All 15 of us used to gather in my grandmother's living room every Sunday to watch and fuss and yell over the races! Grammama was the first one to get cable. Because she was so close to the highway, they gave her free installation! Bill Elliott, Earnhardt, and Rusty Wallace were the top picks. That was before Dale Jarrett came along!lol
When we were little, every summer we were at the Athens Speedway every Saturday night. Daddy worked at a body shop. He did the body work on his boss's race car. The car was #88. Daddy said it was so when it turned over, it would still be #88. I got a call from his boss the other day. He is 85 years old but paralyzed from a bail of hay rolling off a truck, crushing his legs. His body is shot but his mind is sharp as a tack! My very first date was at the Athens Speedway and my first date with my ex-husband was at the Athens Speedway so he didn't have to worry too much about me partying (at the beginning)lol. The only dating advice he gave me was after my divorce (LOL) when he told me to lose weight! His exact words were I had gained weight like ELVIS!lol Then after he got sick and I was trying to lift him out of his chair, he looked at my brown hair and shouted, "What have you done to your hair!!!" He told me to keep it blonde!lol I'm starting to see a pattern in the men I have checked out - They're a lot like my Dad!lol
These photos are from friends of mine, not Daddy's, but they all looked alike to me back then, kind of like the Car of Tomorrow looks today!LOL
Daddy's father died a couple of years before I was born, HAULING LIQUOR! OOH! There's a book in the making my cousin is writing about my grandfather and his brother being murdered by the competition, driving a 1940 Ford. Back then it was either haul liquor or work in a cotton mill so he let my grandmother do the cotton mill and he hauled the liquor. He was just 46. She lived to be 88!
I've put this land up for sale but no bites! You should see it. Daddy was the Jeff Foxworthy Redneck Joke! When Hwy. 441 went 4 lanes, he wouldn't sell out to the D.O.T. and build a brand new house like everyone else. He put a single wide down in the woods! I went through photos last week and found pictures of him clearing off the land. When he retired, he took a 1965 mobile home and built a makeshift body shop on the back of it. The shop became mine when he deeded me this land. It looks like a museum in there! He had a collection of cars but started selling them when he got sick. (Our Brady Bunch station wagon, the last vacation to Amelia Island, that we all went together in 1985). His favorite saying was "It's not what you've got, it's what you take care of."
I don't think I watched a race after Daddy died until June (2008) when I started using Fox's leaderboard because I couldn't see the drivers' names scrolling across the top of the screen from where I was sitting.lol Then I saw a "community" heading and went there. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY & WHO GETS THROWN UNDER THE BUS and RIGHT SIDES ONLY were the only ones I read at first. The guy that wrote "Right Sides Only" sounded like some old geezer from out of the hills (a DELIVERANCE-type), which was exactly the way my hillbilly Daddy sounded!lol
The Bud Shootout and the Daytona 500 were really hard this year because it was coming up on Daddy's 1-year anniversary of leaving us. Now it's the second Christmas without him.
Reading everyone's posts on FOX was the substitute for picking up the phone after the Daytona 500 and saying "Daddy, did you see what Junior did yesterday!" and "Daddy, what about Reed Sorenson coming in 9th and David Ragan coming in 6th and BILL ELLIOTT, even being there, period." Daddy would be pulling for the Georgia homeboys!
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!
