GREEN-EYED MONSTERS

THE BITTER DISCORD THAT DROVE THE FASTEST BROTHERS ON THE PLANET

- BRIAN LOHNES

WALT ARFONS NEVER SMILED. Art Arfons had a big toothy grin. Walt was gaunt and quiet. Art was excitable, almost squeaky. Walt used Goodyear rubber. Art was a Firestone man. They went years without speaking to each other, which isn’t so strange for two highly competitive racers during the height of America’s land speed–record wars in the Sixties. But Walt and Art worked side by side in shops on a shared property and had huge success as a record-setting drag-racing duo in the Fifties. Nobody—not even the Arfons brothers themselves—knew how they went from friends to enemies.

Family rivalries often begin in childhood, and many a psychologist might point to Art’s role as the baby from a second marriage in the Arfons family, but by all accounts, the siblings got on well as kids. Walter, the oldest, was born in 1916; Arthur in 1926. Art followed Walt and another brother, Dale, into the military in the Forties. When the war was over, all three of them were back in their hometown of Akron, Ohio, working at the family feed-and-grain mill and exercising their recently learned mechanical skills in the burgeoning sport of drag racing.