What a life. TV Tommy Ivo went from youth actor in the early television age (Margie, starring Cynthia Pepper, although Tommy’s even earlier cinema co-stars included Boris Karloff and Jerry Lewis) to an unstoppably wild drag-strip entertainer, an actor almost cyborg-melded with a race car.
It was, therefore, perhaps inevitable that TV Tommy was going to get together with automotive and hot rodding historian Tom Cotter at some juncture. TV Tommy Ivo: Drag Racing’s Master Showman is a showpiece of a book, 240 pages with nearly an art-volume layout and more than 250 photos. Above is one of them, showing the 1960 twin-Buick dragster that launched Ivo to national stardom. It used a Kent Fuller chassis with a wheelbase chopped to 88 inches. The nailhead V-8s were tied together by their starter ring gears. During an exhibition stop at a primitive strip in Concord, North Carolina, TV Tommy ran it down an embankment when the parachute failed. His crewman, Don Prudhomme, now our esteemed columnist at Hemmings Muscle Machines, towed the twice-engine car out with a 1957 Cadillac. The book is $28, go to www.motorbooks.com or call 800-458-0454.
