Occoneechee Orange Speedway

[Note: In a departure from the usual style of post, what follows is a 2,000-word feature story on Saturday's fundraiser for the Occoneechee Orange Speedway.]

Long before Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.—heck, long before Darrell Waltrip, Cale Yarborough, and Dale Earnhardt Sr.—there were NASCAR drivers like Worth McMillion. Mr. McMillion began running modified stock cars in the 1940s, and by 1960 was racing in the Grand National Division. “I used to recruit my pit crew at the site of the race, right before the race,” Mr. McMillion, now eighty-two years old, explains. “It was a different time then.” He once let another driver borrow his car for a race. “The driver needed badly to earn some points, and his car was not in great shape. He won the championship that year.”

Among other distinctions, Mr. McMillion competed in the last race held at Hillsborough’s Occoneechee Speedway, in 1968. He was one of several drivers honored at Saturday’s car show in Hillsborough. The show is an annual fundraiser put on by the Historic Speedway Group, a nonprofit organization created in 2007 to preserve the speedway and raise awareness of its significance to the region. At one time or another, there were no fewer than twenty-seven race tracks in North Carolina—and that includes only those that hosted NASCAR events. The Occoneechee, a mile-long oval, is no doubt one of the most historic. It is one of only three tracks remaining from NASCAR’s inaugural season of 1949, and it is the only dirt track used that season that is still extant.

After the last NASCAR race at the Occoneechee forty years ago, the track was left to slowly decay and be reclaimed by the sycamore and the pine. But recently things have changed. In 2002 the Occoneechee was listed on the National Register of Historic Places; it was later purchased by the Classic American Homes Preservation Trust, and in 2003 the path of the former race track was turned into a walking trail. Then last year a group of twelve volunteers founded the Historic Speedway Group. “Our goal is to teach people the history of the Occoneechee Speedway, to let them know the treasure that is in their own backyard,” says Kaylin “Kat” McGee, one of the founding members of the group. I spoke with her at Saturday’s fundraising event, which was held in a large field behind an office park just a stone’s throw from the speedway track. The group had a successful year in 2007, restoring the old ticket office (which now houses a museum of the Occoneechee) and the ladies restroom, as well as regrading the dirt track. “By bringing attention to the history of the speedway, we hope to encourage people to support its restoration,” Ms. McGee said.

A secondary goal of the group is to prevent a proposed bypass around Hillsborough from being built. “All projected routes for the bypass take it right through this property,” Ms. McGee said. “If the bypass is built, we’ll lose the speedway.”

On Saturday morning I drove the ten miles from my home in Durham to one of the park-and-ride lots from which shuttle buses took visitors to the car show. The lot was in front of the Home Depot on NC 86, just south of the I-85 exit. Across the street was a shabby convenience store and an even shabbier produce stand at which I bought two pounds of purple scuppernong grapes. In the parking lot of the Home Depot I noticed a red Dodge Silverado with a vanity license plate from Virginia. On the left side of the plate was a color portrait of Robert E. Lee, under which were the words “The Virginia Gentleman 1807-1870.” Across the bottom of the plate was Lee’s name.

The shuttle was an old yellow school bus (the words “Durham Public Schools” had been painted over but were still visible). A temporary sign that said “Welcome to Fellowship Baptist Church, Durham, NC” was in one of the windows. The driver, a cheerful looking man around thirty, greeted passengers with a “Hey, buddy, how ya’ doin?” as they boarded the bus. Most of the passengers were men forty years old and older, and not surprisingly, there were numerous comments about how small the seats on school buses had become over the years. “I guess there was a lot less of me back then,” one man said merrily.

The bus lurched a half mile north on 86, turned right onto Elizabeth Brady Drive, and let us out at the park-and-ride pick-up and drop-off point. I began walking up Elizabeth Brady Drive to the car show. Along the drive were tents set up by the Marine Corps League, the Cub Scouts, and Angel Food Ministries. Four men from the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Kiwanis Club, when not sharing laughs, were furiously grilling dozens of hamburgers.

I came to a table full of memorabilia from the old Dukes of Hazzard television show. Entertaining the small crowd that had gathered in front of the table was a Boss Hogg impersonator, dressed in the character’s trademark white suit and white hat. I asked him his name. “My name is Thur—” He stopped himself abruptly. “My name is J. D. Hogg, Jefferson Davis Hogg,” he said, then reached into his jacket and pulled out a Georgia driver's "license" with the name J. D. Hogg and a photograph of him decked out as the Boss. His real name was Thurman Wood III. He was younger and taller than the real Boss Hogg, and a lot more genial. As he tugged on the lapels of his jacket, I spied a remote control replica of the General Lee, the orange 1969 Dodge Charger in which the Duke brothers took many a whooping and hollering joyride, heading in my direction. It nearly collided with my feet. Its controller somewhere out of sight, the toy car stopped, backed up, and careered across the tar-paved road.

Next to the table with the memorabilia was a large tent with a sign announcing Tom Sarmento, lead mechanic on the set of the Dukes of Hazzard from 1979 to 1985. I introduced myself to Mr. Sarmento, who had a bushy grey mustache and round wire-rimmed glasses. “We used 317 General Lees during the course of the show, and nearly a thousand patrol cars,” Mr. Sarmento, who lives in Charlotte, said. Today he operates the Hazzard County Stunt Team, making several appearances a year at events around the country. He was there with one of his stunt cars, a lookalike of the General Lee, with its matte orange exterior, the number 01 in black on the side, and the Rebel flag on the roof.

Nearly two hundred cars were on display at the show. Many were from the 1950s, such as the 1956 two-door, 210 Bel Air Chevrolet owned by Randy Cruthis. Mr. Cruthis is from Randleman, North Carolina—“Richard Petty country,” he said. “I live right across the road from his shop.” Mr. Cruthis drives his Bel Air to an area show nearly every weekend. “I’ve put 14,000 miles on it since it was redone. It’s a good, dependable car.”

Sitting in folding lawn chairs beside a 1965 Dodge Rambler were John Williams and Milton Petway. I pointed to the car and asked if they would call the color blue. “Yes, that’s blue,” Mr. Williams said. “Carolina blue!” Mr. Petway corrected. Mr. Williams is from Haw River, North Carolina. He bought the Rambler a few years ago from the nephew of the original owner. “The lady who first bought the car lived down the street from me. I had my eye on it from the very start. She died twelve years ago and her nephew inherited the car. He kept it in the garage; never used it. A couple of years ago I got my chance and bought it from him.” The car, which looked brand new, had 92,000 miles on it.

Some of the cars on display dated from before World War II. One beauty was a 1940 Packard owned by Bill Werner, who lives in Cary, North Carolina. He has owned the car for eight years. “I wanted something different,” he explained. “I didn’t want a Ford or Chevy—a lot of people have those. When I found this Packard, I knew it was what I wanted. I bought it from a guy who had salvaged it from a junkyard. He fixed it up and then sold it to me.” The exterior was original and was painted a beautiful two-tone red and off-white. It had a red padded running board and wire wheels instead of hubcaps. “That really makes it special,” Mr. Werner said of the wire wheels. The running gear is modern; the engine is from a 1985 Dodge police car. “I wanted a car I could drive. We call that a ‘driver.’ I love old cars and I wanted something I could cruise in. I’ve put 20,000 miles on this car since I fixed it up. That’s why you see nicks here and there. It isn’t perfect. But it isn’t supposed to be. It’s a car I can actually use.”

Mr. Werner made sure I knew he was here today not only to show his car. “I am mostly here to support the effort to preserve the old dirt race track. I don’t want to see it go.”

At one end of the field was a stage. The Castaways, a local cover band, played “Crazy,” “Shake Your Booty,” and “Big Bad Leroy Brown.” After the set, one of the organizers of the fundraiser asked for all the drivers who had raced on the Occoneechee track to come up on stage and be recognized. “If it hadn’t been for them, we wouldn’t have NASCAR today,” he said of the twenty-five or so men, nearly all now in their eighties, who squeezed together for a group photograph. One of the drivers was Marvin Panch, who raced at Occoneechee in 1963. He won seventeen races on the NASCAR circuit, his biggest victory coming in 1961, when he won the legendary Daytona 500. Mr. Panch first got into the racing world by building cars for other racers to drive. “When I was a young man in Oakland, California, a driver on the circuit won a race in Oakland with one of my cars,” Mr. Panch, who lives in Daytona, the site of his great victory, said. “He was supposed to race in it again the next week. But he never showed up. So I got in the car and raced instead.”

Worth McMillion also got his start by building cars for other drivers. Racing is in Mr. McMillion's family. His and his wife Gloria’s middle son is a race car driver himself, and their youngest son, Scott, manages the metal shaping department for Hendrick Motorsports, one of the biggest names in NASCAR today and whose Lowe’s team features Jimmie Johnson, the defending NASCAR champion. Scott will soon open his own metal shaping business in Mooresville, north of Charlotte. Sadly, their oldest son, Mac, was killed in a car accident at age sixteen. Mrs. McMillion has written a novel, Whirlwinds Whirl Around, about two siblings trying to cope with their grief after losing a brother at a young age.

Before I left the show, I climbed onto a flatbed trailer pulled by a John Deere tractor and went on a tour of the old dirt speedway. As we headed down a narrow path for the speedway, I saw a white-clad figure emerge from a green port-a-potty. "There's Boss Hogg," a woman on the trailer shouted.

The original track of the Occoneechee is now a walking trail, a dirt path around eight feet wide. What used to be the speedway’s infield is a forest of hardwoods and pines. The tour guide pointed to a road that ran from the track. “That’s where the drivers came down and entered the track,” he said. One straightaway ran parallel to the Eno River, whose banks were not more than twenty feet away. Near the end of the tour we came to the original grandstand, fifteen rows of concrete bleachers built into the side of a hill. The concrete was broken in several places; weeds and vines had forced their way through numerous cracks. Pine trees had sprung up and interrupted the view.

As I went to catch the shuttle bus back to my car, I again saw Kaylin McGee. I told her I had spoken to some of the drivers who had raced at the Occoneechee. “Bringing the drivers together who used to race at the track, that’s the best part of this,” she said. “That’s what brings me joy.”