Chapter 1 - The Earl of Martinsville Clay Earles

IN THE SPRING OF 1998, I VISITED WITH H. CLAY EARLES, THE FOUNDER AND owner of Martinsville Speedway and one of the men who was instrumental in the founding of NASCAR. Earles was a southern gentleman who had earned his wealth through his own vision and through that of NASCAR's founder, Big Bill France.

Earles was 92 years old when I visited him, and he was just as sharp as the day in 1946 when he began to build the NASCAR landmark out of the indigenous red clay of his beloved southland. I began to talk about what I was attempting to do in this book, to tell the history of NASCAR and how it has changed and grown---in the words of the people responsible and involved. In the middle of my explanation, he stopped me.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"St. Petersburg, Florida," I told him.

"No," he said. "Where are you really from?"

"Connecticut," I admitted sheepishly.

"You're a Yankee," he said.

"No," I told him. "I'm not a Yankee. I moved to Florida."

"Then," he said, "you're a carpetbagger!"

He laughed uproariously, then became serious. "I was in the navy during the war," he said. "I served most of my time at Franklin Field, about forty miles from Norfolk. They made me master at arms. I was in charge of all the work details, the upkeep of the place. When I was in the navy, I met a lot of boys from the North, from Connecticut and New Jersey, some of the nicest fellows."

H. Clay Earles, who passed away in 1999, was also one of the nicest fellows. He had been there when NASCAR was founded, a right-hand man of Bill France Sr., the founder and visionary who made NASCAR what it is. Earles was one of those men who loved racing so much that he built a track from scratch, not for money at first, but because he wanted to see men and machines race.

"I'm from Martinsville," said Earles. "I was born in L. A.-Lower Axton, that is. I was born on a farm there on August 11, 1913."

He owned three service stations in Martinsville, and he bought and sold real estate. When he saw something he could buy and make a few bucks on, he did it.

Earles first became interested in racing in 1946. There were a few tracks around, but they were nothing special, just areas where men cut out ovals in the dirt by driving around and around until they made a course. Nothing was organized. There was no sanctioning body. If two or three tracks were near each other, they might be running on the same night, so they didn't stay in business very long.

"I built this track, but it was before NASCAR," said Earles. "I just thought I could build up this track to where people would come. I felt I could make it interesting enough. I told myself it would be a nice hobby. And I figured I could make a few dollars with it, too. I bought thirty-five acres of land. It wasn't even a racetrack. I just shaped out the place. We'd draw two hundred or three hundred people. The prize money didn't amount to anything."

Earles' inspiration was Indianapolis, the granddaddy of all tracks. Cars had been racing at Indy since 1909. Soon after he built his track, he invited the Indy cars to race. He was going to run AAA-sanctioned races at that time, but then after Bill France began the sanctioning body called NASCAR, he changed his mind and hooked his star to NASCAR and not to AAA. Earles had sound logic for the switch.

He said, "I felt it would be the best for me and for the other tracks in this area, because if I ran AAA, the Indy cars had a long way to come in order to race here, and we didn't have highways then like we have today. With NASCAR, the drivers didn't have to come as far. Plus it was easier to get NASCAR drivers. Also, AAA races cost more. I only ran one AAA race, and it cost me several thousand dollars more than we had to pay NASCAR.

"Before my first race - I'll never forget - I got a call from Bill. I didn't know him. He had heard I had built this track, and he said he'd like to work with me.

"What can you do?" I asked.

"He said, I'll park cars for you.' So believe it or not, Bill France came up to Martinsville to park cars for me before the first race I had, on September 7, 1947. It's the only race I ever ran that I can remember the exact date: September 7, 1947. We had six thousand thirteen people who paid. That was a lot of people."

Bill France knew the drivers, had contact with the media, and knew how to promote races. He drove to Martinsville and helped Clay Earles get his track off the ground. In exchange, France asked Earles to help him with concessions during his races on Daytona Beach.

Earles erected ten of what were called knockdown stands up and down the beach. He got a soft drink company to make awnings with its logo to go over them. That year, the beach race made money.

France also asked Earles to help him run his sanctioning body. He agreed. Soon after France organized NASCAR down in Florida in December 1947, he told Earles he didn't have a single NASCAR track in Virginia.

"I told him I would help him with it, and it wasn't long before every track in Virginia was a NASCAR track. I held a lot of meetings with other track promoters, and I told them what we could do for them. I told them how silly it was for two tracks close to each other to hold races head to head. I said, 'We don't have enough cars.' I talked them into arranging the dates so they wouldn't run in competition and so they'd be helping one another out.

"I can't rightfully say what it was I liked about Bill France. I thought, 'We can work together and build this thing up, and it will be successful.' I'll tell you, I put a lot of work into building NASCAR, not just for me, but for the other track owners also."

Earles held the first meeting to get the promoters together in Richmond so one promoter wouldn't be taking all the drivers and putting the other promoters out of business. At that time in Virginia, a dozen or so tracks were running weekly races - most of them on fairgrounds. Earles got them together and told them, "You're running in competition with each other. We can arrange this thing and get the dates organized where you won't be bumping heads with one another."

Said Earles, "They liked what I said, and I got them into NASCAR. Most of them - the ones still in business - are in NASCAR.

"Right from the beginning Bill France controlled NASCAR. He was the one who came up with it. But Bill had a lot of help. He needed a lot of help. I became a regional director of NASCAR."

In 1948, Bill France came up with the idea to race only new cars, but it was impossible to run his Late Model series because most of the drivers didn't have enough money to buy new cars and get them ready to race.

"In 1948, France continued to allow Modifieds, and that year Red Byron won the first driving championship," Earles said. "Red won my first race right here. I can't tell you that much about him except that he was from down in Georgia. He lived in several places, and he came here and won our first race. We have a picture of him. His face is covered with a layer of dust an inch thick."

"Back then, these race drivers didn't have any money," said Earles. "Today, the drivers are worth millions of dollars. Back then, they didn't hardly have enough money to go from one town to another and buy a motel room."

Earles' policies were geared fairly toward the contestants. His policy was to pay them what he could afford. Sometimes racers who didn't finish well would come to his office and plead poverty, and he would hand them 50 or 100 dollars. Not all track promoters were as generous.

"Back then, fifty years ago, it was hard to make money. Bootlegging was no bad thing, just a way of making a few dollars. Even if you hauled legal whiskey in your car and you hauled it across state lines, that was illegal. You know how the law is. But you had to keep a car that would run good on the highway, and I'd say their highway cars were better than we had on the racetrack."

The bootleggers would take a Ford and put a Lincoln engine in it, or an Offenhauser engine. Those tricked-up cars would run faster in second gear than an average car would in high gear.

"The biggest majority of the drivers were bootleggers who hauled whiskey," said Earles. "I can't say I ever saw the whiskey on them - it was just hearsay - but the moonshiners had a pretty good reputation for being good drivers, and they were the ones who got into racing."

In 1949, the drivers, told they would have to run late-model cars, borrowed money to pay for the new cars. In other cases, a driver would go to a friend or acquaintance who had money, buy a car, and agree to split the winnings. They didn't have to do much to the cars. At the beginning, the race cars didn't even have roll bars.

"I can remember Lee Petty raced back then, and he didn't have much money, but enough to build a car, and he got a lot of help from promoters," said Earles. "We got some pretty good publicity out of him. If there was a driver you wanted in the race, you'd call him up and promise him a couple hundred to enter. And whatever I promised, that's what I gave him.

"There was Lee, Curtis Turner, Joe Weatherly, the Flocks. They drew fans to the track. They had good names, and it didn't take long to build up the names because there weren't that many of them. Today, you have thousands of drivers. Back then, you had maybe a hundred. Fireball Roberts had a good name, and he helped racing a lot. People came to watch him."

In 1949, Bill France scheduled eight sanctioned late model races. The sixth race was held at Martinsville. Scheduling the race was no problem because there was little demand for dates. From day one, France gave Earles permission to pick any two dates and he picked two dates (the fourth Sunday of April and September), and he's been running them for more than fifty years.

"In the beginning, it didn't make any difference at all that it was a NASCAR race," said Earles. "It didn't mean a thing. NASCAR had got a lot of publicity for starting this sanctioning body, but that didn't draw fans to the races. Bill France wasn't known very well at all. For a long while, we didn't make any money even though tickets that first year were two or three dollars, which was a lot of money back then, and for the first race we had we had six thousand thirteen paid, though we had more people than that watch the race. That first race we weren't organized that well. We didn't have ticket booths, just people out front collecting money. We didn't have any fences, and there were people who snuck in. But I wouldn't go up to someone and say, 'I know you came in, but you didn't pay.'

"Now that first race we had six thousand thirteen as my initial paid attendance, but everyone left here looking like Red Byron---they were covered with dust all over them. Ladies had come here that day from church with their Sunday best on, and they stood out there on the loose dirt where I was intending to build some stands - I only had about three hundred seats built. I had more planned. But everyone wanted me to have a race, so I went ahead with it, and we drew six thousand thirteen people."

His next race drew about half that, a handful over 3,000 fans, and it stayed that way from 1947 through 1955. To stay in business, Earles knew he had to do something to attract more fans, especially female fans.

Between the spring race and the fall race of 1955, Clay Earles made a decision that would change racing. He decided to pave his track.

"I always put a lot of thought into everything I do. That's one fault a lot of us have, that we don't do enough thinking. Don't you think so? I called up Bill France and I told him, 'Bill, you know we haven't been drawing any people here. I'm going to pave the track.'

"I can hear him right now. He said, 'Don't you think you'll ruin it?' So help me. At the time, there wasn't any such thing as a paved track. I said, 'I'll tell you this, Bill. If I don't pave it, I'm ruined, so I'm going to pave it.'

"So I paved it, and honest to God, the first race I held after I paved it I drew twice the attendance of the first race! I had over twelve thousand people come. That tells you something. People didn't want to come and get covered with dust. And a lot of tracks that weren't paved went out of business. And from that day until this, our attendance has improved every year.

"If I hadn't paved my track when I did, Daytona would have been the longest dirt track in the world."

Added Earles, "When Bill France talked to me about building the Daytona International Speedway, he offered me a fifty percent interest, but honest to God, I could see down the road how much it was going to cost, moving all that dirt, and I just decided if I invested a big piece of money in it, it would still be a small percentage of the total cost. We were going to start out spending two hundred thousand dollars, but I could see he was going to have to spend a lot more. I was afraid we were going to have to invest in it too fast too make it worthwhile for me. I could envision losing my money, so I didn't take it. I had my doubts whether Bill'd be able to borrow that money or get investors to go in with him.

"But Bill had a vision, and he was able to get the money he needed for the track. And by then NASCAR was getting support from the car manufacturers.

"As an owner I wasn't close to the drivers. I tried to stay out of that part of it. If you're promoting a track, you don't want to own a part of a race car, because the first thing some of the drivers could say is, 'He fixed it.' But I did have some dealings with Curtis Turner, who was from Roanoke here in Virginia. Curtis and Bruton Smith built the Charlotte Motor Speedway in the early 1960s.

"I thought a lot of Curtis. He was a man who made a little money over the years. I hate to say this, but Curtis didn't know how to handle his money. You'd hate to invest money with him. I wouldn't want to be partners with him. He'd have a few dollars this year, and next year he'd be broke. A few times I loaned Curtis money. Sometimes he had a hard time paying me back. But he finally paid me every nickel he ever owed me.

"Stock car racing didn't really begin to grow up until the 1970s. People liked the sport, and it kept growing and growing and growing. There was a demand for more seats, and we had to build more seats. Now we have over sixty thousand seats. I just finished six thousand six hundred sixty seven more of them at turns three and four. Soon we're going to build another fifteen thousand to twenty thousand seats between turns one and two. But as we go along, they cost more and more. These seats cost me almost twice what the seats before them cost, because there is so much more steel in them. The seats go into the ground twenty feet and they go up eighty feet, so it's close to a hundred feet of steel. That's money.

"Of course, a ticket today (1997) costs fifty dollars. When you put a lot of money into something, naturally in order to get a good return on your money, you're going to have to charge more. I don't like the idea of going up on tickets, and that's something that's going to hurt some people. At some tracks, the tickets are a hundred dollars or more. Well, the average working man has a wife and a teenage child or two, and he can't afford to pay that kind of money. They drive a hundred miles to the race, buy a hotel room, and buy those tickets. That weekend will cost between five hundred and seven hundred dollars. The average working man can't afford that, so you have to keep some seats that are affordable, or partially affordable. I'm afraid that's going to hurt racing. And another thing, people keep talking about the big tracks, the big tracks. I hate to say anything that's not becoming, but if you are watching a race at a big track, two miles and a half, and you're in turn one and something happens in turn three, can you see it? There's a big wreck and you'd like to know how it was and what happened, but the only way you're going to see it is to watch it on TV later that night. If you take a track like this one that's just over a half a mile, you see all the action. On a big track you hear about it, but you don't see it. And you're paying close to twice as much for a ticket.

"We were here when the big tracks were built, and we'll still be here after the big tracks are gone. I may not be here, but this here track will be."