Forum: Oklahomatidbits.com General Forum (go)
Moderators:  /  David Smith Jr

and Thank You too.

I'm not a big history fan of Oklahoma, ya know it seems like we finish in the middle or the back of many positive ratings for states these days, and actually seems like it's always sounded like that.

But in regards to racing history, and dirt slinging cowboys, man we have a lot to be proud of here!

By the way-

David Grace of Carter-Maxwell Goodyear was the head wrench on the two NCRA top five finishers, Carson and Peters.

USAC left town with a little more respect for them "backwoods supermodified drivers" than what they came in with.

Brian,

At the end of '85 The Old Mans health was really bad, he told Shorty and I that he was going to have to cut back but if we wanted to keep going we could take all of the stuff and run, Pat sold the Rich car and trailer to Burt Woodring along with an engine and some spare parts but we retained all of the Gambler stuff and and a couple of engines, Shane came up with a trailer and we still had the Dually so basically we were ready to race. Now it was on Shane and I to finance it, which led to me going to work for Mr Bill. Carbone had approached me at the end of '85 saying that Mr Bill was interested he hiring me but I had blown it off at the time, in December of '85 Pat told me he was shutting down so I went to work for Wooley at his Gambler Store until April of '86 when I went to work full time at CM, man it was tuff I went to Tulsa every Monday and Wednesday after working at CM until 5PM, worked there until midnite or later slept for a couple hours at there house on in the car on the turnpike, then back to work at CM by 8AM worked on the Gambler stuff on Tuesday and Thursday then went racing on Friday, Saturday & Sunday. Shorty was out breaking his hump with WOO, CRA, or Promoting and that is how we afforded to run in '86 & '87. I was lucky I had good people to work with at Mr Bill's, Bill Remy, Mike Vathe, Indian Tom and Mr Bill and his whole family!! On the Gambler side beside myself and Shane we had Sandy Rushing, David Maxwell, Jerry, Bob & Jimmy from CM and Shorty always had somebody that would fall in and help. It was a really fun time we were racing about a 100 nights a year between both teams and had alot of success but the guys that really made it happen for me were guys like Bobby Kraft, Roger Lessekemp, Steve Carbone, Billy Anderson, Joe "Tube" Houke, Bob Ewell, Tony Armstrong, Jerry Stone, Jon Johnson, Carol Nance, Stan Constant etc. That is what made this such a great group of racers we all worked 10 days a week to figure out how to beat the other guy and we had alot of strong rivilries, we fought cussed and disliked one another but to this day I have the highest respect for everyone of the guys from that time and consider everyone a friend dead or alive today!! It will be tough to ever have another group like this era was.

Amen to that.

First pic was Saturday night

and this was from 24 hrs later! LOL