They would drive down from places like Maine and Massachusetts, all their earthly belongings wedged into the back of their automobile, and look for the little restaurant at the corner of U.S. Highway 29 and Morehead Road. It was just a diner, really, but it stood across the street from the track then known as Charlotte Motor Speedway, and everyone from parts cleaners to crew chiefs could be found there on weekdays eating breakfast or lunch. So the hopefuls would enter, many times with no money and no place to stay, and begin asking around for work.

And more often than not they'd be sent around the corner to the house on Hudspeth Road, where the lights were on until 2 o'clock in the morning and there was always an extra steak on the grill. There they'd find the big man, likely with a cigar clenched between his teeth, almost certainly sanding or polishing one of the car parts he cared for like they were living things. Robert Gee would take them in, give them something to eat and a place to stay, help them find a job. And in his own way this simple fabricator, whose son-in-law would become a seven-time NASCAR champion and grandson would become the sport's most popular driver, would himself grow to be a legend throughout the garage.

He impacted so many lives -- son-in-law Dale Earnhardt, grandsons Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Eury Jr., Darrell Waltrip and Rick Hendrick, countless others who became mechanics or crew chiefs or team executives because he helped them get a foot in the door. His close relationship with Hendrick, an old neighbor from back in South Hill, Va., laid the groundwork for Earnhardt Jr.'s move from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick Motorsports. Few outside the industry knew his name until that day when car owner and driver spoke so fondly of the man who was the common link between them. But inside the garage, they've long known, loved and respected Robert Gee.

"He was a legend," said Jimmy Makar, now vice president of Joe Gibbs Racing, who lived with Gee for four months when he first got into the sport.

"He was my best friend," said Waltrip, the three-time NASCAR champion who fielded his cars out of Gee's modest backyard shop for three seasons.

"I miss him every day," said Brett Bodine, NASCAR's director of cost research, who worked as a fabricator under Gee while awaiting his break as a driver.

And it goes on and on and on, the admiration pouring forth from figures both well-known and little-known, many of them students of a man whose cars were as pretty to look at as they were fast on the track. He may have worn a gruff, intimidating exterior, but inside was a fun-loving personality that sang in bars in Daytona Beach, and until his death of a stroke in 1994 displayed an absolute willingness to share his craft. Over and over, those chasing the dream of a job in NASCAR showed up on his doorstep. Those who knew him are hard pressed to think of any he turned away.

"He's touched a lot of people in this sport," said Eury Jr., crew chief for his cousin Earnhardt Jr.'s No. 88 car at Hendrick Motorsports. "Everybody knew he was a friend. I have never met one person who said, 'I never cared for him much.' I have never heard that in the garage. I've heard, 'I know him. I miss him.' You hear that, and it's very, very touching to know he had that much influence on so many people with what he was doing."

A meticulous man

Autostock

Much of what Tony Eury Jr. does and is stems from the legacy of his grandfather.

Eury Jr. is seen by many as the walking embodiment of Robert Gee, both in his appearance as well as his choice of career. He began hanging out at his maternal grandfather's house when he was 16, mowing the grass, cleaning the shop, doing anything necessary to get a chance at working on the cars. The first NASCAR event he ever attended was a Busch race at Road Atlanta, along with his grandfather and family friend Rick Hendrick. Now he's working for Hendrick, just like granddaddy did.

"I can remember the first two or three times I went out there, and my mom telling me, 'Look, your granddaddy is such a perfectionist, the one thing you need to understand is, you do the best you can do, and it's never going to be good enough for him.' Which was real good, because he stayed on you all the time," Eury Jr. said. "You learned a lesson there that no matter what you did, you always did it the best. Every one of us knows inside ourselves if you didn't try your hardest. If you left a little out there, you know it. I would always go out there to try and impress him, do as much as I possibly could to get his attention."

He wasn't alone. Robert Gee's stamp of approval went a long way toward helping a young mechanic or fabricator get a job. "Robert had a network of people. He could get anything done in racing," Hendrick remembered. That's because Gee had a reputation as the best body man of his era, and independent teams that lacked resources flocked to him for help. He also owned his cars, which he would eventually co-own with Hendrick, and by all accounts they were showpieces. He labored over them as if they were his own children, going to tremendous lengths to perfect even small areas hardly anyone would be able to see.

"Robert was absolutely the best body man, fabricator that I'd ever seen or ever known," Waltrip said. "He didn't do like these guys today. These guys today are what I call R-and-R men, they remove and replace. Robert was a genius. He'd take a piece of sheet metal crumbled up, and he would lay there and beat on it with a hammer and a dolly and rub on it, with a cigarette hanging out of the end of his mouth with ashes at the end of it, and could make it into a thing of beauty."

His meticulousness was legendary. He was one of the first to use a torch to give the dashboard a wood grain appearance, or rake the car's body back for superspeedway use. He would shine up and pinstripe panels that would go behind the driver or over the wheel tub, intricate details the untrained eye would never notice. Under the hood, every piece was polished to a high sheen. He would cut out decal letters and apply them individually, sand down body parts again and again until they appeared silken. If he found a dent or an imperfection, he started over. If his car couldn't win, it was at least going to look good.

"If you used the wrong spray bottle, he let you know it," Eury Jr. said. "You had to use black lacquer. If you used black enamel on his car, it was on. I can remember getting a chewing about that."

His cars were so well-made, there was never any question as to whether they'd fit the NASCAR templates. They always did. His greatest showpiece was a Busch car called Emma, named after his mother, which won at least 14 races during a span of several years. The vehicle was so revered at Hendrick Motorsports that Earnhardt Jr.'s car for this season's Daytona 500 -- his first race for his granddaddy's old team -- had the same name bestowed upon it. Almost every Hendrick driver of the era won a race in Emma. If they wrecked her, Gee would painstakingly piece her back together again, and eventually she would return to Victory Lane.

"That chassis, it was like you couldn't kill it. You'd wreck it, he'd fix it. When it came back, it was always better," Hendrick said.

"He petted it," remembered former Hendrick co-worker Frank Edwards. "He was just like that. If it went out to go to the race, it was spotless. It was polished, shined and spotless. And if there was something wrong with it, it was fixed. I've been with him when the car went to Daytona. Junior Johnson would be kidding him about it. Robert would be raising the hood, showing him under the hood, showing him under the trunk, because it was a showpiece. Everything under the hood was chrome and laid exactly in place."

He had no education in aerodynamics, but he could look at a racecar and figure out how to reduce the drag. He could be so singularly focused; Edwards remembered visiting his shop late one night to find Gee sanding Bondo, his pants having fallen down around his ankles, the seat filling up with dust. He didn't pull them up until he was finished. After Gee died, his planishing hammer -- a tool fabricators use to smooth crumpled metal -- was handed down to Eury Jr. Most planishing hammers have a face about the circumference of a silver dollar. Gee's was about as big around as a dime, a testament to his attention to detail.

"He was very, very much a perfectionist," said friend and former co-worker Mike Jarrett, who now works at Haas CNC Racing. "I can't explain it. I've never met anyone like it. It's almost like it was a dadgum disease. He's got me doing that now. I don't want my stuff looking nasty. All my corners have to be curved. I catch myself sometimes saying, 'Robert, this is all your damn fault.' But I'll tell you something, the man taught me way more about life than he did about a racecar."

The Hendrick connection

Autostock

Rick Hendrick played an important role in the lives of Kelley Earnhardt Elledge and Dale Earnhardt Jr. after their father's death.

Nowhere is Gee's meticulousness more evident today than at Hendrick Motorsports, where he built many of the cars that helped set the organization on a path to greatness. One of the first things that struck Earnhardt Jr. after he moved to Hendrick was the craftsmanship with which the cars were constructed, no surprise given the tight bonds between his grandfather and his new boss.

"You walk through this garage right now, Rick Hendrick has the nicest racecars in this garage," Eury Jr. said. "You look at it from the wiring to the body work, everything. Rick has a passion for winning, and he knows what it takes and how much meticulousness you have to have. Yeah, I think he's got some of [Robert Gee] in him."

Robert Gee's sons, Robert Jr. and Jimmy, who hang bodies at Earnhardt Jr.'s JR Motorsports shop, would agree. "Rick, he likes the same things Daddy did as far as that goes," Jimmy Gee said. "He wants his stuff neat."

It's not a coincidence. When the teenaged gear head named Rick Hendrick needed a hood scoop mounted on a 1965 Chevelle, there was only one place in his native South Hill, Va., to go -- the body shop at the Flying A gas station at a place the locals called Fastback Corner, an outfit run by the man everyone knew as Big Gee. As always, that gruff exterior came out first. "The first thing he would say is, 'Boy, we ain't got time to mess with you and your sh--,'" Hendrick remembered. But of course he did, and he did the best work around at minimal cost.

Mutual respect was forged between the two. Years later, after Gee had moved to Charlotte and Hendrick had made his name as a car dealer and started a fledging NASCAR operation, the two got together again. Hendrick sponsored Gee's dirt car, and they co-owned the Busch car in which Dale Earnhardt won Hendrick's very first NASCAR race. Although Gee also worked as a fabricator on Hendrick's Cup team, the Busch car was fielded out of the shop behind Gee's house. It was an arrangement not unlike the one today between Earnhardt Jr. and Hendrick, who fields his Busch cars out of JR Motorsports.

Gee worked days at the Hendrick Cup shop, and nights on the Busch cars in his own garage. Hendrick thought so much of Gee, that when he brought his old friend Edwards to work in the race shop, the first thing he did was take him by Gee's house. When Gee began to suffer the strokes that would eventually claim his life, Hendrick kept him on the payroll and was a fixture at the hospital. It was during those difficult times that Hendrick grew close to the rest of Gee's family, among them his daughter Brenda and her children, Kelley and Dale Jr.

As a result, strong bonds of trust formed, bonds that are evident even today. After their father died in 2001, it was Hendrick the Earnhardt children often turned to for advice, because they remembered how well he treated their granddaddy. Ask Hendrick whether Earnhardt Jr. would be driving for him without the presence of Robert Gee, and the seven-time champion car owner isn't quite sure how to answer.

"I don't know," he said. "I think there's a sense of comfort that [Dale Jr.] has and Kelley has. Kelley is a big part of it, and definitely Tony Eury Jr. You know what, now that you say that, probably no. They wouldn't have been coming to me for advice even when they were going to buy DEI. We had a relationship that way. So I think there's a certain comfort level they had because of the relationship."

Earnhardt Jr. believes those bonds between him and Hendrick would have formed eventually. "Rick would still be the same person, and we would still have the same friendship that we have," he said. "I didn't meet him directly through my granddaddy. I think things probably still would have happened as they happened. But the trust factor, and my ability to trust Rick and believe what he says and feel confident in the opportunity, comes from how he treated my grandfather and how he treated my mother and sister and the people he knows that I know."

The impact Gee left on Hendrick becomes clear whenever the old fabricator's name comes up in conversation. Hendrick breaks into a wide smile as he describes Gee's narrow eyes, large sunglasses, and penchant for falling asleep -- once even against the pit wall during a Busch race at Darlington. Geoff Bodine woke him up over the radio under caution, asking whether they should pit. Gee told him to do what the leader did. "Robert, we are the leader," Bodine replied. Well then, Gee said, let somebody by.

"He touched a lot of people," Hendrick said, clearly touched himself. No wonder having Earnhardt Jr. and Eury Jr. in the fold now feels like bringing two old family members home. No wonder Hendrick Motorsports carries on the organization and the attention to detail in which Robert Gee took such pride.

"I would say that Robert Gee probably had a pretty good little impact on the way Rick set his stuff up and started," Edwards said. "Rick Hendrick is a man of his own. Anybody who makes an impact on Rick had to be somebody kind of special, and Robert Gee was that special."

Godfather of the garage

Courtesy Hendrick Motorsports

From left, Robert Gee, Geoff Bodine and Joe Hendrick celebrate a Busch win at North Carolina Speedway in October 1984, in the early days of Hendrick Motorsports.

He never really intended to leave South Hill. By all accounts he enjoyed his time there, working at the Flying A and partying with his buddies, even though he had a rather unsettled home life -- he lived at times in a hotel room and a trailer -- and money was often tight. He paid best friend and co-worker Billy Reekes $40 a week in quarters emptied from the shop's pinball machine. But then there was an argument, reputedly involving a woman, so Robert Gee locked his shop and packed his bags and moved to Charlotte.

He never really intended to get into racing. He took a job at Young's Ford, patching up passenger cars. "He wasn't chasing the dream or anything like that. He was just a body man," Reekes remembered. "He could take sheet metal and a paint gun, the tools of the trade, and he could fix anything. It wasn't racing then. He was just trying to make a living."

The way Jimmy Gee remembers it, his father started going to races and doing some body work for car owner Elmo Langley. Another car owner, Ray Fox, noticed how good Langley's cars looked, and offered Robert Gee a job in racing. That was 1968. From then on, Big Gee never did anything else. "His daddy was a farmer, but Big Gee wasn't going to be a farmer," Jimmy Gee said. "He loved cars. And then he got into racing, and he loved fast cars."

Gee was soon well-established as one of the best in his field, and a regular at the old Apollo Restaurant across the street from the big speedway. Breakfast and lunch brought out a who's who of racing, as employees from all the shops in the area met to eat and swap stories. "That place was like the chamber of commerce," Hendrick remembered. And it was a mecca for those hoping to break into the industry, a place where a budding mechanic or fabricator could introduce themselves to men like Jake Elder or Harry Hyde or Robert Gee.

Racing was a fledgling industry back then, and there weren't many jobs around. That never seemed to concern Gee, who took in these hopefuls one after another, providing them with shelter and food, and working them in his shop until they found work of their own.

"He just had a very big soft spot in his heart," Mike Jarrett said. "They'd got to the Apollo Restaurant, they wouldn't have a job, they wouldn't have a place to stay, they'd come here in the hopes of getting a motel room and finding a job in a couple of days, they'd run low on money, they'd get rejected here and there. They'd tell them, 'Why don't you go and see Robert Gee?' Next thing you know, somebody would be driving up the driveway: 'I ain't got no money, and I don't know anybody, and can you help me?' Robert would say, 'Sure, come on in here, we'll find you something. You can live here at the house for a little while. You don't have to pay me nothing. If you find a job and want to hang around for a while, you can pay me some rent then.' That was just the way he was."

Jarrett would know. He had met Gee at a race in North Wilkesboro, N.C., and showed up at his shop a few weeks later looking for work. In his typical style, Gee at first growled that he didn't have any work. But if Jarrett wanted to, he could write his name and phone number on the back page of the phone book in Gee's desk. Jarrett, then 18, went into Gee's office, opened up the back of the phone book, and saw the entire page filled with names and phone numbers. He took a thick, black marker and wrote over all of them, in huge letters. Before he left, he had a job that paid him $250 and two tanks of gas each week.

Bill Hall/Getty Images

Dale Earnhardt won his seventh Cup title in 1994, just weeks after Robert Gee's death.

"He took me over there and put me on the Hendrick Motorsports payroll," Jarrett remembered. "We progressed together. I lived in his house for a while. He was a big teddy bear. I mean, we'd take strays in off the street, everybody that came from anywhere in the country to [Charlotte] to look for a job in racing."

Jimmy Makar would know. The current vice president of Joe Gibbs Racing visited Gee in the mid-1970s when the fabricator did work on a racecar owned by Makar's father. Before he left, Gee offered Makar a job. A few weeks later the future crew chief, who won a championship in 2000 with Bobby Labonte, moved from New Jersey and into Gee's home on Hudspeth Road. He lived there for four months.

"If you were going to do it, do it 100 percent. There was no halfway. It was right or wrong, no in between," Makar said. "If it took you three, four, five times to get it right, that's what you had to do. He didn't accept anything less than that. He was hard to work for if you tried to cut corners or get by with just enough. That didn't fly. It had to be right. Whether it was the paint work, the body work, the metal work, the details, the pop rivet spacing, it had to be right, which is a good lesson to learn as a youngster. It's easy as a kid to want to short-cut things and do it just good enough to get by. He didn't do that. He saw something that didn't look right, you did it again. I've learned since then to have a good work ethic."

It paid off, in the form of an eventual Cup job with Harry Hyde, and now a long career with one of the elite teams in NASCAR. And it all started with Robert Gee. "You don't run across people like that very often," Makar said. "Most people don't have time. But Robert was just a very giving individual, that's all I can say about him. He didn't know me from Adam, and he let me come live in his house and took me in like a son. I'm very grateful. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be here, probably."

Brett Bodine would know. The former Cup race winner and current NASCAR executive worked as a fabricator under Gee while waiting for his break as a driver. That came in 1985, when a scheduling conflict forced his brother Geoff out of a Gee-built car he was supposed to drive in a Busch race at Martinsville. Geoff talked co-owners Gee and Hendrick into letting his little brother drive, and Brett responded by winning the race. Later that season he won two more, and his career was off.

"He was a teddy bear," Bodine said of Gee. "He was just a fine human being. Robert worked, worked, worked hard, and Robert also played hard. He was one of the most talented guys I've ever seen working with Bondo and the things it took to make an aerodynamic racecar. He would just massage on a car, and everything had to be just perfect. We never raced a car that wasn't pretty. The ductwork in the front was all polished aluminum. He taught me a lot, gave me just a tremendous opportunity. I'm very thankful."

And Dale Earnhardt would know. The former NASCAR champion was married to Gee's daughter Brenda from 1971-77, and according to Jimmy Gee often went to his father-in-law for assistance, equipment and advice. It was Robert's connections that helped Earnhardt land one of his first Cup rides, with owner Johnny Ray at Atlanta in 1976. Gee had made Ray a promise: Give Earnhardt the seat, and if anything happened to the car, I'll rebuild it. Earnhardt raced toward the front, but was caught up in a crash. Gee, true to his word, rebuilt the car.

"He was all about giving Dale that opportunity," Eury Jr. said. "I honestly think Granddaddy helped Dale get his start, because of all the connections Granddaddy had. He got Dale into some rides. He was a big influence in making that happen. ... [Earnhardt] was a good racecar driver, but you know as well as I do, in this sport it's not about what you know, it's about who you know."

And Robert Gee was a good one to know. "He just loved to help folks out and to share knowledge and to help people get started," Makar said. "That's just the way he was."

Courtesy Hendrick Motorsports

Robert Gee sits on a tractor in Charlotte Motor Speedway's Victory Lane after a win by then-Hendrick driver Ken Schrader in the track's fall Cup race in 1989.

Robert Gee's generosity was as legendary as his way with a racecar. Growing up in South Hill, Reekes remembered, Big Gee would pay the bill at the truck stop diner if he had sold a little gas or cashed an insurance check the day before. Years later, Hendrick employee Frank Edwards remembered Gee taking in not only future racers, but even a trucker and his wife whose rig had broken down in Charlotte. Often Edwards stayed with Gee, and the fabricator once woke him at 1:30 in the morning with a steak fresh off the grill.

On Charlotte race weekend, his front yard became a haven for independent Busch or ARCA teams trying to make the show. "Robert was like the Pied Piper," Hendrick said. "All the homeless racers would come to him. They weren't homeless, but they'd be in town trying to make the race, and no sh--, there would be eight or 10 racecars out there in the yard from different people, everybody working on everybody's car, trying to make the race."

But for Earnhardt Jr., who didn't spend as much time around Gee as his cousin Eury Jr. did, his grandfather could be a difficult man to know. It was hard for a child, even an Earnhardt, to penetrate the brusque exterior that hid the real person underneath.

"I was always intimidated by him," Earnhardt Jr. admitted. "He was always real tough, cigar in his mouth. When he was at that grill cooking, you thought that if you got within five feet he was going to slap the sh-- out of you. He wasn't that kind of guy, but he looked like it. He looked like the kind of guy who would bite your head off. For a long time, when you're a kid, you don't try to get close to people like that."

He began to appreciate his grandfather around the time Gee had his first stroke, which came as a complete surprise to the family. Big Gee had survived prostate cancer surgery, had received positive reports from his doctor, and was hanging a body on a No. 25 car to be driven by Ken Schrader when he was first stricken in January of 1994. Once Gee recovered, Mike Jarrett remembered, he couldn't wait to build another car, so he constructed a Late Model that Hendrick employee Tom Darling drove on local short tracks. He dearly wanted to return to the big races at Daytona and Darlington, but he never had the opportunity. The second and fatal stroke arrived in October of that same year.

But that's not the Robert Gee his friends remember. They remember the one who had uncompromising standards in building a racecar, who loved a house full of people, who never met a stranger. They remember the one who, when friends moved to Charlotte to work in the industry, would beg them to live not up on Lake Norman but with him. They remember the one who was such a fixture in the bar at the Pirate's Cove motel in Port Orange, Fla., during Speedweeks that the message "Robert Gee parties here" blinked in lights from the establishment's sign on A1A.

They remember the one who worked hard and raced hard and partied hard, and wrung every little bit of living out of life. "He always said, he lived two days for one," son Robert Gee Jr. said. "That's the way he did pretty much everything he went after."

And they remember the one who in many ways became the godfather of the modern garage area, who helped more people find jobs than anyone can count, who left an indelible mark on NASCAR even though most followers of the sport never really knew who he was. "People who know my daddy, they know what he's done," Jimmy Gee said. "Just the average public, they don't have a clue how much influence he had on racing. He didn't mind getting noticed, but I guess some people get noticed and some don't. Maybe he didn't go out and holler enough."

Now, he doesn't have to. His friend Rick Hendrick and grandsons Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Eury Jr. do it for him, with every lap they turn on the track.