Stock Car Racing History, NASCAR, and Other Problems in American Racing History

[Don Capps]

It's interesting to note that my comment about the Wolfe article came from something that I had read in the past. That was one commentators take. I have tried to lay hands on it today, but I realize I may have just seen it in something I don't own. It's funny though, that was an idea that stuck in my head.

When I first started following racing, the first book I bought with my own money was Kim Chapin's Fast as White Lightning. I know it plays up the bootlegging aspect to be sure, but I have always loved it. Are you familiar with it, and if so, What's your take on it?

The Wolfe article still exists somewhere out there in the ether; I think the Esquire site used to have it in their on-line archives. I do not remember at the moment where I got my copy, but that may have been the source. I did have the original issue of Esquire with the article, but it was lost when part of my library was wiped out by a water leak while my materials were in storage awaiting quarters. The switch by Johnson from MOPAR to Ford came about after Wolfe had already committed to the article and visiting Wilkes County.

The Chapin book is on one of the bookshelves in my research office, last being re-read a few (five or six?) years ago when I was delving into stock car racing history and looking at various secondary sources. When it concerned itself with Tiny Lund, it was a far better depiction of contemporary NASCAR and stock car racing than when it strayed off into the "moonshine" legend/mythology material. In the last reading I found myself questioning and wondering about much of what I was reading. Not having read it for awhile, those are the impressions that I still carry regarding Chapin book. As someone who knew Lund off and on over the years, one of the reasons I bought the book rather than just read or skim it at a library was that it devoted time to Lund, someone I thought rather highly of, then and now.

[Lee Roy]

Don,

I too have always had an iterest in Lund. Never met him, but I was at the race in Talladega when he lost his life. He was a fascinating character and is one I think of when I try to remember what NASCAR was really like (at the "cup" level, but mostly below the "cup" level) in the 60's and 70's.

What I really would like to know about Lund is, what part he really played in saving Marvin Panch's life when Panch crashed that sports car in 1963 which led to Lund's Daytona 500 win.

[Don Capps]

Don,

I too have always had an iterest in Lund. Never met him, but I was at the race in Talladega when he lost his life. He was a fascinating character and is one I think of when I try to remember what NASCAR was really like (at the "cup" level, but mostly below the "cup" level) in the 60's and 70's.

What I really would like to know about Lund is, what part he really played in saving Marvin Panch's life when Panch crashed that sports car in 1963 which led to Lund's Daytona 500 win.

Below is something that I wrote literally a decade ago regarding Lund and the incident at Daytona. Someone had written the following -- "Ten days before the Daytona 500, in 1963,Marvin Panch flipped a Maserati. An unemployed driver,Tiny Lund,waded through waist deep flames and pulled Panch clear of the inferno. The grateful Panch insisted that Lund drive his Wood Brothers Galaxie in the 500. Lund won the 500 and a Carnegie medal for heroism." -- which should explain parts of the response I offered.

[quote="Don Capps, 28 Feb 2001, The Nostalgia Forum, "Bravery Awards""] Marvin Panch was NOT entered to drive the Maserati in the 1963 Daytona Continental, a 3-Hour FIA GT race. There were three 'sports car races that year. The USRRC event on 3 February, which was won by Jim Hall]

Lund and the others did not "wade through waist deep flames" to rescue Panch although there was a minor fire in the cockpit area of Maserati and spilled fuel was pooling around the crash site. The five men, working together, managed rescue Panch before the fuel ignited and created the inferno that one often sees in the photographs of the incident. They scarcely pulled Panch from the wreckage before the fuel ignited. Only a few minor injuries and some burns were suffered by the rescue team. By lifting the rear of the Tipo 151, Lund allowed the others the space needed to extract Panch.

While working the press box and the pits at a number of races, then as a "Gofer" for several of Lund's racing efforts, and on visits his fish camp near Cross several times to see him, I became acquainted with Lund. We were scarcely good friends, but we got to talk a bit over the years. He definitely had a temper that manifested itself at times on the track, but that was scarcely unique at the time.

While the "moonshiner" angle of stock car racing has been vastly exaggerated, other aspects regarding the "working class behavior" of those involved in the sport do reflect the reality of the drivers, spectators, and the track personnel. There was scarcely an occurrance at each and every race, but conflict resolution was often handled in various ways and with varied means, often away from the track. Behavior at the GN level was often exemplary compared with what would take place in the Sportsman ranks.

But, I digress....

[Alexamateo]

Thanks, I agree that the prologue on Tiny Lund makes the whole book, and is a glimpse at how racing was at the Sportsman level then. That race was Tiny's 4th race in 5 days. He was gunning for the Sportsman Championship, and according to Butch Lindley, was only running a Winston Cup race (Talladega was his first Winston Cup start in two years) in order to earn money to apply towards the Sportsman championship.

[Lee Roy]

Thanks Don. I never doubted Tiny's heroism or selflessness in the Panch incident, I just was curious as to what was fact and what was embelishment. I never heard that he had won the Carnegie award.

I'll never forget being in the stands at 'dega and seeing the wrecker pulling his car around into the garage.

The week before (the August race at 'dega was run a week late due to rain on that Sunday) I got to see Mark Donohue set a closed course speed record in his Posche Can-Am Car, but he would die a couple of days after Lund.

A few weeks later they had a fund raiser race at the Jacksonville Speedway. Tiny and the promoter there were good friends. I saw Buddy Baker and David Pearson there signing autographs and Bobby Allison brought his car and participated in the race. Also got to meet another hero of mine, Lee Roy Yarbrough. This was a few short years before Lee Roy wound up in the mental hospital from which he would never leave.

August/September of 75 was a month I'll never forget.

[Don Capps]

Lee Roy Yarbrough lived in our neighborhood in Columbia for a bit before moving to another area of the city. He knew my second cousin, Jimmy Lee Capps, from the Jacksonville area racing scene in the early Sixties. The racing scene in the Carolinas was quite an interesting place to be during the Sixties and into the Seventies -- I missed almost all of the Fifties racing scene in the area since we were stationed in Europe at the time. Yarbrough was working the various tracks in the area in the Sportsman Division as well as getting the occasional GN ride until it came together for him -- only for it to all far apart in such a unfortunate way. He did give me a few fast laps around Darlington during a tire testing session that further confirmed the idea that I was far more inclined to be a writer about racing than being a racer. My (lack of) performance in the Hobby Division quickly confirmed that notion -- I was simply not as crazy as the others on the track (of course having by that time I had done time in combat in the Lurps & Rangers and after having been shot up, shot down, and sunk, perhaps a degree of maturity had set in) who were gunning to move up a notch or two.

I have always thanked my lucky stars I was elsewhere -- Fort Bragg -- when Lund crashed at Talladega. I was listening to the race on the radio and had no idea it was that bad at first. Then having Mark Donohue die within a day or so was also a shock. Easy for people to forget just how close the dark side of racing was still lurking under the surface at the time.

[Alexamateo]

What can you tell us about your cousin? I know he made a handful of starts in the 70's and also see he made his first start in the race that Wendell Scott won albeit belatedly at Jacksonville in December of 1963. I'd be interested in knowing his impressions if any at the time.

[Don Capps]

Jimmy Lee is about nine years older than I am, and he also lived in Florida (the Jacksonville area), so I did not see very much of him even during the Sixties. He visited us a few times in South Carolina (he was running some Sportsman events as I remember), and the last time I probably saw him was at Rockingham in either 1977 or maybe 1978. I would say that we met hardly a dozen times over the years, if that.

As for the Jacksonville race in December 1963, I never asked him. Nor did it really come up other than that was his first GN start. He crashed early in the race, which is about all I remember his mentioning at the time.

From what I have found from contemporary sources, Scott was awarded the victory within the time it would usually take to do a scoring check and did receive the prize money for first place -- in cash. That Scott always insisted on being paid in cash is something that I was told by several sources, one of them being John Bishop. The lack of a trophy was not mentioned in the contemporary accounts. It should be noted that there were several other races that season marred by scoring errors; however, keep in mind that just south of Jacksonville, in St. Augustine, there was considerable unrest over civil rights at that time.

[Lee Roy]

Don, when you lived in Florida did you ever go to races over at the tracks in Lake City and down near Ocala? I used to go to the races at Lake City quite a bit during the early to mid 1970's.

[Don Capps]

In the bookshelf recommendations thread, I mention that several from the academic communiy have ventured into the NASCAR history wars. Dan Pierce, on the history faculty of UNC-Asheville, blows quite a few holes in the usual NASCAR/stock car racing legends, folklore & mythology, but he still tends to listen a bit more to his Appalachian roots and his being a true fan of NASCAR racing than exercising a bit more the historian's objectivity at times. If nothing else, Pierce reinforces and puts on paper what some have long maintained: it is highly improbable that stock car racing trippers carving out an oval outside Stockbridge, Georgia for their weekend entertainment created stock car racing in the sense that we know it. This is because there is little to no likelihood that such a track ever existed. Extensive, exhaustive research on the part of Pierce failed to find any evidence for the existence of such a track in the Stockbridge area at the time when all the excitement was supposedly going on.

I have skimmed and now doing a closer reading of Beekman's NASCAR Nation. One can easily quibble with some of his information -- there was a sanction for an event held in 1910 in West Virginia, which prior to the 1935 date that Beekman claims as being the earliest AAA-sanctioned event in that state, for instance -- and some of his conclusions and interpretations, but it is not the all-too-usual endless rehashing of legend, folklore, and mythology that mars most books on stock car racing and NASCAR's past. That Beekman uses footnotes -- the reason for the re-read is that I am doing through them -- cannot be overlooked.

Something that both Pierce and Beekman and others make clear is that Big Bill France seized control of stock car racing in the Southeast through a variety of measures, most of them involving more than a bit of arm-twisting. Pierce takes the time to closely examine the labor relations aspects of NASCAR and the drivers, which is an area the usual NASCAR fare steers well clear of, given that France's views of those relations did not differ very much from that of those autocrats of the New South, the textile mill owners. The blow-up with the PDA at Talladega in 1969 was only one battle in the stormy relationship that France had with the "labor force" in NASCAR.

One should approach many of the recollections found in the Wilkinson book with some caution. As historians are always painfully aware, recollections and memory are like gossamer, fragile and often unsubstanial. While invaluable in providing the crucial elements of Zeirgeist, it is best to remember the caution implied in "trust, but verify."

At some point, all the various efforts should coalesce and a more-informed, realistic view of the origins of stock car racing and NASCAR will emerge; however, mythology dies hard....