Showing posts with label Jerry Punch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jerry Punch. Show all posts

Friday, April 20, 2018

CLIP: Memories of Hickory

(NOTE: This story ran in the Hickory (N.C.) Daily Record in July of 2013.)


Hickory track brings back memories
By Tom Gillispie

 Race fans have their favorite memories of Hickory Motor Speedway. So do drivers.
Often, their best memories are of family.
Two-time track champion Tommy Houston (1975-76) says he enjoyed watching or racing against the greats at Hickory, but his favorite memory?
“My fondest memories are from watching my sons race and my brothers race (at Hickory),” Houston said.
One of Houston’s sons, Marty, was the 1997 Late Model champion at Hickory, but that’s not his favorite Hickory memory. Marty, now the truck chief for Truck Series driver Ty Dillon, says that “I think it's when Dad won a Busch race (at Hickory). It was the day after my grandfather died, his dad, Clyde Houston.
“He came back to Hickory, and it was one of those races where he should never have been in it (for the win). There was a lot of heat that day, and the asphalt was slick, and he got spun out. Somehow he made up two laps. It was one of those days when something special happens; it’s neat when stuff like that happens.”
That dramatic win in the Mountain Dew 400 came on Saturday, April 18, 1992 and was one of Houston’s eight Busch wins at Hickory.
Robert Pressley, like the Houstons, is another former track great who thinks first of family.
“I won 25 or 30 races there, and they were all memorable,” said Pressley, a former standout in the NASCAR Busch (now Nationwide) Series and now the promoter at Kingsport (Tenn.) Speedway. “My proudest moment, though, was when (son) Coleman won the (Bobby) Isaac race (in 2009) at age 18. That was my fondest memory.”
Dennis Setzer, the track champion at Hickory in 1983 and ’93, says it’s hard to pick out one great memory of HMS. There are so many.
“We had a lot of good times at Hickory,” Setzer said. “I was so close to the people I drove with. I drove with my brother in law, Jerry Fox, for one.
“My fondest memory is of the friends I made and enjoyed racing with.”
He remembers people like Jerry Punch, Dale Jarrett and Andy Petree at Hickory.
“I remember Jerry racing a bit at Hickory,” Setzer said. “In fact, he started racing for my dad, Jerry Setzer. Jerry’s (Punch’s) mother and my mother worked together in a furniture factory in Conover.
“Dale was just ahead of me; we went to high school, Newton-Conover, together. Andy graduated, I think, in ’77. Dale was ’75 or ’76. I was ’78.”
Jarrett, who joined Jack Ingram as a 2014 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee, says that Punch was involved in his favorite Hickory memory. And it didn’t happen on track. Jarrett was driving a pickup, and Punch and Andy Petree, Jarrett’s crew chief, were holding a race engine on the back of the truck.
Jarrett says his favorite on-track memory at Hickory might be from his first win.
“I came sliding across the start-finish line,” he said. “Coming out of (turn) four, this guy got into me, got me sideways. It was my first win at Hickory. It was a short-track car that Dale Earnhardt had loaned me. Didn’t charge me a penny.”
Punch didn’t have the on-track success at Hickory that Jarrett, Setzer, Pressley and the others had, although he did race a bit there. Punch was an HMS track announcer for awhile, and since 1984 he has covered auto racing and other events for ESPN.
Punch says his favorite memory of HMS is the day he got to be grand marshal. He isn’t even sure what kind of race it was, adding, “It was the Sundrop 200 or 300. My family was there, and we got to ride (around the track) in a limousine.”
Ingram, a two-time track champion and a recent inductee into the NASCAR Hall of Fame, says his opponents were probably his favorite memory of Hickory.
“There wasn't many bad memories for me there,” Ingram has said. “Ned Jarrett had recently started promoting the track when I first went there. Then after '71, I never ran any more regularly, although I’d come back for the big races.
“It was a hotbed for big-name drivers, a lot of (future) hall-of-fame drivers. It seemed that Hickory was the place to be to make a name for yourself, and it helped me along.”
Ingram, who earned the nickname “Iron Man” Jack Ingram from running a bunch of races during the long 1973 Labor Day weekend, started racing at the Hickory dirt track in 1967.
“Ned paved the track halfway through the season,” Ingram said. “I had a chance to run every race in '68 and won the track championship. It was an unbelievable racetrack.”

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Monday, March 7, 2016

JERRY and BOBBY

(NOTE: I wrote this story in 2013 for the Hickory Daily Record.)



Punch remembers his day with his hero sadly
By Tom Gillispie

Jerry Punch and Bobby Isaac weren’t blood kin, but Jerry called him Uncle Bobby.

Bobby’s son, Randy, went to Newton-Conover High together, Punch explained.

Also, “(Isaac) was Junior Setzer’s uncle, and Junior took me to the races when I was a kid,” Punch added. “So we both called him Uncle Bobby.”

And Jerry was a huge fan of the 1970 NASCAR champion, who was a native of Catawba.

His biggest memory of Isaac was Bobby’s quick exit after a race.

“He’d be out of his (race) car and gone,” Punch said with a laugh. “He was the best escape artist before (Dale) Earnhardt came along.”

In August of 1977, Punch was a second-year medical student at Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, and Bobby was planning to run a Late Model Sportsman race at Hickory Motor Speedway.

“Bobby didn’t have help that weekend, and he didn’t have tools. He’d given his tools to some crew guys,” Punch said. “I went to Cattle Sale and bought a rusted toolbox with some rusted tools.”

Punch remembers that most drivers were racing Firestone tires, but Isaac was insistent on using Goodyears. It meant he’d lose a 10th of a second or more, but he didn’t care. He wanted Goodyears.

“(Driver) Butch Lindley pulled in; Mike Beam was his crew chief,” Punch said. “Mike said they had an extra set of Firestones that we could put on Isaac’s car.”

It was a humid day — no big surprise in August — and Isaac wasn’t feeling well. He wound up lying down in the back of the hauler.

The big problem for Punch is that Isaac had no help, and Jerry normally helped track owner Ned Jarrett in the tower. He’d handle the scoreboard, keep notes and do some announcing when Jarrett was away from the tower. It wasn’t a lot of money, but a second-year medical student needed all he could get.

He was torn, but Isaac told him to go up to the tower.

The race started, and Isaac was running fifth or sixth, Punch recalled.

“He was running with Butch (Lindley) and Harry (Gant), and on the backstretch, he got erratic, like he’d forgotten to turn,” Punch said. “He almost stopped on the frontstretch, and the caution came out.”

“I was sitting in the tower, watching the race, and they restarted in and ran five or six laps,” Punch said.

The race stopped again for Isaac.

“They carried him behind pit road, and restarted the race,” Punch said. “Then they called from the pits and said, ‘We need an ambulance.’ I told Ned, ‘I gotta go; I’m the only one with him,’ and he said to go.”

So Punch rode with Isaac in the ambulance to Catawba Memorial.

Isaac was pale lying on the stretcher.

“I didn’t think it was a heart attack, since both of his arms hurt,” Punch said. “But, in hindsight, it probably was a heart attack.”

They started an EKG, and Isaac told them that his arms hurt, and he was exhausted. Suddenly, he began shaking.

“I was sitting on him, doing CPR,” Punch said. “We worked 30 or 45 minutes and never got a (sinus) rhythm going again. He was my racing hero, and it was to be a special day. I was going to spend it with one of my heroes. He was gone, and I was the last one to see him, to talk to him.”

Finally, around 1:30 or 1:45 in the morning, Punch called Jarrett, and wife Martha answered. She got Ned on the phone.

“I said, ‘Ned, we just lost Bobby. We just lost Bobby Isaac,’” Punch said.

Jarrett made arrangements for the funeral, and Punch says “everyone was crying like a basket case” at Isaac’s wake.

“Cale (Yarborough) was a tough man, but he broke up,” Punch said. “It was a tough few days.”

Punch finished at Bowman Gray and became an emergency-room doctor in Daytona Beach, Fla. His racing background led him to doing radio broadcasts. He went on to doing auto racing and college football with ESPN, and he eventually quit trying to do medicine and TV at the same time.

He says that Isaac’s death haunted him for a while.

“I did a lot of soul searching after that,” he said. “I felt responsible for what had happened; I couldn’t save my hero. I didn’t know what to do.”

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EMAIL: tgilli52@gmail.com   BLUESKY: PROFILE

More entries from TARJ
(a book of great stories about the Intimidator)
(the book of great NASCAR stories)

EDITOR@WORK blog entries 

Entries from The Dog Blog

More blog entries by Tom Gillispie

Anecdotes by Tom Gillispie
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