Land-speed record breaker Walt Arfons dead at 96

The man who pushed the limits of what was possible in racing and became the first person to successfully strap a jet engine to a car to pave the way to decades of innovation, died Tuesday at Summa Health System.Walter Charles Arfons, 96, who was born in Muncie, Ind., but moved to Akron at a young age, designed, built and drove the world's first jet-propelled car in 1959. Five years later, he designed and built the turbojet-powered Wingfoot Express that Tom Green drove on Oct. 2 to set a world land-speed record of 413.2 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.Three days later, half-brother Art Arfons broke the record at Bonneville at 434.03 mph in the Green Monster that originally was a project of both Walt and Art Arfons.

Lacking the normal methods of research, state-of-the-art equipment and support teams that normally accompanied such an endeavor, Arfons worked exclusively out of the back of his own shop, Arfons Mill and Hardware, now a Summit County historical landmark. Arfons had to do without the experience and extensive education that his competitors had — when he bought his first jet engine off an old Vought F4U Cutlass, a plane used in the military, he was denied the manual, as it was classified-Our Towns — but made up for it with what ingenuity and grit he could muster in the little space that he had in the back of a hardware shop.

Arfons' oldest grandson, Mark Stiff, essentially grew up working alongside Arfons and his jet engines. From the age of 5, Stiff was hooked, and he stayed in that shop until he was done with college.“I hung around the shop every opportunity I could get," Stiff said. “Where else can you go that has jet-engine cars that can go well over 200 miles-per-hour just sitting in the back? It was kinda like a fairy tale to grow up in."Some of Stiff's first memories are of traveling with his grandfather to sites like St. Louis, almost like a carnival, where Arfons would race his new inventions. Stiff says Arfons visited 49 of the 50 states with his cars trying to earn enough money to put food on the table. There wasn't much that slowed him down.