REAL NASCAR

The premier of the reality show “The Madhouse” on the History Channel on Sunday, January 10 brought needed attention to one of the great auto racing venues in American history; Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  While the series highlights the current Saturday night show—and from personal experience it’s a great show—it is worth looking back at the history of this venerable facility and to the wonderful entertainment it has provided to denizens of the Piedmont Triad since 1947.

The 1/5: mile paved racetrack around the football field at Bowman Gray was originally built by New York promoter Lew Franco for weekly Friday night midget car races on Franco’s Dixie Circuit.  The first race was held on June 6, 1947, and the midget races drew solid crowds throughout the summer season.  Midget racing continued at Bowman Gray throughout 1948, but by the end of the season, Franco and the Dixie Circuit had pulled out leaving behind an unpaid paving bill.

NASCAR founder Big Bill France saw the vacancy at Bowman Gray as an opportunity for his growing empire of tracks and promotions in the Piedmont South.  In early 1949, he and former Spartanburg, South Carolina stock car racer—now NASCAR flagman—Alvin Hawkins signed a lease to hold weekly Wednesday night stock car races and accepted responsibility for the unpaid paving bill.  While France has received a lot of credit for putting stock car racing and NASCAR on the map, one of his greatest innovations as a promoter was starting weekly stock car races at Bowman Gray.  While many auto racing experts scoffed at the notion that stock car racing could support weekly shows, the success of Bowman Gray soon made local weekly stock car races an entertainment staple throughout the region.

Under Hawkins’s astute management, stock car races at Bowman Gray became an immediate local sensation.  France and Hawkins benefitted from having some of the greatest racers of the day compete in their early races including the “Mad” Flocks, Bob, Fonty, and Tim; Curtis Turner; and Red Byron.  The Bowman Gray races also produced local stars, particularly Billy and Bobby Myers.  By June, 1949, the promoters changed the weekly races to Saturday night, where they remain to this day.

Later in 1949, France and Hawkins made another important innovation: races for amateur drivers, christened as “sportsman” races.  For the August 16 race, the promoters advertised a pair of 25-lap races for non-professional drivers, in cars built in 1932 or later “that must not have a value of $600.”  The races attracted a record crowd of over 8000 fans and a field of thirty-seven local drivers.  As Humpy Wheeler once observed, if you have local drivers, “for every race car, at least thirty people were gonna come to the track to see it race.  Fifteen to see it be successful ‘cause they’re relatives and fifteen to see the guy get beat.”  Sportsman races soon spread along with weekly racing and produced a new farm system for the sport.  While many early stock car drivers had their first high-speed driving experience behind the wheel of a late 1930s Ford V-8 hauling liquor on a winding mountains road, after 1949, most of the top drivers—like David Pearson, Ned Jarrett, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, and Bobby Isaac—came out of the sportsman ranks. 

The thing that really packed the fans into Bowman Gray in the early 1950s and turned it into such a legendary venue, however, was the intense rivalry between former bootlegger, and current timberman, playboy, and NASCAR Grand National star Curtis “Pops” Turner of Christiansburg, Virginia, and local mechanics Billy and Bobby Myers.  The working-class Myers brothers—who owned their own race cars and worked on them themselves--regularly clashed with Turner—who always drove for someone else and was going to win, wreck, or blow up--on and off the track and any event that involved the three was bound to produce exciting racing and probably a fight (or fights) afterward. 

Perhaps the most famous incident occurred when Turner administered on of his legendary “pops” to Bobby Myers’s rear bumper and sent him flying into the infield where his car hit a wall taking him out of the race.  After the race Myers headed for Turner—in the time-honored manner of stock car driver fights—with tire iron in hand.  Turner, sitting on top of his Cadillac, saw Bobby coming, pointed a .38 pistol at him, and asked his potential assailant, “Bobby, what are you planning on doing with that?”  To which Myers responded, “Curtis, I’m just looking for a place to put it down.”

As you watch “The Madhouse” remember that, while much of what you see may be the product of reality show hype and crafty editing, at least a part of what you see grows out of a proud tradition going back to 1947.  Indeed, one of the neater features of “The Madhouse” is that two of the featured drivers are Burt and Jason Myers, the grandsons of Bowman Gray legend Billy Myers.

Come back next week for Part II and more Curtis Turner shenanigans at Bowman Gray next week.