Frank's Place: When Jungle Jim Liberman ruled in Funny Cars
As the sprawling old house south of West Chester was being readied for demolition in 2016, the scavenger cultists began to pick the carcass clean.
As the sprawling old house south of West Chester was being readied for demolition in 2016, the scavenger cultists began to pick the carcass clean.
In search of relics from their hero, by then dead 40 years, they hauled away doors, windows, and cinder blocks until finally the contractor had to raze the building and truck the rubble.
Four decades earlier, that structure near the intersection of Routes 202 and 926 had been the home of Jungle Jim Liberman.
In the relatively small world of drag racing, within its even smaller subset of Funny Cars, the Abington-born racer was an iconic figure.
Liberman won a couple of national championships, but was far from the world's greatest dragster. He was, however, the most colorful, and his natural flamboyance turned Funny Cars - stock vehicles with hyper-charged engines - into the sport's most popular class.
Friends describe him as warm, friendly, and approachable, but also as someone who, according to a tribute website, battled drug and alcohol abuse and was "a skirt-chaser."
A former colleague who posted on the site and identified himself only as "JBobbie" offered a glimpse of Liberman:
"JJ built a header pipe on the exhaust and they tricked up the little engine to run on alcohol. It was really fast and ever so much fun as long as you had it under power. If you let go on the throttle, a big flame came out of the exhaust pipe and set the back of your shirt on fire.
"JJ got into it one afternoon and zoomed up the street by the shop and right smack dab into a telephone pole. He couldn't bend his leg for a while and [afterward, when he raced] we would actually tape his right foot to the accelerator pedal."
Born Russell Liberman in Abington in 1945, "Jungle Jim" was a high school dropout with an innate understanding of automotive engines.
His races were memorable spectacles of guts, smoke, flames, and speed. And when they were over, the show was just beginning.
Win or lose, he'd power his vehicle backwards at 100 m.p.h. in a kind of reverse victory lap. At that point, Jungle Pam would appear and an already delighted crowd would erupt into delirium.
In the early 1970s, Liberman spotted a tall, buxom woman on the streets of West Chester. He dubbed her "Jungle Pam" and they began dating. Soon, dressed in skimpy outfits and preening provocatively at starts and finishes, she was an integral part of his racing performances.
"Jim spent most of the time crisscrossing the country, match-racing two to four times a week at every big and backwater track that existed," recalled Bill Warburton, a Glen Mills racing enthusiast. "His main goal was not to win races but to make sure that fans got their money's worth."
Liberman was a brilliant technician. The cars he assembled ran fast and appealed to the eye. His 1973 Vega - now that's funny – was recently selected by National Hot Rod Association fans as the No. 1 Funny Car of all time.
He built them at first in Philadelphia and then in his Westown Township shop. Touring drivers, as well as young racing enthusiasts from Delaware County and beyond, flocked there.
Not having owned a car or possessed a license until I was 23, I was not among them.
Like Caesar's Gaul, 1960s Broomall was divided into three parts - the jocks, the greasers, and the car boys.
My Converse-clad friends and I were the sports-obsessed jocks. We understood and avoided the greasers, with their leather jackets, pointy-toed shoes, and threatening street-corner ethos.
But the car boys were a strange and unknowable caste.
They spoke in a strange tongue, one peppered with phrases like "dual quads" and "wheelies." They always had grease beneath their fingernails. They kept to themselves, warding off enemies with the roar of their souped-up engines, the screech of their tires.
All that I knew of their world beyond Broomall were the ubiquitous "SUNDAY! SUNDAY!" radio commercials luring them to such exotic locales as Atco Raceway or Cecil County Dragway.
One day, we were talking about sports villains. I mentioned "Jungle Jim Loscutoff," a goon on Red Auerbach's early Boston Celtics teams. An acquaintance, one of those rare kids who tried to straddle two worlds, thought I meant the drag racer and proceeded to relate Liberman's story.
Though I knew less about cars than astrophysics, I knew a good story. And Liberman, with his local roots, seemed a compelling figure. Subsequently, whenever I'd stumble across his name in the sports section, I'd stop and read the entire article.
Decades later, one of Liberman's neighbors told Warburton how the driver would sometimes, in the middle of the night, fire up one of his cars and take it for a test run on Route 202.
"I don't know if you ever heard a nitro-burning engine," Warburton said. "But it's the most deafening sound you ever heard. She said he would wake everyone in a one-mile radius."
One of those nighttime rides would be his last. There would be nothing funny about it.
Sometime around 1 a.m. on Sept. 9, 1977, three days short of his 32d birthday, Liberman was driving eastbound along Route 3 in his yellow 1972 Corvette.
He was, it seems, shooting for a track record.
In West Goshen Township, the speeding sports car careened out of control, crossed the medial strip, and slammed into a westbound SEPTA bus.
Liberman was rushed to Chester County Hospital, where, at 1:52 a.m., he was pronounced dead.
His most ardent fans insist now that on some nights, when the traffic near the scene of the crash is light and the moon is bright, you can hear the late driver testing his car.
And those who are car boys at heart can hear Jungle Jim Liberman, semi-hemi aroar, speed off into the darkness.
@philafitz