Brian, many thanks that is all good information. I would guess that many cars competing in the same area might be roughly protecting the driver in about the same manner, especially when you went and competed, as Swanson and Beauchamp did, in a circuit where there was a meaningful set of rules. Swanson's first car was a ford coupe cut down to be a roadster. I think the year was 1948 or 49. That car had a roll bar over and slightly behind the driver with one brace going to the rear. Two drivers were killed in roll overs that summer in similar cars. Beheaded they said as grisly as it sounds, and easy to see how. They shortly went to coupes with steel tops and much better protection. But the idea of one roll bar and a brace must have hung on for some time as can be seen, more or less, in#55.
I grew up in rural coastal Maine and stock car racing was in it's infancy for sure. My first contact as a helper was racing essentially "Jalopies" (street car, gutted, with some sort of primitive roll protection) and limited to engines that came in the car. We first were involved with it on the old horse racing track at the Cherryfield, ME fairgrounds. No banking on the turns, and very loose surface. Worked as pit crew for a couple summers than got to thinking "hey we can build one of them too".....and we did.
Around these parts installing some sort of roll protection was called "piping up" the car. I think this came from the fact that a guy building one scrounged up what galvanized or black iron pipe he could find.....and went for it. We just looked around and kind of copied what others did. Sometimes the pipe sizes didn't match too good as in any case we were limited to whatever sizes and lengths we could find or get somebody to part with. The welding was done with Mr Lincoln's red box or something even worse. If you look at the pic of my #56 in that other thread, you can see that pipe sizes did not match all that good. In my era (late 60's) nobody in Maine was ever seriously hurt or killed. That came later when the cars got faster and more power. We raced 56 chevys for 3 years and had lots of fun and learned lots. I wish to god I had taken lots more pictures of it all. Would do it again in a heartbeat too.
MB