CRANDON – Annual off-road races have helped shape a small Wisconsin Northwoods community since their launch in 1970. A series of vignettes help tell the story of Crandon International Raceway and the Crandon World Championships through the voices of competitors who know the event firsthand.
Tom Schwartzburg grew up in the car business in Milwaukee and then West Bend. His wife, Ruth, taught kindergarten for 36 years.
A competitor from the start in 1970, Tom has missed racing on Labor Day in Crandon just twice, once due to other obligations and once when he was in the Rhinelander hospital with a kidney stone. This year he needed help from fellow racers to get his buggy into compliance, but he’ll be ready to stand on the gas once more.
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“It just happened. And that was the beauty of it,” Tom Schwartzburg said of their long and deep affection for the sport.
“We just clicked. It’s the only thing I’ve done longer than off-road racing is this: We're gonna be married 59 years in December. And this lady is very special. And it’s been very special.”
At home, even friends have little idea about the race car the Schwartzburgs field out of the little garage on the hobby farm where they’ve lived for more than 50 years. At Crandon it seems as though everyone knows them and recognizes the 1986 truck they’ve driven to the races every year since it was new.
Ruth has participated, as a co-driver when those were used in two-seat buggies and then as a competitor in the popular women’s races that were held at the end of the weekend.
“When the women got out there to race, everyone left their pits, every mechanic, and they put on a show,” Tom recalled during the track’s June racing weekend. “They weren't inhibited, they weren't concerned about fixing the vehicle, because that was the last race of the weekend.”
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Ruth is a storyteller, too, and a favorite is about her greatest innovation from when the then-Brush Run 101 course included a purpose-built mudhole to test the competitors.
“I happened to be at Marshall Field’s at Mayfair,” she said, referring to the mall in Wauwatosa. “And they were having a problem with all of the mud on their goggles. … I saw this plastic lid, which was really for cakes, and I thought that would work if they put it over their face. And so I'm standing there, putting it over my face, and the lady came and she said, ‘Can I help you?’ … And I bought it. She looked at me like, oh, my.…”
As people who’ve been married almost 60 years are wont to do, Tom picked up the story:
“She carried it in her lap during the race. You had the choice, you could idle through the water, or you could hit it at a fairly good speed, but with open wheels, now I’m soaked and I can’t see. So she would hold up that plastic so I could see through it and go through at a moderate speed.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: A Wisconsin couple in their 80s ‘just clicked’ and then fell in love with off-road racing in Crandon, too
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