Smooth ride

Years ago, I was visiting Summerville Speedway a few hours before racing, and the P.R. guy offered to give me a golf-cart ride into the infield. Like an idiot, I took it.

It was a short ride, but it was bumpy. And when we crossed the track in turn four, it felt like the golf cart was going to roll over. I would rather have walked. In fact, I later walked across the track and went through the fence to get to the press box.

Another time, track operator Charlie Powell offered me the same ride, and, without thinking, I took it. It didn't occur to me that Charlie was a former driver who had won a bunch of feature races.

Where the other ride was unsettling, this one was smooth. You couldn't have done surgery in the back, but it was everything the other ride wasn't. You probably could have filled champagne glasses while Charlie was driving.

Leave it to a former driver to be that smooth.

Note: Summerville Speedway is gone. Apparently it was later sold and turned into a housing development.

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FIND MY BOOKS ONLINE

EMAIL: tgilli52@gmail.com   BLUESKY: PROFILE

More entries from TARJ

• Angel in Black: Remembering Dale Earnhardt Sr.

(a book of great stories about the Intimidator)

• Then Junior Said to Jeff...

(the book of great NASCAR stories)

• My best day as a sports writer

• Jeff Gordon's milk toast to Dale Earnhardt

• Wayne Auton: A life in racing

EDITOR@WORK blog entries 

• You really DO need an editor

• Reminders for would-be novelists

• What I do when I'm editing

• What I charge (it's a deal) and what I edit

• Slogging through the Internet

• J-school: More eyes on your stories

• J-school: Go out and learn

Entries from The Dog Blog

• Katie cried

• Growl and pull

• 13-plus years with my dog Lady

• ... said the spider to ...

• The Dog Diary (2014)

• OOH! OOH! The stereophonic huskies

• What Lady and Michael Jackson had in common

More blog entries by Tom Gillispie

• Resume for a writer and editor

• An editor's views on powerful writing

• Advice for be and would-be novelists

• Links to TG's stories online

• Favorite quotes

• What I do when I'm editing

Anecdotes by Tom Gillispie

• Wipeout at Death Valley

• Days with rainbows

• A desperate writer working in the dark

• Yer outta there!

OOPS! Remembering Louise Smith

(NOTE: I think I wrote this in 2010 for Stock Car Racing magazine, which no longer exists.)

Louise Smith Interview | Includes Two Unknown Flips

OOPS! REMEMBERING LOUISE SMITH

By Tom Gillispie

Before Danica Patrick, Lyn St. James and Janet Guthrie, there was Louise Smith. And she was hell on wheels.

Smith, who died April 15 at age 89, was born in Barnesville, Ga., and she was 4 when her family moved to Greenville, S.C. Her first automobile accident was with her daddy's Model T. The tot took the wheel, couldn't stop the car, and drove it right into the chicken coop.

Her start at racing, in the '40s, was more successful. She was a famous local leadfoot, and, Junior Johnson-style, she led many police cars on a merry chase.

Big Bill France was looking for ways to promote racing, and he heard about Smith. Putting a woman on a racetrack seemed like a great way to put people in the seats. Even though she'd never seen a race, she entered one and finished third at Greenville-Pickens Speedway in a 1939 Modified Ford Coupe.

Her husband, the late Noah Smith, was a junkyard owner who didn't care for her racing as she barnstormed the country for tiny purses and a little appearance money.

She won 38 Modified victories and held her own against luminaries like Curtis Turner, Ralph Earnhardt and Buck Baker in Modifieds and in France's NASCAR Grand National circuit. She retired in 1956 and became the first female inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1999.

The chicken coop wasn't her only wreck, though.

Once in Hillsborough, N.C., Turner was teaching her how to slide a car through the turns on a dirt track, then apply the gas as she left the corners. She broke the track record in qualifying, but on her third circuit, the car went airborne and wiped out some small trees. They cut her out of the wreckage with a torch; she needed 48 stitches, and four pins were inserted in her left knee.

Her signature wreck, though, came in '47. She went to Daytona Beach in Noah's new Ford coupe to watch the beach races, but she wanted to race. So she raced the new car and, naturally, wrecked it. When Noah asked about the car, she said it broke down in Augusta, Ga.

Then he showed her the newspaper and the front-page photo of his crumpled coupe.

Oops.

EMAIL: tgilli52@gmail.com  TWITTER: EDITORatWORK

More entries from TARJ

• Angel in Black: Remembering Dale Earnhardt Sr.

(a book of great stories about the Intimidator)

• Then Junior Said to Jeff...

(the book of great NASCAR stories)

• My best day as a sports writer

• Jeff Gordon's milk toast to Dale Earnhardt

• Wayne Auton: A life in racing

EDITOR@WORK blog entries 

• You really DO need an editor

• Reminders for would-be novelists

• What I charge (it's a deal) and what I edit

• What I do when I'm editing

• Slogging through the Internet

• J-school: More eyes on your stories

• J-school: Go out and learn•

Entries from The Dog Blog

• Katie cried

• Growl and pull

• 12 years with my dog Lady

• ... said the spider to ...

• The Dog Diary (2014)

• YIP! YIP! The stereo-sound huskies

• What Lady and Michael Jackson had in common

More blog entries by Tom Gillispie

• Resume for a writer and editor

• An editor's views on powerful writing

• Advice for be and would-be novelists

• Links to TG's stories online

• Favorite quotes

• What I do when I'm editing

Anecdotes by Tom Gillispie

• Wipeout at Death Valley

• Days with rainbows

• A desperate writer working in the dark

• Yer outta there!

A laugh with Dick Beaty

We were at North Carolina Motor Speedway (Rockingham) in the early 1990s, and Winston Cup director Dick Beaty was laughing his head off.

There was a line of cars going through tech, and Beaty was looking at a car owned by a part-time driver; it could have been James Hylton or Delma Cowart or some other part-timer.

I asked Beaty why he was laughing, and he said that car had a Chevrolet engine, but the hood was Ford, and the back end of the car looked like an Oldsmobile. There was another part, maybe the roof, that was Pontiac.

"I don't know which template to put on it," he said, shaking his head.

I don't know if Beaty used a template for Ford or some other car make, but he passed the car. And it went out early in the race for "handling."
  

------------------------------

FIND MY BOOKS ONLINE

EMAIL: tgilli52@gmail.com   BLUESKY: PROFILE

More entries from TARJ

• Angel in Black: Remembering Dale Earnhardt Sr.

(a book of great stories about the Intimidator)

• Then Junior Said to Jeff...

(the book of great NASCAR stories)

• My best day as a sports writer

• Jeff Gordon's milk toast to Dale Earnhardt

• Wayne Auton: A life in racing

EDITOR@WORK blog entries 

• You really DO need an editor

• Reminders for would-be novelists

• What I do when I'm editing

• What I charge (it's a deal) and what I edit

• Slogging through the Internet

• J-school: More eyes on your stories

• J-school: Go out and learn

Entries from The Dog Blog

• Katie cried

• Growl and pull

• 13-plus years with my dog Lady

• ... said the spider to ...

• The Dog Diary (2014)

• OOH! OOH! The stereophonic huskies

• What Lady and Michael Jackson had in common

More blog entries by Tom Gillispie

• Resume for a writer and editor

• An editor's views on powerful writing

• Advice for be and would-be novelists

• Links to TG's stories online

• Favorite quotes

• What I do when I'm editing

Anecdotes by Tom Gillispie

• Wipeout at Death Valley

• Days with rainbows

• A desperate writer working in the dark

• Yer outta there!