Chapter 15

As I mentioned before, we didn't see a whole lot of Frank and Carnie that winter, since they were on the road mostly trying to nail down dates for the 1951 season, to try and make it a little less free form than it had been in 1950. A lot of fall fair dates had already been set, but there were blanks that had to be filled in. It had to be done in such a way that it would keep the jumps between places from being any worse than they absolutely needed to be. Frank concentrated on the fall schedule since he had some contacts in the fair country, while Carnie worked on the spring and early summer season dates, mostly beyond the Mississippi. Those of us in the shop didn't have much detail about what was going on, but there was a big calendar on the wall in Vivian's office. When we went over to the dealership to use the machine shop or get parts we'd often take a look and see that it was getting filled in little by little.

Carnie had been a little piqued about how his late fall swing through the Deep South had mostly been a flop, a fair amount caused by lousy weather, which couldn't be controlled. Now, Carnie wasn't a racer, but he wasn't dumb, either, and he could read National Speed Sport News just like the rest of us. But, when he read it, he was looking for different things than we were, mostly opportunities to set race dates, and somewhere along the way he got a big idea. The first I heard of it was when Frank spent some time talking quietly in the corner of the shop with Spud, and then came over to me and asked, "Mel, how'd you like to take a run to Florida for a few days?"

"I'd like that just fine," I told him. "I could stand to get away from this snow and ice for a bit. What's on your mind?"

"You ever hear of the Daytona Beach NASCAR race?"

Actually, I had heard about it. "You mean those guys running strictly stock cars on the beach at Daytona?" I asked. "You mean they really do that?"

"Supposed to," Frank shrugged. "Carnie thinks it'd be a good place to go and do some politicking and try to sell some dates down south, and I wouldn't mind getting out of winter for a few days either. I thought you might like to go along and help with the driving."

Well, of course I wasn't going to say no to a deal like that, and I told him so. But, I didn't know at the time that there was a little more to that trip than met the eye.

I found out when we left the next afternoon that Vivian was going with us, to help Frank and Carnie out with the scheduling. We were even taking her car.

Now, Vivian was her daddy's daughter, of course, and I don't think there's many car dealers who drive a car of their own. Nine times out of ten they're driving something off of the lot, usually a good used car that they can put a few miles on without hurting the price, and Vivian was tied in with that deal. What made it interesting was that her car of the week was a '48 Lincoln with the V-12, basically a big Ford flathead with an extra four cylinders tacked on. It was a fast and powerful car for the day, if a bit on the heavy side, but it was roomy.

I don't recall Frank or Vivian ever touching the wheel the whole trip. Carnie drove some of it, but I drove most of it; we shared the front seat, while Frank and Vivian were in the back seat, mostly sitting close together. Very close together, as I saw in the rear view mirror. What's more, they weren't keeping their hands to themselves very well.

We were down about Cincinnati and it was well after dark when we pulled into a motel. We had two rooms; Carnie and I had one of them, and guess who had the other one? And guess who disappeared into it about thirty seconds after we checked in?

Carnie suggested that he and I go get a beer. "Mel, you realize what this trip is really all about, don't you?" he asked, after the waitress had brought us a couple drafts.

"I didn't when we started," I said. "But what I saw in the back seat made it pretty clear."

"I think you're smart enough to not say anything except that everything was on the up and up," he smiled.

"Well, hell yes," I snorted. "I got that picture right away."

I knew that Frank had been friendly with Vivian for a while, but I never realized that it was quite that friendly. Vivian was her daddy's only kid, and still lived at home, so it was pretty hard for her to get out and play. Even though she was probably twenty-six or twenty-seven at that point, older than I was, her folks still kept a close eye on her, and probably with good reason since she stood to inherit a pretty good chunk of change some day. Although Frank had been hurting a few years before, he'd had a couple of real good seasons with the MMSA. I didn't know how good, but good. On top of that, it was a wild enough thing to appeal to Vivian's sense of adventure.

But for them to get out and get a few days together – and a few nights – was probably pretty difficult, especially since the MMSA still apparently depended on Herb Kralick to some degree. So although Vivian could take off with Frank for a few days, they pretty well had to be chaperoned, at least to keep things on the up and up, especially with Vivian's mother and possibly with her dad. So, Frank had come up with some chaperones he could trust to keep their mouths shut. As far as that went, I was actually the wild card in the deal, someone closer to Frank than Herb knew, so might not be in on any possible fix. Spud obviously would have been in on any kind of deal like that, but he said he had work to do on the cars so stayed behind.

"Good," Carnie smiled. "We were pretty sure we could count on you."

"Hell, us old motor-pool guys have to stick together," I grinned. "So is this whole thing just to be beards for Frank and Vivian, or are we actually going to see the race?"

"Well, you and I probably are going to go to the race, although I've got some people I want to talk to. You can watch the race or whatever you want to do. I wouldn't be surprised if Frank and Vivian have other plans for that day."

With three or four of us to drive we probably could have pretty much driven straight through, but everyone would have been tired out, and it would have taken away some overnight stops at some motels, which appeared to be the major point of the exercise, anyway. Carnie and I wheeled that old Lincoln south to someplace like Macon, Georgia the next day – going through Atlanta wasn't all that bad back in those days, not like the permanent traffic jam it's become today – and we got a nice motel on the beach right in Daytona Beach that night.

Daytona Beach and the race back in '51 was absolutely nothing like the huge circus it became not many years later. It was still a pretty small town, and the 20,000 race fans or so that showed up filled it up pretty good. It was nothing compared to the 200,000 or whatever they get today, but it was a whole different world to what we MMSA people had been used to.

The motel was pretty nice; it turned out that Vivian had arranged it, through some sort of dealer arrangement with Ford, and I got the impression that Ford was picking up the tab on it. I don't want to say that Frank and Vivian disappeared right into their room and didn't see the light of day until we pointed the nose of that big old Lincoln toward home a week later, but Carnie and I didn't see a lot of them. When we did see them they were pretty close. We mostly figured what they did was their business and let it go at that.

I do recall that one time – well, maybe it was two or three times – Carnie and I happened to see Frank and Vivian on the beach. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit that was pretty hot for that day and age. I don't remember if tiny two-piece swimsuits had been named bikinis by that time, but even though Vivian's swimsuit was about the hottest thing on the beach it wouldn't even come close to being called a bikini today. But back then, Carnie and I agreed that Vivian had one hell of a body and that Frank was a lucky guy.

Carnie and I didn't pay much attention to Frank and Vivian because we had plenty else to keep us busy. It turned out that Vivian had unintentionally done the two of us one hell of a favor by offering to make the trip in her Lincoln, because that car was something of a honey magnet. I don't want to say that all the women down there were turned on by it, but there were enough that figured that two Yankees driving that big old luxury car must have enough bucks to be their next sugar daddy, whether for a couple hours or whatever.

For a while we tried to go turn and about with the motel room. That lasted until we picked up a couple of sisters from the hills of North Carolina or somewhere, and the next thing you know we were taking them both on side by side in beds next to each other. As I recall these were two pretty decent looking women if not quite in Vivian's class. The only problem came when they opened their mouths, because they spoke in pure hillbilly so thick we could barely understand 'em, could have been cut with a dull handsaw. We went at it for quite a while, took a break, and then swapped sisters when we went back to it. It wasn't the first time that Carnie and I had women in beds side by side at the same time, but the last time had been in that whorehouse in Japan.

I had never been the pussy hound out on the road that Chick had once been. I'd had a little action now and then in the evenings following the races over the summer, but I had more action in one week in Daytona Beach than I'd had all summer on the road. There must just have been something about the racing, the Lincoln, and Carnie, and me that clicked with the honeys that week, but it was a week to remember for a lifetime.

Surprisingly enough, we did do things other than fool around with good looking women with hillbilly accents. Carnie was there to talk with promoters and race track owners, maybe buy them a drink or pass a girl on to them or whatever it took. On the way down, we'd pretty well agreed that I'd take a look at this stock car racing and NASCAR business and see if there was anything likely to come of it.

This was long before they built the big two-and-a-half-mile oval out by the airport in Daytona. The race was run on a goofy course that was part pavement – the beachfront highway, A1A – and part run on the sand of the beach itself. The infield was sand dunes, and you could only see a small part of the four-mile course from any one spot. The course changed between the beach and the road in natural cuts through the sand dunes; the north corner wasn't too bad, but the south corner was narrow, sharp, and had loose sand. Like anywhere else in those days there wasn't much to keep the cars and the crowd apart and even during qualifying people would cut across the race course. I still don't know why they didn't kill people by the hundreds. I'd raced a lot in the past year on tracks that were just about as safe, although I don't think we'd run a one of them on a surface that was quite as crappy as the sand part of the course.