When I was little, Jimmy Dean used to park his motorcycle next to our garage. A few years later, launched to stardom in “The Blob,” Steve McQueen played badminton with me in our backyard. If these facts sound fabulistic, you can thank my brother Bruce, 11 years my senior and in the 1950s a young racing driver nicknamed Little Lead Foot for his astonishing skill at the wheel in sports cars, winning races and setting track records first as an underage amateur in California and then as a professional across the U.S. and Europe. He was a hero and a close friend to speed-mad dudes like Dean and McQueen.

Bruce was supposed to ride with Dean in his silver Porsche to the road races in Salinas on the day he died in 1955 but, due to a last-minute change of plan, drove up with another friend. My brother was 19 at the time, and that bit of luck was emblematic of his subsequent charmed life, on the track and off. Three years later he was driving for Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France when, in the middle of the night, in the rain, he crashed into the wreckage of another car — and survived, though seriously injured. A year after that, in Pomona, he skidded on an oil slick left by another car’s blown engine and crashed again, which I witnessed from the grandstands where I was sitting with my horrified parents. His body was banged up, but he survived that one, too.

By 1962, at 26, after a third serious crash, this one at Riverside, he’d retired from racing in the prime of his driving years, having decided not to tempt fate further. That year he directed his first film, a 19-minute short called “The Sound of Speed,” about the testing of a grand prix race car. In that lyrical work of cinematic poetry, without dialogue but with the camera for many shots mounted on the car to show the driver’s point of view — a technique he invented that was later deployed by many subsequent directors — he made his breakthrough into Hollywood as a second-unit (action) director, and parlayed that into a lengthy career directing series and movies for television.

The third act of his life was as a deep-sea fisherman and boat designer who used the hulls of commercial fishing boats to build a series of yachts with decks at the stern from which to fish for marlin. He described this to me as no different than chopping the hot rods he drove as a teenager, “logical modifications.” He and his wife, with a small crew, at one point took three years to circumnavigate the globe.

This is the briefest outline of an epic personal journey that earned him accolades and fame in three different fields, any one of which would have sufficed for most adventurers.

“I don’t know how many laps I have left in me,” he told me over the phone in January. I’m driving down to L.A. next week to help celebrate his 88th birthday, if he lasts that long. My other brother, Rick, who is 85, reports that Bruce is in the hospital and the prognosis is “not good.” It was Rick that I grew up imitating as a kid because he let me hang out with him and his friends while our folks were out building their business and Bruce was racing in exotic places. Rick’s clever parodies of English poems were what got me started reading and writing verse.

But it was Bruce who must’ve planted in my subconscious the idea that one need not have a conventional life; that you could modify your own hot rod, so to speak, write your own script and direct your own story. He showed me that you didn’t have to conform to anyone else’s expectations and, if you had the nerve and learned the skills, you could surprise yourself and everyone else by living the way you liked. As he understated it to me, “I did things that other people didn’t do.”

My big brother had a big life. He may be gone by the time you read this. I’m writing it in homage to his courage and with gratitude for his example.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.