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A wild ride for everybody (Part 3)

C Observer charlotteobserver.com -.. Sunday, May 24, 2009 Charlotte 15C RACEWEEKS COCA-COLA 600 FIRST RACE # from 14C tona, they said. Problem was, Daytona had taken more than three years to plan and 15 months to build. Bruton and Curtis wanted their first race in May 1960, just 10 months away. Remembering the people About a week before David Poole died, he sat at speedway-area restaurant with three former racing writers - Tom Higgins and Bob Moore of the Observer and Bob Myers of the News. They were the Mount Rushmore of N.C. racing journalists; Higgins and Poole alone covered the Observer's NASCAR beat 1 for the past 47 years. The gathering was supposed to be a lunchtime thing, but the afternoon slid past 3 o'clock before the men began to think about pushing away from the table. They talked some about the usual NASCAR topics - best drivers, best races. Mostly, they talked about the people - the good guys and the characters and the tales that'll never find their way into a family newspaper. "Those people always fascinated me," said Higgins, "and they did David, too." Perhaps that's because David remained very much like them - easy to reach, quick to speak his mind, unafraid to offer a peek at his heart. He was, i in his columns and radio work, a very intentional bridge between today and the NASCAR he grew up with. It was a sport often frowned upon in more polite circles in those early years, with brawls in the bleachers often rivaling wrecks on the dirt. "You sure as heck didn't let your kid go to a stock car race," remembers Wheeler. "It just wasn't the thing to do." But racing was, if anything, accessible. Mill folks couldn't afford much, but you could go to the junkyard for a '48 Mercury flathead engine and a Lincoln radiator, and if you could weld a decent roll cage, you'd have yourself a race car for $150. Those cars raised dust at places like the Charlotte Fairgrounds, or Rock Hill Fairgrounds, or Robinwood in Gastonia where David Poole grew up. It was a time where most anyone could plow a field and have themselves a dirt track. At least two believed they could build themselves a fine asphalt superspeedway in about eight months. They couldn't, of course. Charlotte Motor Speedway's first big speed bump showed up quickly, as workers discovered large slabs of granite not far under the soil. As the late, legendary engine builder Smokey Yunick later said: "Bruton and Curtis made a giant mistake. If they'd have searched North Carolina for the worst possible place to build a racetrack, that's where they built it." Contractor W. Owen Flowe, upon finding the granite, decided on explosives as the solution. Each day at noon, they'd shake some granite up with a blast, often aided with some fertilizer to increase the bang. "We started drawing crowds every day to witness the blast," Smith said. "You'd think a minute after the blast, everything would be fine. About two minutes after the blast, this rock about twice the size of your fist came back down ... That would have killed somebody." The blasting caused such delay that by January, crews were hired and lights erected for round-the-clock construction shifts. In March, an 11-inch snowstorm put the brakes on work. Two more snowstorms blew in during the next two weeks. It was, says Edelstein, "almost biblical." Smith, who was at the track most every day, blames Turner for some of the delay. "He caused me a lot of problems because I was having to put out fires all the time," Smith said. "He'd be out drinking, and he'd hire somebody to come and work at the speedway. They'd show up and I'd have to explain to them, you don't have a PHOTO COURTESY OF LOWE'S MOTOR SPEEDWAY ARCHIVES Souvenir row at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the 1960s. The track was saved during that decade by investor Richard Howard, endured the thin years of the 1970s, and roared back as Lowe's Motor Speedway. SOUVENIRS OBSERVER FILE PHOTO ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO Fireball Roberts took the pole for the World Junior Johnson tore up the homestretch 600 with a speed of 133.904 mph. He spun fence at the race. "You'd be running along, out twice on Race Day as asphalt crumbled and big chunks of asphalt would fly up," he beneath the drivers. remembers. job and please go away." Said Edelstein of Turner, who died in a plane crash in 1970: "Curtis may have been, at times, an absentee father of the speedway, but I don't think he loved anyone or anything more in his entire life. And he did work on it." The delays contributed to an already swollen bottom line - close to $2 million in costs instead of the planned $750,000. That's what led to the gunplay. Let's go to David's notes: "Contractor W. Owen Flowe, in an effort to collect money he believes he is owed, orders his crews to halt work immediately. He places bulldozers and earthmovers on the last short strip of the track surface that remained unpaved and his operators stay on their machines, refusing to move. Turner and Smith brandish weapons and force the machine operators to leave. The bulldozers are hot-wired and moved out of the way, and the paving is completed." Did it happen? Smith says no. Well, sort of no. Turner did have a shotgun, he remembers. "He went over there, acting like he was somebody. A guard went up to him and took it away from him." The Charlotte Observer reported it a bit differently on June 10, 1960, quoting Flowe as saying Turner, Smith and a group of men held guns on his watchmen. "I told my men 1 to go on home and not get killed," Flowe said to the Observer. The men left the track, and the paving was completed. Smith will say this now: "I thought it was really great." The race A moment for contradiction, please. What drove David Poole most batty on his beat - NASCAR's situational governing, the molding of rules to the moment - is part of what charmed him about racing's early days. Haphazardness, as much as NASCAR tries to avoid it now, is the trait that links it most to its past. That might never be more true than OBSERVER FILE PHOTO Joe Lee Johnson, a 30-year-old mechanic who lived most of his life in Spartanburg, got his only superspeedway win in a 7-year career. He collected $27,330. with Charlotte's first race. Scheduled for Memorial Day 1960, the World 600 was postponed to June 19 because of construction delays. Even that wasn't enough time for the proper curing of the asphalt, which was poured only about a month before the new race date. At the first race practice, on June 15, it was clear that everyone was in for an adventure. "Four gravel-deep holes grew out of the asphalt in the groove on the second turn," wrote the Observer's George Cunningham, who added: "Practically the entire surface on the third and fourth turns resembled an old lady's wrinkled face." On Race Thursday, June 16, Fireball Roberts took the pole with a speed of 133.904 mph, and drivers fretted about the cratering pavement beneath them. "The people want blood and I'm afraid we'll give it to them," said "Tiger" Tom Pistone. On Race Saturday, June 18, drivers were told they could install wire screens over the grills to protect radiators from the inevitability of flying pavement. Finally, on Race Day, workers hustled to put up the final 400 feet of fence on the back of the track. Bruton Smith wished for the 600 to last at least 300, so he wouldn't have to give customers their money back. Also, he remembers: "I really wanted it to be something." It was. Tires blew frequently in the 60-car field. Fireball Roberts spun out twice. Junior Johnson tore up the homestretch fence. "I'd say there was a chunk of asphalt that weighed 5-10 pounds that hit my windshield," Johnson remembers. "Nobody knew if they'd run the race to the end." Jack Smith led much of the race in his 1960 Pontiac, but his five-lap lead was erased when a chunk of track put an irreparable hole in his gas tank. Joe Lee Johnson, a 30-year-old mechanic who lived most of his life in Spartanburg, took over first for his only superspeedway win in a 7-year career. He collected $27,330. "There were some mangled automobiles, some snorting drivers, some tears, but no blood," wrote the Observer's Herman Helms. "Miraculously, there was no blood." There were, however, 20,000 cars, an estimated 60,000 fans, all going to the same place. "No one had seen anything like it," Wheeler remembers. The story of Charlotte Motor Speedway had begun, and the story of racing was changing. Bruton Smith would lose control of the track, then eventually get it back. Curtis Turner would get voted off the speedway's board and get kicked out of NASCAR for trying to form a union. The track itself would get saved in the 1960s by investor Richard Howard, then endure the thin years of the 1970s, then come roaring back as Lowe's Motor Speedway. David Poole would graduate from UNC, get his first newspaper job in Gastonia, then eventually come to Charlotte, where he spent 12 loud years as the Observer's racing voice. About a month ago, David called Rob Edelstein about Charlotte Motor Speedway. Edelstein considered David a mentor, and they shared a mutual worry about NASCAR - that in the sport's perpetual search for growth, something important was getting lost. NASCAR, David believed, always was and always should be about regular folks driving cars fast - and regular folks watching them. "For them," David once wrote, "racing is one of their celebrations of life." And so he began to report the story of Charlotte Motor Speedway, because the beginning matters, and maybe because it was the beginning of his story, too. On Thursday, 49 years after the first big race and three days before this next one, track officials and journalists gathered in the infield media center at Lowe's. There, they unveiled two plaques, including a gold- rectangle above the entrance. "David Poole Deadline Media Center," it read, now attached to his hometown speedway, now a part of its tale. - OBSERVER STAFF WRITER DAVID SCOTT AND RESEARCHER MARIA DAVID CONTRIBUTED.
Article from 24 May 2009The Charlotte Observer(Charlotte, NC)
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