Plymouth race cars and the big rumble

[Don Coatney]

Follow this link for some fun reading

http://www.inliners.org/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=58683&gonew=1#UNREAD

[randroid]

Don,

Got the message, 'Access denied'.

-Randy

[Niel Hoback]

Yikes!! me too!

[greg g]

gotta post the secret handshake....

[Plymouthy Adams]

Inlinners...them guys are two cylinders shy of an engine...lol

[Don Coatney]

Here is the story as posted on the innliners forum by member Ray Bell.

Stock car racing in the early 50's. I know the son of one of the Hudson team owners. He tells some wild old stories about when he was a kid and they were the 'bad guys' down from Chicago at the southern tracks.

Here's one of his good stories:

My first race was at age 11 days at the International Amphitheater in Chicago. Indoor AAA midget races in January 1948. But my parents rolled me up in a blanket and stuffed me under the seats with the discarded popcorn boxes so I couldn't see anything. I don't have an earliest recollection because my earliest races were all before memory starts and when memory does start, we were at races every weekend.

One of my earliest recollections was about 1952 or 1953. They were going to have a "New Car" stock car race, meaning showroom cars right out of the dealer. We got a new Hudson Hornet. Beautiful red with big white 22 number painted on the side. It was so new it needed to be broken in so my mother put me in the seat and my infant brother between us, and drove it over to the Mississippi River, about a 4 hour drive each way and it was the first time I ever crossed a big bridge and saw a river. I was scared. They put big pieces of paper over the numbers.

So came the big season ending race weekend and the hillbillies my dad had running the car got into a family fight. One faction owned the engine and one owned the car. We were the sponsors so we didn't actually own anything. Well our driver was in the losing faction of the family fight and we got to the track and found out our pretty good hillbilly driver (when he wasn't drunk) had been replaced with some other hillbilly in "our car". So my dad came back from the pits having demanded the company name be removed from the car but it wasn't and it was a big hassle. The cars came out on the track and were lining up and stopping on the main straight for the introductions.

At that point my mother grabbed me by the hand and charged down the steps, my little legs missing about half of them, being suspended in space and drug along. She started going up to the fence and yelling at the drivers in their cars that were lined up. She was waving a $100 bill (big money in those days) and yelling "$100 to wreck the 22 car." I remember she went up to a young Tom Bigelow (years later an Indy 500 driver) waving the money. He looked at her like she was from the moon and said, "Isn't the 22 car your car?" "She yelled back, "Not anymore, $100 to wreck it."

So anyway the big 100 lapper went off and nobody wrecked the car but the driver sucked and finished way back. So afterward off we went to the pits. This is where my recollection is a bit fuzzy but some woman smacked a guy up side the head with her purse and a big riot broke out. I'm pretty sure it was my mom who started it. Anyway, there were about 100 people, men and women alike all fighting and scuffling and I was about knee high to all of them and couldn't help but notice nobody was taking care of me and it seemed kind of dangerous with all these adults fighting all around me. So I decided to bail and ran a zig zag course through the fighting adults and bodies rolling around on the ground until I reached the perimeter of the riot. So I stood there in amazement for awhile watching this and more and more people were pouring down from the stands and joining in and now there were 200 or 300 people fighting all over the place.

So at that point I saw a kid about my age who had also been abandoned standing over to the side so I went over there and sucker punched him and he started crying. I was about 5 years old and was already a racer!

[Edward Roberts]

HAHA! I love it! Sucker punch... thanks for posting the story.