Winston-Salem was key to NASCAR's growth

Through the years, people have asked me if I ever drove a race car.

			Bill France

Yes. I tried it but I found out early on you needed to concentrate on being a race driver if you wanted to be one.

Back in those days (the late 1950s), I was helping my mother and father put on races, and I would go from parking cars or stubbing tickets to jump in a car and run a few practice laps or try to qualify. There was just too much going on and I knew I had to concentrate on one or the other.

I did race a time or two, at Greensboro N.C., and at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem a few times, but I never did any good at it. I got on my side once at Bowman Gray. It's probably fair to say I would have cost a car owner a lot of money if I'd kept racing.

Bowman Gray is NASCAR's longest-running weekly track but back when my family and the Hawkins family operated it, we ran what is now the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (back then it was called NASCAR's Grand National Division) on the quarter-mile, bullring-type oval that surrounds a football field. Alvin Hawkins and his wife Eloise were good friends with my parents, Bill Sr. and Anne B.

Alvin was one of NASCAR's first flagmen and his son Joe and I worked together at the races. Eloise was a second Mom to me, and I lived with them for a while during the summer when we were promoting races all over the place.

Joe Hawkins and I did a lot of things around the race tracks, like replacing guardrails and patching things, painting stuff and other repairs.

Our families were promoting races in lots of places back then, like Victory Stadium in Roanoke, Va.; the Greensboro Fairgrounds, where the Coliseum is now; Champion Raceway in Fayetteville, N.C.; Flat Rock Speedway in Flat Rock, Mich; Michigan State Fairgrounds Speedway on Eight-Mile Road in Detroit. (We promoted a race there during the 250th anniversary of the City of Detroit.)

We were also involved with Martinsville and North Wilkesboro. (Actually, I worked on the construction crew at the track in Hillsborough, N.C. when they were building it.) Road America, the road course in Wisconsin, was also one of the stops for the Grand National Division back then.

We also held Grand National races at what was probably the first lighted one-mile paced track in NASCAR's history, in Raleigh, N.C. That was before Daytona or any of the other tracks were built.

We were living in Daytona Beach but we had a publicity office in Greensboro, operated by Houston Lawing, who later moved to Daytona. (The Houston Lawing Press Box at Daytona is named after him.)

Houston's job was to travel around as an advance publicity man for the Grand National races and visit sports departments of newspapers, as well as radio stations, to let people know we were going to hold a race in their area.

Houston beat the drums for those races back then. The papers and radio stations were mostly interested in stick-and-ball sports, so Houston had his work cut out for him. He was a pioneer in the publicity field for our sport.

One of the first sports editors to recognize our sport and help us out was Carlton Byrd of the Winston-Salem Journal; his paper kept up with the Grand National races on a fairly regular basis. Carlton Byrd's son Jeff is now the President of Bristol Motor Speedway.

When I think back to those days, it's hard for me not to think of Bowman Gray Stadium and Winston-Salem.

One of the other things Joe Hawkins and I had to do was "bill-posting." We had to drive routes ahead of a race and staple cardboard posters to poles alongside the road to advertise the races.

We didn't have any money to advertise in newspapers, or on the radio back then. Television was out of the questions so "bill-posting" was the thing to do.

I've never told anyone this but there was another company that did a lot of bill-posting in those days: Goody's Headache Powders, which years later became one of our first sponsors and is still involved in the sport today.

Joe Hawkins and myself used to have to staple our posters over the top of the Goody's posters because whoever was doing it for them was taking up all the good spots.

Another thing I remember is how we always tried to figure a way to go by Bernice Wood's (wife of NASCAR driver/car owner Glen Wood) or Elizabeth's (wife of Petty family patriarch Lee Petty) house because we knew we would be able to get some awful good country cooking. We knew those two ladies were great cooks and we also knew if we timed it just right, they would always invite us to stay long enough to eat.

Back in those days we were running 100-mile races, sometimes two and three a week, and we traveled all the time. We'd run a race on a Thursday night somewhere and have a race 200-300 miles away the next night.

Winston got involved with NASCAR in the 1970s, and we had started changing the schedule from 100-milers to 250-mile races and longer.

Winston has been with us ever since and we've been great marketing partners. I've always enjoyed going back to Winston-Salem for lots of reasons; one reason is I always enjoy visiting our friends at Winston.

Also, third-generation members of the Hawkins family are operating Bowman Gray Stadium today. Dale and Johnnie (Hawkins) Pinilis are continuing the tradition.

There's also another third-generation family I always go to see when I visit Winston-Salem.

"Pulliam's" is a landmark hot dog place in Winston-Salem. They were serving the best hot dogs I'd ever tasted 50 years ago and they're still doing that today, with Mark Flynt and Gayla Posey keeping the tradition alive.

And of course, there's one other, major reason I like visiting Winston-Salem.

I might not have won any races at Bowman Gray Stadium but I guarantee you I came out of there as one of Winston-Salem's all-time winners.

That's where I met my wife, Betty Jane.

Bill France's column will appear monthly on NASCAR.com in 2002.