The Soap Box Derby car built more than six decades ago by Robert Lewis, with support from family and friends, hangs from the rafters at General Supply & Machine Co. Photo by Coleman Warner

Sometimes the finest cultural artifact shows up in an unlikely spot. Not in a museum exhibit, or educational presentation, but hanging from the ceiling of an old commercial building, requiring a second or third glance and then: Tell me, what is that?

 

Such is the case with the Soap Box Derby car, now antique-ish at more than six decades old, decked out with aluminum covering and orange wheels, bearing in fancy script the words “LAMB’s Garage” and “Robert Lewis” on its side.

 

The car is suspended flamboyantly from the rafters at General Supply & Machine Co., an equipment sales business downtown.

 

Opened in 1913, the Weddington family establishment is located a short walk from the train station and modern county jail; Lewis’ father Ed worked nearly 70 years at the business.

 

The distinctive Derby car recalls a time, circa 1960, when Robert Lewis, barely a teenager, fashioned his own Soap Box four-wheeler and competed in a colorful event that had gained national popularity since the 1930s. Lamb’s Garage sponsored Lewis in the race. Meridian’s Soap Box races were held about a mile away from General Supply, on a downhill stretch of 22nd Avenue near the post office, drawing lots of spectators and media coverage.

 

The Lewis car is “a relic of gone by years, something you don’t see very often,” said Alex Weddington, General Supply’s president and a lifelong friend of Lewis, 78, a retired University of Mississippi Medical Center immunopathologist who now lives in Ridgeland.

 

Lewis said his father, a mechanical genius well known around Meridian, “never threw anything away” and stored away the Derby car at General Supply. Decades ago, Weddington decided to retrieve the beloved racer and hang it from the ceiling. The place has enjoyed a brighter visual touch – and invited storytelling – ever since.

 

“Alex had the bright idea of showing it off, and with no knowledge on my part. I came home (to Meridian) one weekend and found it hanging from the rafters,” Lewis recalls with a laugh.

 

Talk of the racer and innocent fun it represented translates into joy for Lewis, who has kept his copies of the 1960 and 1961 Derby program materials.

 

Lewis enjoys recalling how the competition was linked to the close relationship – at work and in play – between his family and the Weddingtons. How his father mentored and advised him as he assembled his racer, encouraging use of aluminum and upholstery materials that others weren’t using, but stayed out of the actual assembly (contest guidelines dictated, “Follow the rules … YOU MUST BUILD YOUR OWN CAR!”) And how he and other boys were fearless as the momentum of their engine-less cars allowed them to reach speeds topping 20 miles an hour.

 

“You’re excited, you’re getting to go fast,” he said. “What kid doesn’t want to go fast?”

 

Lewis didn’t collect accolades in Meridian’s Derby events, which had dozens of entries. Both of the two years that he competed, he won one of the two-car heats, but lost in a second one. He was a long way from qualifying for a trip to the Soap Box Derby nationals.

 

But winning didn’t seem to matter that much. He loved the process, the excitement, the friendships, the memories created. And that preserved racer, hanging from the sky like something out of a Peter Pan movie, helps to stir similar memories for everyone.

 

On a related personal note: This weekend, Robert Lewis is expected in town to join those celebrating the wedding of Alex and Ann Weddington’s daughter Bailey to Nick Perry. The ceremony at First Presbyterian Church will be a block away from the site of long-ago Derby races. Meridian relationships and stories seem to become richer with time.

 

Warner is a veteran journalist and cultural historian, and can be contacted at legacypress.warner@gmail.com.