Berna Eli Oldfield was born on January 29, 1878, on a farm near Wauseon, Ohio, the younger child and only son of Henry Clay Oldfield and Sarah (Yarnell) Oldfield. When he was eleven years old, his family moved to Toledo, where Henry Oldfield secured employment in a mental institution.
Berna Oldfield left school in 1893.
In 1893 having worked briefly as a newsboy, bellhop, elevator operator, and boxer, Oldfield took up the then-popular sport of bicycle racing. Through the later 1890's, Oldfield - "Champion of Ohio" - and a partner raced in bicycle meets throughout the Midwest, working during the off-season in a factory and as a bicycle-parts salesman. His shift to automobile racing came through his friendship with Tom Cooper, a famed bicycle racer of the day who was briefly associated with Henry Ford in constructing and testing racing cars, including the "999, " an awesome 2, 800-pound vehicle with a tillertype steering mechanism and few safety features.
In October 1902, racing Ford's 999 at the Grosse Pointe speedway near Detroit, Oldfield covered the five-mile course in five minutes and twenty-eight seconds. On June 15, 1903, at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis, again in the 999, he became the first driver to break the one-minute mile. For the next fifteen years, Oldfield drove in organized races, at county fairs, on barnstorming tours, and in exhibitions. At one time or another, Oldfield drove most of the automobile models that to nostalgic later generations symbolized that world: the Winton "Bullet, " the Peerless "Green Dragon, " the "Blitzen Benz, " the Stutz, the Maxwell, the Christie, the Mercer, and the Delage. His last driving season (1917-1918) was spent behind the wheel of Harry Miller's "Golden Submarine. "
Along the way Oldfield established many speed records, but most of them fell very quickly as automotive technology advanced. He was also involved in many accidents. He lost control of his car in Detroit in 1903, killing a spectator; a 1904 St. Louis crash left two men dead; he was badly injured in Hartford in 1906; and his riding mechanic was killed in a 1913 crash in Corona, California. Through it all, however, his public reputation steadily grew. Although other drivers criticized him as foolhardy and although he was often in the bad graces of the American Automobile Association and other official bodies, his gregarious and daredevil attitude, symbolized by the jaunty cigar stub firmly clamped between his teeth during every race, endeared him to his generation. He was celebrated for his showmanship and his improbable exploits as much as for his more conventional achievements.
Oldfield also raced a freight train (1904), an airplane (1914), and starred in a Mack Sennett melodrama, Barney Old-field's Race for a Life. Away from the race track, however, Oldfield was only intermittently successful in capitalizing upon his fame. He retired from racing in 1918 to become titular head of Harvey Firestone's Oldfield Tire and Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio, but Firestone bought him out four years later when his barroom exploits diminished the public relations value of his name. A subsequent effort to establish his own tire-manufacturing business in Detroit was likewise unsuccessful. In the early 1930's, hard hit by the depression, he was often found as a ballyhoo man at thrill shows and speed meets. For several years in the mid-1930's, by contrast, he was employed by the Plymouth Motor Corporation to promote its safe-driving campaign. None of his three ventures into the saloon business in California - Los Angeles in 1911, Van Nuys in 1937, and Beverly Hills in 1941 - prospered. By 1946, he was again lecturing on auto safety, this time for the General Petroleum Corporation of California. Oldfield's later years were spent in Beverly Hills, Calif. , where he died of a heart attack and where, in Holy Cross Cemetery, he was buried.
Berna Oldfield was the first man to drive a car at 60 miles per hour (96 km/h) in 1903 and the first to go over 100 miles-per-hour in 1914. Oldfield was inducted in the Automotive Hall of Fame (1946), Auto Racing's Hall of Fame (1953), the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America (1989), the International Motorsports Hall of Fame (1990), the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame (1990). Berna Oldfield starred in the Broadway musical The Vanderbilt Cup (1906), Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life (1913), The First Auto (1927), The Blonde Comet.
Oldfield was told that “Berna” was a sissy name, so “Barney” became his official name.
On August 25, 1896, in Toledo, Berna Oldfield married Beatrice Loretta Oatis, whom he had met at a bicycle race; they separated in 1901, and were divorced in 1906. His second marriage, to Rebecca (Gooby) Holland, a widow, lasted from 1907 to 1924, and his third, to Hulda Braden, from 1925 to 1945. A daughter, Elizabeth, was adopted by the Oldfields in 1931. A few months before his death he remarried his second wife.
