ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702070014
SECTION: AUTO RACING PAGE: 22 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
Writing about the life of H. Clay Earles is like Earles himself, like driving on his half-mile race track. You have to just keep going and going ...
One of the pioneers of stock-car racing is like the Energizer bunny in one way. Earles uses batteries ... in his hearing aid. And when that doesn't work - as it didn't at a recent interview - he removes the device, takes a pocketknife to it, blows into it and fixes the problem.
``I'm kind of from the old school,'' Earles said.
Well, he is, and he isn't. He quit during his freshman year at Bassett High School. Got tired of walking three miles each way every day. He hasn't gotten tired since. The Martinsville Speedway founder has slowed some, although his wit hasn't.
You might use the word ``cantankerous'' to describe Earles. Just don't say ``can't'' around him. His dictionary doesn't include that word. He was told years ago that he shouldn't pave his track. He was told that with the Virginia Piedmont's limited population base, the speedway never would survive, much less prosper.
Well, here Earles is, at 83. Here his track is, at 50, with 70,000 seats, NASCAR sellouts and $1.2 million-plus purses for Winston Cup races.
``I've always thought that if you're not going forward, you're going backward,'' he said.
He has been given up for a goner under his wrecked car, survived a speedway fire he tried to extinguish himself, somehow avoided electrocution when the speedway well house blew up and lived to talk about a 1975 coronary thrombosis.
``Clay Earles is an individual who's always had kind of a need to do it his way, not that that's bad at all,'' said NASCAR President Bill France Jr., whose late father and family have been intimately involved with Earles and his speedway since the track's opening. ``His track has been a key one for NASCAR over the years, and Clay wasn't only interested in that. He brought other tracks into the NASCAR family, too.''
Earles is as tough as trying to pass on his oval. One of his familiar lines is, ``If I say I'm going to do something, I will do it, even if I tell someone I'm going to give him a whipping.''
He has a permit to carry a gun, has for years, and owns a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson. When asked if he's toting his gun, Earles sometimes will answer, ``Do I have my pants on?''
``Clay Earles is one of the old-timers,'' said Paul Sawyer, the owner of Richmond International Raceway and himself 80. ``I've been at this a long time, but not as long as Clay. He's hardheaded, and I say that in an admiring way. He's either going to do it, or he's going to explode trying to do it.''
How many of the younger drivers on the rich Winston Cup circuit know of Earles or his pioneering for their sport isn't obvious. But their forefathers, literally, have tremendous respect for Earles.
Talk to Richard Petty about the Martinsville chief, and arguably the greatest driver in NASCAR history begins his answer, ``Mr. Earles ... ''
That's a proclamation by The King, folks.
Red-letter day for Clay
``Memories?'' Earles said. ``I have a million of 'em.''
None, perhaps are as vivid as the first race at Martinsville, on Sept.7, 1947.
``We advertised a dust-free track,'' Earles said, sitting in his speedway office. ``We advertised in good faith. Then by 30 minutes after the race had started, it looked like the atomic bomb had been dropped here. Red dust everywhere, 100 feet high.
``We had people who came here right from church, ladies in their Sunday best. It seemed like a month after that, every time I took a bath, the water turned red. I thought I'd never get the dust off me. I've never been so embarrassed in my life.''
Earles also never has been so amazed. The speedway had 750 seats. A crowd of 6,013 paying customers and more than a few hundred freebies watched Robert ``Red'' Byron win. Considering Byron's nickname, it was an appropriate victory.
``I laugh about it now, but it wasn't funny back then,'' Earles said. ``I still have people around here come up to me and tell me they saw our first race. Then they say, `And I haven't been back since.' And the second race we had, we had less than half the crowd of the first.''
When Earles paved the track several years later, he was ripped by drivers who had only run on dirt.
``People said not to pave it,'' Earles said. ``They said we would ruin it. Well, it saved us. I told them, `If I don't pave, I will ruin it.'''
Putting everything into the track
Although the ever-dapper Earles usually wears a white shirt, he certainly isn't a big-city guy. He just talks like it sometimes. He was born Aug.11, 1913, on a tobacco farm in what he calls ``LA - that's Lower Axton.''
Henry Clay Earles was one of four children, the grandson of a Civil War veteran, who grew up appreciating the worth of a dollar. Earles remembers being 3 or 4 years old when a worker on the family's tobacco farm handed him a nickel.
``I still have that nickel,'' he said. ``It was the first money I ever had. I saved and saved it. Saving was always important to me. I always thought, no matter what I earned, that it was important to put something away. That's how we kept this place going for quite a few years.''
Several years ago, Earles had that nickel mounted into a tie clip. When he was 5, he earned his first money by pulling the small sucker leaves off tobacco stalks his parents were harvesting by hand. ``Papa laughed at me when I told him I'd pull them off,'' Earles said. ``I filled three bags, big bags to me, and he took them with him to market.
``He sold them for $3 and gave me the money. I thought I was rich.''
The family's tobacco crop was destroyed by hail a few years later, and so the Earleses changed Henry County addresses, moving to Firestone when his father, Samuel, got a job at a brickyard. Earles went to work in a country store owned by Sam Cardwell. He was 10, and he worked every day after school until 8:30 p.m. and all day Saturday. He earned $1.50 a week, double that for six full days during summer months.
``I learned a lot about honesty from Mr.Cardwell,'' Earles said. ``We used to weigh a lot of things, and he told me if someone ordered a pound of something, be sure to give him 16 ounces - not 15, not 17. Give them what they pay for.
``That taught me that if you're not 100 percent honest, even only 99 percent, you're a little bit crooked. If you're 100 percent honest, you don't have anything to fear from anyone.''
Up from the dirt
Earles got into a sport he helped establish after attending a dirt-track race in Salisbury, N.C., not long after World War II. ``I told someone it might be a nice hobby,'' he remembers.
Earles and his two partners, Sam Rice and Henry Lawrence, made an original $60,000 investment in the proposed track - twice what they had planned - having purchased a 30-acre cornfield.
The late Bill France Sr. of Daytona Beach, Fla., who was to become NASCAR's founder, helped Earles and his partners promote that first race in 1947. When Rice and Lawrence, both since deceased, wanted out of what was a losing proposition in 1949, France joined Earles, whose investment was up to $105,000.
Martinsville didn't run a race that turned a profit until its eighth year of operation. Asked about those years, Earles says, ``We didn't have enough people here to start a good fight.''
Well, times have changed, but Earles still owns 50 percent of the speedway, the other half belonging to the France family. Not long ago, the Earles family was offered $30 million for the entire operation by Bruton Smith, the NASCAR mogul who owns tracks at Charlotte, Atlanta, Bristol and Sears Point, a piece of the track at Rockingham and is opening the new Texas Motor Speedway..
``I told him he was a `toad low,''' Earles said. ``This place is my life. It's my family's life. I've always looked forward to being here with them.''
Since separating from his wife, Mildred, 27 years ago - they've never divorced - Earles has lived in a mobile home behind the speedway grandstands that overlook the finish line. His office door is about 20 yards away. His daughters, Mary Earles Weatherford and Dorothy Earles Campbell, are vice president/secretary and treasurer, respectively, on the speedway's board. They also work in the track ticket office.
Earles is the chairman of the board and chief executive officer. His only grandson, Clay Campbell, is the track president and handles the day-to-day operations. Earles' lone granddaughter, Sarah Campbell Fain, is assistant treasurer and also works in the ticket office. The Frances have two vice presidencies.
Bill France Jr., 63, was a teen-ager when he first met Earles, through his father. The Martinsville track founder still calls the NASCAR boss ``Billy.''
``Clay's family involvement has brought a lot of stability to Martinsville,'' France said.
``Granddad is the last of a breed you won't see anymore,'' Clay Campbell said. ``He's a tough guy, and he protects this place because so much of him is here. We had that fire [in a lounge, from a welding-torch spark] a few years ago. He was here by himself, and he saw it blazing, and he tried to beat it out with his coat and a broom.
``He was lucky he wasn't hurt, or even killed. The speedway is his life. He's a good businessman, but I don't think most people know the side of him that we've seen. I remember having a gas-powered Go-Kart, and I couldn't crank it to get it started because I wasn't big enough. I'd call over here from the house, and he'd drop everything and come over and crank it for me.
``One day a couple of us kids wanted to go to Lakeside [Park], up in Salem. He just stopped what he was doing and took us. Clay Earles was the first person I rode a roller coaster with, if you can picture that.
``In some ways, he's a simple man. Money's not big to him. He could buy whatever he wanted, but that's not him. The thing Granddad did that showed how smart he is was when he decided to reinvest every bit of profit right back into the track, then keep doing it. He just rolled it back, rather than spend it and try to catch back up.
``Paying his debts, not owing people, is big with him. It was tough his first few years, but if he hadn't rolled what profit he made back in, we'd have been playing catch-up for a long time.''
Dick Thompson was a Roanoke newspaper reporter when he was hired by Earles in 1966 as the track's public relations man. It was a first for a NASCAR facility. Thompson isn't family at Martinsville, but he's been by Earles' side longer than some who are. Earles says of Thompson, ``If he tells you something, you can be sure it's 100 percent honest.''
Thompson said his longtime boss is pretty much like the meat and potatoes Earles likes to eat.
``He is a person of contrasts,'' Thompson said. ``He's what I would call a Virginia Gentleman, the nicest man I've ever met, but the toughest man I've ever met. He could be your best friend, but just as easily be your worst enemy, too.
``Clay is a fair person, a very astute businessman. Like a lot of people from his era, he is self-taught. Like here. There was no one who did this before, so he had to teach himself how to do it. He told me when he hired me, `We'll never have a cross word,' and we haven't.
``When he's happiest is when he's building something. He's been building for 50 years. It will never change.''
Ask Earles about himself, and he has a self-description as short as his
``I always thought I was as good as anybody else, '' he said, ``but never better.''
A family man and a family track
Earles was a promoter in the incubator days of stock-car racing when it was necessary to survive. He hammered signs on telephone poles. He cajoled gas stations to put A-frame sign boards at curbs and at roadside, advertising his races. He gave the station owners free tickets as trade payment.
Earles doesn't hesitate when asked what makes for a perfect day: ``A sunny day, a full house, a great and safe race and a bunch of fans going home happy, talking about what a great day they had ... exactly the opposite of the first race I put on.''
His track is the oldest originally owned NASCAR-sanctioned track still in operation. Sawyer hasn't been in the racing business as long as Earles, but his three-quarter-mile Richmond track put him and the Martinsville operator not only in the same state, but in the same state of mind.
``If Clay and I hadn't done what we did, kept making improvements, kept working at it, we'd have been out of business,'' Sawyer said. ``Clay Earles was here before any of us. Short tracks are the backbone of racing. People forget that. Martinsville was here before Daytona, before Talladega.
``Clay is like an old bulldog. He's going to hang on as long as he can. And how many people have a good family operation the way Clay has? That's what makes him special, how much they care about it. These big-track guys, I told Clay one year, `We can't let these guys put our asses out of business.' And I know Clay well enough to know he won't.
``You wouldn't call him a maverick, but he calls a spade a spade. He's stood up to NASCAR before when he didn't like something, and Bill France Sr. was his partner. Clay has always been adamant about two things: You run a good operation; you be fair to people.''
Years ago, when NASCAR drivers met to discuss forming a union, Petty asked Earles if he would attend the meeting. The Martinsville owner agreed. When NASCAR heard of the scheduled meeting, France called a track owners' meeting and went around the table, trying to learn whether any of the promoters would give the drivers an ear.
When France got to Earles, after several other track owners had said they were against a drivers' union, the man who formed NASCAR said, ``How about you, my partner?'' Earles answered, ``I'll be there. If the Good Lord lets me live, I'll be there. I gave Richard my word.''
Earles realized early who was and would be the driving force behind the sport. It was the men on the track. That's why, after a race at Martinsville, even if a driver hadn't won much money, he could count on going home with some cash.
``Mr. Earles was one of the few owners who was a driver's promoter,`` said Petty, whose 15 Winston Cup victories are a Martinsville record. ``At every one of his races, he wouldn't want any driver leaving without some money. Even sometimes when you hadn't driven well, Mr. Earles would come by and give you money.
``I know he was the first promoter to hire a public relations person for the track. He not only ran a track with his family, but it was the kind of track you could take your family to. It was a nice, clean place. The bathrooms there were spotless. You never had to worry about your family when you went to Martinsville.''
Earles' development of his track continued as others built bigger, but not more picturesque speedways.
``Clay used to say that the definition of `superspeedway' was a track with running water in the bathrooms,'' France said.
Martinsville has been called ``the Augusta National of race tracks.'' Earles had roses climbing the outhouses, boxwoods and azaleas in the turns, ducks and geese roaming the grounds. He was ridiculed by other promoters. One said Martinsville ``doesn't look like a race track. It looks like a cemetery.''
There is one word Earles uses often that he never wants connected with his speedway. It's ``unsightly.''
A survivor in more ways than one
Earles is conservative and calculating. He's a Republican, and said he votes that way ``95 percent of the time.'' He's also a survivor.
When someone asks to talk to some of his peers, and Thompson's answer, not flippant at all, is, ``That's going to be tough. Most all of them are dead.''
He is a survivor in the literal sense, too. In the '30s, during a collision on U.S. 220, Earles' car turned over into a ditch. He was driving and flew out when the door opened and the car rolled on top of him. His head went forward next to the opened hood.
``To this day, I can still feel that hot oil running on my face,'' Earles said. ``I thought I was going to drown. A car going by stopped and some men got out. One guy came over, looked down and grabbed my arm that was sticking out. He said to his buddy, `Forget it, he's covered with blood and he's dead.'
``I said from under the car, `Man, I'm not dead. That's not blood, it's oil. Now pull me out.'''
There was the autumn day in 1943 when he went into a Danville eatery. A serviceman who saw Earles called the service-station operator ``a damn 4-F.'' Earles, having just enlisted in the Navy during wartime earlier that day, put the guy through a screen door.
Maybe he didn't go to school very long, but he was around long enough to get into trouble there, too.
``One day a couple of us put a stink bomb in the room, and it was so strong they had to take it outside,'' Earles said. ``The teacher - she must have been about 60 - chewed me out about it, and so I got a little smart with her.
``She swung around with the back of her hand, hit me right in the face and broke my nose,'' Earles said. ``When people are shocked to hear that, I just tell them I deserved it. I learned you don't raise your voice to your elders. You give them respect if they deserve it.''
When the track's cinder-block pumphouse on which he was working exploded, Earles was thrown back into the water. He was fortunate the electric lines snapped, too, because he could have been electrocuted. He dislocated a shoulder and cut a hand. A few days later he removed the stitches from his hand with a pocketknife.
``He's indestructible,'' Thompson said.
Success always in the cards
Whether mechanical or mathematical, Earles can handle it. He prides himself on saying he's never used a calculator, instead doing long division in his head. ``He does it faster than most of us can with a calculator,'' Thompson said.
During World War II, he repaired airplanes in the Navy, where he was discharged at war's end as a Petty Officer Second Class. Learning an experienced mechanic said it would take two days to change a carburetor, Earles set out to do it faster, and got the time down to a day-and-a-half.
His grandson, Campbell, recalls the pre-computer days not so long ago when the speedway's Addressograph machine needed repair or cleaning. Earles wouldn't call a repairman. He did it himself, taking apart the machine, polishing and oiling, and putting it back together in a few hours. He did the same thing on a similar machine at Piedmont Trust Bank.
Earles also is a card shark, although he hasn't played in 35 years.
``I'll tell you why I quit,'' he said. ``Honestly, nobody could beat me.''
His first poker game came at age 16, in an abandoned church in Bassett Forks. He began suspecting he was pretty good at the game when foes began using marked cards. ``I can pick out marked cards today,'' said Earles, who used to play in high-stakes games from Roanoke to Henry County.
He once won $17,500 in a game. Another time he broke a man with only a pair of deuces, because he said he picked up that his opponent had only marked the deck down to the 10s. He quit playing because he found he was gambling too often against his friends, and he didn't enjoy winning their money.
The only time he picks up a deck of cards these days is to do a card trick, and not the one he impressed his sidekick, Thompson, with in the speedway office one day.
``Clay's two daughters and I were here and he said something about a hand of cards,'' Thompson said. ``So, he dealt them, and we told him how many we wanted. Then he told us to lay down our hands. One of us had four jacks. One had four queens. One had four kings. Clay had four aces.
``Then he said, `This is why you shouldn't play cards.'''
The work still isn't done
Earles' ``hobby'' of 50 years ago was a gamble, too. After quitting school, he went to work for the Stanley Furniture Co. at a quarter an hour. ``My first raise was to 271/2 cents an hour,'' he said. He worked for other furniture manufacturers in Roanoke and Martinsville before opening his first business, the Broad Street pool room, where there wasn't much to pocket during the Depression.
He bought the Boat Landing Service Station and ran that for three years, then opened Martinsville's first drive-in restaurant, the Travelers Inn. ``I couldn't boil water without burning it, but I learned to cook real fast,'' Earles said. He also bought The Spot service station and began speculating in real estate.
Asked what would have become of H.Clay Earles had he not gone to that race in Salisbury a half-century ago, he said, ``That's a tough question. ... I do know this. I feel like whatever I would have chosen to do, I'd have been successful. Anyone can make something work, if they think hard enough and work hard enough. I've always thought that.''
Worked, he has. He hasn't taken a vacation since going to Cuba in the pre-Castro days of 1959. His speedway office's paneled walls are lined with memories and virtually every award in motor racing. The turn 2 tower at Martinsville is named for him. No, it wasn't his ego rising to the sky. The naming was a surprise in 1988.
``The only thing he doesn't have is the Hall of Fame,'' Thompson said with a grin. ``You have to be retired or dead to get in there, so Clay might not ever make it.''
Earles' legacy in his sport is more than towers with the gleaming stands above a half-mile oval he built literally from dirt. However, the location of his office in the speedway building says something, too. It's the one closest to the back door. It's also closest to his home.
``Quite frankly, knowing him as I do, he probably doesn't care whether he's remembered in his sport or not, much less how he's remembered,'' Earles' grandson said. ``He's not a big ego. Never has been. He does want what he's done for the sport appreciated. His whole life, at least the last 50 years anyway, has been about making the sport of racing better, about making this place better.
``He always said, `If you're spending money on something other than the business, then you're throwing it away.' He really believes that. Wasting time, he doesn't do.''
He's not a big spender. Earles eats most of his meals at Clarence's Steak & Seafood, just south of the track on 220, or at Shoney's or Hardee's. His favorite restaurant on the road is Morrison's Cafeteria. Asked if there is something on which Earles does like to splurge besides the speedway, Thompson and Campbell agree it's his ``$300 suede sport coats.''
He was wearing one of those jackets the night he tried to put out the lounge fire before calling the fire department. He still has the jacket. It's singed around the sleeves, but, ``I like it, so I kept it.'' He also doesn't want to forget what could have been that night.
``You'll take a chance with your life for something like that,'' Earles said. ``This place is my life. This is all I need. I never needed anything fancy. The Good Lord's been good to me. We've paid our bills. I'm most proud of that. What's important to me is that a man pay his just and honest debts.
``I've enjoyed my life, and I've always looked forward to working here with the family. I know the day is coming when they will inherit everything I own, and then they'll run the place. I'll be gone, but I know who will be running the place.
``I'll never forget the day when someone asked young Clay if he were going to college. He said he went to MSU - Martinsville Speedway University. I always asked the Good Lord to let me do the things I could do to help my family, and I think I have the best family in the world..
``I've enjoyed my life. I can't really remember any part of it I haven't enjoyed. I don't want to be looked up to. I did what I did because that's what I thought I was supposed to do. I just haven't quite finished yet, I guess.''
LENGTH: Long : 402 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. When he was 5, H.Clay Earles earned his first moneyby CNBby pulling the small sucker leaves off tobacco stalks his parents
were harvesting by hand. The $3 the tobacco brought is in Earles'
hat. 2. H. Clay Earles (left) and Paul Sawyer, president of Richmond
International Raceway, have been promoting races for a combined 92
years. They are the two longest-surviving NASCAR Winston Cup
promoters. 3. Clay Earles plays with pals Brownie (left) and Snoopy.
4. H. Clay Earles with (from left) the late Clarence Rogers,
daughters Mary E. Weatherford and Dorothy E. Campbell and track
publicity man Dick Thompson in the early 1970s.