Chapter 21

By early 1967 I felt pretty comfortable with the way things were going in my life. We had all the kids in school by now, had time to spend on things to enjoy ourselves, and realistically Arlene and I didn't have much to complain about. It wasn't a bad deal for a town we'd wound up in by pure accident over a dozen years before. Life had become pretty placid and settled for Arlene and me. I was content. It looked to me like it had every reason to stay that way, and I didn't see anything new on the horizon.

I guess I had forgotten that it's the unexpected that keeps life interesting.

It's really kind of amazing how so many of the changes in my life in Bradford started over a cup of coffee at the Chicago Inn, or at Kay's Restaurant, which closed several years ago when Kay got well beyond retirement age. At the time it started I didn't even recognize it, but it was to bring big changes to the balance of my life.

It was a Saturday morning in February, I'm sure of that, but I'm not sure which Saturday, not that it matters. I was sitting at the big coffee table in the Chicago Inn with half a dozen other guys, when one of the other guys at the table, Kenny Peterson, spoke up and said, "Hey, Mel. You heard anything about the Bradford Speedway getting sold?"

"Not a word," I told him. "Mostly because I'm not interested, so I haven't been listening."

"It wasn't sold," Rod Hodges said from down the table. Rod was the president of the Bradford State Savings Bank, and because of that kept an even closer ear to what went on around town than even Lloyd Weber, who ran the Bradford Courier. "There was a nibble on it a while back and a ninety-day option got taken out, but it expired, and as far as I know no one has heard from them since."

"Who was that?" Kenny asked. "The story going around was that someone was going to buy it and reopen it."

"Don't know," Hodges shrugged. "From what I heard the option was taken out by some holding company I never heard of before. Nothing local, anyway. But whatever it was, it's a dead issue now. It was pretty close to a dead issue then, since the track is in foreclosure."

"You mean the bank is taking it back?" Kenny asked as I took a sip of my coffee, just letting the gossip flow by me.

"Not that we want to," Hodges said. "What the hell use do we have with that patch of clay? But, that looks like what's going to happen. It's almost three years since a payment has been made on it, we have to do something."

"That's a damn shame," Kenny said. "Back a few years ago I liked to go out there and watch the races now and then, but that looks like something else we're not going to have in Bradford anymore." Kenny glanced over at me and continued, "Why don't you buy it, Mel?" he asked. "An old racer like you with your race cars, it seems like you ought to be able to make a go of it."

It was obvious Kenny didn't have an inkling of what he was talking about. "Well, I'll tell you," I said. "If it had been available back about five or six years ago and I'd been in the mood to buy it, I probably could make a go of it. But Smoky Kern let Glenn Mansfield bleed it dry, and all the local enthusiasm for it got bled dry, too. If anyone were to buy it, me or whoever, they'd be starting right from scratch with a place that's seen a lot better days and more than used up its stock of good will."

"I remember those days," Kenny said. "For a while there a few years ago things were going pretty good, like they used to in the old days. It seems to me that it could be built back up again."

"Oh, it probably could," I shrugged. "The big things it would take to do it would be time, and money. You don't build a car count up overnight, it could take years. Like I said, whatever good will the track ever had was pissed away by Glenn Mansfield. I'm not a short track racer, but I hang around with that crowd a bit now and then, and you would not believe what a dirty word 'Bradford Speedway' is to some of those guys. It would take years to live those days down and rebuild the good will. All that time, you'd be getting along on tiny car counts and not enough of a crowd to fill a large station wagon, so that essentially means no income while you're got operational expenses out the wazoo. And unless someone had a big, thick wallet there'd be payments that would have to be made while you're trying to accomplish everything else. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I don't have a wallet thick enough to do it."

"Yeah," Hodges said, looking thoughtful. "To try to open it again would take someone that knew what they were doing, that's for sure. The heck of it is that once upon a time it was a fun place to go on a Saturday night. Mel, if there's anyone in this town that could make a go of that place, you'd be the one to do it. My kid was one of those running out there back when you ran the Junior Stock class. He said it was a heck of a ball because you cared about the kids and wanted to see them make a success out of it. When you got shoved out, a lot of the fun went out of it for him. He ran that Henry J down at Angola for the rest of the summer, then sold it. Said it wasn't fun anymore."

"Henry J?" I frowned. "Oh, I remember, the kid with the Kaiser-Frazer that was pure sleeper."

"When everybody else was running legal he could run with them," Hodges said. "He didn't do bad with it considering it was a seventy-five-dollar repo we took in."

There were a couple other racing stories told and then the topic drifted off somewhere else, I don't remember what but it doesn't matter now. I didn't realize it at the time, but the conversation lit up a little coal that had been burning in the back of my head ever since Glenn Mansfield spent so damn much money to push me out of the place. If I'd had the money he spent buying trophies for his kid, with what I'd had to work with in those days, I thought it would have been running pretty good today.

How would you build up a local short track starting from almost nothing, which is about what the Bradford Speedway represented? It wouldn't be an easy proposition. Probably a few cars could be talked into showing up on a Saturday night, especially if a little money was thrown around. There might still be some local racing interest; I knew of a handful of kids who had gone through the Auto Shop II classes and were still into it. I'd even helped them work on their cars and the like – helping kids with their race cars was still something that I enjoyed.

Maybe do something different? I'd spent some time hanging around the kart racing scene in the past couple years, and I knew some of us were getting pretty tired of having to go to a different factory parking lot and lay out a course with flour every weekend. Even though karts didn't race on dirt much, it wouldn't take a great deal of asphalt to make for a pretty decent little kart track right in the infield. Something to think about...

I'd just have to hold every expense to a minimum. Even though the place was a dump, that still didn't mean it couldn't be fixed up some. Maybe not even try to hold night races, but race on Sunday afternoons – not many places did, that might bring in a few racers who had raced the night before. That would mean you wouldn't even have much of an electric bill. Try to get by with a minimum of paid personnel. Don't worry about the crowd; this is for the racers. Maybe not even charge admission until the show had been built up to something that was worth seeing ... in the beginning, you might not get enough out of the front gate to pay someone to take the tickets.

The big stumbling block wasn't time and money. It was just money, because you could buy time with it. Time to build up the show and get some regular racers involved. I had a few bucks stuck back, not very many when you considered doing something like that. Not enough to make a go of it, that's for sure.