A Racing Drag

This year, NASCAR lost so much of its own past.

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Pee Wee Jones passed away this week at 80. He survived an era with slightly different safety measures. (Look at that helmet!)

You've probably never heard of Pee Wee Jones. And that's a shame. You would have loved him.

While America celebrated the holidays, the family of Phillip Sylvester Jones Jr. were busy calling friends and loved ones to inform them that Jones had passed on Christmas Eve at the age of 80.

When NASCAR was incorporated in 1949, Pee Wee was just 21 and itching for a place to race. He found that place in the league's original division—the Modifieds. He raced out of his hometown of Clemmons, North Carolina, on the outskirts of Winston-Salem, and made his name on perhaps the greatest short track in these United States, the legendary Bowman-Gray Stadium.

"Everybody wanted to race at Bowman-Gray," says Bobby Allison, a man who won two Winston Cup races on the quarter-mile oval. "And if you were going to win a race up there, you knew you were going to have to go through Pee Wee Jones to do it."

Jones worked at a local Chevrolet dealership during the week and towed his racecars to the track during the weekend. He won six track championships at Bowman-Gray, including a record five in a row. When the lights were off at B-G, he went racing at places like Caraway Speedway and South Boston, VA and kicked butt wherever he went.

Pee Wee Jones was the kind of man on whose shoulders NASCAR was built. Before the age of private jets and Park Avenue penthouses, everyone in the Cup garage resembled Jones. And now, while the sport's financial house of credit cards begins to collapse in on itself, race fans and even people within the sport are becoming more and more nostalgic for the good old days. And that means that saying goodbye to gearheads like Pee Wee is becoming increasingly harder to do.

They are guys like Ron Hornaday Senior, father of Truck Series ace Ron Jr., who passed away December 21. Like his son, Ron Senior was a west coast short track superstar. Unlike Ronnie, he never got a shot to come east and make big money, but Senior still did make seventeen Cup starts when the series came west to places such as Phoenix, Ontario, and Riverside.

This year we also lost Bullet Bob Reuther, who made it to Daytona Beach in '47 and won the first Nashville Speedway track championship ten years later. A licensed pilot, he flew his godson Bobby Hamilton to races and became a favorite in the Cup garage for his stories of Music City motor madness.

In May the oldest living NASCAR driver, Lloyd Moore, passed away only a couple of weeks shy of his 96th birthday. In '49 he came down from his home in Upstate New York to run the league's seventh ever Strictly Stock (now Cup) Series race, finishing sixth at the Heidelberg Raceway outside Pittsburgh. Fifteen races later he won at Funk's Speedway in Winchester, Indiana.

"Lloyd was a connection to the origins of NASCAR," Richard Petty recently said. "He'd come down and race in the Carolinas and beat and bang with Daddy (three-time NASCAR champ Lee Petty) and then he'd come stay at the house and sit around and tell racing stories all night long. For a kid like me, it was like being in heaven."

As Moore, Jones, and Reuther were slugging it out during those earliest NASCAR laps, they were having their pictures taken by two phenomenal photographers named T. Taylor Warren and Don Hunter. While their newspaper brethren were busy snapping shots of the obvious, T and Don were pointing their cameras in the opposite direction, capturing genuine emotion and images that hardly look real when you thumb through them today. In May I stood side-by-side with Warren on the roof of the press box at Rockingham, where he told story after story about The Rock and expressed his happiness that the old track was back in business after sitting in mothballs. I also made him re-tell the story of his picture that ultimately determined the outcome of the inaugural Daytona 500. Five months after our chat, T was gone.

Jim McKay, who once broadcast a race from Rockingham for ABC's Wide World of Sports, passed in June, as did local North Carolina broadcaster and Lowe's Motor Speedway public address announcer Bill Connell. That's Bill's voice you hear rattling off the play-by-play behind Burt Reynolds in Stroker Ace. The man who wrote the book that film was based on was Bill Neely, a great writer who described racing action in Playboy, Esquire, and, more importantly, Sports Illustrated.

There were so many others we lost this year in the racing community. Pioneers such as Hendrick Motorsport co-founder Jimmy Johnson, parents such as Kitty Allison, Hazel Parsons, and Gerald Kulwicki, and men and women who kept NASCAR running every weekend, from league technical director Steve Peterson to track officials Brienne Davis and Steve Lawson.

"I learned something that day. You think you're all important, and then you realize that when you're gone they'll just move on without you. This deal's bigger than any one person."

As the year dragged on and the list of those we lost became longer, I started telling the same story over and over. In 1996 Cup Series pace car driver and former racer Elmo Langley was bragging to me about how he had only missed one Cup race in nearly thirty years.

"My kid was getting married," he said through his bushy mustache. "We had the wedding on Saturday and on Sunday I turned on the TV to watch the race. Damn if they didn't go on and run it without me. I learned something that day. You think you're all important, and then you realize that when you're gone they'll just move on without you. This deal's bigger than any one person."

Five months later, Langley, who started his first Cup race in 1954, died of a heart attack while in Japan for a NASCAR exhibition race. Just as the Jones family can't watch a race without thinking of Pee Wee and Richard Petty still reminisces about Lloyd Moore, more than a decade later I can't go to a race without thinking of Elmo.

No matter how big our sport becomes, we can't forget those who got us here, especially these days.

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