Gordon Pirkle, the legendary proprietor of the Dawsonville Pool Room, got a rare treat on Wednesday. He got to sound the siren atop the pool hall twice, once when local resident Bill Elliott’s name was called as a member of the 2015 class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame and again when Fayetteville’s Rex White’s name was announced.
The two Georgians were joined by pioneering African-American racer Wendell Scott, two-time Cup champion Joe Weatherly and 26-race winner Fred Lorenzen.
The old siren that announced all of Elliott’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series wins hadn’t been used since the fall of 2003 when he got his final win, at Rockingham, the same track where his Cup career started. It balked after being idle so long, so Pirkle cut loose with the one he recently installed for Elliott’s son Chase, the current Nationwide Series points leader. Then Pirkle went over to the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame and amped up the shrill sound there, for both drivers.
“I cranked it up wide open,” he said. “They had a meeting going on at City Hall, but they had to take a break.”
For Pirkle, Wednesday’s news was more than siren-worthy. It was an historic day for Georgia’s racing community. Elliott, his late parents George and Mildred, and his brothers Dan and Ernie set about in the 1970s to take on NASCAR’s best, and before long they did. Starting out in primitive facilities, including one shop that was once a school house, the brothers prepared cars in rooms that still had chalkboards on the walls and ran engines on a dynamometer that was exhausted out a classroom window. They struggled in the beginning, racing mostly hand-me-down cars and with only friends and family members for pit crews.
But soon the Elliotts found success, and Bill became known as Awesome Bill en route to 44 Cup victories, 55 pole position wins and the 1988 championship. He also was voted Most Popular Driver a record 16 times.
Elliott who went on to drive for others including Harry Melling, Junior Johnson, Ray Evernham and the Wood Brothers, said he was most proud of what he and his brothers were able to accomplish far away from the current center of the NASCAR world in Charlotte.
“The thing I’m most proud of is we started with a bunch of nobodies and built what we did and accomplished what we did,” he said. “We did it right there in Dawsonville. We didn’t go to Charlotte and buy our way in.”
White’s career was much the same in that he did things his way. He was born in Taylorsville, N.C., overcame polio as a child and began racing in Maryland. He eventually moved to the Atlanta area to be the lead driver for a factory Chevrolet team but spent the bulk of his career as an independent driver/owner. In his racing days he was both the chief chassis specialist and driver, pioneering many of the chassis innovations that are common today, such as jack screws to quickly adjust the front springs of a race car. In a relatively brief nine-year, 233-race career, he won 28 races, 36 poles and the 1960 Cup championship. He was a specialist on the short tracks that dominated the sport in his era and got his lone superspeedway win at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 1962.
He left the sport in the mid 1960s while still one of the top drivers to work as a service manager for Bob Maddox Chrysler Plymouth and later as a truck driver.
“I had to make a living,” he said, explaining that NASCAR racing didn’t pay as well in those days as it does today. Indeed, the last-place finisher in this year’s Daytona 500, Martin Truex Jr., earned $292,311, while White’s career earnings were just $223,511.
In his retirement White has traveled the country representing the sport and his time in it.
“They couldn’t have picked a better person,” Pirkle said of White, now 84. “He never really got the glory in his driving days that people get today. There’s no better person to represent the Hall than Rex White.”
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