Quote: Hey Joe, good seeing ya again. Got any funny stories about the brand-X guys? Particularly the Grump?? Dick was mentioning something about a midwest match-race.
Mike,
This is the type of stuff that someone could write a book about... The best I can do right now is to take some of this stuff a little at a time.
When it comes to Jenkins, I'm not sure exactly what story Dick told, but my memories of him were that his nickname was very appropriate - 'da Grump. Jenkins' cars only looked really good the first day of the season. After that they went downhill. Dick and I took great pride in keeping the Missile pristine and so did a lot of other teams especially Sox, Landy, Grothier, Bagshaw, Vanke, etc. Jenkins - not so much...
One of the guys in brand X world that was really fun to race against was Nicholson. Don was absolutely a dedicated soul but you could most definitely rattle his cage. Carlton mamaged to convince Nicholson at Bristol one time that he (Carlton) was just going to get up to the tree and "leave" on Nicholson. Well, those two met in the final and poor old Nicholson starts pulling into the lights - lights up the top bulb and just flat takes off - RED LIGHT!!! We all got quite a laugh out of that!
There are a number of other stories that are probably left best untold if you know what I mean, but over the next couple of weeks I will try to gather up some of those old memories and post them here for everyone to get a few chuckles over.
