Came across a nice segment of 4 video interviews totaling 45 minutes with 40-year Nashville Tennessean motorsports writer, Larry Woody - one of my favorite traveling writers when I was in the business. Good stuff about his travels with the late Joe Caldwell, afternoon motorsports writer for the Nashville Banner. A young fellow not much older than our Cody Dinsmore conducts the interviews:
Looks like some good viewing. Glad its in segments. As a kid, Woodhead was the beat writer for Nashville's fairgrounds speedway plus putting the local spin into whatever wire copy came for from the national races. When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I remember a Sunday morning article in the Tennessean where he messed up who set successive track records the night before. It was L.D. Ottinger and Harry Gant. Today, I can't remember who went 1st and then had their record broken moments later - I think Gant went 2nd. But I knew then Larry had it wrong. Haha. My mom suggested if I felt that strongly about it, I should write Larry. So I did. About a week later, she answered the phone, said "just a minute", shrugged her shoulders, and handed the phone to me. I said hello, and the voice on the other end said "Chase? This is Larry Woody ... from The Tennessean? I got your letter." I remember the blood draining from my face and breaking into a cold sweat - and my mother starting to snicker. But I made it through the call and restated my position that Larry got it wrong. He thanked me for reading and pointing out the error. Beyond that, it was a short call - though it seemed to go on forever.
In recent years, I've traded e-mails and a couple of calls with Larry. I've told him that story before - and its easier for me to laugh about it now than it was then.
That site looks like it features several interviews by David Lipscomb University students of Nashville area journalists. A couple of other names jumped off the page at me that have somewhat of a racing connection in addition to their Nashville roots.
Joe Biddle has covered golf, Vanderbilt & a myriad of other sports stories around Nashville for 30+ years. Before moving to Nashville, he was on the sports staff at the Daytona Beach Morning Journal. He wrote the local copy for Richard Petty's 7th Daytona 500 win in 1979, and I included his article in my blog post about RP's win.
In Biddle's interview, he skips over that part of his career and gets right into his Nashville sports reporting. He laughed when he told me he knew nothing about racing back then. He was just told by his editor to get to the track to cover Speedweeks that year.
The other person interviewed that caught my eye was John Jay Hooker (http://nashvillejournalism.com/2012/04/14/john-jay-hooker ). That dude has been about everything. A lawyer. An entrepreneur. A shyster (he roped many investors into a failed business venture called Minnie Pearl's Chicken). The owner of The Nashville Banner. And even the CEO of STP following Andy Granatelli. A couple of my entries featured JJH in victory lane with The King.
Chase, we've spoken in these forums previously about John J. Hooker's excursions into NASCAR sponsorship of #00 cars at Bristol and Nashville during election years! H00KER is what they looked like.
