Book Review: “One Off”

“One Off”
By Anatoly Arutunoff
254 Pages, color and B&W illustrations, hardbound, 6.25 x 9.25
Beeman Jorgenson, Inc. Indianapolis, IN 2008
ISBN 0-929758-25-0

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Review by Pete Vack

Anatoly “Toly” Armaisevich Arutunoff is not your average autobiographer any more than he is an average amateur race driver. There is nothing average about Toly and that’s what makes “One Off”–an often incoherent accumulation of anecdotes–so compelling. The title could not be more fitting for Toly, like many of the weird cars he has owned, is himself a classic one-of-a-kind. So is his book.

Disclaimers. I first met Toly at the Walter Mitty at Road Atlanta maybe 25 years ago, where he was competing with his Lancia Appia Zagato. Somehow during the rain I got myself holed up with him in his van and listened—for when one is with Toly that is what is done—for hours. Many years later I asked Toly to write a few pieces for VeloceToday, which he did, and I hope he continues to do so. And of course we will review his new book. So is the reviewer biased? Of course.
Read on anyway.

Make us describe “One Off” in one word and it would have to be “funny” or on first read even “hilarious”. His humor is original, unexpected and poignant but like all humor isolated by time, culture, geography, gender, interests and language itself. Otherwise merely amusing or puzzling anecdotes will provide huge belly laughs if you were born a white-middle-class male in the midsection of the U.S between 1930 and 1950 and loved cars and women. If not, all bets are off.

Give us another word and it would be “American.” Born in Tulsa and raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, (about 50 miles north of Tulsa), Oklahoma, his parents were both from Russia, his mother an aristocrat and his father possessing an engineering genius that made the family wealthy (dad invented the submersible pump). Toly grew up to be as American as the two-tone Chevy Bel Air he drag raced on the flat, white highways of his home state. He drove Packards, Studebakers, motorbikes, ( a single cylinder Powell flathead) and listened with fear when Johnny Law spoke to him from behind reflective RayBans. His is a uniquely American story told with fondness, a distinct feeling and unerring insights. “I was born nostalgic,” he wrote.

Proust-like, no matter what the subject, Toly has some distant recollection which usually adds to the flavor of the particular story being related. “One autumn afternoon in 1953, gray and cold, the late Eddie Turner, Helen Smith, Sydney Grant and I put the top down on my Lincoln and drove down to Tulsa. In the full flush of teenage energy, we saw ‘The Robe,’ went shopping, saw ‘Mogambo,’ and went to a football game that night. We beat Houston 17-14; now ask me to remember something important.” As he travels the world he remains consistently and honestly born in the USA. He races in the Targa Florio, but never really leaves home. He meets English royalty but pines for the girl next door. The gangly boy with the Rusky name is the all American boy next door, as generous and smart and naive as Opie from Mayberry. Maybe more sexed; a good part of the book is a coming-of-age humorous homage to the many women in his life. You have been warned.

His baptism into our way of life came as an accidental tourist at the 1957 Mille Miglia. Until that time he was comfortable being an Okie fom Bartlesville, albeit one with a good deal of inheritable money. Having money allowed Toly to live a life the vast majority of Opies could only dream of. After catching Portago on film in that last tragic Mille Miglia and deciding that road racing was the only way to go, the 18 year old Arutunoff went home and ordered up a brand new Jag XK–SS no less! The factory fire at Coventry meant that he had to settle for a new Porsche Carrera Speedster.

Arutunoff takes us from his baptism to the creation of Hallett Motor Speedway near his beloved Bartlesville, but pays no attention to any kind of formal structure such as subject matter or timeframe (as Denise McCluggage wrote in her review, “chronology [is] shattered like the flower burst of fireworks”) but a guy who has earned two and a half college degrees either knows what works or doesn’t. It works and somehow flows well, bringing the reader back to the pages to find out what craziness he is up to now. Partial to Italian cars (Abarths, Alfas, Ferraris, Lancias), Toly would race anything from a Studebaker Golden Hawk to a Bristol Zagato and everything in-between. His epic drive in a box-stock Lancia Flaminia Zagato in the Targa Florio is recounted in detail and reflected again years later as he drives the Lancia again in the Targa Florio Historic event.

Toly laughs out loud and makes us laugh, too. He lived–and lives–the life many of us dreamed. Who of us could not say, in the summer of 1967, “Wouldn’t it be neat to have enough money to buy a new Lamborghini Miura, and go race it?” (He did.) Or to take off on whim and go to Europe to race in the last of the great road races? (Many times.) Some might see too much of ourselves in this book, for Toly was our hero when we were young. He raced the cars we longed to merely see, traveled the world and partied ‘til dawn when we were homebound; he caught the girls we loved to chase and came out of it all with seemingly nary a scratch and with a sense of humor and humility. He had it all, except Cary Grant looks, but that didn’t slow him down.

As Toly put it, “I wrote the book fundamentally to let the youth (up to 40 years old) of today know how simple motorsports used to be…” and as such is not meant to be philosophical. Still and probably purely accidentally, Toly’s lifestyle tugged at this reviewer causing a bit of introspection. I couldn’t help asking myself, like Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” of both ourselves and our hero.