ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702080004
SECTION: AUTO RACING PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
Clay Campbell's life is Martinsville Speedway.
Even more than his grandfather, H. Clay Earles, who built the place three years before Clay was born.
Clay Campbell's life is Martinsville Speedway because it was his life from the moment he was born. He happily made it his life from the time he could reason, and he intends to keep it his life as long as that may last, which could be a long time, since he is 37 years old.
By the same token, the story of Martinsville Speedway is the story of NASCAR. When Clay Campbell was born Feb.6, 1960, NASCAR racing was alive, well and already rolling through its first great growth spurt. And Martinsville Speedway had been along for the ride from the very beginning, as it continues to be.
In these days of unprecedented NASCAR growth, and in the track's 50th anniversary year, people talk about tiny Martinsville Speedway as if it already has one grandstand in the grave. They say it won't survive, that stock car racing has outgrown the short track in the small market.
But as long as Campbell has something to say about it - not to mention his granddaddy - Martinsville Speedway will continue to be a NASCAR track, and it will continue to play host to two Winston Cup races each year.
Campbell has no designs on buying other tracks and doesn't want to expand his role in the sport in any other way. He's even curtailing his own Late Model Sportsman racing habit, which never got beyond a part-time pursuit anyway.
He simply wants to continue to run Martinsville Speedway.
``I enjoy what I do here, and this is where I want to do it,'' Campbell says.
``I think Martinsville has kept up with the times,'' says NASCAR great Richard Petty. ``In fact, they were the ones who started a lot of `the times.' They were the first ones to have a full-time press guy. And they've always kept the place painted and cleaned up.''
Still, given the size of its market, the small track and the small starting field, logic might argue against keeping two Cup dates at Martinsville. But in the world of NASCAR, when logic washes against loyalty, loyalty usually scrubs logic.
And the loyalty between NASCAR and Martinsville runs to the very roots of the sport.
As Petty says, ``As long as it stays in the family, they'll be OK.'' |n n| Bill France, the founder of NASCAR, actually competed in the first NASCAR-sanctioned race at the track in 1948, the year after Martinsville opened. France became a part-owner of Martinsville around 1950. And while he and Earles often locked horns, they always did business together.
And what a tough business it was.
When Earles promoted his first race at Martinsville Speedway in 1947, it looked to him like a million people had shown up. But then the race started, and everyone became covered in red-clay dust. Earles was humiliated.
NASCAR's first strictly stock car races were held in 1949, and Martinsville had one of the eight events that year.
From 1950 on, it was two stock car races a year at Martinsville: one in the spring, the other in the fall. The crowds were small for the first few years - 6,700, 7,500, 6,200 - and Earles lost money. But not much. He was close enough to making it to avoid becoming too discouraged.
By 1955, crowds were exceeding 10,000 a race, and it wasn't hard to see why. On May 15, a brash young moonshine runner named Junior Johnson stood a crowd of 11,000 on its ear with his wild driving. He took the lead, lapped the field, blew a tire, lost four laps, regained two laps and finished third.
In 1956, Earles decided to capitalize on the racing mystique of the number ``500.'' He went to France and proposed a 500-lap race.
``That's never been heard of,'' France replied.
``It will be after I do it,'' Earles said.
The hook worked. Almost 20,000 fans showed up to watch Buck Baker beat Speedy Thompson. The race lasted 4 hours, 6 minutes.
By 1960, the sport was booming in the South. The big new track in Daytona Beach, Fla., had opened a year earlier, and the new speedway near Charlotte, N.C., would hold its first 600 that May. There was no question Martinsville Speedway had become the life's work of Earles, just as NASCAR and stock car racing had become for France. |n n| Earles was born in 1913 and came of age during the Great Depression. He worked for several furniture companies, ran a pool hall, even gambled for a living at times. He ran a service station, and opened Martinsville's first drive-in restaurant.
But this was something special, this Martinsville Speedway. This was a place worth keeping, a legacy.
On Feb.7, 1960, Earles was in Daytona Beach for Speedweeks when word came that his daughter, Dorothy Earles Campbell, had given birth. It was a boy. Earles had two daughters and one granddaughter. But this was the male heir he had been awaiting.
In his exuberance, Earles sent a telegram back to Martinsville addressed to ``The Future President of Martinsville Speedway.''
Two months later, Richard Petty won the 1960 Virginia 500. It was the first of his 15 victories at the speedway.
Clay Campbell's first memory of the track is vivid. He was 3 or 4 years old. He remembers how frightening the cars looked, with their roll bars and incredibly loud engines.
``They were tanks,'' he recalls. ``Race cars were scary looking to me.''
Around the same age, Campbell also had his first taste of speed. He had a pedal car all dressed out like the Indy 500 pace car, and his granddaddy took him up by the railroad tracks outside turn 3.
``He started me at the top of that thing and gave me a push,'' Campbell says. ``And you can imagine a little joker like me, with the speed I built up crazy.
``But Mother didn't like it too good. She didn't like it at all.''
He also took his first ride around the speedway sitting in his grandfather's lap. Buddy Baker did the driving.
``I just remember how loud it was,'' Campbell says. ``I was afraid the thing was going to blow up. When it came to a stop, I was ready to get out and get away from it.''
That was just fine with his grandfather.
But the speedway was Campbell's world. It was his preschool as a toddler. Then it became his after-school haunt. Beginning in the fourth grade, he started working there, slowly taking hold of his life. His sweat fell in the red-clay dirt. His clothes became covered with speedway paint. His muscles bore the evidence of speedway labor.
``I spent all my free time here,'' he says. ``I couldn't wait to get out of school to come over to work. And I thought I was big-time when I worked. I took it very seriously. At that time, we had plenty of grass to mow and I mowed with a wheel-horse tractor.
``I remember that very first year I worked, my grandfather put me on the bank in the third or fourth turn with a swing blade in my hand. That hill, in the hot summertime, looked like Mount Everest to me.'' |n n| In 1967, Petty won both races at Martinsville in the season of his 27 victories. His second Martinsville win, in September, was his ninth straight on the circuit that year. He would notch one more at North Wilkesboro for 10 in a row, a record that may be as hard to break as his record of 200 victories.
No one would make a stronger impression on Campbell than the King.
``He stood out more than anybody,'' Campbell says. ``He always took the time to joke and play around with me. In fact, the biggest part of his team was that way. Dale Inman has always been really friendly to me all my life.''
Petty always found a way to win at Martinsville. He won by three laps. He won by four laps. He won by seven laps - on seven cylinders. He won after a beer can hit his windshield. He won with a loose gas cap after a protest was denied. He won with a relief driver.
In the 1960s and '70s, when a majority of the Winston Cup races were run on short tracks, the Martinsville race was considered a major event.
``Of all the short tracks that we ran, I think everybody pointed toward Martinsville as the ultimate short track,'' Petty says. ``It's a very challenging track. It's a thinking-man's track. You have to pace yourself. You have to have brakes. And you have to save those brakes.
``Martinsville has always been the biggest small track. At least that was the way it was when we were running. And it was a pretty prestigious thing to win the Martinsville race, more so than the Wilkesboro race and some of the other races we ran.''
During most of his childhood, Campbell had a Go-Kart. He grew up in a home with a circular drive way - his first track.
``Every afternoon, I'd be on my race track,'' Campbell says. ``I'd ride my Go-Kart for three hours on Sunday, pretending like I was driving a race at Martinsville. I'd drive for three hours straight.''
When his best friend, David Davis, got a Kart, they began racing. It didn't take long for them to shift their races to the speedway, where their main track was a makeshift oval on the frontstretch.
``Eventually, several of us had Go-Karts,'' Campbell says. ``We weren't supposed to race each other. We were supposed to be riding. But we raced each other. We had a flagman, and anytime he saw anyone in the family, he waved the yellow flag. When he did that, we'd spread back out again and be civil about it.''
This was the era of Cale Yarborough. From 1976 and 1978, he won four of the six Martinsville races.
``Ray Powell had his Go-Kart painted up just like Cale's and he had a little `Cale' sticker on his back bumper,'' Campbell recalls. ``Of course, our Karts had angle irons for bumpers, and David Davis and I, we'd go back and forth trying to scrape that `Cale' sticker off. We'd get to the end of the straight and pop him as he went in the corner.''
Well, on one lap, someone popped Powell too hard at the wrong time. Powell's Kart got up on two wheels and headed toward the wall. He stuck out an arm, but the wall won. Ray Powell broke his arm.
``We tried to disguise it by saying he broke it playing football,'' Campbell says. ``But somehow, word got back that that wasn't what happened. Then, a short time later, a maintenance worker lost control of a Kart, stuffed it into a fence and cracked five ribs.
``That wasn't good either, considering how he worked there,'' Campbell says. ``That was the end of our racing over there. My granddaddy banned it.''
As eager as Earles was to have his grandson get into the racing business, he had no intention of allowing him to participate behind the wheel of a race car.
``He always tried to steer me away from getting into the driving end of it,'' Campbell says. ``He didn't want me to do something that risky. In fact, he told me if he ever caught me in a race car, he'd kick my butt.''
Campbell did not begin his Late Model Sportsman racing until the early 1990s, when he was well past 30 years old.
``I've done more dangerous things working here than I ever did behind the wheel of a race car,'' he says.
A bush hog fell on him once in the early 1980s, and he couldn't breathe by the time some of the workers got to him. It broke his collarbone.
``I've worked in every operation this place has got,'' he says. ``I've worked in maintenance, I've mowed, I've worked on concessions and novelties. I pretty much knew from the time I started working over here that this is what I wanted to do.'' |n n| Campbell had a big fight with his mother when he enrolled at Drewry Mason High School in Martinsville.
``All I wanted to take was vocational classes,'' he recalls. ``She wanted me to take college-prep courses. But I didn't want to take college prep, because I wasn't going to college. I didn't see the point of wasting four years in college when I could learn everything I needed right here.''
He lost the battle, but won the war. He took college prep in high school, but never went to college.
``In hindsight, I haven't regretted it a minute,'' Campbell says.
The speedway even played a role in Campbell's social life. It was a great place to park with a girlfriend. And there were bathrooms, too. He had the keys.
As Campbell put school behind him, the 1980s were looming. The sport was headed into a period of tremendous growth, partly fueled by television. That, in turn, ignited the explosion in the 1990s that made NASCAR racing the country's fastest-growing sport.
Petty won his 15th and final race at Martinsville on April 22, 1979, leading the final 130 laps to beat Buddy Baker by four seconds. It was the 187th victory of his career.
The next year, Dale Earnhardt posted the first of his six victories at Martinsville, but it was Darrell Waltrip who would dominate through the 1980s, taking nine of his 11 Martinsville victories in that decade.
Now, Rusty Wallace is the king at Martinsville, with five victories in the past seven Winston Cup races there.
But the same growth that has prompted the family to expand Martinsville Speedway to a once-unimaginable 70,000-plus seats is cited as the reason it ultimately will disappear from the Winston Cup scene.
But how many other tracks have the chairman living in a trailer home behind the main office and the president living in a ranch home overlooking the speedway?
Campbell's life is here, and his senses are so well-tuned to the place that one stormy early morning a few years ago, a noise woke him and drew him to a window. He looked out and watched as a tornado dipped down and tore across the landscape, damaging the speedway sign at the front entrance.
Campbell has felt the pressure of change. He has been approached by Bruton Smith, chairman of Speedway Motorsports Inc., and owner of five tracks. And if the course of Campbell's entire life wasn't enough of an answer, Campbell laid it out in plain English:
Martinsville Speedway is not for sale, nor will it ever be for sale.
``Look how many years granddaddy's got in this place,'' Campbell says. ``He's got 50 years in this place. He's still got the ultimate say. But I run the place. And now it's getting to a point where I've got a bunch of years. I enjoy what I do here. And this is what I want to do.''
LENGTH: Long : 251 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. The day his grandson, Clay Campbell (right), wasby CNBborn, Clay Earles sent a telegram from Daytona addressed to ``The
Future President of Martinsville Speedway.'' 2. Richard Petty always
found a way to win at Martinsville. Petty won 15 Winston Cup events
at the speedway, four more than his closest challenger, Darrell
Waltrip. 3. WAYNE DEEL/Staff. Darrell Waltrip drove to nine of his
11 Martinsville Speedway victories during the 1980s. 4. Bill France,
the founder of NASCAR, drove in the first NASCAR-sanctioned race at
Martinsville in 1948. France became part owner of the speedway
around 1950. 5. In May 1955, brash newcomer Junior Johnson thrilled
a crowd of 11,000 with his wild driving. 6. FILE/1990. Bruton Smith,
chairman of Speedway Motorsports Inc., and owner of five tracks, has
expressed an interest in purchasing the speedway. He has been told
in plain English: Martinsville Speedway is not for sale. 7. The late
Fireball Roberts (left) was named the most popular driver on the
Winston Cup circuit in 1957.