It's name was "Twin-City Raceway" located on US 701 between Loris, SC and Tabor City, NC. As best I remember, TCR was probably a big 1/4 mile, with fairly high banking, and could have been any of countless southern dirt tracks of the '60's, except for one unique idea: heated grandstands and year-'round racing. Potentially brilliant......year 'round racing! Why had nobody ever thought of this before, or again for that matter? Probably, it's been thought of countless times before, heated facilities along with covered ones. Nobody short of Bruton Smith, and the Twin City owners had likely given such 'out of the box' ideas a second thought.

Time has everything to do with success, or its counterpart, and is often an ingredient that can't be overcome. Twin City Raceway's time was summer 1964, the year of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and liquid propane (LP gas). LP was just beginning to become a commodity, and was a God-send to tobacco road. By the mid '60's, every tobacco barn in the south was so rigged., and it was cheap. Global greed and political posturing had not yet been perfected to the threatening levels that both enjoy today. LP gas was dirt cheap.

Along the southern U.S. coastal-plain, hills are rare, and land is flat. I once longed for a local "soap box derby' event, but, among other problems, my community had no suitable hill. The grandstands at local racetracks did not have the option of employing some nearby hill-side. Nope, poles were usually driven the in ground and elevated grand-stands were constructed accordingly. The resulting structure had lots of dead space underneath.......and what if that whole shee-bang was enclosed in roofing tin, and LP-fired tobacco barn burners were placed underneath? Sure the produced heat would quickly escape into outer space, but on its way to warming the cosmos, it would first have to get by whoever was sitting on the plank, seat. Twin City Raceway officials were literally attempting to warm the great outdoors, but it did sort of work. And it did impress fans, and they did come to late season events.

As a matter of fact, TCR scheduled an extensive agenda of winter racing back in the day. Veteran driver, Ed Ray, of Old Dock, NC remembers "opening presents and stuff on Christmas day........and then goin' on to (and driving in) the races Twin City........." Yup, stock car racing on Christmas day, 1964 or 65, and Ed also recalled that a fair-sized crowd was on hand....thanks to heated grand-stands, no doubt, but also a window to a much different time than now. Dirt track racing once was a community staple, and racing on Sundays and even Christmas was not considered an oddity. It was not racing on holidays or even in the winter that hastened the death of Twin City, nope, for all of their unique thinking and novel promotional approaches, the Internal Revenue Service proved to be a bigger foe than mother nature. It was that old-time death and taxes thing.

The remains of the old retaining wall separating the heated grandstands from the race track.