Few men have affected their discipline of racing, in or out of the cockpit, like East Coast midget racer Ed “Dutch” Schaefer.
His incredible career started in 1933 and spanned five decades. A midget racing star before WWII, after the war his renown grew to the point that he was voted the most popular midget racer in the nation. He won hundreds of features, the exact count now lost to the dusty archives of racing statistics. 
Even when a rock, pitched up by another car, took the vision in one eye in 1947, Schaefer kept on winning. During one holiday weekend in 1948, he won five features, and captured his second championship at Philadelphia’s Yellow Jacket Speedway. He won the first in 1946.
Schaefer’s greatest accomplishments, however, came with the ARDC, the famed East Coast midget racing club he helped form in 1939, and where he collected 78 feature wins. In the years immediately following WWII, the ARDC became the strongest midget organization in the nation, easily usurping the AAA in the lucrative Eastern market. They staged races every night of the week, often running at multiple tracks on the same night, with huge car counts and crowds. But by 1952 the ARDC had slipped into a tailspin.
It was then that Schaefer made, perhaps, his most important contribution to racing. Taking the reigns of the ARDC as its president, a position he held until 1968, he solidified a meager eight-race schedule for 1953, saving the club from extinction. By 1959 that had expanded to a 50-race slate, and under his leadership the ARDC returned to its once prominent position. During this busy, off-track era Schaefer never stopped winning, taking ARDC championships in 1956, ’57, ’60 and ’65.  
In 1968, Schaefer was involved in a grinding accident that took the life of Larry Rice. Because of a communication error at the hospital, during a USAC Champ car race at Dover, Del., the next day, he was announced as dead.
But, Schaefer survived. Few believed he would race again. Yet he did. Nothing seemed capable of keeping him out of the winner’s circle. Not a near fatal heart attack in 1972. Not a suspension from the ARDC because he co-founded another midget association, the SMRC.
In fact, he won SMRC’s first race and championship in 1973. In 1976, at age 61, he captured five features. In late 1977, he took his last victory, before another massive heart attack claimed him, March 12, 1978.
Schaefer was inducted into the National Midget Auto Racing Hall of Fame in 1999, bringing well deserved and lasting honor to the Dutchman.