North Florida, Circa: 1966-1968

When I graduated from high school in 1965, I began working for a company that made and sold decorative art objects by day and, beginning that autumn, I was fortunate enough to be accepted to a great institution, Detroit’s famous Society of Arts and Crafts school, now known as the College for Creative Studies (CCS), where I took classes a couple nights a week and on Saturdays. I had a blast working and paying for school all through that winter. It was incredible! How I lucked out like this…wait a second…what’s this letter from the draft board…it says, basically, “You got thirty days. Join something or you’re comin’ with us!” And shortly thereafter, I was accepted into yet another great institution, the U.S. Navy.

A hernia operation and three-week recovery period in boot camp cost me my orders to jet mechanics school, so instead, I received orders to the Naval Station in Mayport, Fla., as a crash crew/firefighter, which gave me ample time to hit everything that was labeled “racing” in that great, damp, muggy, smelly, segregated, water bug-infested, mosquito-infested, armadillo-infested, snake-infested, gator-infested bog known as Florida.

One day, about this time of year in 1967, a couple buddies and I went to Daytona the weekend of the 24-hour endurance race. We decided to go to the race, but we didn’t have near enough for the $7 a piece tickets. Now, I had bought a guitar at the Base Exchange and I had it with me in case we hit the beach and found some honeys to serenade. Three minutes later, I was at a pawnshop selling it for $15, but we were still 25 cents short of the $21 we needed. So we stood outside the ticket booth trying to bum a quarter from someone amidst the throngs of people going through the gate – and no one stopped to help us out!

Finally, the ticket guy himself called us over and gave us the quarter because he was tired of us pissing off his customers with our nagging. A freaking quarter?! WTF! Anyway, we got to see some of the coolest racing I’ve ever seen to this day! A week later, we paid $2 to watch tire testing for the Daytona 500. I saw Curtis Turner on the track all alone in his ’67 Chevelle, running 186 mph, with the web up and his left arm propped up in the window!

Was there drag racing down there, too, you ask? You betcha. On an old abandoned runway out in the swamps near Naval Air Station: Jacksonville (see pics). Lots of nice racecars down there at Thunderbolt Raceway. Some famous ones, too. We met Phil Bonner, who had his nasty little “Daddy Warbucks” Mustang with him. Shirl Greer from Georgia with his “Tension” AWB ’65 Dodge, and there were many other hard runnin’ machines you’d be proud to own.

But one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me came together all because of a lettering job I did on a guy’s ’64 Chevelle drag car.

Claude West was head of the Mayport branch of the Jacksonville Ship Yards. He had heard I lettered trucks and cars, so he looked me up and told me he had a dark blue ’64 Chevelle he was having built to drag race and he wanted me to put “The Wild, Wild West” on each rear quarter panel. So I got a couple of sheets of mirror gold ScotchCal mylar-type material, cut the letters out, grabbed my paint kit, and off we went into one of the most incredible experiences of my life!

We headed southwest out of Jacksonville through miles and miles of desolate swamplands. Every now and again we’d pass a barely visible path that led off the main road, and Claude would point it out and say, “If you drove back in there a hundred yards or so, neither you or your car would ever be seen again.” Turns out, Claude had been a “revenuer” -- one of those government agents whose job it was to hunt down and destroy illegal stills and arrest the many distillers of pure corn squeezin’s that inhabited the swamps of north Florida and south Georgia back in the late ‘40s and early-to-mid-‘50s!

He then told me the tale of how he actually survived and actually thrived in those harrowing years: It became readily apparent to Claude that his life wasn’t worth a cracked Mason jar if he tried to assault these well-armed, highly motivated swamp-dwellers who would not be deprived of their livelihood by some “gum’ment tax man,” so he devised a plan that turned out to be mutually acceptable to all involved.

After several months of getting to know who represented whom in this tight-knit, very competitive community, and through much hard work toward gaining a small amount of their trust, Claude was able to arrange a meeting with many of the heads of families involved in the “shine runnin” trade in those parts.

He explained how he was charged with showing some progress toward shutting down their business and, if that didn’t happen soon, it would be out of his hands and a huge hoard of armed-to-the-teeth ATF agents would descend upon their happy little fiefdoms with a vengeance, and more than one of them would not survive the confrontation. With that, they agreed to Claude’s idea.

Claude and his men would raid and destroy the still of one of the families and, to make up for their product shortfall, one of the other families would make extra batches of hooch and give it to the affected clan to sell, which, in turn, would do the same for the others that Claude hit. That way, Claude could send photos of the smashed stills to Tallahassee and Atlanta, proving his tactics were productive and no further interference would be necessary. Thus, the resident businessmen of the Okefenokee were free to continue plying their very skilled trade, and no one got hurt…least of all, Claude!

Well, when we finally got to our destination, which was a huge clearing in the woods, there sat a brand new building that housed probably twenty stalls, many of which were filled with different types of racecars, mostly dirt track racers. I met the owner, a short, thin, scoliosis-ridden man named “Speedy,” who looked as though he’d spent a lifetime hunched over the fenders of a thousand mudslingers. I never found out anything else about him.

While I was working on Claude’s Chevelle, a guy comes up to me, introduces himself, and asks me if I might want to join his crew. He was heading up to Atlanta and needed someone to re-letter the car – owner, driver, numbers, etc. – when (not if!) it got wrecked and they had to replace body parts. The man’s name was Eldon Yarborough.

Eldon was (and still is) the younger brother of famed NASCAR driver (the late) LeeRoy Yarborough, and once had a short-lived career in NASCAR in his own right. But Eldon’s true calling was dirt track racing, at which he excelled (pun intended!). He showed me the car and the whole outfit, and it broke my heart to have to tell him I was still active Navy and wouldn’t be able to fill the job. 

How cool would that have been, though? Traveling with the second generation of those who souped-up their cars to outrun the law while carrying tens of gallons of “white lightnin’” destined for the poor indigenous folk of the swamps and back woods, who had no intentions of sharing their ages old recipes with any but their own.

Well, as we got Claude’s car done and we headed back to “civilization,” I discovered I had learned an extraordinary lesson in human relations and the human condition. And being stationed within a hundred miles of such phenomenal examples of racing and being able to partake of them was a blessing that I was, and am, very well aware of, make no mistake about that!

Yep, it’s been over forty years since I heard the announcer at the 24-hour endurance race saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, your leader is exiting the infield course, now climbing the 1-2 bank, now your leader is in the backstretch traveling in excess of one hundred ninety one miles per hour…!” That was Phil Hill in the injected big block Chevy-powered, automatic trans-shifted Chaparral making history…and I got to see it all for seven bucks! What can I say? Somebody had to become a firefighter down there! And you know I’m still thankin’ my lucky stars for that hernia!

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