When I was a kid (5-12) my father and uncle were involved in stock car racing. Their home track was O’Hare stadium. I found this corny movie about the history of the track. I knew Gene Marmor and spent some time learning how race cars were built by handing tools and picking up parts.
They raced at O’Hare, Meadowbrook, Rockford, Illiana, Soldiers Field and Milwaukee.
Fred Lorenzen was my hero. Fast Freddie won the Daytona 500 in 1965. I was a 9 year old kid watching from the infield. Cheering our hometown hero. In my white dungarees and a wife beater dago tee. They didn’t call them wife beaters back then but all the Italians in the ‘hood were proud to call them dago tees.
This film mentions a USAC driver named Whitey Gerken. He was Gene Marmor’s teammate. He was like my uncle. We built his first race cars in our garage in the backyard. This is back in the day when they truly started with a “stock†car. Since I was small I did all the under the dash work. Removing all the stock wiring and instruments and hooking up racing gauges and wiring. They would hand me an asbestos blanket, a tube of gasket adhesive and a pair of blunt scissors (just kidding Frank). They were actually my grandmother’s pinking shears. I would have to cut the blanket and glue it to the firewall. I am suprised I didn’t end up with lung disease from that. Whitey Gerken was killed in a racing accident in 1973 as was another driver at Illiana.
In the winter we heated the garage with an oil burner stolen from an orange grove near my grandparents farm in Temple Terrace, Florida. These oil burners would be lit in the winter to protect the oranges from frost.
The picture down below was an old studebacker driven by a guy nicknamed shorty. As a 10 or 11 year old kid I fit the seat perfectly. As a joke my father had me jump in the car in the pits after a race and steal poor Shorty’s race car. I drove it out on the 1/4 paved banked oval and made my very own victory lap.