Chapter 24

We got an awful lot done that weekend. In some areas, we were beyond where I'd hoped to be when we actually got things going, but there were other areas that hadn't progressed along as far as I'd hoped. We didn't have crowds like that every weekend, but typically there would twenty or thirty people out on Saturday for the next few weeks. By the time we got done, it didn't look like the same old place. Two or three weeks later I stopped off by the track on the way home from school one afternoon, to discover that someone had dropped off fifty gallons of white paint! I had no idea where it came from, there was no receipt or bill of lading or anything, but once again I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. That weekend we had three compressors running spray guns, and the place looked a lot better when we got done.

One of the things that needed to be done was to build a catch fence along the front straight to protect the spectators in the bleachers. This struck me as a good idea although I'd rarely seen it done up until that time, but the insurance company said they would give me a cut on the rates if it was there, and I was not one to argue. There was some other fencing to be done – we needed to build a woven wire fence to keep people off the track. I did some figuring on the fencing involved for the two projects, and it came to a considerable total that would cut deep into our cash reserves.

Fortunately, Art Angunar solved that problem. This was in the days when a lot of little farms were consolidating into larger ones, and with bigger machinery it was getting a little inconvenient to work the small fields that had been the standard up till then. As a result, there was a lot of farm fence being ripped out and just left in rolls, worthless. Art had quite a bit laying around, and found more; one Saturday morning we showed up and there were three farm wagons full of the stuff, along with piles of posts. Some of it wasn't worth the powder to blow it away, but a lot could be salvaged, enough for what we needed, and it didn't cost us a dime.

There were a lot of little things like that over the course of the next few weeks, too many to mention, and that helped keep things way under the budget we had projected. People came out of the woodwork to help, and it was for a lot more than just getting rid of that eyesore west of town. The mess that Smoky and Glenn made had put a lot of noses out of joint, and I think there were a lot of people who wanted to see things put right.

I haven't mentioned the boys and Elaine, but they pitched right in, too. There wasn't a lot they could do – but they did what they could, picking up trash, pulling weeds, scraping paint and things like that. This was a family thing and we were all in it.

Still, there was a lot to do, and it was touch and go whether we were going to be ready for our opening weekend. In spite of our brand spiffy new concession stand the Health Department dragged their butts on getting it approved, and I wasn't sure it was going to be available for our opener. That could have been a disaster, since we didn't have front gate receipts to help with our income – it was going to just have to come out of back gate entry fees and concessions. Fortunately, it finally did get signed off on Friday, just two days before opening day, and whatever happened, we were ready to go.

I will be the first to admit to having quite a case of nerves on the Saturday night beforehand, which was the opening night for several tracks within a hundred miles or so. I'd done my best to spread the word among the racers that we were going to have a casual Sunday afternoon show, and several people had said they were going to be there, but I had visions of only half a dozen cars showing up and it being a flop.

I guess I was being a pessimist unnecessarily. Arlene and I got up early, drove over to the Chicago Inn for breakfast to find Zack and Diane doing the same thing. "So, did you wind up running over at Maple Shade last night?" I asked Zack.

"Yeah, didn't do too bad, either," he said. "I wound up fourth, but I was leading till the last couple laps when I sort of got punted. Oh, well, I'll get him next time."

"I take it that means you're planning on being out there today," I said. "That means that we'll have one car."

"Oh, I think we'll have more than one," he said. "There were a lot of people that seemed interested."

"I sure hope you're right," I said gloomily. "I sure would hate to see all that work go for nothing."

"It's not going to go for nothing," he smiled. "You just wait and see. This is going to turn out fine."

I told him I wished I could believe him. There was a lot riding on this being a success, and even a halfway good day would get us off on the right foot. I was still pretty nervous when we drove back under the overpass and into the parking area for the track. Hours before we were due to start there were a dozen cars or more on haulers or tow bars, waiting for us to open the gates for practice!

One of the cars surprised me. I mean, it really surprised me – it was the old '52 Hudson that Phil Sharp had run when I'd been in charge of the Junior Stock class there in the early sixties. You didn't often see those old Hudsons anymore; they were getting pretty old for those days. What really surprised me was that Phil Sharp was the one there with it! It turned out that he'd just come from graduating from college to work in the insurance agency with his father, had heard that I was reviving the track, and got that old Hudson running after it had been sitting behind the garage under a tarp for five years. By God, I thought, this might really work.

As if that wasn't enough of a surprise, along in the morning Pepper and Dewey showed up, with a Mini-Cooper 1500 sitting on a trailer! "That's not exactly a stock car," I commented, seeing the little bug that would be at home on a road course.

"Hey," Dewey grinned, "You said, 'Run what you brung.' This is what we brung. You think this is far out, you ain't seen nothing, yet."

I soon found out what he was talking about. It turned out that there wasn't a sports car race anywhere within reasonable towing distance that weekend, so Pepper and Dewey had passed the word among some of their teabagger friends that if they wanted to find out what it was like to run a dirt oval, they wouldn't find a better chance. I swear, they brought in half a dozen cars that probably had never set tires on dirt in their lives, bringing drivers with them who probably had never even seen a dirt oval. The absolute untoppable capper came a couple hours later, when a guy with a pickup pulled in, towing a trailer loaded with an honest to God 427 Shelby Cobra! They hadn't built Cobras in the last couple years, but they were still about the hottest things you could find on a road course, but a little dirt track in the middle of nowhere was about as far out of its normal stomping grounds as you could imagine.

"You guys," I shook my head. "What else are we expecting? A Ferrari, maybe?"

"Don't think so," Pepper said. "There was a guy that was interested, but we told him that it probably would be better to have a little higher centered car for a dirt track. Kind of a shame, too. We could stand a good road course in this neck of the woods."

It got busy for a while there. Arlene was handling registrations and entry fees, while I was trying to make some sense out of the people that kept showing up, trying to build some sort of a race plan. It kept continually changing, since more and more cars kept showing up, ranging from that Cobra down to old Fords that might not have been run in years, and stuff like Phil Sharp's Hudson. Cars of every description – it was just hard to believe.

Right in the middle of the whole damn show, when it was beginning to strike me that this was going to be a whole lot bigger deal that I'd ever dreamed it could be, Frank showed up. "Looks pretty good for an opener," he said. "You know, if it's going to go this well, you really ought to have the 2 and the 66 down here so you and Arlene can run a ceremonial opening lap."

"Great idea," I said. "I should have thought of it. Now I haven't got the time to run up and get them. If you want to do it, they're sitting in the chicken coop behind my house. There's batteries for them sitting on the charger."

"OK, great," he said. "I'll grab Dewey and Pepper and go get them."

I was so damn busy right then that I didn't have time to think about it, but when I happened to look up a few minutes later, I saw Frank and Dewey driving the 2 and the 66 cars into the parking lot. I'd thought they were going to trailer them, but they didn't mess around with that – they just drove them down the highway, cops or no cops.

By now, practice was under way, and let me tell you, with the varying speeds of cars we had out there, that got interesting. I turned people out to practice four cars at a time for ten laps – well, actually Zack did, he volunteered to handle the flags for a while. I didn't get to see much of the practice, but I noticed that Dewey and his little Mini-Cooper were really flying around the track. Even though it was pretty far away from the MMSA midget that he'd spent so much time on dirt with, he hadn't forgotten how to drive on dirt. He wasn't the fastest thing out there by a long shot, but that little bug was a heck of a lot faster than it looked at first appearance.

One of the surprising things was that the 427 Cobra really wasn't doing that well. It was one hell of a pavement car but getting all that power to the dirt was interesting, and the driver – damned if I can remember his name, Tom something or other – had never driven on dirt in his life. After a while – and a few helpful hints from Dewey – he began to get the hang of it, and was making pretty good time, but that big side-oiler mill in that thing was really too much for that car on that track. Still, it was a hell of a sight to see.

What may have been the best sight of all to see was a half a dozen or so older six-cylinder cars that we now called "Economy Stocks," all of them veterans of the days when I'd been running the Junior Stocks at the track, most of them with the same drivers from back then, like Phil. Some of those cars and drivers, like Phil, hadn't raced since the night that I'd walked out of the place after getting the knife in the back from Smoky Kern. While it was nice to see the high-end and the odd stuff, I knew they weren't going to be a regular part of the show – it was going to be the little guys who liked to race for the hell of it that were going to be the bread and butter of the place.

When everything was said and done, we had eighty-three cars registered! I don't know for sure, but I'll bet that beat the best car count that Smoky had ever had when he owned the place. It was, realistically, four or five times as many cars as I could have reasonably anticipated, and I was being run ragged in the process. There were things that needed to be done, and I had to grab people who didn't have something heavy in both hands to do them for me. One of them was Frank. "I hadn't figured on doing too much with the PA system, other than to help set races and like that," I said. "You're now the track announcer for today."

"I can do that," he said. "I've called a few races. I haven't done it in years, but I don't think I've forgotten how."

"More like a few hundred races," I joked at him. "I think you'll knock off the rust pretty quick."

Finally, about half an hour before the scheduled race time, I got on the PA myself and called all the drivers down to the bleachers for the driver's meeting. When they showed up, along with some people who had come with them, I began to wish that we're repaired and painted more bleachers because the place was standing room only with more people showing up all the while. "All right, everybody," I said. "For those of you who don't know me, I'm Mel Austin, the new owner of this place along with my wife Arlene. Welcome to the Bradford Speedway. Drivers, spectators, everybody else, we're all here to have a good time so let's keep it that way. Reopening this speedway wouldn't have been possible without the help of a lot of people, and I see many of those people sitting here in the stands today. I'd mention names, but I'm afraid I'd miss somebody so I won't mention anyone except Arlene, and our concessions manager Diane Gorsline, who's responsible for those great hot dogs everybody's been munching on."