Salt Walther Dies at 65

Hi folks -- I never met the man, but play tennis at a park that is named for his father.  His obituary in the Dayton Daily News yesterday was only 4 lines or so. Ho could I have missed looking up and talking to this Iconic racing figure from my generation, not the fastest driver but certainly a survivor of one of the most horrific crashes of the 1970s or for that matter any decade.It was said that addiction to pain killers dominated his life after 1973 until the recent past. It was said that he lived life on the edge, at least part of it. He drove the Dayton Steel Wheel special, a car owned by his father and made possible by the wealth accrued from the Dayton-Walther Corporation. He was a generational legacy of a Dayton that is no more -- a medium sized city filled with metalworking and foundry firms, a prosperous city that is now the shell of its once proud self.

I am sure the stories he could have told me would have been one great book, a reflection of one fast-burning life that took no hostages.