It seems Mr. Obama was addressing a group revolving around “Planned Parenthood” and made the statement, although this is not verbatim, that anyone opposed to the goals of Planned Parenthood wished to return the U.S. to the 1950s. I saw several responses to that on the social website I belong too, many of those comments so politically inflammatory that I wouldn’t dare quote any of them. But the essence of one of those comments was the question “what’s so wrong about going back to the 50s”? Of course, from there the comments went on with a strong discourse concerning the values of the 1950s and the total lack of values in the world today.
Maybe it was that comment, or perhaps it’s the fun I’m having doing the Racing History Minute each day for the Forum here, many of which, took place in the 50s. Maybe it was the discussion a couple of weeks ago sparked by Dave Fulton when Annette Funicello passed away. What a loss that was for those of us who grew up in the 50s and made sure we were in front of the TV at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time for “The Mickey Mouse Club”. Then, we lose Jonathan Winters. How I remember him in so many things from the 50s and also from that movie in the early sixties, “It’s a Mad, Mad,Mad, Mad World”. I hope I got enough “mads” in there.
Maybe it is the fact that most of the television I watch these days consists of shows from the 50s and early 60s. “I Love Lucy”, “The Andy Griffith Show”, “Bewitched” “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, well you get the idea. As I sit here at my desk in The Lair, I am surrounded by pictures and models and diecasts from the 50s. I said once, not long ago, that perhaps we look back at the days of our youth in a different light when you get to be my age.
Wally Bell, who is with us here on Tuesday nights sometimes when he leaves “the straight life behind” had a post of the social media website and whether it was his comment or a response to a comment he made, I do not recall. I don’t recall exactly the words used, but someone had written that the past is never as good as we remember it and the present is not as bad as we imagine it to be. Maybe that is true, but after more than 48 hours of thinking back to those days of my youth in the 50s, I have to let my side of the story, not that much different from most of you listeners I’m sure, out into the light.
I was almost 6 years old when I attended my first stock car race on a half mile dirt track in Cayce, South Carolina, now known as The Historic Columbia Speedway. It was that night, although I didn’t know it then, which would begin my lifelong love affair with stock car racing. I’ve heard many of you here talk about the first race you attended, at whatever age, that made you a lifelong fan.
Throughout the 1950s,I was extremely fortunate to attend many races around South Carolina and North Carolina and I got to see the pioneers of the sport bang it around short tracks all over. Buck Baker, Tim Flock, Fonty Flock, Rex White, Bill Blair, Billy and Bobby Myers, Fireball Roberts……You want me to go on? Probably not because I would be here from quite some time naming all the guys I got to see race.
Fords, Chevrolets, Cadillacs, Buicks, Pontiacs, Studebakers, Desotos, Chryslers, Dodges, Plymouths, Nashs, Hudson Hornets, Henry Js, and others all raced in front of my eyes. Some folks have never heard of, much less seen, some of the cars I just named. I am always thrilled when I am able to tell a new fan about the FABULOUS Hudson Hornets. To watch those cars just “float” around a dirt track is an experience I don’t think has ever been matched in my eyes at least.
Quarter mile and half mile dirt tracks dotted the landscape in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina almost like the stars dot the sky on a clear night. Races were held on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays as a rule, but record books show that Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays were also race nights at some point.
Much has been written about being a kid in the 50s. You played outside until your parents turned on the porch light. You were welcomed in the home of any of your friends and they were welcomed in yours. Doors were never locked. You went to Sunday School and Church on Sunday morning, then played away the afternoon and got ready for church at night.
My group of kids back then built a number of “tracks” around the neighborhood where we raced bicycles. During the summer, we raced one track in the morning and another in the afternoon and then, we had a couple tracks on lightly traveled roads with street lights so we raced the bikes there at night.
About 1957, the movie “Thunder Road” hit the theaters and we then began to use the bikes to “run moonshine”. We split up between the “runners” and the
“revenuers” but in our group no one wanted to be the revenuer so the game didn’t last long and we were back to racing.
It was the spring race at Darlington, 1957, when I had my first super speedway asphalt track experience. Watching those convertibles come by on the parade laps was an experience I can still relive, feeling the ground shake as the field rumbled by my vantage point against the fence going into turn three. If the short tracks had never hooked me, I was surely hooked by the Darlington experience. Darlington is still my favorite race track of all time. I won’t mention the fact that it set the stage for all subsequent super speedways and advanced the future of NASCAR quite a bit. No I won’t mention that. I won’t. The hell I won’t. NASCAR, you inconsiderate idiots took MY Southern 500 from Darlington on Labor Day weekend where it belongs. Tradition means nothing to you now. Not like living in the Fifties when things like that did mean something to us, to you.
Sure, in the Fifties we lived with the fear of the nuclear attack from behind the Iron Curtain. I still remember the drills we had in school to get under our desks and tuck in. If I tried that today I would be stuck in that position for hours and that is not even acknowledging that I can’t fit under those desks. There were other things in the Fifties which, I’m sure, were much different than today, but seeing things then through my kid eyes, and seeing what kids have today with my adult eyes, I am thinking I had it so much better. My imagination invented tree houses, bicycle race tracks, and rafts to float in Mr. Frick’s pond. We had no cell phones, no computers, I-pads, etc. We had friends, we had the outdoors and we had racing. We had good racing.
So, was racing better then? I know, in my opinion it was. I think if you sit and listen to some of the pioneers of the sport talk about those days, you will see what I mean. It’s not only me. And I’m not looking back through rose-colored glasses. I have a keen memory of those days, in fact a much better memory of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, than I do of the more recent years.
Things in the 50s were, in my opinion, much more positive than today. I would need to consult the eternal optimist Wally Bell on that, but it seems to me that movies, television, music, and life in general, focused on what was good. The only real “drug” of prevalence was asprin and use of that increased substantially when Elvis showed up on the scene.
I hope you all enjoyed a little reminiscing here, not all necessarily concerning racing but most spawned by racing as my life has been since the 50s. I like the beauty of the memories from those days and the wonderful folks who filled my life as I hung on the fences of speedways watching those “heroes” battle it out around the track.
One of those television shows Dave Fulton and I talked about a couple weeks ago was “The Howdy Doody Show”. One of the characters in that show was a clown, Clarabell, who could not speak but had a box he wore of a belt that had two horns attached, one for “yes” and one for “no”. Clarabell would answer questions by the horns and would use gestures to communicate anything else he needed Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody to know. After 13 years, and 2,343 shows, “Howdy Doody” came to an end and the final show was an hour long “closing down of Doodyville”, the imaginative town where everything happened. The final surprise of and quiet voice “goodbye kids”. That was the end of the show, the end of an era, and almost the end of the innocence for my generation of the Fifties.
So, for tonight “goodbye kids” and may you always have the memories of the good things. After all, the bad things were never meant to be real.
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