The anticipation was overwhelming as I awoke early Saturday morning. I had known for three days that Uncle Jim, Aunt Naomi and cousin Jimmy were taking me to the stock car races this Saturday night. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else the entire day. My wardrobe for the evenings activities would be dungarees, a striped t-shirt and a crash helmet purchased at the track earlier in the year. Jimmy and I had painted the helmets with Testors Dope (that’s what we called model airplane paint back then) with our favorite driver’s name and number. Jimmy had the familiar yellow and black number 7 of Johnny Roberts and I had the number 5 of Ken Marriott.

We would be attending the races at Westport Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland. The stadium was less than 10 minutes from downtown Baltimore. The stadium was the former home of the Baltimore Elite Giants. A Negro League team that had left Baltimore for Nashville in 1951. Baseball greats Roy Campanella, Larry Doby and others had played at Westport Stadium. Ed Otto, a friend of Bill France’s, picked Westport as a place to hold stock car races. The track would be 1/5 of a mile, flat and run around the perimeter of the playing field. It was basically a circle. Telephone poles, painted white and laid end to end, were used as the inside guard rail. The track was red clay. The stadium had chair back seats and seated in excess of 4,000 fans. The back stretch had an imposing wooden wall that must have been thirty feet high. The pits were behind the wall. There were two huge doors that allowed the race cars to enter the track.

The special thing about this evenings activities was that we were going to go early enough to get some photographs and autographs of our racing heroes. We arrived at the track before the pits were open for the competitors. They were all waiting in line when we arrived. Most were flat towed with a tow bar behind a sedan or pick up truck. Some were towed with a tow truck. Nearly all the race cars had extra tires carried inside the race car. I even think some were driven directly to the track illegally. Sponsors on the race cars were usually gas stations, garages or new and used car dealers. The best part was that the race car driver was usually the owner, tow driver and mechanic. So loaded with our box cameras and autograph books it was easy for Jimmy and I to go from one vehicle to another and accomplish our goal of a picture and an autograph. And even back then race car drivers didn’t refuse an autograph request.

What a thrill.

It is a hot, muggy July, 1953 evening in Baltimore. Jimmy and I are eleven years old. We have taken our pictures and gotten our autographs . We have now entered the stadium for tonight’s races. A stop at the souvienier counter to purchase a small plastic replica of a 1937 Ford stock car for twenty five cents is the first order of business. Two racing newspapers are available, Illustrated Speedway News and National Speed Sport News. There is a book titled “The Mighty Midgets” also for sale. There were also replica crash helmets, checkered flags and generic stock car window decals for sale. A race program was available. There were no t-shirts or baseball caps.

There were between 50 and 60 cars in the pits tonight. We would witness four heats, two semi finals. A consolation race and a twenty five lap feature. The show would begin at 8:15. The grandstands were packed with over four thousand fans. The races were sanctioned by NASCAR.

In the field tonight are: Wally (Crash) Campbell of Trenton, New Jersey the 1951 NASCAR National Modified Champion, Frankie ”Fireball” Schneider of Lambertville, New Jersey the 1952 NASCAR National Modified Champion , Johnny “Big Boy” Roberts of Brooklyn Park, Maryland the 1953 NASCAR National Sportsman Champion and Ken (Bones) Marriott of Baltimore, Maryland who would become the NASCAR National Modified Champion in 1957 . A surprise visitor from the outlaw track Dorsey Speedway in Dorsey, Maryland is Elmo Langley. Elmo would one day win two NASCAR Grand National races and eventually drive the NASCAR pace car at Winston Cup races. Rex White, NASCAR 1960 Grand National Champion , would make his first appearance in 1954 and Glen Guthrie, 1959 NASCAR National Modified Champion , would race at Westport in the late 50’s. Johnny Roberts would go on to win the 1960 and 1961 NASCAR National Modified championships. To say that tiny Westport Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland was the “Home of Champions would be a fair assessment .

The heat races went off like they normally do on the tight oval with plenty of beatin’, and bangin’. A few spin outs and the inevitable car getting stuck on the infield telephone pole guard rail. Of course there are the geysers of steam from the old flatheads that overheated. The semis were run without incident and the 22 car consi was a nightmare as wrecks were the order of the day. The feature was next. The drivers are lined up according to their position in the point standings. They are inverted with the number one point man starting toward the back of the field. Schneider, Roberts, Marriott and Campbell will start towards the rear. The green flag waves and the race is off and running. Schneider, arguably the best dirt driver of all time) passes 6 cars in the first lap. He’s weaving in and out of traffic like a New York taxi driver. On lap 6 a bombshell. A pink ‘37 has put Johnny Roberts in the yellow and black number 111 into the fence. The local hero is done for the evening. Roberts had been following Frankie through the field to the front. Several laps later Junior Tauber , a gas station owner from Linthicum, Maryland would park his car in the baseball dugout along the third base line. It takes some time for the wrecker to get Taubers number 115 out of the dugout. A few more spins and the twenty five lap feature is in the record books. Schneider wins over Ken Marriott. Langley gets a top 10 along with Wally Campbell. Other finishers tonight include Junior Tauber, Danny Woolford, Harry Erbe, Bobby Tester, Buzz Haymire, Duke Martindale, Pee Wee Pobletts, Bucky Guilfoy, Ed Lindsey, Ace Canupp, Cannonball Poore, Lou Thomas, Walt Martin, Reds Kagle and others. What a night. Watching Schneider drive a modified is like watching Jim Brown, a great fullback for the Cleveland Browns, run with the football. Poetry in motion. I would imagine that only the Good Lord knows how many races Frankie won in a career that spanned five decades. He was always special to me because he won the first race I ever attended and put me onto a love of stock car racing that has remained with me for all of my 64 years.

To cap the evening off, Jimmy and I scoured the grandstands for programs and racing papers left behind by others. That was one of the special things about Uncle Jim, he always allowed us the time to accomplish these tasks without rushing us out of the track. Thirty minutes later I was home and in bed reliving the night’s races over and over. It was many years later when I started going to the pits after the races that I found out there were arguments and fights and a lot of beer drinking that was part of the drivers experience. What a day, what an era. Memories are made of this.