This story includes a couple of folks associated with racing, but it is not a racing story. It's really an "Isn't this a small world" story." For many, many years, before Sunoco,the Official gasoline of NASCAR was Unocal/Union 76/76 and before that it's predecessor was Pure, as in Pure Firebird racing gasoline. That NASCAR relationship with Pure Oil Co. and following its buyout with Unocal, began in the early 50s and was spearheaded by and supervised for many, many years by a man named Dick Dolan, who was Special Events Director for Pure Oil out of Palatine, IL and later in Schaumburg, IL for many years carrying the title of Manager of Automotive Events & Public Relations for Unocal 76. Pure Oil, along with Pepsi and a few others loaned Big Bill France the money to build Daytona.
It was Dick who started the famed Pure Oil / Darlington Record Club that every year inducted the fastest qualifier of each automobile make for that year's Southern 500 in to that exclusive club. I was fortunate to attend a number of those Darlington/Florence dinners hosted by Dick. They always featured good entertainment, such as having comedian Jerry Clower as a dinner partner.
For many years Dick was assisted at the track by the very capable Bill Joyner. Bill Kiser, who had once worked for Dick in Pure Oil PR, became for a number of years the PR honcho at Darlington and was replaced by the familiar Bill Brodrick, the "hat man". It was also Dick who began the famed Pit Crew Competition at Rockingham, in conjunction with one of the track's founders, Larry Hogan.
Pure Oil and then Unocal had a hospitality suite at every track that had suites. Rockingham's Larry Hogan's wife Jane always catered Dick's UNOCAL suites and she also started catering all of my Wrangler hospitality suites. I had met Dick at functions, including the Darlington Record Club dinners, but I hadn't had any interaction with him until the 1984 Daytona 500, my first working for Southland Corporation as Motorsports Coordinator, including the Kyle Petty primary sponsorship by 7-Eleven with affiliated sponsors Chief Auto Parts and CITGO Petroleum, both owned at the time by Southland.
On each quarter panel of Kyle's car, we'd put a very large CITGO triangle ID. Anyway, shortly after the first time Kyle went out on the track that February of 1984, I got paged to call the NASCAR suite. I called and was told Bill, Jr. wanted to see me right away. So off I went. When I got to the suite, Bill told me Dick Dolan of Unocal had something he wanted to tell me. If you ever met Dick, he was very blunt and not a people person. In fact, the late Bob Latford used to kid that every year Dick won the National Motorsports Press Association poll of the "least liked person in racing." Dick at that point was on a real vendetta against the Pettys. He was campaigning with Bill, Jr. to have the STP logo and the saying "Racer's Edge" taken off the front spoiler of Richard's car.
He really got upset when he saw the CITGO logo on Kyle's car. He told me, in Bill Jr.'s presence, it had to come off because Unocal had the exclusive right to all gasoline signage in NASCAR.
My answer was quick. I told him and Bill, Jr. we were advertising CITGO motor oil and if they didn't like it, maybe our legal staff could explain it. That was the end of the discussion and it was never raised again. I'm sure Shell used the same reasoning many years later. Anyhow, fast forward to the 90s and my time at Richmond International Raceway. If you ever wondered at any racetrack where the winner is whisked off to so fast after victory lane ceremonies at every track, it was to Dick Dolan's UNOCAL suite to meet his guests, another little perk for the years of service to NASCAR and Daytona.
During my ten years at Richmond, I felt like I knew Kenny Wallace and Rusty Wallace on a first name basis from having escorted them after every Richmond win first to Dick Dolan's suite, then to track owner, Paul Sawyer's suite. In fact, I started receiving very nice Christmas gifts each year from Dick & Bill Joyner for getting the race winner to their suite in such a timely fashion. All these many years later Dick was still using Jane Hogan of the Rockingham connection to cater and staff all his suites. It was at Richmond, escorting Rusty Wallace in Dick's suite, that I met Dick's two daughters, briefly, who were working for Jane as hostesses in the Unocal suite. Although living in Illinois, they both were going to college in Richmond, 800+ mile from home.
Change thoughts for a moment. In September 1948 my parents bought the first and only home they ever owned (they were married in 1938 and rented), a small Cape Cod bungalow in Richmond.Dad sent the downpayment for that house to my mom from poker winnings he amassed over nearly three years on the island of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during WWII. He never held a deck of cards again after returning to the states.One month after mom and dad moved in I was born in October 1948 and brought home from the hospital in dad's used 1938 Plymouth, with the big, tall stick shift coming out of the floorboard. Two years later dad bought his first new car, a 1950 Plymouth with the stick on the steering column. It was a 4-door, not the Johnny Mantz-winning Darlington 1950 Plymouth coupe, though.
Mom and dad lived in that little Richmond house together for 53 years (with 1950s/1960s updates like enclosing the side porch, adding aluminum siding and finishing two upstairs bedrooms and a second bath), until dad died in 2001, followed by mom in 2002. They were both age 85 and lived the exact same number of days. Mom was bornOctober 3, 1916, 1 year and two days after dad was born on October 1, 1915 and she died May 16, 2002, 1 year and two days after dad died.
Anyway, I was living in Charlotte when mom passed and my sister in Richmond took charge of emptying the house of 53 years of memories and getting it sold. When my copies of the sale papers arrived for me in Charlotte in the summer of 2002, I was absolutely startled and taken aback by the purchaser's name.
Dick Dolan's oldest daughter had bought my mom and dad's house and the only home I ever knew growing up! What do you suppose the odds would be of someone I had met once and was the daughter of someone I knew from racing years before and who had lived over 800 miles from Richmond in Illinois buying that house? It was eerie. Again, not a racing story and you may be very bored if you got this far, but I was thinking of Dick and his daughters today.
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"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
updated by @dave-fulton: 04/23/18 10:44:01AM
