Chapter 7

Even though I was a little early, I found the kids for my next session waiting for me. There was no point in waiting around, so we headed over to the driver's education car and got going. Since the I-67 construction made it difficult to get west of town, usually I'd been staying to the Hawthorne side of things this summer, but for once I was just a little curious. I had the kid driving the car head out Main and Taney west out of town to where they were building the overpass, and as luck had it we got through the construction area pretty easily.

The track lay back off Taney Road just past the construction area. It looked like the Interstate had just missed the track, and I got the idea that it would eventually be possible to look right down into it from the overpass. You couldn't see much of it from the road; I'd driven past it at least twice a day, sometimes several times a day, for nearly a year and I hadn't really paid any attention to it. I had the kid driving pull into the parking lot and up to the ticket window behind the stands.

To be honest, the place didn't look in very good shape. The last time I'd been there, back in the fall of '54, it had looked to me like there were some places that needed some paint and some cleaning. From what I could see from the seat of the driver education car there hadn't been any paint used since then. Everything looked weather beaten and rusty; what I could see of the board fence around the track looked rather beat up, and there were some boards missing. "You ever come out here and watch the races?" I asked the kids in the car with me.

One of the boys, Phil Sharp, said his family used to come out once or twice a year to catch the action, but they hadn't done it in a few years. Bonnie Littlefield, the girl I had in the car said that she'd been in there on a date earlier that year, and that it was fun but awful dirty. She didn't care to go back unless there was a good reason, like a date with the right guy.

I asked if they knew of any kids from the school who came out and raced. It turned out they knew three or four; two of them I knew from my driver's education or auto shop classes, but they mentioned a kid whose name I hadn't heard: Bert Mansfield. "Who's he?" I asked.

"Oh, he's just going to be a freshman this fall," Sharp said. "Thinks he's hot stuff. He's already a pain-in-the-butt jock, and he's not even in high school yet. His folks have a big dairy farm out south of town."

"Well, that would account for my not knowing him," I told the kids. "Guess you don't have to be sixteen to run out here."

"No, the story around school is that you have to be fourteen and have one parent present," Sharp responded. "I thought once that I might like to give it a try, but my folks weren't too crazy about the idea."

"I'll bet that could get wild," I smiled. One of the facts of life about driver's education, especially in a country place like Bradford, was the fact that some kids came to the class with an awful lot of driving behind them. Some of the farm kids – both boys and girls – had been driving farm equipment for years, and not just in the fields. That included things like trucks and cars, but usually only on the back roads where the sheriff's patrol cars never went unless there was a reason to. The experience was good in a way, but sometimes they had some awfully bad habits they had to get over, too.

"I guess they pile up some cars," Sharp smiled. "Bunch of old junkers, mostly."

I told Bonnie, who was driving, to take us back out to the highway, then to turn right on Fremont Road. I knew this would take us around to the back of the track, and thought I'd see if the gate was open.

Sure enough, it was – and from the way dirt had piled up and weeds grown around it, it looked like it had been open for a while. Years, maybe. If the track hadn't looked good from the front side, the back side looked even worse. There was a tumbledown old garage there and a row of outhouses that didn't look much better; there wasn't a lot of grass growing in back, and what there was hadn't been mowed recently. "If I didn't know better I'd think this place was abandoned," I remarked.

"I guess people don't come out here like they used to," Sharp said.

Like a lot of small tracks, this open area served as the pits – there really wasn't enough room in the infield to make for the parking needed, especially with a lot of cars running. I pointed Bonnie at the entrance to the oval proper. "Take us around the track," I told her. "Just take it easy, we don't have to do a hot lap or anything."

"You sure this is all right?" she said.

"It's OK," I said, figuring that if Smoky wanted me very bad he'd better not gripe about me going around the track a couple times.

The track looked a little better from the inside, but just a little. There had been some paint used along the back fence – but it was only on some billboard ads on the fence. I could see where the fence had been patched a few times, probably from cars going through it. As I remembered, the track had a little banking to it, not much, but had a little bit of flat runoff area in the corners. The infield was dirt, of course, but looked like no one had done anything to even smooth it out in a while. There were scrubby weeds growing here and there, and junk was scattered around. There were a couple big puddles left from the last rain, and it looked about as unappealing as the mud field it was. The grandstand wasn't so grand, either – it was just a low bleacher arrangement, and the board seats also hadn't seen paint in a while, if ever. I'd remembered the place as being something of a dump, and it was even worse than I'd remembered.

I won't say that it was worse than anything I'd ever seen in the MMSA, because we'd raced in some awful dumps over the years, but this was definitely toward the bottom of the list. I could see why the spectator count was down – you had to either be a real fan or be related to someone in the race to want to spend any time in a junky place like that. Now, if there was anything I'd ever learned in all my years in the MMSA, it was that dirt tracks were dirty. It's the nature of the beast; you can't have cars throwing dirt in the air without it landing someplace. But even though they were dirty by nature, it didn't mean that the places had to be junky, and this one certainly was.

I had Bonnie drive a couple laps around the place, then asked the boys if they'd like to do it for the sake of saying that they'd done it. Of course they did, so we switched drivers around for another few laps, not at any great speed, while I mostly took in the sight. I had spent an awful lot of time in bullrings like this back in my MMSA days, and as crappy as the place was it took me back. I'd had a lot of good times on little tracks like this, and a few bad times. After a while, I got Bonnie back in the driver's seat, and we headed out of the track and back onto the road, thinking that it was just as well that those days were behind me. It probably was a good idea to keep them there.

I thought about the whole idea quite a bit while I drove around with the kids that day, and for the most part I didn't think much of it.

There was a part of me that missed the racing. I missed the noise, the smell, the flying dirt, the excitement. Most of all, I missed the fun of racing with friends and the traveling around to new places. That had been a part of my youth – my late youth, I guess you might say, but compared to ten years before I knew I had grown up now.

There was no doubt in my mind that working with Smoky Kern down at the track to bring some organization to his Junior Stock class sounded interesting, but it also sounded like a pain in the backside. Thinking about it, I reasoned that I wouldn't have a lot of trouble keeping the kids under control, but the parents could be a different story.

Hearing that a Mansfield kid was involved was just about enough to put me off the idea right there. I didn't know the kid from Adam, but I knew his parents by reputation. While I wasn't involved with the football team at all, other than to have to schedule my driver's education kids around their football practices, I knew something of the politics around the football team from eating lunch in the teacher's lounge.

Football was a big deal in Bradford – too big of a deal in my opinion. School sports were and are supposed to be a way for kids to work off a little excess energy and have some fun, while building a sense of school unity. But too many parents wanted to relive their youth from pushing their kids at the game, and sometimes they could get to be more than a little pushy about it. Bradford wasn't a big enough school for getting on the football team to be an issue, but how much a kid played and in what position could be a very big deal.