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It all started as just a little dream

It all started as just a little e dream Brasington dream turns into more than expected By Jeff Owens Morning News staff writer DARLINGTON - The year was 1933 and Harold Brasington was a mere 24 years old when he first heard the voice. The young Darlington native had traveled to the midwest and was watching his first Indianapolis 500 when it flashed into his mind. Sitting among more than 150,000 racing fans, Brasington heard what no one else could hear and saw what no one else could see. The words exploded in his hears like those Ray Kinsella heard in the fictional movie "Field of Dreams." "If you build it, they will come." But unlike Kinsella, it was not a baseball field Brasington was told to build. And unlike the movie, this was not fiction. What Brasington saw was a superspeedway sprawled across acres of farm land in the deep South. He saw thousands of racing fans like himself flooding the gates to see the likes of Johnny Mantz and Fireball Roberts zip around a 1.25-mile oval. "The crowd amazed me and the speed amazed me and I said then that if that many people would go to see the Indy cars run, I think they would love to go see the stock cars run," Brasington recalled. "I thought that the butcher and the candlestick maker and the mechanic and the barber and the grocery man would all have something in common to look at, and that stuck in my mind and I kept thinking about it." It was then that Brasington decided to build an asphalt track that could withstand 500 miles of highspeed racing. He envisioned a track that could one day rival the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Brasington continued to nurture his love for racing, visiting the dirt tracks throughout the Carolinas, promoting races here and there and even driving in some road course events in Daytona during the late '30s. But all the while, the vision kept burning in his mind. He kept seeing a superspeedway that would be the talk of the South. Finally, after scouting plots of land in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina, Brasington found the land he was looking for in his hometown. J.S. Ramsey owned more than 100 acres just outside Darlington that Brasington saw as the perfect location for a track. And since he owned his own trucking company and earthmoving equipment, he approached Ramsey with his idea. Though legend has it that Brasington won 1 Ramsey's land in a poker game, Brasington says his friend just liked the idea and told him to start building. "We just shook hands on it and he said you could start any time you want," Brasington says. Ramsey then left town for a Florida fishing trip. When he returned two weeks later, Brasington and his crew had stripped the top soil and were well on their way to building what is now Darlington Raceway, the nation's first asphalt superspeedway and home of the South's 500-mile race. "When Mr. Ramsey got back from Florida, he said I believe you mean business," Brasington said. "From then on, it was just a matter of making the deadline. He knew I was going to get started, but he didn't think I would get started that fast." That was 1949 and for the next year Brasington was arguably the most popular man in Darlington. To some, he was a couragous innovator. To others, he was just plain crazy. "People had all kind of comments," he recalled. "They thought it was going to ruin the town. A lot of people said I had had a stroke or my brain was fried because the heat had got to me." Brasington's project became known as "Harold's Folly," and he became the butt of so many jokes he felt like Noah trying to build another ark. Jay Capers / staff Harold Brasington looks over his creation, the Darlington Raceway, before today's running of stock car's oldest race, the Southern 500, on one of NASCAR's toughest trakcs. "Some preached to me about working around the clock because we were working at night and on weekends," he said. "They would come over and say, You are going to the devil if you work out here on Sunday.' I just said, 'Well, I'll try not to go there.' Through it all, Brasington trudged on. He had a dream and he was not about to let the unbelievers get the best of him. "I really and truly believed that it would go over," he said. "I was dead set on it. I believed it like it was my religion." In the end, it was Brasington who got the last laugh. "Later on, when the race was run, I went back to one of my neighbors who used to come over and give me a little sermon about working on Sunday and I said 'Look here, you are parking those cars and charging people.' And he said, 'Well, they have to have somewhere to park.' "So I'll say this, a little of that green stuff will make a whole lot of difference." By late 1950, Brasington's track was finished and on Sept. 4 his dream came true. Seventeen years after he saw the vision, the first Southern 500 was run on the superspeedway where the grandstrand now l bears his name. The response that day was even bigger than Brasington could have hoped for. A sell-out crowd of more than 25,000 fans filed into the raceway to see the first 500-mile race of its kind. "All of them couldn't buy tickets, so before the race was over some of them tore the fence down because they had to see it," Brasington said. Forty-two years later, more than 70,000 fans filed into Darlington twice a year for two of the most popular races on the Winston Cup circuit, And all because of a dreamer, "I guess I could call the shots pretty good," the unassuming 83- year-old says. "It came to pass, so yeah, I guess I was a dreamer. But you can't just dream on, you have to get out there and work."
Article from 06 Sep 1992Florence Morning News(Florence, SC)
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