ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997 TAG: 9704180025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: breaking the color barrier: the jackie robinson barrier
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON THE ROANOKE TIMES
CAR NO. 34 was up on its side and Frank Scott's dad was inside.
It was the summer of '62, and 12-year-old Frank was sprinting down pit row at Georgia's Savannah Speedway to make sure his dad was OK.
All he could see was the underside of the blue-and-white Chevy. He and his older brother hit the dirt-packed track, and suddenly the car was tipping back onto its wheels. His dad had crawled from the wreck and pushed the car over.
"Give me some rags," Wendell Scott said as he climbed back in. "Give me some rags."
The front windshield had been shattered. He wrapped the rags around his neck and face. The rags, plus his goggles and crash helmet, were all he had to protect himself.
Then he was off, racing around the half-mile oval as the wind and flying dirt and gravel beat him in the face. Racing had always been a wild sport, but it was hard for Frank Scott not to be frightened for his father. A chunk of metal or shard of glass might fly up and hit him at any time.
Wendell Scott went another 30 or 40 laps before a broken A-frame - which came loose during the wreck - forced him to make a pit stop. His face was slashed and bleeding, but he wanted to finish the race.
"He wanted to fix it and keep going," Frank Scott recalls. "He always wanted to fix everything. We persuaded him to park it for the night."
That was the way it was with Wendell Scott. He never let anything stop him from trying to make it to the finish line - not broken bones, not the specter of financial ruin and not the segregationists who hated the idea of a black man behind the wheel of a race car at the highest levels of the Southern stock-car circuit.
When people called him names, he ignored them. When major sponsors snubbed him, he scrounged for cast-off cars and parts and used know-how and imagination to make them run faster than they should have.
Wendell Scott died in his hometown of Danville in 1990 at age 69. But his exploits are being recalled this spring as the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking of baseball's color line.
ESPN did a special on Scott two months ago. Newspaper reporters have been calling.
Scott's widow and children are glad he's finally getting his due as the only black driver to have ever made a sustained run at NASCAR's Grand National level. But they want him remembered for more than the color of his skin. They want him remembered as a great driver who kept fighting to win no matter how tough the challenge.
"Racism was prevalent then. It's prevalent now," Frank Scott, 49, says. "But he never dwelled on that. It never bothered him. It was like he was invincible."
Greased lightning
The story starts and ends with speed. Wendell Scott hated to sit still.
When Richard Pryor decided to make a movie about Wendell Scott in 1976, he called it "Greased Lightning." He began it with Wendell at age 11, taking up a challenge to race bikes with a white kid.
By the time he was 14, Wendell had his first car, a Model-T Ford that cost $15. He taught himself to be a mechanic by tearing the clunker apart and rebuilding it. He quit school in the 11th grade and drove a cab in Danville to help his mother put his sister through college.
After serving in Europe during World War II, he returned home to find he had no taxi license, thanks to 11 speeding tickets he'd piled up from the same Danville policeman before the war.
He opened a garage but struggled to balance the books. So he began supplementing his income in a traditional Southern fashion: hauling bootleg whiskey.
In later years, he'd sometimes brag on his skills as a moonshine runner, recalling how he dusted off deputies in a '46 Packard loaded with Mason jars. Other times, he downplayed it simply as a way of surviving.
But as had happened with Junior Johnson and many other stock-car greats, the wild back-road chases led Scott to a careeron oval race tracks.
Promoters at a small Danville track were looking for a black driver, hoping the novelty would put people in the seats. Scott recalled they'd had no luck until they went to the police station to ask about fast drivers and were told: "If you want somebody that can drive, you get that Wendell Scott."
On his debut that day in 1949, the largest crowd in the Danville Fairgrounds' history turned out. Scott said the white drivers drew names out of a hat to see who would run him off the track.
They missed their target, but he had other problems. His '35 Ford literally fell apart: His seat fell out from under him, and he had to reach his arm out the door to hold himself up. Then the gas pedal and the throttle broke off.
He had to pull over with just two laps left.
But Wendell Scott was hooked. He kept racing and found himself in direct conflict with the South's Jim Crow tradition.
Jackie Robinson faced constant abuse and unfathomable stress when he broke baseball's color line in 1947. But he at least had a measure of support from the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, the National League and the national press corps.
Wendell Scott would eventually enjoy lots of help from white friends in the auto racing world. But in the beginning, he had to do it almost alone. He had no money, no institutional backing, and his races took place not in the big Northern cities but mainly in small Southern towns where stock-car racing was almost a civic religion.
In the 1950s, he became a regular at the "sportsman" events at small tracks around the South. Some promoters would turn him away because he was black, but he'd keep coming back until they gave in.
Before his first race in Georgia, Scott said, the promoter told him he'd gone all the way to the Chamber of Commerce to secure permission for him to race. The promoter added that he was glad Scott was "light-skinned," and if he stayed in his place, everything would be fine.
The big time
Scott won 128 races in the minor leagues of stock-car racing, including the 1959 Virginia state championship. In 1961, he moved up to stock-car racing's top division, then known as the Grand National and later renamed the Winston Cup.
He blew an engine in his first major race, at Spartanburg, S.C. But he finished in the top 10 five times that year competing against Junior Johnson, Richard Petty and other racing legends. He pocketed $3,240 in prize money.
Then in December 1963 in Jacksonville, Fla., he won his first and only big-league race.
But he had to win it not only on the track but off the track afterward.
When the race ended, track officials called him third behind Buck Baker and Jack Smith.
"The promoters and NASCAR officials didn't want me out there kissing any beauty queens or accepting any awards," Scott recalled years later.
He insisted he'd lapped both Baker and Smith. Scott, Baker, Smith and race officials debated the issue long after the fans had gone home. Finally, according to a 1983 profile of Scott in Grand National Illustrated magazine, Smith said: ``Come on, Buck, let the nigger have it."
"I don't remember saying it," Smith told the magazine. "But I probably did."
After 21/2 hours, race officials finally conceded scorers had missed two of Scott's laps. He'd actually run 202 laps to win the 200-lap race.
As Scott shook things up, fans started to notice.
Many Southern whites still hated the idea of a black man competing against their driving heroes. But a growing number began to root for Scott despite their segregationist upbringing.
In the World 600 in Charlotte in 1964, Scott started 40th and fought his way up to 9th at the checkered flag. Afterward, white fans mobbed him for autographs, shoving pencils and programs in front of him.
`Get him back'
In his early years of racing, Scott said, many drivers tried to run him off the track with their cars; they were angry at the audacity of a black man out-racing them.
During one race, another driver kept banging into his car, and Frank Scott chalked in big letters on the pit board: "Get him back."
His father ignored him. Frank was angry; his dad was letting himself get pushed around.
But after the race, Wendell Scott got out of his car, strode over to his nemesis, stuck his finger in the driver's face and gave him an in-no-uncertain-terms warning. Then he came back and explained to his son: They only had one car, and no money to fix it. He couldn't afford to get into a demolition derby with another driver. He had another race to run, in another town, the next weekend.
"At first the drivers had just as quickly run over me as look at me," Wendell Scott recalled near the end of his career. "They tore me up so bad that I started carrying spare parts." He shared his parts with other drivers when they needed them, and "I guess they figured once a guy was nice to them, it was hard to play dirty."
In turn, some fellow drivers helped Scott with second-hand parts and engines, or stood up for him with promoters.
Once in the late 1960s, Junior Johnson found Scott and his sons stranded along the highway with a broken-down truck.
Johnson, whose car was stowed on top of his truck, slapped a tow chain to the Scotts' truck, and off they flew to the next race - with Johnson's truck pulling Scott's truck, which was pulling Scott's No. 34 on its trailer. All at 70, 80 miles per hour.
In 1969 at Alabama's Talladega 500, Scott decided to join a group of drivers who pulled out of the race, citing unsafe conditions. He needed to race. He needed the money, and he didn't know how he was going to make it home without it. But he decided if he didn't support the others, he'd be "right back where I used to be."
Then Jack Smith jumped up on his running board. Smith was an old nemesis; Scott had accused him in the past of intentionally trying to wreck him. Scott thought there was going to be trouble. But he was wrong.
"He handed me three $20 bills and told me what a man I was," Scott recalled later. "He said if we had stuck together like that years ago everybody would have been better off. That was really a surprise."
Winning acceptance from many fans and drivers didn't put much money in Scott's pocket, though. He still kept hoping he could lasso big-dollar financial backing that would allow him to race at the front of the pack. "I wrote just about every company there was," he said not long before he died. "The answer was always that they would help, but ..."
In 1972, still without a major sponsor even as the cost of racing was soaring, he missed all of the early Winston Cup races. Then Richard Howard, the general manager of Charlotte Motor Speedway, saw him hanging around pit row at Martinsville Speedway. Howard made him a stunning offer: How would he like to drive a Junior Johnson Chevrolet?
Blown hopes
Fans were excited: Wendell Scott was finally going to get a chance to drive a competitive car.
But Scott said it was promotional hype. He said the car that was delivered to him a week before the Charlotte World 600 simply wasn't all that it was advertised to be.
Scott told Stock Car Racing magazine he thought Howard's intentions were honest, "but somewhere along the line somebody who counted resented my being in a Junior Johnson Chevrolet, and Howard yielded to the pressure."
With 80,000 fans watching, Scott struggled to hold his position. The engine blew, and he was out of the race.
Howard said afterward that the deal might not have worked out as well as Scott hoped, but it had been the best thing anybody in racing had ever done for him.
Scott took one last great leap of faith. He put himself in hock to buy a '71 Mercury. He swore it was the fastest he'd ever had.
In May 1973, at age 51, he entered it in the Winston 500 at Talladega. But he didn't make it past the first dozen laps: He and his Mercury were caught in the middle of a 21-car, 180-mph smash-up.
It crushed his car and broke his ribs, his pelvis and his left leg. His left arm was so mangled it needed 70 stitches. He spent 32 days in the hospital.
Four months out of the hospital, and Scott was back in a race car. He placed 12th in Charlotte, taking home $1,800.
It was his last Grand National race. He left big-league racing, he said, $20,000 in the hole.
But he was not forgotten.
Comedian Richard Pryor, looking for a serious movie script, found it in Wendell Scott's life story. "Greased Lightning" was filmed in 1976 in Georgia. Scott earned a modest fee for the rights to his story. He also built three cars for the movie and drove in some of the action scenes.
Some of the facts were given a Hollywood spin - Scott is shown winning the "Grand National Championship" at the end - but the movie did bring his story to a larger audience when it came out a year later.
When "Greased Lightning" premiered in Danville, the city declared Wendell Scott Day.
Over the last years of his life, he drove in a few races at small tracks, always hoping for one more shot. He raced at Franklin County Speedway in July 1984, finishing a respectable 7th.
"As far as being 62, that's clean out of my mind," he said the next day. "I felt as good last night as I ever did in a race car."
Frank and Wendell Jr. thought about following in their father's footsteps. But they'd seen all the financial brick walls their dad had crashed into. Frank Scott found another outlet for his competitive urges: He became one of Virginia's winningest high school basketball coaches, with 300-plus victories.
In the spring of 1990, Wendell Scott was at his son's side as Frank coached his Laurel Park team into the final rounds of the state tournament.
He told a newspaper columnist he was still angry about the barriers that had been put before him. But he was philosophical.
"It wasn't all honey, and it wasn't all bad," he said. "If I was younger, I'd do it all over again."
Against all odds
Two days before Christmas 1990, Wendell Scott died of spinal cancer and kidney ailments. He had just turned 69. Junior Johnson, Ned Jarrett and other big-name drivers came to the little cemetery in Danville where Scott was laid to rest.
They remembered a man who had done so much despite all the roadblocks. He'd faced down racism, run in 495 big-league races, finished in the top 10 147 times, had a Hollywood movie made about his life, put six of his children through college. Johnson eulogized Scott as "one of the finest men you'd ever want to know. His word was what he stood by."
But the greatest tributes had been streaming in for months: Cards and letters and checks addressed to "Wendell Scott, Memorial Hospital, Danville, Va."
Many of them came from white Southerners lauding his accomplishments. Some thanked him for making them think about the prejudices they had grown up with. Scott's widow, Mary, and his children have preserved them in scrapbooks stored in the family's trophy room.
Roger Bass, a jewelry store owner from Hickory, N.C., wasn't the kind to sit down and write a letter. But when he heard about Wendell Scott's illness, he did just that.
Two decades before, when he was 9 or 10, Bass's big brother Johnny had taken him to see his first race at Hickory. In those days, Bass wrote, he'd never been around many black people. "I was afraid and distrustful of blacks and always thought white people did white things and black people did black things."
After the race, he walked down pit row with his brother and watched the racers load their cars. "I remember looking at your car and thinking to myself, that your car and the people loading things on the truck didn't act any differently from the others."
Bass said he learned an important lesson that stayed with him as an adult: "I had to write and tell you that you were a success as a race car driver in ways that you probably never imagined."
Then he added a postscript: "I have a fourteen-month-old son now and I hope he sees people in his lifetime that he can admire for doing something they love, against all odds."
LENGTH: Long : 294 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Courtesy of the Wendell Scott Family. 1. The best raceby CNBcar Wendell Scott owned (above) met its demise in a 21-car pileup
during the Winston 500 at Talladega in 1973. 2. Scott's racing card
(left) reads ``Heroes of Racing.'' color. 3. The Scott family
(above) at the Martinsville Speedway in 1952, including Wendell's
mother, wife and children (from left) Willie Ann, Wendell Jr., Frank
and Deborah. Today, Scott's last race car (right) is parked amid the
weeds behind the garage he operated in Danville. (B&W). 4. ERIC
BRADY THE ROANOKE TIMES. The Scott family today includes Wendell's
widow, Mary (seated), and (from left) daughter Sybill Scott,
grandson Frank Scott Jr., and son Frank Scott Sr. 5. Car No. 34. (no
caption). 5. In 1977, actor-comedian Richard Pryor (right) produced
and starred in ``Greased Lightning,'' a movie biography of Wendell
Scott (B&W). ERIC BRADY THE ROANOKE TIMES. The Scott family keeps an
autograph (above) that Pryor signed to Wendell. color. KEYWORDS: AUTO RACING