The Northward Contrail

Racing memories, part II

After I left the radio station, I didn't think much about racing.  It went on in the background, of course, and my father remained interested.  But I wasn't, not at all.  My sport was baseball.  Oh, how I loved it.  I still didn't care for racing, though.

My old man, though, loved Dale Earnhardt.  It's not hard to understand why.  My dad's blue-collar, worked his way up from nothing to build what we had.  Earnhardt was the hero for guys like him, men who valued that kind of quiet resolve, the kind who took nothing off anybody.  One year, for my dad's birthday, I decided that instead of buying him a present, I'd build him one.  So I got one of the Revellogram kits of a Goodwrench Monte Carlo and built that for him.  It wasn't a great build; I wasn't interested in the subject, so I built it sort of halfheartedly.  I also didn't like that it was molded in black, so I had a devil of a time painting the chassis and roll cage.  (Note: you should have used a blocking primer.)  My old man liked it, though, and kept it on his desk for a long time.

Nothing much happened with me and racing from then until 2000.  I met someone, and my life was completely different afterward.  Turned out, he was a racing fan.  And an Earnhardt fan.  Why was it I kept ending up with Earnhardt fans?  Inevitability, I guess.  That was fine.  At first I hated racing, and I hated sitting around watching races when we could have been out doing something else (I especially remember being a little grumpy sitting around on a Saturday night watching the July race from Daytona, which was the last thing I wanted to do then).  

But, somehow, it grew on me.  I'm not sure why.  As the season went on, I started caring about it.  I think part of it was that, at a time when I was living far away from home in a strange and scary place, it reminded me of home.  It was something Southern I could hold on to in a place that didn't seem Southern.  And as I was surrounded by people who seemed shallow, it seemed like Earnhardt was somebody familiar, somebody with depth and character and strength, and I really came to appreciate what my new mate, and my dad, saw in him.  I slowly started to assemble my own cast of good guys and bad guys: gritty respect for Dale Earnhardt (and the related interest in Junior); affection for outspoken and doughily handsome Tony Stewart; a perpetual underdog's sympathy for hapless Michael Waltrip.  And, likewise, the consternation that somebody like Jeff Gordon could provoke.  (He was too much like a racing version of Ned Flanders for my tastes.  And too successful.  With time, I've come to appreciate Gordon a lot more, but back then, ooh, I couldn't stand him.  He reminded me too much of the popular kids in high school who always won the Student Council elections, won all the awards and everything, and ran with the "in" crowd.  Now, though, let's just say there are plenty enough folks who have come along since that now make me think Gordon's okay, and now I don't mind when he does okay.)

One Saturday during our weekly hobby shop visit, I picked up a Revellogram kit of Tony Stewart's Pontiac.  Just a tiny taste, I told myself; just something to have some fun.  But, oh, how the car kits soon after multiplied.  There were so many different cars I wanted to build.  They were colorful and interesting and complicated.  In a way, all those tiny parts reminded me of those wonderfully complex kits they made in the 1950s -- the cutaway nuclear submarines, for instance, where it's a dozen miniature dramas in injection-molded plastic.  

So by the time the 2001 Daytona 500 came around, I was fully interested.  I'd been following things.  I was hoping to see a black #3 car in Victory Lane.  But I also remember watching that race with kind of an eerie, sick feeling in my stomach the whole time.  It's almost as if I was picking up on some vibe that something really bad was going to happen.  When the inevitable "big one" happened, the one that looked scary, it turned out to not be that much.  But the smaller one near the end, the one that looked innocuous, turned out being the one that justified my sick feelings.  (No, I'm not linking to that one.)  Right at what should have been a great moment -- a perpetual underdog winning the season's marquee race -- came heartbreak.  We got the feeling, as the television screen showed the ambulance driving off just a little too slowly, that it was a lost cause.  We were correct in our assumptions.  What happened in that last turn that day broke my dad's heart.  He took that model I built him of the #3 car, put it in a box and stored it on a shelf in his closet.  It took him a while to get over, and to this day, I still think he mourns a little bit. 

Over time my interest in stock cars grew, and then waned.  I saw things happening that I didn't like, and I saw things that I felt should have been addressed go neglected for far too long.  I also didn't like how commercial it was getting.  It was neglecting its roots.  It was eating its young.  It was getting too much like showbiz.  My interests started moving towards the sports car series, thanks in part to hubby's fascination with it.  The sports car series aren't as widely-known, but they can really be entertaining, and they also seem a little more accessible.  Success hasn't (yet) spoiled them.  (I also started getting interested in Formula One, thanks in some part to a certain pen pal who is also a motorsports fan.  Now, I know my interest in F1 seems weird given that I've just decried the carnival commercialization of stock car racing, but I got interested in F1 knowing full well what I was getting into.  I knew from the start that F1 was a soap opera, and I think that's part of what attracted me to it.  That, and how exotic it is.)

So that's the history of me and motorsports, boiled down to a couple of not very interesting blog posts.  The older I get, the more interested I become in the stuff I lived through, but didn't care for at the time.  There are things that bring back so many memories, and there are model projects I have planned for the near future.  Before too long, I'll be building models of a #7 car and a black #28 car. They'll remind me of a couple of good racers who were gone too soon, and of all the Saturdays and Sundays I spent at a radio board as they made history.

Racing memories, part I

I've had an odd, prickly relationship with motorsports.  I spent many earlier years not caring much for racing, but later on it would come to be a pretty big deal in my life in a few ways.  The funny part is, now I look back on some of the memories from when I hated it -- when I was exposed to it but didn't care, or when it was nothing more than a means to a paycheck -- and realize that I blew off some great moments.

In my younger days, I was obsessed with cars.  But I didn't care much for them when people had hot-rodded them.  I didn't understand why, for instance, you'd take a perfectly nice '57 Chevy and stick a big ugly scoop on the hood, redo the interior, and all that sort of business.  The historian influence was in me even then: the car should be a reflection of its times, or so I thought.  I didn't care much more racing cars; they seemed unreal, exotic, too artificial.  But, my age was in single digits.  I remember asking for this racing car playset one Christmas; it included a plastic wind-up version of a NA$CAR-ized Chevy Caprice, a two-door version of the car we had.  My first act was to rip the racing decals off it and try to turn it into a "stock" stock car.  I didn't like the big logos and what all on it.  I just wanted a normal car.

In the background was the occasional racing thing going on.  Everybody knew who Richard Petty was, because he was just so darn famous, showing up in the STP commercials and everything.  Cale Yarborough wasn't far behind, because for a while he was sponsored by Hardee's, and Hardee's restaurants were all over the South like kudzu.  Darrell Waltrip, his youthful brashness still at full volume, his hair still in that sort of goofy bowl style, was hard to miss.  Stubborn, indestructible Bobby Allison was still out there, too, plugging away and winning races.  I knew who these folks were, but somehow they didn't matter that much.  They were famous people who drove cars, and that was the extent of it.

There was a period when we'd go see anything with Burt Reynolds in it, so I remember going to see Stroker Ace when it came out.  (I now own it on DVD, and while it's a terrible "adaptation" of a terrific book, it's still a hoot to watch to see so many famous racers in their younger days...and a memorable, profane cameo by Ken Squier.) We'd also watch The Dukes of Hazzard each week, though the significance of the Dukes' racing aspirations was completely lost on me.  (The fact that Waylon Jennings was the narrator was a little more interesting to me, as were the bungling antics of Boss Hogg and Sheriff Roscoe.) 

My father didn't like the idea of going to a car race (I remember him making some crack about "I don't want to go watch these cars go around like mice in a circle"), but he did listen to racing on the radio.  Sometimes, we'd go out for a drive on Sunday afternoons, and my father would tune in the car races on the radio.  On other lazy afternoons, car races would be the only thing on television that was halfway interesting.  For whatever reason, we watched the 1985 Daytona 500, and the memory that sticks out isn't Bill Elliott's win, but Lake Speed's emotional interview after a surprise second-place finish by his little team.  (I didn't understand the context back then.)  There were other little things, too; for instance, I vaguely remember the flamboyant shooting star that was Tim Richmond (mostly thanks to an Old Milwaukee commercial I must have seen a hundred thousand times in 1985), and folks like Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt would whiz by in the background of my awareness.  And some guy named Kulwicki kept getting mentioned a lot on our local stations, too.

(Tim Richmond, by the way, is another too-forgotten character who fascinates me.  The relationship between him and crew chief Harry Hyde was the basis of another laughably regrettable movie about racing, one that came out in 1990 that was basically the same movie the same star and production team had done three years before, but with race cars instead of fighter jets.  Why are there so few good motion pictures about racing?  For my money, the only movie about racing in the last 25 or 30 years that's come anywhere near being accurate, oddly enough, is Talladega Nights.  But, I digress.)

In 1992, I got a call from a local radio station.  I'd submitted a resume the previous year, and a new program director had gone through the files and found it.  My first job was running the board during the Motor Racing Network and Performance Radio Network events.  I was a young college student, very idealistic, and car racing represented a lot that I wanted to leave behind.  But, it was a paycheck, and I figured that if I started with the drudge work, things would come in time.  The first race for which I worked the board was the 1992 Busch race at Watkins Glen.  Over the coming weeks and months, I was at the board when a lot of things happened.  I remember being there when Davey Allison had his frightening wreck at Pocono.  I sat at the board that afternoon, wondering if I'd just heard the radio announcers describing a fatal accident.  But, sure enough, he grunted back to start the next race, and I remember all that drama. 

Somewhere, I still have most of my MRN cue sheets from back then.  For whatever reason, I saved them, and I'm glad I did.  I'll have to go through them and figure out which moments from that great season I got to hear as they happened.  The worst part of it is, though, I wasn't interested.  I had no love for the sport then.  It might have helped had we had a television in the control room.  Had I been able to watch the races on television (which would not only have necessitated a television, but also cable, which I doubt our cost-conscious station owner would have allowed), I might have been able to build some interest.  But, it didn't happen.  I also didn't like that car races were unpredictable, that delays and cautions prolonged my stays at the board, and that throws to the locals from the networks could happen very quickly and with little notice.  And, oh, did I hate rain delays.

To this day, I regret that I wasn't interested, because 1992 was a season like few others: the drama of Davey Allison in a year full of triumphs and danger; the retirement of Richard Petty and the debut of Jeff Gordon; and a tight race for the championship that went down to the last moments of the season's last race, and was won by a stubborn, determined independent in a story Hollywood couldn't have scripted.  I didn't work that race; I was on the early Sunday shift at that point, so I missed history being made.

In early 1993 I was put back on race duty, and this perceived 'demotion' led to my eventual resignation from the station.  (I was young and full of myself.)  The one memory I do have is broadcasting that year's Daytona 500, which I remember for no other reason than watching it on the little television in the AM control room, and watching Kyle Petty and Bobby Hillin get into it (which starts about 6:45 into this clip).  Again, because I had no context, I couldn't understand why those two were getting into it, and because of that, it took me a long time to like either one, really.  

I got out of it in March 1993 and didn't pay much attention.  But horrifying things happened that brought it back to my mind.  A few weeks after I quit, Alan Kulwicki was killed.  Then a few months later, so was Davey Allison.  Those were names I'd heard week after week, and even if I didn't particularly care then for the sport they were in, they were still names I knew, still people who were real somehow to me.  And, abruptly, they were gone. 

Tomorrow, thoughts about motorsports in my life since radio.  The theme of "inevitability" comes up.  Stay tuned.

Random randomness

Last week was refreshing, but this week I'm back in the salt mine, and it's one of the crazy parts of the year, and things are starting to stack up a little.  So, in lieu of any Really Deep Thoughts today, some random Internet silliness I've enjoyed:

-- Looking for fine dining?  Try Hamm and Buble.

-- Titanic, as re-imagined by a certain entertainment megacorporation.

-- And because there's a place on the Interweb for everything, a website devoted to game show pilot episodes (industry lingo for the "proof-of-concept" shows done for networks or sponsors). 

The necessary nudge

Given that I'm able to work independently most of the time, given that by the nature of my job I give orders for people to follow, and given that my word is the word in the classroom, it's easy for me to forget that, no, I'm not the last word.

That's why the times when someone tells me "no" when I've stepped over a boundary are valuable, even if they're painful.  This doesn't happen too often, because I'm usually very, very careful about the things I say out loud or the things I do.  But, sometimes, things happen or I get carried away, and I end up doing something stupid in front of somebody who will, thankfully, call me on it.  I get very mad at myself for doing something stupid (remember, I'm always my own biggest critic), but having that outside disapproval teaches a lesson, too.

This is healthy.  I see it too often: too many people in whatever area in life don't get told "no" as much as they should.  They surround themselves with people who, out of fear or out of the desire for advancement, don't tell the emperor, "Hey, I ain't too sure about them clothes."  I've seen it in entertainment and sports, when celebrities become too rich and too powerful for their own good and surround themselves with yes-men and toadies who can't, don't or won't tell these people that all this time in the echo chamber is a bad thing.  Sometimes I even see it in my own profession (most notably, a run-in with a particularly entitled-acting professor at a bookstore coffee shop a few years ago who was doing something I found not particularly professional, that could potentially have compromised student data.  Man, how I had to resist the urge to tell him, "Look, I do the same thing you do for a living.  And you're wrong, mister.")

Case in point: a few nights ago, hubby and I are watching television. We normally crack wise while watching television, and we spend a lot of time around people with senses of humor as twisted as ours.  (Sometimes it gets really twisted, too.)  At any rate, as we're watching, I made some wisecrack about something on the television, and...well, let's just say the intent, and the embarrassingly botched execution, were divergent.  Hubby called me out on it.  My brain immediately went into full "kick thy own self" mode, and I spent much time wishing I'd kept my fool mouth shut.

As painful as that moment was, it was good for me.  And it's also reassuring to know I'm with somebody who will tell me those kinds of things when I need to hear them.  That's what an ideal mate should do, anyway: be someone to keep you on the ground when everyone around you is either saying nothing or acting like everything you say or do is the greatest when it really isn't. The folks with the healthiest, most well-adjusted personalities, more often than not, have someone around them who's willing to tell them they're full of crap when they need to hear it.

I'm glad I have that.  One of my worst fears is becoming one of those people who should have been told "no" more often, but weren't.  Hubby helps me keep from becoming one of them.  I'm thankful.

Daytona, back in the day

A few weeks ago I picked up this book, read it through in a weekend.  It's one of the best sports books I've read in a while -- funny, vivid and well-done.  Early on, it retells the story of the 1979 Daytona 500, the one we all remember with the fight at the end. 

As longtime readers will know, for many years we've made annual trips to Daytona Beach.  Sometimes we've gone to see the 24-hour race, and other times we've just gone for a long weekend.  It's a special place for us both; it was the destination of the first overnight trip we took together, and for hubby it's a special place because that's where he went to college, learning how to work on airplanes.  Sometimes he'd get to help out at the Speedway, lending a hand in the parking lots, and sometimes he'd be in the neighborhood when history was made.  (My favorite is his story of being around there in 1983 when a certain Mr. Foyt, whose original entry retired early, was called back in to help another team and emerged victorious in his first Porsche outing).  

Daytona Beach was expanding like mad the first time I visited ten years ago.  Now, it's unrecognizable from even then.  Every time we go back, hubby looks for familiar landmarks, and they're going away too.  And, of course, Daytona International Speedway looks nothing like it did back then.  The track's the same shape and Lake Lloyd is still there, but it seems everything else has been so extensively modified, rebuilt or replaced that it's hard to recognize sometimes.  I can see pictures of how the place used to look, or see old television footage, and remember seeing it on television when I was a kid.  Now, sometimes, you have to remind yourself it's the same place.  Different, but it's the same speedway.

With that in mind, here's some footage from that first televised flag-to-flag Daytona 500 in 1979.  This piece gives you a good overview of the challenges of televising it, and also a taste of how significant it all was.  (It's also enjoyable to see Ken Squier talk about it -- and to see footage of a younger Ken Squier and David Hobbs -- and it's also neat to see and hear the original billboard, with longtime CBS Sports announcer Don Robertson's voiceover.)  Then here's the opening laps, which were run under caution.  Yes, it's a parade with no excitement (save for a Brock Yates interview with Herb Nab -- and, unfortunately, footage of a horrifying crash from the previous day's Sportsman race that, while it didn't kill one of the drivers involved, did leave him a prisoner in his own body for the rest of his life).  But it's worth watching because it gives you so many chances to see what it used to look like there.  It was the days before the colossal grandstand down the back stretch, before the Winston Tower, before the huge country-club looking garage and hospitality complexes in the infield.

(For the record, I think I may vaguely remember that weekend in 1979.  If memory serves, we were among those blitzed by the weather, and we were without power most of that weekend, so I doubt we watched the race.  I don't think I would have remembered it if we had, anyway.  Most of what I remember involves huddling by the fireplace in the den of our then-new house, and spending the night in sleeping bags.)