Miracle: Bobby Allison and the Saga of the Alabama Gang

By Peter Golenbock

For the first time, Miracle presents the full story of NASCAR legend Bobby Allison and the Alabama Gang--written with the corporation of the Allisons.

While you were sitting in the stands or watching at home on TV, did you ever ask yourself what's really going on behind the scenes? Take a ride on the seat next to auto-racing legend Bobby Allison and relive the dramatic saga of the Alabama Gang in this unique look at NASCAR from the inside.

Bobby Allison, who ranks fourth in wins in NASCAR history, began his Grand National/Winston Cup career in 1966. After winning eighty-five races, he retired in 1988 when an accident at Pocono Raceway nearly killed him. He was severely brain injured, and it took him a full fifteen years to recover. After the accident, more tragedy struck. In 1992 his younger son, Clifford, died in a crash at the age of twenty-seven. A year later, his other son, Davey, died in a helicopter accident, and in 1994 he lost his close friend and protégé Neil Bonnet in a fatal crash. Then Bobby and his wife, Judy, separated and divorced. Through it all Bobby Allison persevered.

Today Bobby's mind is as sharp, detailed, and analytical as anyone's in sports. Bobby remembers so much, in such great detail, the stories he tells leap off the page. It's all there--the feuds, the infighting, the victories, the accusations of cheating, and worse.

Incredibly, Bobby, the poster boy for hard work, honesty, and integrity, holds nothing back, even when it reflects poorly on him. "It happened, and there's nothing I can do about that," is what he says. The result is raw racing history.

Along with the Earnhardts, the Jarretts, and the Pettys, the Allisons are racing family royalty, and Miracle, a family saga of determination, loyalty, and love, is filled with some of the greatest racing stories of all time. If you ever wanted to read a book that puts you in the garage, in the pits, and in the boardrooms, and at the same time tugs at your heartstrings--this is the book for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781429904827

Peter Golenbock

Peter Golenbock, who also grew up in Stamford, is one of the nation’s best-known sports authors. He has written ten New York Times bestsellers, including The Bronx Zoo (with Sparky Lyle), Number 1 (with Billy Martin), Balls (with Graig Nettles), George: The Poor Little Rich Man Who Built the Yankee Empire, and House of Nails (with Lenny Dykstra). He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

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The Photograph

Bobby Allison, who kept his memories locked inside him, carried one photograph in his wallet. This tells the whole story, Bobby says. The picture was taken in the spring of 1992 while his sons were sitting together at dinner. Clifford is holding up two fingers to make a devil sign in back of Davey’s head.

There’s Davey doing what he’s supposed to do, smiling for the camera, Bobby says. And there’s his little brother, giving him a set of horns and loving it, and Davey doesn’t know.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. At one time, Bobby Allison, racing champion of 1983 and winner of eighty-five Winston Cup stock car races, was the toast of all of stock car racing. Then he almost died in a horrific crash. After that, the tragedy that followed him and his wife, Judy, is almost unimaginable. And yet, despite all the heartbreak, Bobby’s deep faith and his inner strength have made him an inspiration for all Americans.

People have compared Bobby Allison to the biblical figure Job, who is the poster boy for suffering and trouble.

Bobby himself says he is no Job.

Job was an entirely different kind of man, he says. Only because, unlike Job, Bobby refuses to forgive those who he feels have wronged him.

Bobby’s priest, Father Dale Grubba, suggests Bobby had it tougher. Job never had a head injury, with all the frustration, the confusion, the self-doubt to come with it. God left Job his clarity, so that he could reason through his trials.

Bobby’s story and that of his brothers, Eddie and Donnie, his sons, Clifford and Davey, and his friends, Neil Bonnett and Dale Earnhardt, may be less catastrophic than that of Job, who was tested time and time again by God, only to keep the faith. Like Job, Bobby and Judy had to suffer indescribable loss and pain. Miracle is a tribute to their faith and courage.

CHAPTER 2

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Pop and Kitty

Daddy could fix anything, and he passed that on to us.

—Eddie Allison

You’ll be surprised to learn Bobby Allison’s dad was not a Southerner. Rather, he was a Yankee from Pearl River, New York, a town a stone’s throw from the northern border of New Jersey. Bobby’s mom came from Park Ridge, New Jersey, on the other side of that border. They were both devout Catholics, and they met and fell in love.

Edmund J. Pop Allison rode motorcycles as a teen, but his love affair with his Harley ended after he ran into the back of a car, flew over the top of it, and was injured badly.

He then turned his attention to cars. A master mechanic who could fix anything, Pop Allison opened a car repair shop in Pearl River.

In 1935 he went to help a friend who had a garage on Staten Island fix a car. While working on it, he was almost killed by carbon monoxide poisoning. His doctor told him he needed to live where he could get fresh air. His parents and brother had moved to Miami and highly recommended it, and so shortly thereafter Pop Allison and his wife, Kitty, moved to South Florida.

Pop and Kitty Allison faced tragedy early when their first baby died in childbirth. After a daughter, Claire, was born, Patsy came next, and then came a son, Eddie, born on September 19, 1936. He was soon followed by Bobby, born December 3, 1937, and Donnie, born September 7, 1939. More children would follow: After Tommy Mrs. Allison suffered the loss of three children in a row. Stanley lived four days. The cause of death was a mystery. Then came Mary Catherine, who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and only lived nine months. The next sister, Margaret Mary lived to be sixteen She, too, had cystic fibrosis.

We thought she would make it, said Eddie. There’s no telling how much money Daddy spent on medicines to keep her alive. Even when she died, you never heard him complain. He was a fantastic man. I didn’t have any trouble burying him, but I sure do have trouble talking about him, because he was so great. And he doesn’t hold a candle to the woman he married.

Jeannie, Aggie, and Cindy followed, and adding to the din of the Allison home were foster children.

My mom and dad took in children from Catholic Charities, a boy here, a girl there, said Bobby. They would try to give them a little bit of a home life. Those children had to do their chores like we did. They had to go to church and say grace before meals. I would say over the years there were ten or twelve. I haven’t seen any of them in a long, long time.

Every Sunday afternoon two large tables were set for dinner. For many years the two-story house would be filled with the laughter and horseplay of children.

The family always ate meals together, and every meal started with grace, said Bobby. Dad worked a lot at night. He built and repaired gas stations, and in his business he would do the repairs at night so the place could be open during the day. If my dad worked all night Saturday night, he’d come home Sunday morning and bathe and put his suit and tie on—he always wore a tie to church—load us up in the car, and we would all go to Mass. Then he would come home and go to bed.

When Pop Allison moved to Florida, he started a company that supplied service station and garage equipment. As part of the construction he installed gas pumps and tanks.

My dad was a healthy, six-foot, 190-pound, very strong man physically, said Bobby. He worked very hard.

The work included the laying of concrete floors.

He was a master at concrete finishing, Bobby said. He could lay a large slab of concrete and finish it without a flaw on the top surface. His concrete jobs were supersmooth and superstraight, and he was always very proud of that.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and war was declared, Pop Allison wasn’t drafted because he had so many dependents. But he did not shirk his duty. He went to work for the navy at its base at Opa-Locka, a town near Miami. To take advantage of his expertise, the navy placed him in charge of the fuel systems of the Black Widow fighter planes. Before he arrived, the planes would regularly crash after takeoff. When he got there, he determined there was a problem with the purity of the fuel, so his first order was for his men to go down into the gas tanks and thoroughly flush them out. Problem solved.

He also devised a new fueling system. It took three sailors on the wing to hold the nozzle, because the hose acted like a whip when the fuel was shut off. It took the strength of those three men to keep it from knocking them off the wing. He solved that problem, too.

When the war ended, Pop Allison resumed his civilian work installing gas pumps and tanks. One of his jobs was to install the first service station lift to pick up a car on the island of Key West, Florida. The Boca Chica Bridge had yet to be built, and he had to ferry the equipment there.

In 1948 he helped build and equip a local Firestone store, and as part payment, he received one of those newfangled television sets.

We were the only family on the street with a TV, said Eddie Allison, and when the TV broke, Daddy didn’t call a repairman. He fixed it himself. Daddy could fix anything, and he passed that on to us. I, myself—there is nothing I can’t do. I could have been a rocket scientist if I had wanted to. A rocket scientist is just a man. You do what you want to do.

After the war ended Pop Allison took his young boys to work with him. Though Bobby was a small child—he didn’t grow tall until he was nineteen—early on, when he worked for his dad, he became proficient at digging holes.

One of the really special people my dad had working for him a long time was an old colored fellow by the name of Sam Hepburn, said Bobby. Sam was nearly as tall as my dad, and he really knew how to dig. He made sure every shovelful he picked up had a good amount of dirt. And he never had to go far with it. He figured out how to move the most dirt with the least amount of work and effort. He showed me how to do that, so I became really good at digging small holes for my dad, even though I was small myself.

Above all, Pop Allison set an example for his children. He believed in spare the rod, spoil the child. Eddie and Bobby at times feared him but always respected and even revered him.

My dad always set a very good example, said Bobby. "I never heard my dad say a cussword—never. As I was getting older, I was still a little bitty guy, but I would work with the colored laborers who he hired from a street corner in downtown Miami. Sam Hepburn would govern their work production. They would jump on the truck and work hard, digging a ditch or a lift hole, and the colored laborers used a lot of bad language. Those guys didn’t have any language rules.

"One day I was digging a ditch, and I was practicing some bad words, damn and hell, not really bad stuff. I was digging this damn ditch and throwing a damn shovel of dirt over. My dad walked up behind me, and I thought, Oh no, I’m going to get murdered. Because I was a little bitty guy, and my dad was a big and strong man, and when he’d lose his temper, he would swing. Instead of a spanking, it would be a beating. If you did something wrong, you would get hurt.

"I’m not sure I had ever done anything as wrong as this up to this point. And I had already gotten hurt. He put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘Come here with me.’

"We went behind a big pile of dirt where a dump truck had left it. I was really concerned.

"He said, ‘Let me tell you something: There’s a proper word for what you’re trying to say. Why let the whole world know how stupid you are by using that kind of language?’

"And it impressed me to such a degree. I thought, Here’s the biggest, strongest, and best man I’ve ever known, and he’s telling me why should I let the world know how stupid I am? It really helped me. I’ve always appreciated that, and I’ve told that story to youngsters along the way."

If Bobby worked hard for his dad, his brother Eddie worked harder. Eddie began going to his dad’s jobs when he was as young as five years old.

Eddie was very, very industrious and very dedicated to our dad, said Bobby. "He worked a lot of nights with Dad even when he was still in high school. He would work late into the night and occasionally all night long. Eddie picked up on mechanical things quickly and got interested in the mechanics of automobiles even before I did.

Eddie was always wanting to take the lawn mower apart. My interest was the outboard motor. Dad had an outboard motor and a little boat, and I would drag that motor down to the canal, which was a block and a half to the Miami River from our house. It was a 3.3 Evinrude, little, but really heavy, and it was a lot of work to drag it to the river, but I would do it. I made a deal with a guy in the neighborhood for a dump of a little boat, a real piece of junk, but it floated, and I would put that motor on that boat, and I would go up or down the river to fish or to look around, while Eddie was over helping dad.

Daddy didn’t believe in doing anything but right, said Eddie. "It’s our forte. Why did we work the way we did? Because of our daddy. And then my mother made sure we stayed straight. She beat our butts if we didn’t.

"We were taught how to live the way people are supposed to live. That’s what made us what we are. We could whup the world because we knew how to live in the world. As we were doing it, we didn’t think we were doing such a great thing, but when you get to be our age and you look back…

They raised us as perfect as a man and a woman could raise a family, he said.

After the war, Pop Allison rented property where he kept his service station and garage equipment. He decided that as long as he had the space, he should start a business in which he bought junked cars and sold car parts.

He built it into a major operation, said Eddie.

My dad always wanted a junkyard, said Bobby. It should be called a used auto parts facility, not a junkyard. He really felt that was a great business. He had a great interest in cars and the mechanics of cars. That facility was something he always had as a special dream. It was a way to allow him to get away from the hard labor.

The city of Miami was a terrific place for the Allison kids to grow up. Miami was a tropical playland. The weather was ideal, and in the mid-1950s it was safe from crime.

When the boys were growing up, no one locked his doors. The Allison kids didn’t even have a key to the house. Eddie would walk down the streets of Miami with a cigar box under his arm, selling chances to raise money for his school. I never worried that somebody was going to touch it, he says.

When the temperature and humidity rose, the boys were never far from the water. There was a canal a couple of blocks from their house, and the boys had the little dingy to mess with. Eddie, Bobby, Donnie, Tommy, and their friends would head out onto Biscayne Bay to fish or just enjoy themselves.

The brothers Allison were tough kids who were always up for a challenge, no matter how daunting.

One time Eddie, Bobby, Donnie, and Tommy decided they would ride their bikes to a spot where they were sure to catch the largest bass: the forty-Mile bend on the Tamiami trail. All four brothers got on their bikes, and they tied a rope to six-year-old Tommy to make sure he kept up. It wasn’t long before their dad got wind of what they were doing. Dad went out and retrieved Eddie and Bobby. A friend in another truck went and got Donnie and Tommy.

Not a lot of words were spoken, said Eddie, who added, You have no idea how much fun our life was. And we did it all with nothing.

Their home was located at the corner of Northwest Fifteenth Street and Thirtieth Avenue in the northwestern section of the city of Miami, a stone’s throw from the Miami airport. The Pan American Airlines office was three blocks away. The property had a large field with palmetto trees scattered every ten yards. The boys used it as a football field.

Across from the Pan Am offices was an electricity plant that supplied the power to the neighborhood. It was privately owned by a man named Ware, the inventor of aluminum storm windows. Ware put the wires underground, so when hurricanes hit, no one lost power. The plant had three cooling pools for the generators, and the boys would fish there for bass.

It had fish you couldn’t believe, said Eddie.

The boys lived within a couple miles of the West Flagler Kennel Club, a dog track. They loved to go watch the grayhounds when they ran schooling races, practice races during which there was no betting.

When Eddie was ten, eleven, and twelve, he was a batboy for the Miami Sun Sox, a minor league affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. After Brooklyn completed its training at Vero Beach, the Dodgers would travel south to Bobby Maduro Stadium in Miami to play their spring training games. They brought their own batboys, but they hired the visiting batboys from among the locals. Eddie retrieved bats for the visiting players from 1949 through 1951. On April 12, 1951, Life magazine published a picture with a caption that read, Leo Durocher and his son. But it wasn’t Durocher’s son. It was Eddie Allison.

I knew it was me, said Eddie. It was a black-and-white picture, and I didn’t have a uniform on, but I was wearing cleats, and my cleats had yellow shoelaces, so in the black-and-white picture they really stood out. Eddie’s mom had the picture on her walls for years.

The visiting player Eddie remembers most fondly was Stan the Man Musial, the star first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals.

It was 1950, and I had worked all summer for my dad, and I made two dollars, said Eddie. "The Cardinals played three games, and before they left, Stan gave me five dollars.

"The next year, when the Cardinals came back, I was in the tunnel going from the home clubhouse with a double armload of towels and wash rags to put in the locker of the visiting team. Stan came bopping down that tunnel from the other direction, and he grabbed me and said, ‘Hi, kid.’ We shook hands, and he had one of those wind-up hand buzzers, and he shocked me, and he laughed, and then he gave me another five dollars. Stan Musial was a fantastic human being.

I had a fantastic life growing up, said Eddie.

Pop Allison made a decent living, but there were so many kids to feed and clothe there wasn’t much money for frills.

There were eight or nine kids to raise, said Eddie. "It was such a neat life for people who didn’t have any money. We had no money. Absolutely no money. We had enough clothes to wear, enough food to eat. Back then you wore shorts and no shirt and you didn’t have shoes. Your feet were tougher than shoe leather. You could walk on the asphalt without wincing when it was ninety-five degrees out.

Right above the Hialeah racetrack was a dairy farm, where Mom and Dad drove to get the fresh milk. My mother was a real shopper. She knew how to grocery shop. We ate everything on our plate. Even today, I love leftovers. Bobby can’t stand them. But that’s different personalities. I could eat food until it’s gone.

Pop Allison and his wife, moreover, were determined that no matter what the cost, their children would all receive a Catholic school education. The boys went to elementary school at the First Avenue and Second Street Primer. By the time Eddie reached the eleventh grade, the archdiocese had closed all the existing Catholic schools in Miami and opened two brand-new ones, Notre Dame for girls, and Archbishop Curley for boys.

When Eddie graduated from Archbishop Curley High School in June 1954, he became the first person in the history of the school to get a diploma. He was in the first graduating class, and he was the first student whose last name began with the letter A.

I was the very first Curley graduate, alphabetically and sizewise, he said. I was the shortest.

Around this time Pop Allison became very sick, and he had to stop working. He had worked so hard that he was knocked for a loop, said Eddie.

He had begun developing stomach and digestive problems, said Bobby. "He continued to work until he wore himself down physically to the point that he just nearly collapsed one day. A doctor friend operated on him and took his gall bladder out and repaired a hernia in the stomach. It took him quite a while to recover from that.

"When Dad got sick, Eddie really got after his basic business, which was the service station work. Eddie and I both did the junkyard stuff. Early on, Eddie did quite a bit more than I did. He was really into the service station end, did the repair work, went out and fixed pumps and lifts that needed it.

For quite a while Eddie was my dad’s right-hand man. Then both of us did the junkyard part.

Said Eddie, I begged my daddy. I said, ‘You get the work, and I’ll do it.’ He was too sick. He just couldn’t do it anymore.

One reason Eddie and Bobby were determined to keep the junkyard going, even though their daddy was sick, was because of their passion, stock car racing. The parts business was the best way they could get what they needed to build their race cars.

’Cause we didn’t have any money, said Eddie.

CHAPTER 3

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Bobby: Exiled to Wisconsin

At one point he told himself, I’m done. This is it. I’m going under right here.

—Bobby Allison

B obbywas only one year behind Eddie at Archbishop Curley High School. Though he weighed only 103 pounds, Bobby drove either an old Chevy or rode on a Harley-Davidson 74 to school. He was so light he needed to have someone ride on the back of the Harley with him so that when he stopped at a red light he could hold up the bike. Bobby like Eddie and Donnie, had jobs after school. We figured out at an early age how to buy things, said Eddie.

In addition to riding a motorcycle, at age fifteen Bobby also learned how to fly an airplane. Bobby had a friend, Tommy Chalk, whose uncle owned an airline.

When I was twelve, I took my first plane ride, said Bobby. "Walter Lang, who my father built a gas station for, had a friend, Zack Mosley who wrote the Smilin’ Jack comic strip, and Mosley took me for a ride in his Piper Cub. I thought it was the neatest thing I ever did. He let me hold the stick while we were en route. I think about it now and really smile.

"Tommy Chalk was a year older than I, a buddy of mine from the neighborhood. He went to public school. His mother and dad were divorced, and he lived with his mother. His father owned an airport in Adel, Georgia, which was a long way from Miami. His uncle owned Chalk Airlines, which flew flying boats to the Bahamas from the Miami Causeway. Tommy had a pilot’s license, so Tommy and I would earn a few bucks on the weekend and go and rent a single-engine Piper Cub, and we’d leave from Tamiami Airport or South Dixie Airport down U.S. 1, and we’d go flying.

I was going to take flying lessons under Tommy’s observation, but when I went for my physical, I found out I was color-blind. It didn’t bother my racing, but I stepped away from flying.

But not forever.

When Bobby Allison was 17 years old, he began racing in the hobby class at Hialeah, a third-of-a-mile track with long straightaways and narrow corners.

Bobby was racing the old Chevy he drove to school. Brother Eddie also was involved in racing, working for an engine builder by the name of Harold Wilcox. Eddie watched Bobby twice turn over his Chevy.

The car had no roll bars in it. It scared me to death, he says. But the car had such a strong door post that it didn’t cave in, and Bobby wasn’t hurt.

It didn’t take but a couple weeks for Bobby to eliminate his mistakes and pace the field. Eddie saw that Bobby had rare control when it came to driving, whether it was a motorcycle or a race car.

Instantly, we saw he was going to win races, said Eddie.

In my senior year of high school, they started an amateur division at Hialeah Raceway, said Bobby. By then I had become a big racing fan. At first I hitched rides to get to the racetrack. At age fourteen in Florida you could get a restricted driver’s license. You could drive a motorcycle, but you couldn’t drive a car at night. So I bought a little motorcycle, and I would take it to the races at Hialeah or to the Medley Speedway, which was a little harder to get to. Medley was in the middle of nowhere, but it was a neat racetrack. It was a third of a mile, semibanked. It had a railroad metal guardrail around it, which was really hard on race cars.

The track was owned by John Fitzgibbons, and in the meantime he built a quarter-mile track in Hollywood, Florida, on the site of an old drive-in theater.

When I was seventeen, said Bobby, "I sold my motorcycle, and I bought a ’38 Chevy coupe from a friend, Fran Curci, who was a year behind me at Archbishop Curley High School. Fran was the star of the football team, and I was a football equipment manager, so I was around him some. The car was a ’38 standard, which had a solid front axle instead of the knee action that General Motors came out with at the time.

"The only requirements to race were that I had to put a seat belt in it, wear a helmet, and strap the driver’s door shut. I had to roll the window and the quarter window in the back down so I could put a belt around three or four times and fasten it.

"I’d take the car out to the track, and I’d take off the muffler and put it in a little cardboard box and take the headlights out. And I’d race.

"I had to promise my mom I’d improve my grades in school for her to sign the sheet to go out and compete. Mom signed the form, thinking it was for one week. Of course, I was thinking it was for a hundred years.

She signed the form, and I went out there.

Bobby won the third race he entered.

Said Bobby, "I didn’t do anything to the engine, but to make the car go around the corner better, I jacked the car up and put a coil spring between the frame on the right front and the U-bolts on the right front spring. It was something I was sure the car needed to turn the way I wanted it to.

"I randomly picked one that looked like it would be the right strength, length, and diameter. The thing actually held itself in place. And it worked.

In my mind it was like I had just won the Daytona 500, said Bobby.

Bobby also began racing at a track at West Palm Beach. The half-miler was laid out in a real crazy way. When you came off turn two, you had to press your foot to the floor as you headed straight for the fence in order to get the car off the corner. Very few drivers had the nerve to do that, but Bobby did, as did Donnie and an older racer by the name of Red Farmer. All three would go on to win a lot of races there as a result.

Bobby was winning races, and his mom was becoming concerned. No, she was petrified that her dream of his going to college and getting an education was being detoured by racing.

One evening she said to him, I didn’t give you permission to run all these races. I want you to go to college. I want you to get a better education, and I don’t want you messing with these greasy old cars and these greasy old people.

To stop him, she realized, she had to send him somewhere where he would get away from the influence of racing. Bobby had graduated from high school in June 1955, and she called her sister Patty and her sister’s husband, Jimmy Hallett, who lived in Wisconsin.

She said, Can Bobby come stay with you?

Of course, they said.

Hallett called Bobby and asked him to come stay with them.

Bobby said to Hallett, I don’t want to come for a vacation. I want to go to work.

He said, You come to Wisconsin and I’ll get you a job.

If Kitty Allison had thought things through, she never would have sent Bobby to Uncle Jimmy’s. Jimmy Hallett was the national sales manager for the Mercury Outboard Motor Company, which was owned and run by an intense, profane man by the name of Carl Kiekhaefer. In 1955 Kiekhaefer was the owner of the race car that Tim Flock drove to the Grand National stock car championship. You wouldn’t think a seventeen-year-old kid who went to work testing outboard engines would end up as a crew member of one of Kiekhaefer’s race cars, but that’s exactly what happened. It would take the better part of the year for Bobby to do it, but do it he did. With a will as strong as Bobby Allison’s, there was always a way.

The Kiekhaefer Mercury Outboard Engine organization had delivery trucks that carted engines all over the South, and three weeks after graduation Bobby was picked up at his house and driven to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in a panel truck. The Halletts—Aunt Patty and Uncle Jimmy and their three daughters, Carol, Laurie, and Barbie—lived two blocks from Lake Winnebago, one of Wisconsin’s small lakes. His first weekend there Bobby went to the beach, swam, boated, picnicked, and fished.

Jimmy, meanwhile, got Bobby a no-brains job testing outboard engines. The mechanics would build the engines, check them out, and put them on small runabouts, and it was the job of Bobby and three other teens to drive them around the rivers and lakes of Wisconsin for six hours a day. At the end of the day they were to fill out a report on the performance of the engine. For a summer of fresh air and easy money, Bobby was paid $39 a week.

To drive a boat around the lakes of Wisconsin and get a paycheck every Friday, that was the first home run I hit along the way, said Bobby. And it was decent money. I knew adults who weren’t making $39 a week. This was a great deal.

Bobby paid his aunt and uncle $5 a week room and board, so he had money in his pocket and weekends to do whatever he wanted. It didn’t take him long to discover that every town in Wisconsin had a stock car racetrack. If he wanted to, he could go see races seven nights a week, and sometimes on Saturday they raced in the afternoon and at night, and sometimes on Sunday they raced in the afternoon and at night.

Though Bobby didn’t do any racing himself in Wisconsin, there were weeks he went to nine races as a spectator.

The Wisconsin racer Bobby liked the most was Miles Mouse Milius. His nickname arose because he was so good at getting through traffic without damaging his car. Most of the tracks were quarter-mile dirt, except the Milwaukee Mile, which was paved. Despite the beating and banging on the dirt, Milius would finish intact, and often won. Bobby took note that Milius kept his car clean. The lettering was neat, and he was amused by the mouse decal on its side.

I became a fan of his immediately, said Bobby. He raced at Slinger, a dirt track, and Hale’s Corners and Cederberg, and at the fairgrounds track at Oshkosh. He won a lot, and I watched him, and I got to start forming an opinion about how to make it to the checkered flag.

Summer was over. Cold weather arrived in Wisconsin, and Bobby saw something he had never seen in his life: snow. He was still running the outboard engines six hours a day, but now he would put on long underwear and a ski jacket to wear under the life jackets. On his feet he wore tie-up ankle boots. The air temperature dropped to around twenty, and on days like this Bobby and the other boat testers would freeze as they drove to the north end of Lake Buttes des Mortes and headed for the local coffee shop.

In fact, said Bobby, we spent a lot of time in the coffee shop. We would leave our engines running at the dock of the coffee shop, and we’d go inside, where it was warm. Carl Kiekhaefer never caught on. Good thing. He’d have beheaded us right there.

On one particularly cold, windy day, Bobby and the other three boat testers put their boats on the cranes that moved them from the boathouse into the water. The other three took off together, heading upriver, when Bobby remembered he had to go back to the boathouse to get something he had forgotten.

When Bobby returned, he saw his boat was leaking, but that often happened before starting a trip. The wooden boat would swell after it sat in the water a while, and the leaking would stop. Bobby paid no mind to the water sloshing around the bottom of the boat, and after he pulled out the bailer plug, the boat emptied of water. He reinserted the plug, revved up the engine, and headed for open water in an attempt to catch up to the others.

Bobby was driving a boat with a Mercury thirty-horsepower engine, capable of going forty miles an hour. Back then it was one of the more powerful engines. He was considerably behind the others, and he pushed the throttle open in an attempt to catch up.

As he rode onto Lake Buttes des Mortes, the waves grew higher than he had anticipated. He hit a wave that bounced the boat out of the water into the air. He shrugged it off and continued. The next wave took the boat way up, and then the tail of the boat hit another wave, which tipped the boat nose down to a third wave, which, as Bobby described it, made it into a submarine.

The boat flipped up, and the motor headed downward. The nose of the boat was lifted out of the water, and Bobby figured he would hold on to it until help arrived, but the water on the nose of the boat froze, and like Rose’s ill-fated lover in the movie Titanic, Bobby’s hands slipped on the icy surface. He knew he had to swim to shore or die.

The swim was perhaps an eighth of a mile, but the air was freezing, and Bobby was weighted down by his laced-up boots and the heavy jacket. His life jacket allowed him to float with his nose at water level. But with the temperature plunging, staying in the water very long meant certain death.

Any way you look at it, said Bobby, I was in trouble.

Bobby began swimming, but the weight of the clothes made the task too difficult. At one point he told himself, I’m done. This is it. I’m going under right here. He accepted the inevitable and let himself sink to a watery grave.

Then his feet touched bottom. His head was above water.

I can make it, he told himself, and he exerted more effort until he was able to swim, wade, and walk to shore. He headed for the nearest house, and as he climbed up out of the lake onto a lawn, a dog began barking at him.

A woman emerged from the house, and when she saw Bobby, she told him, Go to that door right there. Bobby went to her laundry room, where she poured a large tub of hot water. Bobby took off his wet, freezing clothes and got into the tub. He was suffering from hypothermia and had turned blue. After he got into the tub, at first he couldn’t feel the heat. Then it began to burn, and she told him, That’s good.

After he had sat in the tub awhile, the woman gave him dry clothes, and he got into bed. When she called an ambulance, she was informed that the roads were too slick for service.

Bobby gave her the telephone number of the boathouse, and two employees of the Mercury Outboard Engines company drove out and got him. They then drove him to Oshkosh Hospital.

Bobby recovered fully except at times he would feel cold, and his body would spasm for several seconds. The vicious chills went away after about six months.

Carl Kiekhaefer, the company owner, gave Bobby two days off. He spent the two days recuperating at his aunt and uncle’s house. In the meantime, the boat testers were gearing up to move their operation to their winter proving grounds in Siesta Key, Florida, at the southern edge of Sarasota. The four adults in charge of the testing operation lived in one cottage. The four teens, including Bobby, lived in another. At the tip of the peninsula was a boathouse. The operation was identical to the one in Wisconsin.

Bobby by then had turned eighteen, and one weekend he returned home to Miami to buy a new car with his earnings. He and his father went to the Chevy dealership, and he bought a ’56 Chevy Bel Air hardtop.

This was a hot deal for me, said Bobby. He drove the car back to Sarasota and parked it by the cottage he was staying in.

Carl Kiekhaefer, who was in the habit of roaming around his various facilities unannounced, came walking into the boathouse where Bobby was getting ready to run an engine for the day

Who owns that Chevrolet up there in the complex? asked Kiekhaefer.

Bobby said, I do. He was proud of his car, and he had a big smile on his face when he said it.

I hate Chevrolets, said the dictatorial, unpredictable Kiekhaefer, whose race teams drove Chryslers. Get it off my property.

Said Bobby years later, He made me park the car outside the gate of the facility and walk in. A couple hundred feet, no big deal, but here was this great big open area where you could have parked a hundred semis, and he wouldn’t let me park my Chevy in there because he hated Chevrolets.

Bobby stayed in Florida all winter running the engines. In April, as winter was leaving Wisconsin, it was time to pack up and move the operation north again.

About then Kiekhaefer returned to Sarasota.

You, he said to Bobby, drive my Mercedes to my race car shop in Charlotte, and the truck will come by and pick you up there.

Bobby had wanted to drive his Chevy back to Wisconsin, and this was Kiekhaefer’s twisted way of denying him that pleasure. Kiekhaefer thought by doing this Bobby would have to leave the Chevy in Sarasota, but Bobby got one of the other teens, a friend of his by the name of Marlon Felker, to drive it up to Wisconsin for him. Kiekhaefer’s vindictiveness would later propel Bobby into Grand National racing.

Bobby drove Kiekhaefer’s 190 SL Mercedes from Sarasota to Charlotte. When he arrived, he was introduced to Ray Fox, who was the crew chief for Kiekhaefer’s Grand National cars. In 1955 Kiekhaefer had run a car driven by Tim Flock, and Flock had easily won the Grand National driving championship. Kiekhaefer, who might have served as a prototype for New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, was a tyrant who had a lot of money and wasn’t afraid to spend it in pursuit of victory and after Flock was so successful in 1955, he decided that if one top driver was good, five top drivers would be better, so he hired five of the best drivers NASCAR had to offer to race his fleet of Chryslers in 1956.

When Bobby walked into the large car-building facility and met Fox, he was probably five foot four, weighed perhaps 120 pounds. Bobby could see several Chrysler 300s and several Dodge D500s. He noticed several mechanics were inside, but also saw that little work was getting done. Most of them were sitting on the workbenches in small groups talking to each other. Bobby was surprised that no one seemed to be working.

Bobby said to Fox, I brought Carl Kiekhaefer’s Mercedes from Sarasota, and the truck is going to pick me up tomorrow to take me to Wisconsin.

Fox looked at him wearily and said, Boy, I am really in trouble. Are you a mechanic?

Bobby said, Yeah, I’m a good mechanic. Why?

Kiekhaefer drafted all of these guys out of different parts of his companies, Fox told him, and none of them want to be here, and I can’t get any work done. Will you work until your guys get here to pick you up?

Bobby, who was no stranger to work, immediately agreed. Fox said, We made up a work sheet how to prepare the car for the race. I’ve selected which bits and pieces to put where to prepare it for the next event. Here is the sheet for the car over there. As you work on it, this sheet will tell you what to do.

None of the steps on the list was unfamiliar to Bobby, but he was surprised at the added details he hadn’t considered before. He said to himself, I can do this, and as he went from job to job, he worked on the Chrysler 300 with efficiency and skill. A couple of hours later he walked over to Ray Fox and said to him, I’m done. What else do you want me to do?

When Fox quizzed him to make sure he had done things right, Bobby assured him he didn’t make any mistakes.

The sheet tells you what to do, said Bobby

Fox said, Oh man, what a help you are. Here, do another one. He gave Bobby a sheet for another car. This time Fox offered Bobby the use of his personal toolbox as a token of his appreciation.

Bobby worked, all alone, until ten that night. Before he headed to the hotel, Fox said, I really appreciate what you’re doing. I’ll see you in the morning.

When he returned the next morning, Carl Kiekhaefer was waiting for him. The trucks had arrived, and Bobby was expecting to ride to Wisconsin when Ray Fox came over and said, I told Carl Kiekhaefer I need to keep you here.

It was Bobby’s mother’s worst nightmare, and a dream come true for Bobby, who told Fox, That would be great.

Bobby stayed another two months. One of his assignments was working on the car of driver Herb Thomas, who in a Chevrolet had been one of Tim Flock’s closest rivals in 1955. The next year Thomas was driving a Chrysler for Kiekhaefer, who gave his drivers the best deal in the history of NASCAR. Not only did they get to keep the entire purse, but they got a salary as well. When Kiekhaefer made Thomas an offer, the gentlemanly tobacco farmer couldn’t refuse.

Working on Thomas’s race car also meant Bobby got to go to the races. In those days the schedule consisted of more than fifty races, many of them held during the week. Over the next two months, Bobby went to a dozen races.

Humpy Wheeler, who would go on to become the president of the Charlotte Motor Speedway, knew Bobby when he was working at the Kiekhaefer shop sweeping floors and working on the cars.

Wheeler, who was still in high school, worked for Bob Oseeky a drag racer.

We all came up together, Cale [Yarborough] and Richard Petty and Bobby Allison, said Wheeler. We were all the same age, and we were doing various things in racing. I saw Bobby around the track, because I was going to races, too, and working. We all would do anything in those days to get to the track.

In 1956 the Kiekhaefer race team was the class of Grand National circuit, winning sixteen races in a row between mid-March and early June. If Herb Thomas didn’t win, then Buck Baker or Speedy Thompson won. Baker would go on to win the racing title in 1956.

Allison also went to a few United States Auto Club races. Norm Nelson and Tony Bettenhausen Sr. drove for Kiekhaefer on that midwestern circuit, with equal success.

For two months I never saw any but a Kiekahefer car win a race, said Bobby.

Another of Bobby’s duties was to drive the truck carrying one of the Kiekhaefer race cars to the next race. The Syracuse race was held on May 30, 1956, Memorial Day and the order Kiekhaefer gave Bobby and his partner and the drivers of the other truck was to act independently. If the other truck had a flat or engine trouble, keep going.

Bobby and his driving partner, Willard Stubby, left Charlotte for Syracuse with Buck Baker’s race car inside the Ford van he was driving. These vans, the first ever to haul race cars, had major brake problems. When the power brakes malfunctioned and the driver was going downhill, suddenly the driver would be without brakes. The driver had to push the brake pedal, let it up a little, push it in, let it up, until finally the power brakes would kick