HR: Is that the bicycle that’s inside, that’s been restored?
JM: From what I have heard, that is the bicycle that he rode from up here all the way to Lakewood to see the drivers run there. So it’s wonderful that we have people that are so interested in racing that they will do what he’s done and made the investment he’s made, but what I like most about right here is not the past 40 years in racing, but we go back into the late ‘30s, the ‘40s.... pictures on the wall showing how racing really started. And that’s what we.... the Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame Association as well as LLOAR is most interested in. We’re trying to bring back the past and put it in print, put it on tape, that the race fans of today can look at those things and see where racing started.... really, on the short tracks, the dirt tracks in this country.
HR: Jimmy, let me ask you something, ‘cause I was 11 years old when my father took me to Macon, Georgia, to the Central Georgia Fairground and the racetrack there by the ball stadium. The year was 1951 and you were calling the races, I remember.
JM: Central City Park in Macon, and you mentioned the fairgrounds. See, that’s where we used to run.... was the fairgrounds over the country. Same thing in the Carolinas, same thing in Alabama. In fact, they still have an asphalt track now at the fairground in Birmingham. But there’s one thing for certain. We love to go back where it started and where it’s come to today.
I was telling somebody at breakfast this morning that, when they first built Jeffco Speedway at Jefferson, Georgia, just out of Jefferson, we ran a Grand National, which is called Winston, of course, now run a Grand National race there. The purse was about $5,000. Cale Yarborough won it. Well, he was another generation of drivers coming along at that time, but in the top eight or ten drivers, I’d say, it started at maybe a hundred dollars and went up to a thousand dollars. Cale won a thousand dollars. But the men from there back that was in the race....they didn’t get a whole lot, maybe enough to get home and maybe not enough. Some of them had tore up their racecars.
The sad part about it is, in the early days there was no money. I remember at Lakewood Speedway when you used to pay two dollars to get into the fairgrounds at Lakewood. Then if you sat in the cement grandstand they had, you’d pay an extra dollar and a half. Three dollars and a half to get in the grandstand at Lakewood. That’s the reason all the hills were filled up with race fans from over the country. They could afford the two dollars but they couldn’t afford the buck and a half.
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