Bygone Days

Originally appeared in:
FasTrack racing weekly
June 29, 1995

Looking back, it seems the world in which I grew up, in rural Pennsylvania, was "pre" most everything. There were no drugs, although beer drinking was right of passage. There was no Pill, so there was very little premarital sex (or a lot of worrying about the possible consequences!). There was no television, at least no stations within range of our home, so we didn't have a set until about the mid-1950s.

As a boy, I remember sitting under a big shade tree in the summertime and reading the same comic books, over and over again. I remember weeding our garden and eating all the vegetables we grew. There was a one-room schoolhouse down the road about a mile. That was longest mile in the world on snowy winter mornings and one of the shortest ever walked on balmy spring afternoons.

Dad gave me a battery-powered radio for my 10th birthday, one of the old tube-type portables with a 45-volt “B” battery. I remember hiding it under my pillow late at night and listening to the Grand Ole Opry. It sounded like the wind howling through telephone wires on a frosty day. The sound it made was lonely and spoke of faraway places. Places I wanted to go to someday, but that is another story.

Perhaps the sharpest memories from those days are of summer Sunday evenings. My brother Bobby and I walked to the Bankes' house on the ‘back road’ and along with their family would pile into a 1950 Ford pickup for the ride to Susquehanna Speedway. It was a half-mile, banked, red clay oval that Bob Bankes helped to prepare for racing each week. The conversations on the way to the races were always high-spirited, punctuated with opinions of which race car was fastest, which driver boldest. There were no curfews in those long ago days and racing would not end until all the events were run. On nights with many yellow flags, we wouldn't head home before 1 or 2 AM, always under a starry sky it seemed. I’d give a great deal to relive one of those nights again.

Bob Bankes died some years ago. I went to see him a few months before he died, and we spent a pleasant family evening remembering racers and racetracks. I still visit and keep in touch with his wife Tess, the unofficial mayor of Pinetown, Pennsylvania, although letters from ‘back home’ seem distant and are filled more and more with obituary notices.

I left those parts to join the Navy and, except for brief visits, was gone for 20 years. When I moved back, a whole way of life was gone. Man had walked on the moon, Elvis had come and gone and the fields I walked as a boy were now housing developments. I had grown and changed and so had the world. Nothing seemed secure, nothing intact. I searched for some connection to my past, some fertile soil in which to grow my roots anew.

That need to rediscover a tradition was fulfilled at the racetrack. Racers still ran several times a week. If you broke or wrecked on Friday, repairs were made so that Saturday night's events could be run, and then racers readied their equipment for Sunday night. Sometimes events were scheduled for weekend afternoons as well as the same evening. Midweek events appeared on the schedule as well. Yet, race teams answered the Call. They were ready when the green flag flew, and most were competitive.

What wonderful values for a changing world! The racing community had held firm those traits I so admired in my youth. No one has a more concentrated dedication to goals than a racer, no one a deeper commitment to stated purpose. The heroes we all need are no further away that our local dirt tracks and never have been.

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