At the brand new Talladega Superspeedway in '69, on the Saturday afternoon before the first Grand National race (which would become Winston Cup), NASCAR's Grand Touring cars staged a 200-mile event. Rush, driving a yellow Camaro, won by nearly a lap.
A few weeks later, Michigan Speedway opened. Again, NASCAR ran its Grand Touring cars on Saturday. Rush won by more than a lap.
In the summer of 1970, Dover signed its first NASCAR sanction. Once again, Rush streaked to victory on Saturday. Richard Petty won the race on Sunday.
Rush also won at South Boston, Virginia, that year. Then came a horrifying accident at Flemington, New Jersey, which led to the end of his career.
"It was a half-mile dirt track," Rush recalls. "After the first few laps, you couldn't see out the windshield for all the mud. I was coming wide-open, and Stan Styers spun in the middle of Turns 3 and 4. I didn't see him until I hit him, and I drove straight into him, head-on."
Rush lost 12 teeth and suffered a broken sternum and a broken jaw.
"They worked on me in the emergency room until about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning," Rush says. "Finally, they rolled me into a hospital room. I smoked back then, so I reached over and got a cigarette. I lit it and puffed, but nothing happened. I threw it away and got another one. Same thing happened, and then I realized my lip was cut all the way through and when I puffed, the air was going through my lip. I had to hold my lower lip together in order to puff the cigarette."
Today Rush, 70, and wife Patsy live in High Point, North Carolina. How did it all begin?
"Bob Welborn and I became friends in 1950. He was already racing, and helped me get started. Then Jim Paschal helped me get into the Late Model division."
Rush started racing in 1955 and won track championships at Bowman Gray Stadium and the Greensboro Fairgrounds. In 1964, he won the Modified championship at Bowman Gray.
"We were a wild bunch, sometimes about half human, especially at Daytona," Rush says. "In 1957, crew chief Paul McDuffie, Red Jones, myself, and two other guys, I can't remember their names, were down on the beach in this new Chevrolet station wagon. It belonged to Chevrolet.
"I was driving. We'd go down the beach at 70 or 80 mph and cut the steering wheel. On the hard sand the vehicle would spin around and around like it was on ice. Somebody said, "Let's try it at 100." I pegged the needle out of sight and cut the steering wheel. The station wagon didn't go 40 feet until it threw the right rear tire off. When that happened, here we go turning over and over. We ended up way out in the ocean. I was the only one who got hurt. It about knocked a hole in my head, and I nearly drown.
"Red Jones had a bottle of whiskey. He said the law is coming, and he stood on the roof of the car and threw the bottle as far out in the ocean as he could.
"They pulled me to shore as the police arrived. I looked back at the ocean, and in the moonlight you could see this bottle of whiskey bobbing up and down with the waves, following us ashore.
"The policeman asked if we'd been drinking. He was standing at the edge of the water. Somebody was trying to persuade him we hadn't had a drop. Then the whiskey bottle hit his boot."
Welborn heard about what happened and went to the hospital to check on Rush. The nurse told him he couldn't stay but a minute. "This man has a serious brain concussion," she said.
Rush said Welborn told the nurse, "Lady, he may have a head concussion, but he ain't got a brain."
Looking back on his career, Rush says there is one thing he would change if he had control over such matters. "I would have been born in 1971 instead of 1931. That way, I believe I would have something to show for my racing career. I won a lot of races that paid $200 or less for first place. Sixty percent of that would go to the team owner.
"Race drivers today make a lot of money," he says, "but I don't believe they have the fun we did."
