Mom and I went to the Social Security office yesterday to have the nursing home removed as her representative payee. Because we had to wait for an hour, Mom was frequently talking about wanting to leave and walk home, while I had to force her to stay. Because she lost about 50 pounds in the nursing home, basically none of her pants fit her, and the ones that fit her best, she had pooped on that morning, and they weren’t dry yet, since I don’t have a functioning dryer and have to hang-dry everything, so the pants she had were constantly on the verge of falling off her, and she had to catch them (one time they actually did). With $60 left in one bank account and $70 in the other until next week, I can’t really afford to buy her clothes, but I did think this would help with that. I assumed that she was going to be taken in a PACE CNY bus in a wheelchair, but they ended up sending a smaller van instead that wasn’t equipped for a wheelchair, so she had to bring her walker. She isn’t great at using the walker, so I had to hold on to it and guide her, while she stopped often to pull up her pants. It was not fun.
I would have preferred for her to have complete access to her money again, but once again, they said she did not have the cognition to make her own decisions, simply because she can’t remember her address, even though she remembers everything else they ask her. Instead, I had to be made a representative payee, which obviously limits what can be done with the money since it is not supposed to go to anything for me. That’s fine, but thinking about things like shared grocery bills is really confusing, as this seems to imply that I would only be allowed to buy her groceries with this money, which might force me to do separate grocery orders with separate delivery bills if I try to do this. What I’m probably going to do instead is have her mortgage come directly out of her Social Security. Since the mortgage payment has gone up from $500 to $1,000 because the escrow includes her taxes and insurance and she has emergency homeowner’s insurance until I can get some insurance company to take her after the previous one dropped her, since I couldn’t get the roof repaired in time. I’m still going to try, and have that lowered, but if I can move that from my ledger to hers, that should free up enough money for me to cover everything else after that and maybe I can actually save now. One thing I know I’m going to do immediately is pay off my last credit card company in default, which is only about $400. Then, I suppose I can decide between some combination of saving, paying off student loans, paying off Mom’s credit cards in default, paying off the debt we took out on our life insurance policies, saving, trying to repair our dryer/see if our oven needs fixed, and/or paying for funeral expenses. That’s a lot of different possibilities to consider and I still haven’t decided which of these things I’m going to focus on first, but that will finally give me a lot of options again. She’s going to receive a debit card with her back payment on it, so only the next week until I’m paid again is going to be rough now. I’m probably going to have to go to the 0 to see what paperwork I need to fill out to have the mortgage withdrawn from her Social Security again, and if she’ll be able to have direct deposits again. I guess since I’m the representative payee now, I can do all that myself, and she doesn’t have to go out again, which is a blessing. And obviously, I can and will use her money to buy her pants that fit better, but it might be a challenge buying online since she probably isn’t strong enough to go to a store.
Since the Social Security office is located in the Syracuse Federal Building and it is also a courthouse, they are required to take everybody’s cell phones when they enter the building (presumably so they do not take pictures or make audiovisual recordings of the proceedings). That was really frustrating to me, because the transport company told me that I was supposed to call them to arrange a return trip twenty minutes before leaving the Social Security appointment, but how do I do that without my cell phone? Well, the Social Security teller or whatever his title was allowed me to use his phone to make the call, so we were good. When the return cab arrived, I couldn’t find it though, and we had to stay out there 30-45 minutes later as I tried to simultaneously walk around the block to look for the cab while trying to make sure Mom didn’t leave the bench where I had sat her down, ‘cause I was very concerned that she would after she talked about wanting to walk home. The cab driver drove around the block four or five times, but I guess we were never in the same corner of the block at the same time, so it took me forever to find him. Then, as Mom was trying to walk off the sidewalk and into the van, she fell on her bottom. I couldn’t lift her up, but the driver and I together could. I asked her several times later whether she was hurt there and she insisted that she wasn’t hurt and that she didn’t even remember falling (that’s how bad her short-term memory is these days). Hopefully, this was one of the last times she’s going to have to go to an office for paperwork, because I don’t know how many more times she’ll have the strength for an outing like that.
Anton de Pasquale (14)
Summary: Active Supercars driver with 11 wins. After qualifying for the Supercars playoffs this year, he has earned his sixth top ten points finish in seven seasons.
Case for: He is very much still relevant today and is arguably having his best season yet, since he has posted a 26-4 head-to-head record against his teammate David Reynolds, meaning he has a chance to be the highest-rated Supercars driver this year in my touring car model. He also won six races in 2021, second-most to Shane van Gisbergen’s 14. His rating of .089 entering this season was still a little questionable, but his rating has markedly increased from .012 in my original model, and it should markedly increase again this year.
Case against: Five of those six wins in 2021 happened in the gimmicky Sydney SuperSprint series, where Supercars raced on the same track 11 races in a row after races at several other tracks were canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions. Winning repeatedly at one track isn’t as impressive as winning at a bunch of tracks, and it seemed people defined de Pasquale’s career based on that for a long time, especially since he only won three races in all other seasons.
Verdict: Keep. He might not belong on the list yet if I finished today, but given his current trajectory, he probably will before I’m done. This year, I think he finally proved that he did more than simply benefit from having to compete and dominate on the same track over and over.
Giniel de Villiers (18)
Summary: De Villiers won four consecutive South African Touring Car Championships and 42 races from 1997 to 2000 before winning the first fake Dakar Rally in 2009.
Case for: Winning four titles in a row in any national touring car series is difficult to dismiss, and he did not necessarily back into any of those titles. Crossing over between touring car racing and rally racing also helps his case. In addition to winning the first Dakar Rally that didn’t actually race to Dakar, he won a couple of South African Rally Championship races as well.
Case against: His case comes down basically entirely to how seriously I take his touring car titles, and I really don’t think that I do. Looking at all the other drivers that he beat, I don’t see any that even felt to me like the slightest contenders to make the list. The most famous driver he beat was Shaun van der Linde, the 1994 champion, I guess, because he is Kelvin and Sheldon’s father. Shaun has a rating of .109 (pretty paltry compared to Sheldon’s .349 and Kelvin’s .328), while de Villiers is not eligible for my model, but de Villiers did win 32 races to Shaun’s 9 from 1997 to 1999 when they both competed. He also had a pretty short run in touring cars as he had his four great seasons and then he was done, but the “Dakar Rally” win was admittedly nine years later in 2009.
Verdict: Keep. Since de Villiers is not eligible for my touring car model, I have to do some hazy guesswork here, but if Shaun van der Linde has a rating of .109 and de Villiers won over three times as many races when they competed together, my guess is de Villiers, if he had a rating, would be around .25. So yeah, probably. But the competition there was so bad that you shouldn’t be surprised if I change my mind.
Don Devendorf (16)
Summary: IMSA driver with two titles in the GTU and GTO classes in 1979 and 1982, respectively. He has 7 overall wins and 15 more in class.
Case for: The volume of wins alone is enough to make a case for him, especially because 15 of his 22 wins came in solo drives (the other 7 were shared with the more famous Tony Adamowicz, who I have already rejected). Before that, Devendorf also had five SCCA Runoffs titles, one in the G Production class in 1968, one in E Production in 1970, and three consecutive in the C Sedan class from 1973 to 1975.
Case against: Devendorf never won a 24 Hours of Daytona or 12 Hours of Sebring and that’s a major strike against for an IMSA driver since those races are probably more important than the championships. He had a short run as all his IMSA wins were from 1978 to 1983. What his case ultimately comes down to is how strong the fields were, and I don’t think they were amazing. Excluding Daytona and Sebring (where he didn’t win anyway), there were only three IMSA winners in Devendorf’s classes during his run who even have Wikipedia pages: Adamowicz, Walt Bohren, and Yoshimi Katayama, and I have none of them on the list. I know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything since there are great drivers without pages, but it suggests his classes weren’t all that relevant. Devendorf was better than these guys, but was he that much better?
Verdict: Drop. I like the fact that almost all his wins were solo, but he was competing against fields of nobodies, and he wasn’t dominant enough for long enough to overcome that. At least de Villiers won four titles in a row and a lot more wins against his shallow field, and his Dakar Rally win is more prestigious than anything Devendorf ever had. I suspect I’d feel differently about Devendorf if he had endurance wins or a longer period of relevance, but he didn’t, so I don’t.
Darel Dieringer (16)
Summary: Solid NASCAR driver with 7 wins from 1963-1967. He also has 9 proto-ARCA wins, 1 proto-ARCA West win, and 1 NASCAR Short Track win.
Case for: Dieringer had a strong reputation, because his wins often came in major events, including a 400-mile Riverside race, the 1966 Southern 500, and a 400-lap 1967 North Wilkesboro race that he led flag-to-flag. He was always hyped as one of the big stars in his heyday and he consistently drove for big factory car owners like Bill Stroppe, Bud Moore, and Junior Johnson. He also won a race by eight laps despite starting 20th in a weird race where they kicked all the factory cars out.
Case against: 1963 to 1967 is a very short run, and four of his wins (1965 and 1966) and his best points finish (3rd in 1965) came in the years of the Chrysler and Ford boycotts, when plenty of the top drivers weren’t entered in most races. Most of his wins came for Bud Moore, but three of them came in 1965 and 1966 after Joe Weatherly died as the two-time defending champion, then Billy Wade died the year after becoming the first driver to win four races in a row. He did beat Wade for a win once when they were teammates, but he likely never would’ve been the team leader there if Weatherly or Wade hadn’t died, and I don’t have Wade on the list either. Despite his flag-to-flag win at North Wilkesboro for Johnson, I don’t think anybody’s ranking him highly on the list of all-time Junior Johnson drivers. I don’t find his .048 stock car rating compelling.
Verdict: Drop. He had his moment with bursts of dominance but it came against some of the worst fields of all time. He might have a strong case if he was a dominant driver in other stock car tours like his contemporary Paul Goldsmith or something, but he wasn’t. I think if I was going to go for a driver like this, I’d rather go for someone like Nelson Stacy, who had a much higher winning percentage (4/45 vs. 7/181) with Cup wins that came arguably against stronger fields on average and with consecutive proto-ARCA titles and much more dominance in other divisions in general, but I’ll get to him later. This is like Jamie McMurray against worse fields to me.
Louis Disbrow (15)
Summary: Disbrow was one of the most prolific winners in an era that has been very poorly documented. There is a great historian named Darren Galpin, who I’ve talked with before, who has archived more pre-1950 races than anyone else in the world. I really recommend his site, and I’ve downloaded all his books, and this guy seems to know more about pre-World War II American racing than probably anyone else ever, even though he’s a Brit!
Case for: What is best-known about Disbrow is that he has four non-points IndyCar wins in seasons that did not actually exist in 1911 and 1913, although you’ll often see him listed as a four-time winner because previous inept historians retroactively “counted” those seasons that never existed. The Third Turn also lists him as a three-time IMCA Big Car champion, but as far as I can tell, those seasons are fake too, and the actual IMCA Big Car championship didn’t start until 1925. From my best count, Disbrow has 111 wins in Galpin’s books, and he obviously has many more unrecorded. It was difficult for me to figure out what races to include since there were various heat races, match races, time trials, record attempts, and free-for-alls, and nearly all the top drivers competed in all of these things, which were frequently held on the same weekends. I counted the heat races, match races, and free-for-alls, but did not count time trials or record attempts, and that’s how I got the number 111, but that is very, very fuzzy. I ranked Disbrow #5 for 1915, but obviously, he significantly benefited from the fact that Europe was already at war.
Case against: Most of Disbrow’s wins (as with most of anybody’s wins in this era) came in 1 to 10 mile “races” against fields of only a few cars. (This is also how Ralph DePalma can end up with 2,557 listed wins.) He had some wins in 100-to-200 milers but nothing longer, and the vast majority of Disbrow’s wins came in scrimmages. He was very lackluster in his four Indy 500 attempts, and he wasn’t a standout in his American Grand Prize (proto-USGP) races either. He only seemed to perform strongly against weaker fields for the most part, but he was definitely one of the most dominant drivers of his era, with one of the strongest reputations. There’s also an intangible where he was indicted but acquitted for murder before his career began. While I’ve decided I’m not going to omit a truly deserving driver for moral reasons, for a possibly more marginal driver like Disbrow or Dick Seaman, I might.
Verdict: Keep. Ultimately, my vibes-based opinion right now is that I should keep him for his dirt track dominance because I know he was considered kind of a rival to drivers like Barney Oldfield, who I do have (reluctantly) as a lock. Additionally, Disbrow seemed to have been winning consistently for a lot longer period than even Oldfield did, even if none of Disbrow’s IndyCar wins were official, and Oldfield was probably better against stronger fields. Furthermore, I initially rated Disbrow’s seasons before I seriously looked at Galpin’s books. I only rated five of his seasons (1911, 1913, 1915, 1921, and 1922), and it seems like, from what I’ve learned from Galpin, that I need to rate him in a lot more seasons than that. I suspect he probably needs to be a lock, especially if I have later (and arguably even more obscure) perennial IMCA Big Car champions as locks. It just feels like there’s insufficient evidence for it, and I will mostly have to go on vibes here, whatever I decide.