Adventures of The Legend Over the Years
by: Tim Leeming
This will be the first installment of memoirs of my years around stock car racing. Some of these installments will be tongue-in-cheek conversations about one thing or another, some will be funny, and some will just be examples of what can, and often did happen, back in the day when I lived in the infield of race tracks all around the circuit.
This first adventure takes place on March 3, 1963, when several of my friends and I talked the father of one of the friends into allowing us to take his immaculate 1956 Dodge 2-door hardtop with the hemi from Columbia, South Carolina, to a stock car race in Asheville, NC. It was, in fact, a race in what was then known as The Grand National series and we were going to watch Richard Petty race. Back in those days, it didn’t matter much who else may have been running, but if Richard was racing, we would do whatever it took to get to as many races as we could. Richard was not known as “The King” back then, but to our group of teenage boys, he was one step away from Sainthood. I had already been to the 1963 Daytona 500 with my uncle but my friends hadn’t been to a race since the October race in Charlotte in October, 1962, so they were primed to go.
Very early in the morning of March 3rd, we packed up six of us in that Dodge and headed out into the darkness. Interstate 26 was only a partially completed highway in those days so we were using two lane roads through most of the upstate of South Carolina and once into North Carolina we were in the mountains and, of course, playing visions of running moonshine around the twisty roads. I was the driver as I was the only one in the group at the time old enough to have a driver’s license.
