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Champion through the years

From the start, Dale Earnhardt drove hard, but he also left his mark on friends.

By KEVIN KELLY

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 22, 2001

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Dale Earnhardt lugged the white refrigerator to every new garage and race shop he ever moved into.

It reminded him of the lean times, the sleepless nights tuning his race car in a cramped Kannapolis, N.C., garage waiting for Gray London to stop by and stock that old fridge with sandwiches and Sun Drop soda.

"I told him one time that I didn't think he had a sentimental bone in his body," London said Wednesday from his home in Boiling Springs. "And he said, "Well, you see that refrigerator don't you?' "

Back in 1974, the year before Earnhardt made his debut in Grand National racing, predecessor to the Winston Cup, London bought a 1965 Chevelle from Harry Gant for $10,000 so that Ralph Earnhardt's boy could compete on an asphalt track.

"We raced to pay the bills," London said. "But Dale would have raced for a bunch of bananas. He didn't care about the money. All he cared about was racing. He was hard-headed and stubborn and determined. I never heard him say there was anything else he wanted to do."

Those are the details the 65-year-old London remembers, especially now after Earnhardt's death in the Daytona 500 on Sunday.

The seven-time Winston Cup champion was buried Wednesday in a private service held for family and close friends at a cemetery in Kannapolis, the Associated Press reported. A public service is scheduled for noon today at Calvary Church in Charlotte.

"We shared a lot of holidays and other times with him," London said. "I guess I knew him when he didn't have nothing. When you come that far with him and know him that long, then they get awful close to you."

He isn't alone -- from the fans who gobble up his merchandise to those who raced with the bushy-haired and always-mustachioed Earnhardt back when he cut his teeth on Carolina short tracks in the mid-1970s.

The old racers have plenty of stories to tell about the young Earnhardt. Many are what you'd expect to hear about someone who later became known as The Intimidator -- blocking, bumping and wrecking. Some, however, aren't like that at all.

"My best memory of him was 1978," said Bob Pressley, a former Late Model Sportsman driver and father to current Winston Cup driver Robert Pressley. "I was running for a championship and we were at Caraway Speedway when I wrecked my car. We had a race at Hickory the next afternoon and there was no way I could've made that race because we didn't have enough time (to fix it).

"Dale told us to bring the car and says, "C'mon to my shop.' So we took the car to his shop and Dale helped us work on it all night long. That was the type of fella he was. He would race you. He would race you hard. But then he was a friend too."

Earnhardt had quit high school while in the ninth grade in 1971 and started racing on local dirt tracks like Metrolina Speedway and Concord Motor Speedway.

By 1973, he had won 48 features. By 1974, his 45-year-old father had died while working under a race car.

That was the year Earnhardt got serious about his career and took Gant's old car and used tires to the Late Model Sportsman division.

Jack Ingram was one of the top drivers in the division at the time.

"What he would do that basically I didn't like is there would be several of us racing for the lead and we lapped him," Ingram said. "But we would lap him and he would rub into us. Now, whether he was just wanting to race with us and try to figure out what we were doing, but he was one of the few that ever did that."

Earnhardt's career took off in 1975 when he got invited to drive for Ed Negre in a 300-lap Grand National race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

He finished 22nd.

"We told Ed that we had won the race," London said. "Ed had two cars and (Dave Marcis) drove one of them, so you know which one Dale drove. For the first race, we were very happy."

Said Ingram: "When he got on those superspeedways, he was probably as good as anybody that I had ever seen. It kind of surprised me that on the small tracks he didn't seem to do very well in the division he chose to use as a steppingstone."

Earnhardt went on to win rookie of the year honors in 1979 and the first of his seven Winston Cup championships the next season. Before his death, he had won 76 races and $41,411,551.

London watched Earnhardt's career progress through the seasons, watched the hard-headed, stubborn kid from a mill town never forget his roots.

Why else would he keep that old refrigerator?

"I guess the things that I remember and always will is that he never gave himself but one choice," London said. "He was a good welder. He was a good mechanic. He was good at a lot of other things, but I never heard him say, "If we can't make it, I'll do that.' He never gave himself that option."

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