Warren Beath's

Who Killed James Dean

Available at www. Amazon.com

The September 30th 2007

"Death Drive" To Cholame

Below is a stretch of James Dean's Highway 99

The Story of The 9/30/2007 Death Drive and the Cholame gathering. 

 Click-on Death Drive 2007 Tab

              SEPTEMBER 30, 1955

      By Warren Beath

James Dean in his fancy silver racer descended a grade to the Cholame Valley between 5:30 and 5:45pm on this date and collided with a customized 1950 Ford driven by a twenty-three year-old college student on his way home. His life was terminated at the end of a set of skidmarks and against the grill of a huge bathtub of a car. Dean was killed and his passenger gravely injured. The student, Donald Turnupseed, a local boy from nearby Tulare walked away with barely a scratch, but with over a half-century of abuse, lawsuits and intrusive curiosity from reporters to look forward to. This traffic accident would eventually achieve an iconic status as an epochal event in the cultural consciousness as ratified by numerous recreations in documentaries, books and motion pictures. The facination with Dean's car accident and the scarcity of actual detail in the original accounts resulted in a wealth of folklore and cultural accretion which is an ugly reflection of ourselves in the mirror of the collective unconscious. If the event was not important in the galactic perspective, what it has become and what we have done with it, says much about us.

        When Dean left Hollywood behind that morning he entered the everyday and workaday world of the flat farmlands and oilfields of Central California. He descended from the dream realm into the commonhood of regular people going about their normal tasks in that most normal of conveyances that had transformed American life, the automobile. Americans and their cars. In entering into the stream of traffic on that rural highway the movie idol was made man in its lowest denominator and became one of us for a while. He was foreign bacterium rejected and destroyed by the suspicious bloodstream of the world of the average. That is how his death has taken on a sacrificial or sacramental aspect. He became one of us and died and ascended, and is once again a star in the firmament and a beacon to all who would follow his light.

      The boy who had risen from a rural farm found himself among his own at the very end. A beekeeper, a farmer, a housewife who was a nurse, a rural tow-truck operator, schoolchildren enroute to a ball game, a school custodian, an accountant-these were the dramatis personae of his last act.

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  Below Warren Beath Collection
  
  
  

Dean's Porsche 550 Spyder was demolished. It was a 1955 model with approximately 500 miles on the odometer . 

(Photo Warren Beath collection )

Going east in the opposite direction was  50-year-old farmer Clifford Hord

He and his family  were in a Pontiac. Hord testified  that Dean in his sportscar nearly ran him off  the road. Seconds later, Dean's Porsche would collide with Turnupseed's Ford at the intersection in the distance..

Just a few hundred yards from the intersection. This gleaming chromium Memorial was erected in 1977 by Japanese businessman Seita Ohnishi at a cost of $15,000.

(Photo courtesy of Greg LaBorde)

Write your own James Dean story and send to Tim Black at Blackcost@aol.com. If you want to, send jpegs with the story and it will be published under your own name!

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Books By Warren Beath 

To get yours, simply click on the James Dean In Death Book cover below.

The Death Of James Dean: What happened the day he died?  

 Available at www.Amazon.com

Take the Death Drive This 9/30/07 

Bring to life the last day through Jimmy's eyes. The air, the feel of the original road and  the landscape is waiting for you. Drive the death drive of September 30, 1955  

Take the Death Drive. Click on the "Death Drive" Section above!

Turnupseed's 1950 Ford ended up thirty-six feet from impact. Turnupseed  was able to hitchhike home. 

(Photo Warren Beath Collection)

Below both cars are stored in a Cholame garage the night of the accident. The 1948 cream-colored Packard seen next to Turnupseed's Ford was not involved in the accident. 

(Photo Warren Beath Collection)

This is the 1953 Buick ambulance owned by Paul Moreno which transported Dean and his passenger/mechanic Rolf Wutherich to War Memorial Hospital in Paso Robles 26 miles west of the crash site. The hulking ambulance made the drive in twenty minutes .Although Wutherich survived ,Dean expired before reaching the hospital and was pronounced dead by the physician on duty, Dr. Bossert.  

(Photos Warren Beath Collection)

In 1955, this building at 1219 North Vine Street in Hollywood was home to Competition Motors where James Dean purchased the 1955 Porsche Spyder 550. It was here his Porsche was prepped on the day he died at Cholame.  Dean and  mechanic Rolf Wutherich left  for Salinas at 1:30pm.  Dean's friend and racing mentor, Bill Hickman, a Hollywood stuntman, and his photographer , Sanford Roth,  followed  in Dean's 1955 Ford Country Squire station wagon.  

(Photo Courtesy of  Barry McMahon)