. I believe my hearing loss has a lot to do with driving race cars for 40 years! A lot of the time I used headphone communications with the crew while driving, and we had custom made radios so we could all communicate during the races. But yes, there sure was a lot of noise on the track over all those years!
Beck: How long have you worn hearing aids?
Rutherford: Well, it's probably been about ten years. Al Unser (senior) told me about Bill Austin and Starkey, and my wife had a lot to do with me finally deciding to get hearing aids too. She was getting tired of repeating everything to me. So to make a long story short, Al told me about Bill and Starkey, and my wife told me about my hearing problems, so a few years ago, I asked Bill to work with me, and he's been taking care of me ever since. I cannot believe the difference hearing aids make, it's been a real blessing to have these hearing aids.
Beck: So you wear the 100 percent digital, completely-in-the-canal (CIC) models?
Rutherford: Yes. They're the Starkey brand, and the Axent model.
Beck: Do you find yourself wearing them all day?
Rutherford: Well, that varies with what I'm doing. If I'm in a high internsity noisy area, I take them out. But for day-to-day conversational speech, I pretty much wear them all day. So it all depends on what I'm doing. If things are noisy, I tend to take them out, and if it's normal conversation, I wear them both.
Beck: That's a great strategy. I used to tell all of my patients that you don't need to wear hearing aids when things are too loud, and if you can take them out in a loud or noisy situation, that may be the best thing to do, depending on the situation. And you're exactly right, hearing aids are primarily for conversational speech, one-on-one...that's what they were made to do, and that's what they do best. Mr. Rutherford, I know you have to run, and it's really been a pleasure meeting you and speaking with you.
Rutherford: Thanks Dr. Beck, it's been fun for me too.
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