While it was a “first” for New Jersey-racer Jerry Wall, it was a “last" for the state of Rhode Island.
Wall won an American Three Quarter Midget Racing Ass’n event at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence on April 18, 1959. It was, according to historian R.A. Silvia, the Ocean State’s “last sanctioned race.”
“I’m pretty sure it was the first race I ever won,” says Wall who remembers racing on plywood over the hockey ice. “I had just started out. I started up front because I was new. It wasn’t the greatest place for passing.”
A dozen years later (June 5, 1971), Wall’s victory in a Northeastern Midget Ass’n race at Stafford Motor Speedway in the “Yellow Jacket” was acclaimed as “the first victory for a rear-engined midget on an oval.” 
“I could have scrapped the car after that and been happy,” says Wall, now 74. “It was fantastic.”
Powered by a Chevy V-4 (he had cut a V-8 in half), Wall was “still learning the car” coming to Stafford. Sixth the night before at Albany-Saratoga Speedway in New York, he found himself in the Stafford consi after “over correcting” handling problems.
He still remembers coming up on the leader in the consi: “It was in the back stretch and I was about to pass him. I said to myself ‘no, do it in the front stretch’ and I did. The feature was easy, like there was no competition.”
He went on to win seven more shows in ’71 and five more in ’72.
The car made an “anticipated” visit to Winchester where he missed setting the track record by four hundredths of a second. Wall got “busted up” in the feature.
It was the impetus for major changes in NEMA, leading to the mid-engine Badger that dominated the club for a decade before being outlawed. While he had only $5,000 in the car, he suspects he was responsible for making midget racing more expensive
It was the sixth race for the car that Wall started building a year earlier. A mainstay with ARDC, he had some rear-engine experience with a Ken Brenn car (“it was huge, a monstrosity”) and with a TQ at Wall Stadium. A body shop owner, Wall used many skills – carpenter, machinist, welder, mechanic, plumber — building the car.
Wall came to NEMA because it was primarily an asphalt club.
He actually cut the engine in half with “a big hack saw,” using the back half, which gave him mounts for the oil pump and such, and allowed him to hook up the transmission. He built the dry-sump system and used a Chevy V-8 magneto, “shorting out half of it.”  Starting with a 135-pound piece of steel, he “whittled away on the lathe” until he had a 35-pound crank.
Wall sold the car (he believes it is presently in Rhode Island) and was working on still another creation when a series of physical, legal and family difficulties convinced him it was “time to quit” in the mid ’70s.