As I mentioned before, we didn’t see a whole lot of Frank and Carnie that winter, since they were on the road mostly trying to nail down dates for the 1951 season, to try and make it a little less free form than it had been in 1950. A lot of fall fair dates had already been set, but there were blanks that had to be filled in. It had to be done in such a way that it would keep the jumps between places from being any worse than they absolutely needed to be. Frank concentrated on the fall schedule since he had some contacts in the fair country, while Carnie worked on the spring and early summer season dates, mostly beyond the Mississippi. Those of us in the shop didn’t have much detail about what was going on, but there was a big calendar on the wall in Vivian’s office. When we went over to the dealership to use the machine shop or get parts we’d often take a look and see that it was getting filled in little by little.

Carnie had been a little piqued about how his late fall swing through the Deep South had mostly been a flop, a fair amount caused by lousy weather, which couldn’t be controlled. Now, Carnie wasn’t a racer, but he wasn’t dumb, either, and he could read National Speed Sport News just like the rest of us. But, when he read it, he was looking for different things than we were, mostly opportunities to set race dates, and somewhere along the way he got a big idea. The first I heard of it was when Frank spent some time talking quietly in the corner of the shop with Spud, and then came over to me and asked, "Mel, how’d you like to take a run to Florida for a few days?"

"I’d like that just fine," I told him. "I could stand to get away from this snow and ice for a bit. What’s on your mind?"

"You ever hear of the Daytona Beach NASCAR race?"

Actually, I had heard about it. "You mean those guys running strictly stock cars on the beach at Daytona?" I asked. "You mean they really do that?"

"Supposed to," Frank shrugged. "Carnie thinks it’d be a good place to go and do some politicking and try to sell some dates down south, and I wouldn’t mind getting out of winter for a few days either. I thought you might like to go along and help with the driving."

Well, of course I wasn’t going to say no to a deal like that, and I told him so. But, I didn’t know at the time that there was a little more to that trip than met the eye.

I found out when we left the next afternoon that Vivian was going with us, to help Frank and Carnie out with the scheduling. We were even taking her car.

Now, Vivian was her daddy’s daughter, of course, and I don’t think there’s many car dealers who drive a car of their own. Nine times out of ten they’re driving something off of the lot, usually a good used car that they can put a few miles on without hurting the price, and Vivian was tied in with that deal. What made it interesting was that her car of the week was a ’48 Lincoln with the V-12, basically a big Ford flathead with an extra four cylinders tacked on. It was a fast and powerful car for the day, if a bit on the heavy side, but it was roomy.

I don’t recall Frank or Vivian ever touching the wheel the whole trip. Carnie drove some of it, but I drove most of it; we shared the front seat, while Frank and Vivian were in the back seat, mostly sitting close together. Very close together, as I saw in the rear view mirror. What’s more, they weren’t keeping their hands to themselves very well.

We were down about Cincinnati and it was well after dark when we pulled into a motel. We had two rooms; Carnie and I had one of them, and guess who had the other one? And guess who disappeared into it about thirty seconds after we checked in?

Carnie suggested that he and I go get a beer. "Mel, you realize what this trip is really all about, don’t you?" he asked, after the waitress had brought us a couple drafts.

"I didn’t when we started," I said. "But what I saw in the back seat made it pretty clear."

"I think you’re smart enough to not say anything except that everything was on the up and up," he smiled.

"Well, hell yes," I snorted. "I got that picture right away."

I knew that Frank had been friendly with Vivian for a while, but I never realized that it was quite that friendly. Vivian was her daddy’s only kid, and still lived at home, so it was pretty hard for her to get out and play. Even though she was probably twenty-six or twenty-seven at that point, older than I was, her folks still kept a close eye on her, and probably with good reason since she stood to inherit a pretty good chunk of change some day. Although Frank had been hurting a few years before, he’d had a couple of real good seasons with the MMSA. I didn’t know how good, but good. On top of that, it was a wild enough thing to appeal to Vivian’s sense of adventure.

But for them to get out and get a few days together – and a few nights – was probably pretty difficult, especially since the MMSA still apparently depended on Herb Kralick to some degree. So although Vivian could take off with Frank for a few days, they pretty well had to be chaperoned, at least to keep things on the up and up, especially with Vivian’s mother and possibly with her dad. So, Frank had come up with some chaperones he could trust to keep their mouths shut. As far as that went, I was actually the wild card in the deal, someone closer to Frank than Herb knew, so might not be in on any possible fix. Spud obviously would have been in on any kind of deal like that, but he said he had work to do on the cars so stayed behind.

"Good," Carnie smiled. "We were pretty sure we could count on you."

"Hell, us old motor-pool guys have to stick together," I grinned. "So is this whole thing just to be beards for Frank and Vivian, or are we actually going to see the race?"

"Well, you and I probably are going to go to the race, although I’ve got some people I want to talk to. You can watch the race or whatever you want to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank and Vivian have other plans for that day."

With three or four of us to drive we probably could have pretty much driven straight through, but everyone would have been tired out, and it would have taken away some overnight stops at some motels, which appeared to be the major point of the exercise, anyway. Carnie and I wheeled that old Lincoln south to someplace like Macon, Georgia the next day – going through Atlanta wasn’t all that bad back in those days, not like the permanent traffic jam it’s become today – and we got a nice motel on the beach right in Daytona Beach that night.

Daytona Beach and the race back in ’51 was absolutely nothing like the huge circus it became not many years later. It was still a pretty small town, and the 20,000 race fans or so that showed up filled it up pretty good. It was nothing compared to the 200,000 or whatever they get today, but it was a whole different world to what we MMSA people had been used to.

The motel was pretty nice; it turned out that Vivian had arranged it, through some sort of dealer arrangement with Ford, and I got the impression that Ford was picking up the tab on it. I don’t want to say that Frank and Vivian disappeared right into their room and didn’t see the light of day until we pointed the nose of that big old Lincoln toward home a week later, but Carnie and I didn’t see a lot of them. When we did see them they were pretty close. We mostly figured what they did was their business and let it go at that.

I do recall that one time – well, maybe it was two or three times – Carnie and I happened to see Frank and Vivian on the beach. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit that was pretty hot for that day and age. I don’t remember if tiny two-piece swimsuits had been named bikinis by that time, but even though Vivian’s swimsuit was about the hottest thing on the beach it wouldn’t even come close to being called a bikini today. But back then, Carnie and I agreed that Vivian had one hell of a body and that Frank was a lucky guy.

Carnie and I didn’t pay much attention to Frank and Vivian because we had plenty else to keep us busy. It turned out that Vivian had unintentionally done the two of us one hell of a favor by offering to make the trip in her Lincoln, because that car was something of a honey magnet. I don’t want to say that all the women down there were turned on by it, but there were enough that figured that two Yankees driving that big old luxury car must have enough bucks to be their next sugar daddy, whether for a couple hours or whatever.

For a while we tried to go turn and about with the motel room. That lasted until we picked up a couple of sisters from the hills of North Carolina or somewhere, and the next thing you know we were taking them both on side by side in beds next to each other. As I recall these were two pretty decent looking women if not quite in Vivian’s class. The only problem came when they opened their mouths, because they spoke in pure hillbilly so thick we could barely understand ’em, could have been cut with a dull handsaw. We went at it for quite a while, took a break, and then swapped sisters when we went back to it. It wasn’t the first time that Carnie and I had women in beds side by side at the same time, but the last time had been in that whorehouse in Japan.

I had never been the pussy hound out on the road that Chick had once been. I’d had a little action now and then in the evenings following the races over the summer, but I had more action in one week in Daytona Beach than I’d had all summer on the road. There must just have been something about the racing, the Lincoln, and Carnie, and me that clicked with the honeys that week, but it was a week to remember for a lifetime.

Surprisingly enough, we did do things other than fool around with good looking women with hillbilly accents. Carnie was there to talk with promoters and race track owners, maybe buy them a drink or pass a girl on to them or whatever it took. On the way down, we’d pretty well agreed that I’d take a look at this stock car racing and NASCAR business and see if there was anything likely to come of it.

This was long before they built the big two-and-a-half-mile oval out by the airport in Daytona. The race was run on a goofy course that was part pavement – the beachfront highway, A1A – and part run on the sand of the beach itself. The infield was sand dunes, and you could only see a small part of the four-mile course from any one spot. The course changed between the beach and the road in natural cuts through the sand dunes; the north corner wasn’t too bad, but the south corner was narrow, sharp, and had loose sand. Like anywhere else in those days there wasn’t much to keep the cars and the crowd apart and even during qualifying people would cut across the race course. I still don’t know why they didn’t kill people by the hundreds. I’d raced a lot in the past year on tracks that were just about as safe, although I don’t think we’d run a one of them on a surface that was quite as crappy as the sand part of the course.

I was wandering around in the pits one day before the race, and who should I run into but Goober Buford, who I’d beaten out to win that Jeep race back on Okinawa years before. He and a couple friends had this great big Nash Ambassador that they’d entered in the race, and they were out there practicing and tuning on the car. It turned out that he remembered me, and introduced me to his buddies as "That Yankee that done beat me in th’ first stock car race I iver ran."

It may have been a big race they were preparing for, but chewing the fat, having a beer and talking about the old times was more important just then. I told his buddies that ol’ Goob had run one hell of a race, I just was lucky to have a Jeep that was a little bit of a cheater. Goober admitted that his jeep had been equipped with one of those heads that the Navy repair ship had milled. That got us to talking about stock cars, and I asked right up front why he was running a fat assed Nash, for God’s sakes, rather than a Ford. "Dayum Fords won’t get outa they own way no more," he told me.

Since the girls that Carnie and I had been running around with for the last couple days had hillbilly accents at least as bad as Goober’s, I was a little practiced with it, so the bunch of them almost made sense as they explained what they were talking about. In the couple years that they had been running Strictly Stock – it was called "Grand National" now, the first year they’d used that term – it had become clear that a stock Ford just wouldn’t cut the mustard on the track. There were better cars out there now. Oldsmobile had come out with a big overhead valve V8 a year or two before, and it put out a lot of power, more than enough to overcome the heavy car. Along with that, while the Nash had a six-cylinder, it was a big six and put out a lot of power too – Goober didn’t think it was quite as powerful as the Oldsmobile, but that it handled a little better, especially in the sand. The Fords were just not keeping up. There were only a half dozen or so trying to make the race, and they weren’t doing at all well.

Well, one thing led to another and the next thing you knew I was taking that big old Nash out onto the course. In those days "Grand National" was still pretty much "Strictly Stock," and that car was about as strictly stock as you could get. I mean, the big old bench seats that would lean back to make the Nash the pussy paradise of the fifties were still in it, front and back, and they hadn’t even taken the ash tray out to lighten it up a bit. It didn’t have a radio or a heater, but in those days both things were options that didn’t automatically come on a car. It even had head lights and tail lights, although they’d been taped up to keep down the busted glass in case of an accident.

I wasn’t real comfortable in the Nash – it was a hell of a lot bigger than a midget, after all, and it didn’t even have a seat belt, so I felt pretty naked as I took off around the track. I didn’t push it too hard because I didn’t want to risk piling up Goober’s ride, but it went like stink for those days down the pavement section. The south turn was tighter than hell and pretty rough. The car didn’t feel very happy to me in a full-out power slide through the corner but it went OK, and the run up the back stretch on the beach went pretty good since the sand was harder than I expected. The north turn wasn’t a problem, and I could hang the tail out pretty good going around it.

I only ran three or four laps or so, just enough to get the feel of it, but when I came back to where Goober and his friends were waiting they had some big smiles. "Runs pretty damn good," I told them.

"You just done climbed into ’at thang an’ run within a second of mah time," Goober shook his head. "Cain’t believe you wouldn’t a done better in a few more laps."

"Well, I’ve done a lot of racing since I saw you last," I told him as I wondered just a little bit about what it would be like to take a MMSA midget around that course.

Before it was all over with I’d promised to hang around and help out in the pits for him during the race, and be available if a relief driver was needed, which wasn’t unknown on that track.

When race day rolled around, Goober got a few laps into the race and was running up in the top ten when an accident with some slower cars he was lapping broke out in front of him in the middle of the south corner. He tried to dodge the accident, and did, at the expense of winding up stuck about half way up one of the sand dunes. It took him several laps and the help of quite a bit of the crowd to push that big old Nash back onto the track, and after that he just dinked around until the end, coming in several times to gas up or get fresh tires.

It was hot and dusty out on the track, and the pit stops were a Chinese fire drill compared to today. In NASCAR these days, if you get four tires and a full load of gas in fifteen seconds, it’s a disgustingly slow pit stop, and somebody’s going to get yelled at. I know nobody timed us, but I’d imagine that it took about five minutes to do the same thing. Of course, it took everybody else about the same, so things evened out.

The thing of it was that every time Goober came into the pits somebody would hand him a cold beer, and it was hot enough that he needed it. Of course, beer is beer, and partway into the race Goober was hurting when he came in for gas. "Mel," he said. "I gotta take a leak so bad it’s killin’ me. Run this thing a few laps for me, will ya?"

So, naturally, I got into the thing and drove it for a few laps while Goober tapped a kidney and polished off another beer. It was clear that he was racing to stay in the race, so I didn’t push it too hard, just trying to keep it on the track and not get stuck again. After a while, I pulled into the pits and opened the door – that’s how stock the thing was, we didn’t even tie the doors shut – and got out. Goober got back in, fresh beer in hand, and finished the race. I don’t know where he finished; I could look it up I suppose, but it doesn’t matter now. My driving in the race was probably illegal as all hell and I don’t think it made it into the record books, but I did it just the same.

So yes, kiddies, old Mel actually drove in the big Daytona race, back in the days when men were men and women were glad of it. At the time it was no big deal, but years later it was – I’ve had a few big stares and jaw drops when I tell someone I drove it, and back in the days of the beach course at that. Of course, I’m not quite as quick to tell the story that the only reason I did was so that the main driver could find a place to piss away what was left of half a dozen beers.

If you look in the record books, you’ll find that Marshall Teague won the 1951 Daytona race, driving a Hudson Hornet. Now, in those days, us Ford partisans considered Hudsons to be another one of those fat old granddaddy cars that couldn’t get out of their own way. But, the Hudson factory had come up with a twin carburetor hop up kit they called the "Twin H-Power" and under the NASCAR Strictly Stock rules it was legal. It was also fast enough to win the race.

The Fords finished nowhere in particular. After the race, Frank and later Herb grilled me pretty good about what I’d learned down there. I guess old racer Herb had been thinking about getting into stock cars a little. I told them the truth – that a Ford in those days couldn’t be hopped up enough legally to be competitive any more, and that was about the end of that. I’m pretty sure Herb bitched to the company about that, but he was just one of many that were doing it along about that time. It wasn’t until years later that Ford came up with an engine and a car that could be competitive in stock cars, and Chrysler 300s ruled the roost for several years before that.

But I also told them that I thought that screwing around with factory stock cars was mostly a southern thing. It was mostly a bunch of hillbillies who liked to tear up cars, and that it would never measure up to real race cars like midgets, big cars and Indy cars. I sure booted that one, but it was a long time before I was proved wrong.

Things died out around Daytona Beach about as soon as the race was over with, and a couple days later we had the nose of that big old Lincoln pointed back toward all the snow and ice in Michigan. We took our time and a couple motel stops getting back, and from what little Carnie and I could figure out Frank and Vivian made good use of the night stops, although we never talked about it at all.

I pretty much expected to get a serious grilling from Herb, or maybe Vivian’s mother about what went on while we were on that trip. A little to my surprise, nothing much was said, and no one ever said anything to hint that they thought that the trip hadn’t been on the up and up, what everybody said it was. For myself, I just figured that it was just a fling for Frank and Vivian, that they had the hots for each other and wanted to work it out. About as soon as we crossed the Michigan line it was all business between the two of them again, and I never detected any loving glances or holding hands or anything that would indicate that it had been more than just a one-time affair. But as it worked out, we all had a real good time, and it was a trip to remember.

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