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James Diedrich Hallum, 5/18/32 - 7/19/16
In another big loss for the old-timers of Seattle Outboard and Region 10, Jim Hallum died yesterday from non-smoker's lung cancer. This took him very quickly, which is fortunate, but a few of his old friends were able to talk to him first.
Jim was the oldest of three children born to Valdemir and Lillian Hallum, and is survived by his younger sisters Mary and Karen and their families. His dad Val (b. 1908), a great guy remembered by some of us, was a dairy farmer before he retired, but had started in his own father's business, Seattle Oxygen Supply. Val was also an outboard racer, starting before WW2. He raced KRs in A hydro with such local notables as Chuck Hickling, Lin Ivey, Dick Polk, Jack Livie, and Leonard Keller, our hardware supplier and one of Val's particular pals.
Jim was exceptionally mechanically talented from early on, and in high school was racing control-line model planes, even building his own engine on a lathe in the Tolt High School shop. Jim graduated from Tolt High (Carnation, WA) in 1950, but not before he was working on his dad's racing equipment even as Val was going to the airplane meets with him. There is a wonderful photo (which I hope to get scanned and reproduced here) of young Jim driving his dad's boat in his one and only race, which he won, coming out of a turn in front with an enormous grin on his face.
Jim entered the Engineering program at the Univ. of Washington after high school; he was delayed by illness, but graduated in 1957 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
At some point in the Fifties, the parents of a young racer, Gerry Walin, who had heard of Jim's abilities, asked if he could get some more power out of Jerry's KR. This started a long association of the engineer Jim and the driver and boat-builder Gerry.
Also somewhere in the early-mid-Fifties, Jim had obtained a Tenney Red-Head pulse-jet model engine manufactured by engineer/inventor/industrialist and racer Bill Tenney in the Midwest. Having built a couple of airframes to carry this screaming powerplant, and having gotten his best plane to making laps in the 130 to 150mph range, local champion racer Jim traveled to a big national meet in the Midwest. For some reason Jim had another fellow fly the plane, and it didn't quite perform at its best, but after the races Jim and Bill Tenney got together and talked pulse-jets, engineering, . . . and Anzani racing outboards, for which Tenney was the U.S. importer.
So at some time in the late 1950's we think, or maybe 1960 (nobody can remember any of this exactly anymore), Jim and Gerry began racing and developing the A and B Anzani. Lee Sutter was another SOA Anzani pioneer at about the same time (and we hope he will help correct and add to any of this!). Another essential figure in this period was another young engineer, Russ Rotzler, who had been working with Hu Entrop and who himself occasionally raced one of Entrop's early cabovers. Russ would visit Jim when he was building an engine and bounce ideas off him, which frequently appeared in the next-version racemotor.
Jim, working as always out of tiny home shops with very simple equipment, managed over the years to transition the rather balky "Anxieties" into increasingly fast and increasingly reliable engines that always held numbers of A and B records during the 1960s and early '70s. It was a lot of work. But it was made more fun by the presence of yet another young U of W engineering student and grad, Ron Anderson out of Port Angeles, WA, who had been racing an Alden-built Hot Rod in BOH before discovering the Anzanis and getting deeply involved in their development. Ron, who went on to the highest levels of factory tunnel boat racing, describes Jim's initial relationship to him as that of a mentor. A couple of other names to add at this point are Ron's brother Don "Dewey" Anderson and Charles "Honker" Walters, both of whom could fairly be called "team drivers."
We who watched this are of the opinion that Jim Hallum would have had a strong claim to be the best engine man in outboarding at the time, because his Anzanis were outrunning other men's Konigs which actually had more potential power in them than did the Anzanis. Jim himself, a rather shy and self-effacing man who preferred to stay quietly in the background, would never have thought in such terms. There's an old saw about show-horses vs. work-horses, and Jim was emphatically one of the latter. Additionally, he "could do more with less" than about anyone we knew, working at a little bench in a garage with the cars in it, and little equipment beyond a homemade press, a gas-welding rig, a little Atlas lathe, and his "Civil War milling machine," a genuine relic, yet sending world-beating 2-stroke screamers out the door.
If that's not enough, he helped some dirtbike and flat-track racers, and roadracer Jimmy Dunn with hopping up their bikes. Oh, and he built some racing chainsaws! In these efforts he was among the earlier American developers of tuned exhausts and expansion chambers.
Have I mentioned that Jim was a regular hiker and fly-fisherman?
The justly famous 100mph record set by Gerry and Jim in B Hydro with a rather obsolescent 2-cylinder Anzani, long into the era of Quincy loopers and 4-cylinder Konigs which even in the C and D classes had not yet matched that speed, has been described elsewhere. So has the less-known "D" engine, comprised of two B Anzanis (one of Jim's, one Ron's) mounted side by side on a very impressive Bill Tenny gearbox. I'm trying to coax Chuck Walters, who was the driver of this experimental 140hp brute, to come tell this story and others.
Ron Anderson moved to Wisconson in the early-Seventies to work for Mercury, and I believe he and Lee Sutter did about the last racing of the "Seattle-style" Anzanis. By that point the weak-kneed Lucas magnetos had been replaced by the Mercury "Super Spark" (right?) CD ignitions, making the final Anzanis, with their four carbs and high porting and expansion chambers actually more reliable than the early ones, certainly a lot easier to get on-plane without fouling plugs. I remember the season that Fantum ran Jim's last iteration of the B Anzani, and that motor ran like a watch, race after race.
By then the Anzani's time was up, and Jim was working on a B and a C Konig 4-cylinder Gerry had purchased. The C got sold fairly soon, but Jim's reworked B/350 Konig over a four-year period and with three owners and four drivers, won back to back National Championships (Walin and Dick Rautenberg), set a competiton record (Barry Lewis), and was National High Point in 350ccH (Steve Johnson). Jim Hallum could build a racemotor!! He also built what we think was the first alky race conversion of the Evinrude 60hp triple, with much bigger carbs, etc..
My computer is timing out. I'll be back with more, and am soliciting Jim's other friends, mostly named here, to tell their stories. Among them certainly will be the members of the Losvar family which employed Jim for many years; several Losvars (Art, Jim, Tom, Dave) were racers themselves. Another long-time friend, Leland Schmidt, a local tunnel-boat builder and racer, went on hikes and fishing trips with Jim in later years. In his last years Jim did some volunteer work in the local Duvall, WA food-bank, and we might hear more about that.
For myself, I want to say that Jim Hallum was a wonderful fellow to talk with. Nobody I've talked to can remember ever having seen Jim get angry. He had taken up working on and flying his old pulse-jet model planes, and some new ones, some years back, and was happy to talk at length of all the technical minutiae and fabrication problems with anyone who was interested in such things, and so I got to assist in a couple of launches. We had shared interests in light planes and old warbirds, which Jim enjoyed photographing, and yakked for hours on these and many other things from the space program to the making of pipe organs, and I will miss it very much.
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