HOGANSVILLE — While all the multimillion-dollar teams of IndyCar and NASCAR were gearing up last week for big Memorial Day weekend showdowns, 88-year-old Roston “Pappy” Powell was out in his front yard putting his beat-up Bomber-class car back together again.
His ride, the simplest kind of full-sized race car, isn’t pretty. Its 1979 Monte Carlo body is painted red, but that’s a mere undercoat for all the rust-colored clay thrown at it during a season of dirt-track racing. Powell just turned a year older and hasn’t gotten around to changing the number on both door panels yet. So it is a bright yellow 88 on one side and 87 on the other. In freehand, his wife has painted the names of his pit crew members on one roof support. Top of the list is his trusty Jack Russell terrier, Pettie.
“It runs good on the track, but it looks like crap,” he chuckled.
He had that thing running so sweetly a week ago at the three-eighths-mile track in Senoia that he blew by them all, despite starting at the rear of a 10-car field. “It was a fireball, man. It was flying,” he said.
The crowd at Senoia Raceway went wild, their cheers building when Pettie hopped out of the car and, with tail wagging at 80 mph, delivered a small diecast model to a child in the stands.
“It was like Pappy won the Daytona 500. He got a standing ovation,” said Kevin Horton, a witness and fellow driver.
The second race followed a different script. Powell was out front by himself until the bungee cord that he employs to keep the gear shift lever in place worked free and the car slipped out of gear entering a turn. The resulting spinout and crash rearranged the rear end of ol’ No. 88/87.
John Stiles, director of the Indiana-based America’s Short Track Association, could not remember a case of driver as old as Powell winning on any track. Even more peculiar, he said, was a man that age doing all the hard, menial work required to keep a car running at this subsistence level of the sport.
Unlike the rolling billboards at today’s Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600, this beat-up old car is sponsored by nothing but a seven-decade-long love of trying to go faster than the next guy.
This beat-up old driver, born in Boston, Ga., has been involved at the gut level of racing longer than anyone. He’s a storyteller of the first rank and very likely a character more colorful than any of those on display at this weekend’s big races.
So, for a moment, imagine yourself sitting next to Pappy in a squeaking swinging chair out front of the home he built from the bones of two truck trailers. Try to hear his words as they are poured out like South Georgia cane syrup.
“My first race [1939], me and my brother went up to Albany [Ga.]. They had a track there called Suicide Circle. We went out there and nearly got killed the first time out. You know how you are when you’re a kid [just 15] — you ain’t got sense for nothing, no how.
“We didn’t have no safety belts, no roll cage, didn’t tie the battery down [it was next to the driver]. That first race, I turned the car over and that battery put me in the hospital. It beat me up flying around in there.
“I got out of the hospital and I was determined to make that thing go. I got pretty good at it after a few years.”
Powell was married for the first time at 17 and wasted little time starting a family. He had eight children. By the time he was 23, living in Tallahassee, he already had picked up the nickname Pappy around the track, but not because of his own brood.
“I got down and didn’t have any money to do this racing. So I took my old street car and started playing around at the drag strip. Any kid in the car got in free. Every kid in the neighborhood came and crawled on my pickup to go to the races on Sunday. They got to calling me Pappy. Boy, I hated that name then. I wasn’t old enough to be called Pappy. I’m old enough to wear it now.”
He moved around plenty, a truck driver by trade who has called Georgia, Florida and Texas home at various times. Fifteen years ago, he settled in Hogansville, about 55 miles southwest of Atlanta.
Throughout his travels, racing was the one constant.
“I’d drive a truck all week long, come home Friday night and work on the race car, get it ready to go Saturday night and then tear it to hell in 10 seconds.
“It’s a way of life. I’m 88 years old and never drank, never got into dope. These damn ol’ race cars have been my dope.”
Wrecking is an inevitable part of racing. Powell has gotten sideways and upside-down more than he cares to remember. His most serious wreck happened 27 years ago, in Dallas, while driving a faster model sprint car. His right arm was mangled so badly that he could no longer compete in the speediest classes. And to this day, he drives mostly one-handed.
“I’ve been hurt real bad in these cars. Anybody who gets in a car and says that they don’t get scared at times, they got something wrong with them.
His life off the track has had its share of adventures. At 65, having been long divorced and involved in a series of casual relationships, Powell met his second wife while living in Coolidge, Ga. She was an 18-year-old named Brenda.
Brenda told him how she had noticed him around the neighborhood and at the track. He told her she looked way too young. He wanted her to prove that she was of legal age, and to do it in front of a witness. Their first date, he said, was a meeting with a deputy outside a convenience store.
“The sheriff said, ‘How old are you little lady?’
“She said, ‘I’m 18.’
“He said, ‘You got any proof of it?’
“And man she had it. This girl was unbelievable. She threw out there her driver’s license, her birth certificate, her divorce — I didn’t even know she had been married — and a birth certificate for a little 3-month-old baby. I didn’t know she had a baby.
“That sheriff let out the biggest laugh, looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Powell, you know what? Every 65-year-old man ought to have this kind of luck to have an 18-year-old girl fall in love with him. She’s grown. Ain’t nobody’s damn business but yours and hers. And she’s been there with me ever since.”
Powell will “race you like an 18-year-old,” Horton said. Tim Moses, the owner and GM at Senoia Raceway, said of Powell’s May 19 victory, “He put it on them; he went for the lead and didn’t let up.”
Powell has won so often — he can’t produce a precise number — that earlier this year he cleaned out a room and took more than 150 trophies to the dump.
“How do I keep racing? It’s the want-to. If you want to do something, you find a way to do it.
“I’m no smart man; I’ve just been at it awhile. When you stay at anything long enough, you learn something.
“I guess my reflexes are pretty darn good. I can’t tell much difference in that than in years back. But I do get tired. I can run these races, but if I had to get out and walk around, I don’t know how many laps I’d go.”
All the buddies with whom he began racing are long dead. He is at an age, maybe even past it, where the kids start taking away the car keys. Yet, it was one of his sons who talked Powell into continuing to race when he was contemplating quitting three years ago. Racing keeps you alive, his boy told him.
By Friday afternoon, Powell had his red Bomber put back together, ready to race the next night.
“I guess I’ll keep doing it until the good Lord takes me or fixes me so I can’t do it anymore.”
