- - - - - - - Way to go, Cale! I miss drivers like him. Don't much care for the whiny boys on the NASCAR circuit now, or the fact that they don't race at N. Wilkesboro, Rockingham, etc. - - - - - - - Yarborough's country roads taking him to Hall of Fame By Ron Green Jr. SARDIS, S.C. Cale Yarborough's lake sits just a short walk from the back porch of his sprawling one-story house and it's evidence of what a soon-to-be 73-year-old man can do with his own bulldozers, backhoes and belief in himself. There are many things of which Yarborough is proud. There's his marriage of nearly 53 years to Betty Jo, which produced three daughters and six grandchildren. There's a thriving Honda dealership in nearby Florence, S.C., other business interests and a 4,000-acre farm that's been home for the past 35 years. There's his success as a stock-car driver that is about to put him into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. A half century ago, Yarborough was part of the sport's founding generation of racers who learned to drive on country roads that snaked in and around the small-town homes they left, but to where they always returned. He won 83 races on NASCAR's top circuit (sixth all-time) and was the first driver to win three straight series points championships. Yarborough will make the 100-mile trip northwest to Charlotte for Friday night's induction ceremony where he plans to spend most of his five-minute speech saying thank you to as many people as he can. Then, he'll come home to his family and his business and the 30-acre lake he dug and filled himself in the heat of seven summers. The lake, of which Yarborough is especially proud, is stocked with bass and bream and dotted with old growth cypress trees that rise out of the water, giving it the look of a Louisiana bayou. There's a new pier and a pontoon boat tied to the dock. An enormous garage filled with hundreds of tools and the last race car Yarborough drove competitively in 1988 is within sight. "I've been all over the world," he says, "but I've never been anywhere like Sardis, S.C." Lightning, rattlesnake Yarborough comes from a time and place that helped create stock-car racing, small Southern towns where lives were built around their farms, their churches and their cars. He was born and raised just a couple of miles from where he lives today. His name always was tied to Timmonsville, S.C., but that's because Sardis didn't have a post office, he says. Timmonsville and Sardis bump up against each other as much as small communities in the Pee Dee River basin can. Randleman produced Richard Petty, Wilkes County gave us Junior Johnson and dual streaks of determination and competitiveness produced Yarborough. "The thing that separated Cale was he was as tough as a railroad spike," says longtime racing promoter Humpy Wheeler. Yarborough was struck by lightning while standing inside his home in his early teens. "What looked like a big fireball came right across the field, came through the front window, tore the TV to pieces and knocked me across the room," Yarborough says. "I woke up with my mama, my two brothers and the preacher standing there." As a teenager, he also survived a rattlesnake bite and a sky-diving mishap when his primary chute failed to open, his secondary chute opened late and he landed in a soggy field. He later spent time at a hospital when a tree limb broke when he was raccoon hunting, leaving him unconscious for a time. He was introduced to racing by his culture and his father, Julian, who died in a plane crash when Cale was 11. They built a couple of Soap Box Derby cars, but Cale wanted to go faster. He remembers trips to the quarter-mile dirt track in Sumter, S.C., with his father, the thunder of the engines and the fender-banging competition practically reaching inside him. The two talked of going to watch the first Southern 500 on Labor Day in 1950 at nearby Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, about 20 miles away, but never made it. A year later, a 12-year-old Yarborough snuck in to watch the second Southern 500. "I saw the drivers and smelled that smell ... ," Yarborough says. A football offer Johnson learned to drive hauling moonshine over mountain roads. Yarborough got his training racing between tobacco fields from Sardis to Timmonsville. The narrow, sandy road where Yarborough learned to drive hasn't changed much in those 60 years since Yarborough first got behind the wheel. When he rounds a corner in the dirt road, giving a visitor a tour of where he's spent most of his life, Yarborough points to an overgrown patch of land. Among the trees and weeds is a rusted piece of metal, part of the shell of the house Yarborough lived in the first six years of his life on the farm where his family grew tobacco, cotton and corn. He was a good enough football player at Timmonsville High that Clemson recruited him. He later played semi-pro football and got a letter from the NFL's Washington Redskins inviting him to try out. But he wanted to race. After several failed attempts at starting a career, he left home in his early 20s for a time to live in Charlotte, earning $1.25 an hour sweeping floors at Holman-Moody's racing shop in the early 1960s and waiting for a ride. Plans for a new race team with Yarborough as the driver fizzled, but he decided to live in Charlotte to be around the racing business in hopes another opportunity arose. Soon it happened, his first victory coming in Valdosta, Ga., driving for Kenny Myler in 1965. He raced against Petty and Bobby Allison and David Pearson, all in the Hall of Fame. When Dale Jarrett and Rusty Wallace came along, he raced against them, too. Never a gifted mechanic, Yarborough instead almost inherently understood how to handle a race car, coaxing speed from it with will and determination while driving through traffic. Short track or superspeedway, Yarborough didn't care. "He was a purebred driver," says Darrell Waltrip, who will enter the Hall with Yarborough. "Cale drove with his heart." The first NASCAR driver to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine after his 1977 Daytona 500 win, Yarborough helped stock-car racing break from its regional boundaries and become a national sport when he got into a fight with Bobby and Donnie Allison at the end of the 1979 Daytona 500, the first live national telecast of a NASCAR race from start to finish. If the racing hadn't captured the nation's imagination, Yarborough's fists did. Yarborough and Donnie Allison were racing for the lead on the final lap when they wrecked. Moments later, Bobby Allison stopped to check on his brother and wound up in a fight that many credit with helping popularize NASCAR. Bobby Allison says Yarborough "wrecked" his brother and when he came to check on Donnie, "Cale went to beating on my fist with his nose." Yarborough, naturally, has his own version of the story. "I had Donnie set up to pass him and win the race, but when I got by him, he ran me off the racetrack," Yarborough says, smiling at the memory. "Watch the film. It'll show you exactly what happened. It made me mad enough to fight, and that's what I did." Echoes of the past On Thursday, Yarborough begins his day with one of his two weekly visits to his Honda dealership in Florence, a 15-minute drive from home. He wears blue jeans, cowboy boots, a dark blue shirt and sleeveless fleece vest. His blond hair has turned white and reading glasses dangle from a chain around his neck. His upstairs office is filled with trophies and photos from his racing career. One photo shows Air Force One landing beside Daytona International Speedway with Yarborough's race car in the foreground, leading the Daytona 500 that President Ronald Reagan attended in 1984. Driving home to what he has named Cypress Branch Plantation in his white pickup truck, Yarborough apologizes for the bumps in his long driveway caused by tree roots growing under the pavement. His wife, Betty Jo, is preparing to go exercise and tells her husband he'll have to fix his own dinner because she has circle meeting at church that evening. The nearby schools Yarborough attended are gone but Sardis Baptist Church remains. He's still a regular there. His mother lives about a mile from his house, just off Cale Yarborough Highway. "She's not home today," he says. "She's at work (at a dry cleaner). Ninety-one-years old and going strong." When he passes two bulldozers he used to dig the lake, Yarborough looks at them like they were his first car. He dug the lake in the heat of recent brutal South Carolina summers, a tolerance that helped him as a driver. He drove before the advent of cooling suits and power steering, meaning he wrestled cars in 130-degree heat, muscling them through turns and traffic. As Yarborough's white truck makes its way back down the long driveway at home, his dog, Annie Mae (named after his mother), runs alongside. A cool wind is blowing a blast of winter across Yarborough's lake and soon it will be racing season again. "Some of these guys now, they have houses all over. They have places in the Bahamas," Yarborough says, the winter wind turning his cheeks pink. "This is my Bahamas right here." He doesn't go to many races these days, preferring to avoid the crowds and watch on television at home, napping occasionally. When he is inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame on Friday night, Yarborough says he hopes he will be seen for what he is. "I hope they see a country boy who found something he loved and he was successful at it," he says. "I'm still that same guy." link: http://www.thatsracin.com/2012/01/15/80741/yarboroughs-country-roads-taking.html
I was watching live when Cale got into it with the Allisons in 1979: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXbHQtZH8dE
You betcha I love Buddy! First racer to break the 200 mph mark and I like him as a commentator. He raced flat out all the time and usually did well if his equipment held up.
