THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996 TAG: 9603030176
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EDWIN SLIPEK JR., SPECIAL TO THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long : 226 lines
Andy's Barbecue and Ribs in Mechanicsville serves up Southern cooking, not celebrity sightings. But don't tell that to the women who cornered Paul Sawyer there recently.
``We can't wait until March,'' they said excitedly. ``Can we have your autograph?''
Delighted, he obliged. Elvis couldn't have pleased them more.
Aside from Tony Bennett and Paul Newman, there aren't many septuagenarians who make middle-aged women swoon. But then, no one but Sawyer delivers a world-class sport to Richmond with all the accompanying glitz and glory.
When the green flag falls at Richmond International Raceway at 1:15 p.m. today, it also will fall on Sawyer's 41st consecutive season at the helm of his personal field of dreams on Strawberry Hill.
With 83,000 seats, the track is Virginia's largest sports facility - Virginia Tech's football stadium is a distant second at 50,000. The speedway also holds the record for largest sports crowd ever assembled in the state.
But perhaps most impressively, at a time when communities nationwide are debating the financing of sports facilities, it can be noted that Sawyer built the track entirely with private money.
Today, packed stands will groan under the weight of wildly loyal enthusiasts who've paid up to $60 for a coveted seat. Thousands of additional fans will crane their necks from the infield. But most importantly, temporarily deafened fans will leave the Henrico County raceway hungry for more.
Will Sawyer, who turns 80 this year, kick back? Hardly. He'll shift gears to promote his next major race weekend in June, a USAC Triple Header weekend slated for broadcast on ESPN's ``Saturday Night Thunder.''
``You have to stay on your toes and keep fighting all the time,'' he says.
And growing: Henrico County has approved eventual expansion to 125,000 seats.
Sawyer also may establish an automobile museum at the track.
``He is extremely visionary,'' says Sean Sawyer, 28, one of Sawyer's three grandsons who work for the family-owned operation. ``And he will work a circle around you.''
The speedway's headquarters are an encampment of office trailers anchored on a sea of asphalt just beyond the track's sweeping aluminum bleachers.
On every available surface of Sawyer's office, mementos from a half-century in racing vie for space with some of his 200 clocks: eclectic creations in styles ranging from Chippendale to Art Deco.
What a visitor doesn't see is Sawyer's fleet of vintage automobiles - 20 cars including a '64 Cadillac Fleetwood, assorted muscle cars and even the 1954 Cadillac limousine in which the late Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr. was chauffeured about. The collection is stored at the raceway and eventually may be shown at the automobile museum Sawyer would like to build.
The office walls are plastered with posters and photographs: Sawyer with former Gov. Gerald Baliles; Sawyer with Gov. George Allen. All of Virginia's governors since Mills Godwin (except L. Douglas Wilder) have made pilgrimages to Richmond International Raceway.
The phone rings again and Sawyer takes another call. It's his gold dealer. Oh yes, Sawyer also collects coins and antique watches.
``It's gotten out of hand,'' he says of his collecting mania.
``I've worked all my life,'' he explains. ``I was never envious of other people, but I always thought to myself, `If they can do it, I can do it.' But it (material things) was never an obsession. I delivered papers. I jerked sodas. If I wanted a bicycle, I worked for it. If I wanted a car, I worked for it.''
What Sawyer wanted most, however, was to be around race cars, race drivers, raceways and race fans. Most of his life he's worked to be able to do that.
He gazes at a large, sepia photograph on a wall and gets almost reverential.
Even without the viewer knowing the time, place or people, the photograph portrays a magical, golden moment. Afternoon sunlight filters into a wooden shed. A few relaxed-looking young men sit on a hard wooden bench. One has a beer bottle, suggesting they've just finished racing. But nobody is sweating, and the guys wear casual summer attire - not the logo-emblazoned, heat-sensitive uniforms racers wear now. The young men stare clear-eyed and earnestly into the lens. There is obvious camaraderie.
Sawyer says this prized possession was shot in Darlington, S.C., in 1963. He draws his chair closer and identifies Junior Johnson, Jim Paschal, David Pearson, Glenn ``Fireball'' Roberts and Joe Weatherly. What makes the moment all the more poignant is that Roberts and Weatherly would be killed in separate crashes the following year.
``There was friendship then,'' Sawyer says, looking intently at the photograph, ``It was close-knit. Everybody was close. After races we would go to a restaurant and party. Or after a race, 20 of us would go out - racers, tire manufacturers, spark-plug representatives. They don't have time for that anymore. I miss it. Even here at the racetrack I can go into the garage, but I don't bother the racers.''
While Sawyer has witnessed, played a part in and profited from stock-car racing's tremendous growth - he won't reveal the track's annual revenues: ``That's between me and my tax man'' - he mourns the lost simplicity of the old days.
``The amount of money involved now is horrendous. An engine can cost $40,000 or $50,000. Heilig-Meyers will spend $3 (million) to $4 million-plus this year,'' he says of the Richmond-based furniture retailer which sponsors a racing team owned by Richmonder Junie Donlavey.
``The reason you see Tide on a car out there is not because the company president loves racing,'' says Kenneth Campbell, the track's vice president of public relations and marketing. ``It's a marketing department decision: They know the demographics of who is in the stands.'' Forty percent of the fans in the stands, Campbell explains, are women.
``It's like everything else,'' says Sawyer. ``It's progress.''
Sponsorships, demographics, marketing - much has changed since racing first captured the young Sawyer's heart and energies.
He was reared on Norfolk's Claiborne Avenue, within sight of the Elizabeth River and a short distance from the shipyards.
His father was a furniture cabinetmaker - ``I never remember him without a job or without putting food on the table,'' he says. His mother was a homemaker who looked after the children: Paul, four daughters and eventually another son, 17 years Paul's junior.
As a teen, Sawyer was obsessed with one thing: automobiles. Every chance he got, he'd scamper out the back door and zip down the alley to the Tadlock family's garage. Most days, brothers John, Eldridge and Monk Tadlock, in their 20s and 30s, could be found at work building open-wheeled race cars.
Spotting the wiry Sawyer again, John Tadlock would snap: ``Get home.''
Sawyer would leave. Inevitably, Eldridge would intervene and pull the youngster back in.
``Gizzard, I thought I'd told you to leave,'' John would yell exasperatedly.
Eldridge would intervene again.
``Eldridge was my hero,'' Sawyer says, shaking his head at the recollection, ``Cars fascinated me and I was mechanically inclined.''
After leaving Maury High School in 1933, Sawyer joined Norfolk Farm Supply Co., where he worked on engines. Evenings and weekends he helped a family friend build race cars. In 1939, Sawyer took at job as a salvage officer at the Norfolk Naval Air Station.
Norfolk had two racetracks in the '40s: Virginia Beach and Princess Anne speedways. About this time Sawyer started building race cars with a fellow Norfolkian, Joe Weatherly. In the early '50s, Weatherly asked Sawyer to invest in a speedway in Wilson, N.C. With a $5,000 investment, Sawyer took the raceway ownership, management and promotional plunge.
Sawyer also became involved in the Virginia Beach Speedway on Virginia Beach Boulevard near Witchduck Road, and in 1955, Sawyer joined Weatherly as co-owner of Richmond Fairgrounds Raceway - the humble dirt-track precursor of today's 83,000-seat facility.
Managing three tracks in three towns while still holding a full-time job was a challenge.
``It was a schedule, but racing was in my blood,'' Sawyer says. ``A lot of my help back then was volunteer. We'd leave work at 3 or 4 o'clock and work on cars or go to the speedway. But I went home every day and had dinner with my wife and children.''
By 1960, events conspired to cause Sawyer to sharpen his focus on Richmond. On Easter Sunday 1958, a fire wiped out the Wilson track, and by 1960, escalating rents at the Virginia Beach speedway and lack of expansion space for parking made its continued operation unfeasible.
Sawyer took early retirement in 1965 and devoted his full energies to racing.
The fortunes of stock-car racing, a sport that legend claims grew out of bootleggers trying to escape the law, changed dramatically in the late '60s when broadcast advertising by cigarette manufacturers was banned.
``When that happened, Winston came into the sport,'' the Richmond track's Campbell says. ``That brought a lot of national credibility. And Winston agreed that if they were going to go into the sport, they would help develop it.''
Campbell says television producers became interested and introduced a far broader audience to the sport: ``People came out and got totally enthralled - they came out as skeptics and got hung up on it.''
In 1968, the Richmond fairgrounds dirt track was paved with asphalt to accommodate a faster generation of cars and drivers. Paving upgraded the facility, but it still didn't allow Sawyer to put the thousands of extra seats he knew he could fill around the three-quarter-mile, D-shaped track he had envisioned.
Sawyer's landlords, the not-for-profit Atlantic Rural Exposition, had consistently rejected major expansion. Its corporate culture centered on horses. Says Campbell of stock-car racing at the time, ``It wasn't accepted by the establishment that this was for real - a bunch of guys in black leather jackets and grease up to their elbows.''
``It wasn't their thing,'' says Sawyer, ``They didn't want the tail wagging the dog. But we were a major league sport operating in a minor league facility. We had old outhouses in the middle of the field like in the country.''
Sawyer looked beyond Richmond to build his dream track. In 1975, he tried to open a track in Prince George County.
``I fought the Environmental Protection Agency, wetlands restrictions and everything else,'' he remembers. After eight years he threw in the towel.
By 1980, he had set his sights on building in Dinwiddie County, but after two years of planning, interest rates were too steep to make the project feasible.
In 1986, he had an option on 12,000 acres in Isle of Wight County. ``It looked rosy,'' he thought at the time, but it didn't pan out.
``There was this tremendous growth in the sport, and then there was me, struggling, struggling struggling. It irked me that I couldn't do it. You get everybody's blessing and then there are more hoops. I'd ask myself, `God, is it ever going to happen?' I knew if I didn't build it, I was never going to be happy.''
Finally, in 1987, Sawyer again approached the Atlantic Rural Exposition for the sixth time to allow him to build a new track at the fairgrounds: `` `You're going to have to let me do something or let me go with y'all's blessings.' ''
``I never wanted to leave here,'' Sawyer says, adding that Richmond's amenities such as restaurants, hotels and highway access would have been all but impossible to duplicate in the rural locations he'd explored.
Sawyer got the green light. He says he financed the project by ``going into some debt'' and selling a chunk of the family-held stock to a friend. (Sawyer says he repurchased the stock within 18 months.)
``He's an entrepreneur with a big heart who's a gambler down deep,'' says Wyndham B. Blanton, Jr., a former president and longtime member of the exposition's board. ``Selling the dreams of a gambler is a tough sell. It was a sales job. When he first started, Paul was bringing something that had no roots, and (the exposition's) board members traditionally came from Main Street. They would probably all jump at the chance today.''
The old fairgrounds raceway was demolished, and a $4 million construction of the present facility began. Today, Sawyer estimates the total investment at the raceway represents about $25 million.
``He was always pushing,'' says Donlavey, a NASCAR car owner who has known Sawyer since the '50s. ``He always had enough confidence in his ability that he would succeed at it. He could foresee what was going to happen before it happened. His view of the future was so good. It was amazing he was able to put it all in action.''
But most importantly, says Donlavey, ``He's a people person. He loves to be with people, and he's a fine gentleman and a caring person. He always wants to know how other people feel. He is always there to help you; he never, ever wanted to take advantage of you. You don't meet a lot of people like that.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JAY PAUL/Landmark News Service
Paul Sawyer is surrounded by racing memorabilia and other treasures
in his office at Richmond International Raceway.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY AUTOMOBILE RACING by CNB