Tradition revived
Southern 500 receives joyful welcome back to Labor Day weekend,
Imagine the Masters leaving Augusta, Ga., the Kentucky Derby being run in November or the Green Bay Packers moving to Milwaukee. Sports blasphemy of the highest order.
Residents of tiny Darlington — population 6,236 — and NASCAR traditionalists from every corner experienced much the same slap in the face in 2003 when the Southern 500, stock car racing ’s oldest asphalt superspeedway race and a mainstay of Labor Day weekend, was moved from the date it had embraced since 1950.
For many, the Southern 500, a dynamic link to the sport’s rough and tough early years, almost died that day. The Labor Day weekend date went to Auto Club Speedway in California.
“I was incensed,” remembered Nina Huntley, a longtime worker and volunteer at Darlington Raceway. “It was obvious that NASCAR didn’t give a rip about the traditions we had here. What they were concerned about was spreading NASCAR across the country and getting more fans and money in. It was a political move to expand the fan base, but taking the Labor Day race was awful.”
A dozen years later, the race has come full circle. After existing in a sort of nomadic no man’s land on the schedule — with dates in November, on Mother’s Day weekend and in April — the Southern 500 is back at home. The race is scheduled for Sunday — Labor Day Sunday, back where, as people in this farming section of South Carolina will tell you, God meant it to be. ROUGH ROOTS Ray Branham’s father, W.D. Branham, was there at the beginning. Before the beginning, really.
A friend and business associate of Harold Brasington, Darlington Raceway’s founder, W.D. Branham owned a sawmill and lumber business about a half-mile from the track. After Brasington, a Darlington resident and sometimes racer who owned a construction business, visited Indianapolis Motor Speedway and decided the South also should have a large, paved racetrack, he called on Branham for assistance.
When it opened for the first Southern 500 in September 1950, Darlington Raceway had a fence, though a rudimentary one. Branham cut the pine posts that were placed around the track to support the horizontal fencing.
Although substantial, the posts were no match for stock cars running at high speeds. “Those heavy cars would hit those things like they weren’t there,” Ray Branham remembered. “Hit them wrong, and you’d go up and over and out of the track.”
The early Southern 500 years brought mayhem. Stock cars had not run at these speeds — more than 100 mph — over such a long distance. The speed advances that would be seen at giant Daytona International Speedway in Florida were still almost a decade away. Before the superspeedway construction boom of the 1960s, Darlington was the place for speed and daring. And not all of it was pretty. Driver Bobby Myers, a 33-yearold from Winston-Salem, N.C., was killed in a gruesome crash in the 1957 Southern 500.
Ray Branham attended that race with a friend. They were 9, and their group had arrived at the track early enough to get prime parking against the infield fence near Turn 3.
“On the 27th lap, Fonty Flock spun out and stopped in the track near the end of the backstretch,” Branham said. “His car was painted black, and some people thought that made it so it couldn’t be seen easily.”
Myers and Paul Goldsmith were rocketing along the backstretch, racing for the lead, when they approached Flock’s stalled car. Video shows Myers’ car running at full steam before slamming into Flock’s car.
“Paul Goldsmith was right on Myers’ bumper,” Branham said. “Goldsmith later said Bobby never saw the stalled car. He said he could see Myers looking at him in his rearview mirror. When Bobby hit the car, his car went cartwheeling. The engine was thrown out of it, and the top was ripped back like a sardine can. Then Goldsmith hit the car, too. It was arguably the worst wreck in the history of NASCAR.
“It happened right in front of us. It sounded like bombs going off. I can still see that car going end over end. It was just terrible.”
There would be other Darlington deaths over the years as stock car daredevils tested the limits of their courage and their equipment, but the competition went on.
Although a spring NASCAR race was added to Darlington’s calendar in 1960, the Southern 500 remained the “granddaddy of them all,” as its publicity claimed, and Darlington became a motor sports capital of sorts.
“Labor Day was an excellent date,” Branham said. “A national holiday. It worked out so well. When you mentioned Labor Day, everybody knew you were talking about Darlington.”
For most of the track’s first 30 years, the 500 was held on Labor Day Monday. Practice and qualifying were held the previous week, but the Sunday before the race was a day off. Drivers, many of whom stayed in the Darlington-Florence area, used Sunday to rest and/or party. Tales of wild times around motel swimming pools survive to this day.
In 1984, International Speedway Corp., which bought the track in 1982, moved the race date from Labor Day to the Sunday before the holiday, creating an automatic rain date if weather intervened. BIG CROWDS When Harold Brasington threw open the gates of Darlington Raceway for the first Southern 500, friends said, he hoped for a crowd of 10,000. Estimates vary, but consensus from many who were there is about twice that many fans crowded into Darlington to see the new spectacle.
When the last ticket was sold, Brasington told workers at the gates to simply admit fans who paid the $3 general admission charge. There was no record of their purchases, a reality that would cause tax issues later.
That was of little importance on such an amazing day, however, as a standing-room-only audience watched Johnny Mantz grind through 6 hours, 38 minutes of racing to win the first 500. Seventy-five cars — almost twice as many as in current fields — started the race, and to say the afternoon was chaotic is to understate it. The asphalt ate tires; some teams resorted to taking tires off passenger cars in the infield and putting them on the race cars. And overheating cars were forced to the pits.
“Nobody had any idea what to expect,” said Frank Willis, whose father, Gene Willis, helped Brasington build the track. “There were so many people that it took three hours to drive from downtown Darlington to the track (a distance of about 2 miles). Nobody anticipated how much traffic there was going to be.”
The NASCAR circus, still in its birthing throes, was in town. Over the succeeding years, area residents would come to know drivers and officials like family. Locals remember the late Fireball Roberts, a fan favorite, challenging Darlington hotshots to drag races on town thoroughfares. And, of course, winning.
Frank Willis, who was 8 when the track opened, later operated his father’s construction business. He became mayor of nearby Florence and now is Darlington County economic development director, a position from which it’s easy to see the benefits of the 500’s return to September.
“The general concern when they moved the race was that Darlington eventually wouldn’t have a race at all,” Willis said. “They were building tracks all over the Midwest, and there was some real anxiety.”
Now, Willis said, breathing is easier in the barbershops, hotel lobbies and bank boardrooms of Darlington and Florence.
“Bringing the 500 back is somewhat of a statement from NASCAR that Darlington is still one of the more venerable sites,” he said. “It has stood the test of time.
“It may not have the attendance you get in some of the big metro areas, but our attendance is about the same year after year, and that’s because it’s Darlington. For NASCAR to go back to Labor Day was a very positive statement that Darlington is going to be viable for a long time to come.” DIFFERENT TIME If NASCAR has been viewed for most of its history as a distinctly Southern sport, the 500 was ground zero for that sentiment.
Confederate flags still fly from fan vehicles in the track’s infield, even in an era in which NASCAR and many of the entities within motor sports have rejected the emblem of the South’s secession from the Union.
For many years, markers identifying the track with the Old South were virtually everywhere, from an avenue of Confederate flags greeting fans to the rebel flag prominently displayed on souvenir programs and track signage to a speedway employee dressed in a gray Confederate uniform celebrating with race winners in victory lane.
In 1958, that paradigm mixed with Hollywood’s version of the American cowboy as James Arness, star of the long-running television Western Gunsmoke, was a celebrity guest at the track.
Arness rode in the Southern 500 parade and got a very fast ride around the speedway with superstar Curtis Turner.
“Imagine Arness, who was very tall (6-7), squeezing into a 1958 Ford and squatting down on the floorboard,” Ray Branham said. “He was holding on to a bar. Cur- tis took him around that racetrack within 2 miles per hour of the track record.” HAPPY RETURN Harold Brasington died in 1996 at 86. His grandson, Harold Brasington III, and other family members will be guests of honor at the track when the race Brasington started returns to its original date on the calendar.
“It’s like getting a piece of your childhood back,” Brasington III said. “I can remember sitting on Cashua Street as a 10-year-old kid watching the floats in the parade go by. School was back in by then, and all the tobacco was out of the field and in the warehouses.
“When that parade came through, you knew something big was about to happen. That was part of the cycle of fall around here. It was the pinnacle of the year.
“It was a very nice nostalgic time that we’re glad to see back.”