Date of Story-09/06/2010
Scene of Story-Oswego Speedway
By Ben Roberts
Ben Roberts and Eddie Bellinger
It all started when I was not quite ten, some time between 1991 and 1993. My family and I were on a summer trip though the upstate New York area. We had been to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Howe Caverns in Schoharie County, and seen the Finger Lakes Region. Friday night we even got to go see the dirt cars run at Canandaigua Speedway, then up to the Steel Palace in Oswego for Saturday. The Oswego Speedway, a 5/8th pavement Goddess that would start a long love of the most powerful short track cars in the world for me.
It was just a regular 45 lapper for the methanol fueled non-winged Wonders. But believe me at that age, the night is long enough to keep a young mind active. I remember looking at the track from the front gate and thinking, wow this place looks like a coliseum, with the grandstand roof raising high from East Albany Street. Mom, dad, my brother, sister and I all followed my grandfather into the track; he and my mother knew this place well. You see my mother and grandfather had been coming here for many years, they would make the weekly trips up to the Big “O” every summer, from about 1970 when the Supers stopped running regularly at local London, Ontario tracks Nilestown and Delaware, until I was born in 1984.
Sitting there under the front stretch grandstand roof snacking on the famous fried dough, or maybe a juicy Hoffman hotdog, I was in awe of the shear speed, ear-shattering roar, and the smell of those big block engines burning off that methanol fuel as they ran off the laps. Watching the likes of Doug Heveron, Eddie Bellinger Jr., and long time racer Bentley Warren. My mother and grandfather talked about the legends of the Speedway from years past, between breaks in the action. Legends like Jimmy Shampine, “Irish” Jack Murphy, ”Stormin” Norman” Mackereth, Harvey Lennox, Warren Coniam, and Kempton Dates. [Read more...]
Popularity: 8%
