The stationery bears the formal letterhead of Bill Tuthill, a historian who was there in the Streamline Hotel on the day NASCAR was founded, and an executive who essentially oversaw the day-to-day operations of the sanctioning body while Bill France Sr. was off running races. The date, stamped out in the bulky typewriter font of the era, is Feb. 27, 1980. The purpose was to encourage the nomination of Harold Brasington, the founder of Darlington Raceway, for induction to the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame.

Harold Brasington, circa 1950

“

I felt it was important that history be told in the correct manner, and that people realize the pillar of NASCAR that he was. ... He has been the forgotten man.

”

-- ALLAN MILLER

Tuthill, very much one of NASCAR's founding fathers, seemed aghast that such encouragement was even necessary. "It is a damn shame," he wrote three decades ago, "that a fellow like my old friend Harold has to receive recommendations from me or anyone else at this late date."

It is no small endorsement, given that Tuthill's statue now stands alongside those of fellow stock-car pioneers Raymond Parks, Red Byron, Red Vogt and Big Bill himself on the third floor of the new NASCAR Hall of Fame. Allan Miller keeps Tuthill's letter along with two others, written by France and driving champion Ned Jarrett, each of them espousing Brasington's contribution to the sport. They're part of a modest arsenal of information that Miller hopes will help earn the often-overlooked Darlington founder a place of his own within the NASCAR shrine.

"Harold was a very unassuming guy," said Miller, who met Brasington in 1976 and worked with him for many years. "Harold really didn't look for the glory of the sport. He just loved the sport that much, and he wanted to make sure it continued to grow. Other people were getting recognition for what they were doing, and some of the things Harold had done, other people had taken credit for it. I didn't feel that was right. I felt it was important that history be told in the correct manner, and that people realize the pillar of NASCAR that he was."

In the long history of NASCAR, there perhaps is no pioneer more overlooked than Brasington, who scraped the old Darlington track out of a peanut field 60 years ago, went door-to-door selling shares in his enterprise to try and raise money, and was so ridiculed for his efforts that some even threw tomatoes at him. It's a bittersweet story of an ambitious yet humble man who nearly went broke, ultimately lost control of his greatest creation and, even though it succeeded, experienced virtually no financial gain. And yet, Brasington's legacy lives in asphalt and concrete, in the form of that quirky, egg-shaped speedway that helped usher NASCAR into the modern era.

A former driver who competed on fairground circuits and twice on the famous old Daytona beach road course, Brasington was inspired by the Indianapolis 500 to create NASCAR's first major speedway, a Darlington track that in 1950 hosted the sport's first 500-mile event and first race on a paved surface. In an era when NASCAR vehicles competed exclusively on short dirt tracks, it was no small undertaking. Brasington would go on to design three other venues that hosted the sport's premier series: Tar Heel Speedway, a quarter-mile dirt track in Randleman, N.C.; Champion Speedway, a third-mile paved track in Fayetteville, N.C.; and North Carolina Speedway, the Rockingham edifice that was home to the Cup cars until 2004. (Continued)