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The summer of 1950 brought stock car racing to Victory Stadium.
Courtesy of the Turner Family
Bill France congratulates Curtis Turner on a victory, undated.
Roanoke City Council was skeptical. They heard about auto racing once before in the late 1940s and felt they had been hoodwinked. Granted it was midget cars, but the promoters had lost money and never made good on what they owed the city from concessions and tickets. The crowds were small, the cars slow and interest faded.
When Bill France and Curtis Turner appeared before city council in the spring of 1950 to talk racing at Victory Stadium, the council had little interest. City Manager Arthur Owens echoed the sentiments of the group when he raised pointed questions about finances, contracts, concession sales, noise and ticket prices.
Turner, who had moved to the Roanoke Valley in 1947 with his wife Ann, was undeterred. He described to the council that stock car racing had a future. France, who had cobbled together the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing with thirty-five men in the Ebony Room of Daytona’s Streamline Hotel just a few years earlier, quickly made an offer.
“Give us four races!”
The council turned to Owens, who agreed to meet with the two and work out an arrangement. A couple of years prior, Owens had instructed police to pull down racing fliers on light poles as the promoters were not paying what they owed. The council gave France and Turner permission for four races, but only four, on the track at Victory Stadium. Any more would depend on the money and the crowds.
Turner had already gained a following in Roanoke, especially those that hung out at Paul Cawley’s gas station on Grandin Road. The two men had become good friends. Cawley recalled having breakfast with Turner one Sunday morning at the Coffee Pot when Turner suggested the two race to the Floyd County line in what became a weekly ritual.
“It was thrilling. There wasn’t any traffic. The only thing is, sometimes we’d get to racing when church was letting out and the sheriff would call down to the filling station and say, ‘Ya’ll quit that racing! It’s Sunday morning, and I’m trying to keep the telephone on the hook.’ He was nice so we wiped it out.”
Each of the four races that summer featured amateur events preceding the 25-lap NASCAR contest. Railroad ties edged the inside track, but they were hardly a barrier for the occasional car that spun out of control into the football field. There was Stubby Pee Wee Martin of Bassett, Jimmy Lewallan of High Point, Ted Swain of Winston-Salem and Gordon Mangrum of Leaksville.
Those were just the ranked drivers, but Turner outranked them and had the hometown advantage. He won three out of four at Victory Stadium and on the fourth race – the one he lost to Martin – he was on a winning streak seeking his tenth consecutive NASCAR victory.
The crowds that summer averaged around 5,000…far more than had ever turned out for the midget cars. But stock cars were backwater news. The Roanoke Times gave far more press to the soap box derby in South Roanoke with front page photos and multiple articles preceding the Crystal Spring Avenue race than was ever given to France and Turner. WDBJ and WSLS had live radio broadcasts from the derby, but were no-shows for the stadium stock car loops. Little wonder as over 8,000 attended the derby that summer.
City council agreed to two more races at the stadium for late August. Turner won both. The amateur events seemed to provide the most entertainment. At the sixth and final race of the summer the Times reported:
“Wrecks have been numerous at all of the races and last night was not an exception. In fact the wreck of wrecks took place in the first heat of the amateur events. Roy Alman of Roanoke turned in the No 1 ‘loop-de-loop’ of the year when he hit a fence in the northwest turn and rolled his car over four times only to land on the wheels directly in front of the west side stands some fifty yards from where he made contact with the railing.”
The wrecks, the concessions, and the crowds gave the city council the one thing they needed to tolerate stock car racing – money. France and Turner worked with city officials and gained a few more years of NASCAR racing on the stadium’s oval asphalt track.
Eventually NASCAR grew beyond what the stadium could provide and eliminated it from the circuit. Turner, however, remained based in Roanoke. He and his wife had a home on Laban Road in north Roanoke County, so Turner could view something else he liked as much as cars – airplanes. From his front yard he had an expansive view of the air activity at Woodrum Field. His passion for flying proved fatal in October 1970 as Turner died in a crash with his Aero Commander over Pennsylvania. Twelve minutes after taking off from DuBois Airport, headed home to Roanoke, the left engine stalled. Unable to restart it, the plane banked and plummeted into a hillside.
Turner’s funeral at Oakland Baptist Church included his good friend France. He was interred at Blue Ridge Gardens on Airport Road to forever rest beneath the sounds of airplanes. His six-foot long, bronze marker declared him the “Babe Ruth of Stock Car Racing.”
One wonders what went through France’s mind as he saw Turner laid to rest, and if he thought back to that city council meeting where he and Turner had to do a hard-sell on a sport with bootlegging roots.
France and Turner brought stock car racing to Victory Stadium in 1950 and with it a summer of loud exhausts, modified cars and high speed dreams.
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