The first race was still three hours away, yet knots of fans were already lounging in the shade outside the gates on portable furniture, preparing high-cholesterol food beside their pickups, refueling for the long night of action. The sun was shining on a late-summer afternoon. The big trailers were rumbling in, towing the decaled racecars — the ones that resemble giant wedges, speeding doorstops. The air was redolent of grease and the unmistakable smell of a clay racetrack.
This was Grandview Speedway, a rudimentary third-of-a-mile high-banked dirt track nestled in the flyspeck town of Bechtelsville, Pa., amid rolling farmland 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia. In operation for 56 years, Grandview bills itself as “the greatest show on dirt.” Saturday night they run NASCAR-sanctioned modified stock cars under the lights, $15 to come watch. The roar of engines hammers your ears as the drivers slide their racers sideways through the turns, spinning up whorls of red dust. Speed merchants, my father liked to call them, back when he took me to the races decades ago.
Already on the grounds, patrolling through the pits where the racecars were parked, was Jeff Ahlum. He was 55 and had on crisp shorts and a T-shirt and carried his favored drink, Mountain Dew. Drivers waved at him familiarly. Fretful mechanics were draped over humming engines or spread-eagled beneath the rears of inert racers. Clutching his familiar clipboard so he could scribble down the latest dope on the competitors, Ahlum talked shop with the men who knew his voice all too well.
Ahlum was the track announcer, the play-by-play man, the voice of Grandview Speedway. Friday nights he was at Bridgeport Speedway in New Jersey, where he called microsprint races. He also handled the mic for an 18-race series for the modifieds called the Short Track Super Series, which traveled to assorted Northeastern tracks. All told, he calls about 75 races a year, making him one of the busier auto-racing announcers in the area.
Before making it up to the announcing tower to get the races going, Ahlum lingered to hear out one last driver. “What’s going on?” he said, his reflex welcoming remark.
“Nothing,” the driver said, giving a shrug.
“Nothing, huh?”
“Well, nothing until I win it tonight.”
Ahlum let out one of his ringing laughs. He had heard that one before.
The announcing tower juts atop the grandstand, overlooking the start/finish line. It’s a narrow, glass-fronted affair with linoleum flooring, abraded in places. Taped to the wall are the booth rules: “Keep door closed,” “Be respectful at all times,” “No swearing.” This is Jeff Ahlum’s principality.
“A pleasant good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Grandview Speedway. Beautiful evening here in Bechtelsville,” he told the crowd of some 1,500. “Don’t forget to visit the concession stands — get your fried Oreos, the loaded fries, a pulled-pork sandwich. Make sure you pick up something good to eat and drink this evening.”
He added a plug for Shankweiler’s Drive-In, the oldest remaining drive-in theater in the country, which was handing out free passes to the first seven fans who came to the booth and named a movie playing there. Quickly, bodies were moving out of their seats.
Ahlum delivered the invocation, thanking the Lord for the gorgeous evening, offering prayers for America’s servicemen, for a safe night of racing, for a safe trip home, all in Jesus’ name. The national anthem played. Then it was time to race. The first heats for the modifieds were set to go, brief preliminary races that would determine qualifiers for the 30-lap feature.
Squinting against the sinking sun, Ahlum read out the lineups. The drivers were as young as 14 and as old as mid-60s. Many boasted colorful nicknames, bestowed on them by fans, crew members or even by Ahlum himself. The Threat. The Catfish. The Richland Rocket. The Handler. Big Sexy. The Temple Tornado. The Ultimate Underdog. The Bechtelsville Bullet.
To level the competition, a track handicapper arranges the lineups so the best drivers start farther back. Jeff Gromis, the handicapper, told me, “You want your hot dogs back in 12th, 13th, 14th, so you get a lot of passing.” Points earned in each race determine the season championship. They are also used for handicapping purposes. The Grandview system, Gromis said, was to take the points already won by drivers and divide that figure by the number of events raced and put drivers in inverse order of their totals for the heats. For the feature, the top 16 finishers from the heats start in inverse order, with last week’s feature winner placed last among them, penance for being too good. The other qualifiers fall in behind them according to their heat finishes. Certain drivers are reputed to game the system by running sluggishly for a few weeks to merit a front spot in the next feature.
The heats packed plenty of action. Cars bunched tightly, compressing themselves into the minimum space. The racers averaged about 85 miles per hour and surpassed 100 miles per hour on the straightaways.
“Hold on to your hat on this one,” Ahlum announced. “Two to go. This one is not for the faint of heart!”
And: “Some heavy contact going into the turn.”
And: “Into the turn, look out, couple of cars get together.”
And: “Three wide, throw a tablecloth over them. Whoa, whoa and whoa!”
As I watched, absorbed, I heard in memory my own father’s voice spilling out of the loudspeakers, the rhythmic roar of the engines. The enchanted evening my father asked one of the champion drivers at Old Bridge Speedway to take me in his stock car for a couple of careful laps around the track, the most amazing moment of my young life. The fury of speed as the scarred modified sucked up the asphalt, controlled by a sun-roughened man with muscled arms who was my hero. I felt as if I might fly away.
My father, Nat Kleinfield, was a racing announcer, too, a career that found him by happenstance. His own father was killed by a horse while he was crossing a street in Philadelphia, and he dropped out of school following eighth grade to help support the family. He worked with his brothers at a deli before landing a job at a television equipment manufacturer. He also installed public-address systems. One evening, he was wiring up a P.A. system at a local racetrack featuring motorcycles when the announcer called in sick. The track promoter, who had heard my father’s mellow voice testing the equipment, asked him to do a favor and fill in. He did, and was on his way.
In the 1930s, well before I was born, he announced motorcycle races on cinder tracks, including at Yankee Stadium, and open-cockpit midget-car races at places like the Nutley Velodrome in Nutley, N.J. It was a steeply banked board track — in effect, a giant wooden bowl — built for bicycle races. Boisterous crowds turned out, but its time as a site for car races was brief, only the 1938 and 1939 seasons, because it proved to be hideously dangerous and was shut down after the deaths of several drivers. My father also announced football and basketball games, boxing matches, bicycle competitions and rodeos, before devoting himself exclusively to auto races.
Sometimes my father would work at four New Jersey tracks on consecutive nights — Pine Brook, East Windsor, Flemington and Old Bridge. Pine Brook was a tiny track that hosted three-quarter midgets. The others were half-mile tracks that held races for modified stock cars, which were old reworked passenger cars. (Today they are purpose-built for racing and look like nothing traveling on a highway.) My father also announced at a mile-long track in Trenton that put on several Indianapolis car races a year. Every February, my parents took my sister, Dawn, and me out of our New Jersey school, and we drove to Daytona Beach, Fla., where my father was one of the announcers. He began there in the 1930s, when races were run on a course that stretched along the highway and passed across the packed sand on the beach. (The storied speedway didn’t open until 1959, the same year the Daytona 500 started.) Racecars that veered out of control sometimes were swallowed up by the ocean.
Beside announcing upward of 150 races in some years, my father also handled publicity for local tracks. He wrote a column, Speaking of Speed, for a racing paper, and hosted a radio show, “From the Pits.” During winters, when the Northeastern outdoor racing season was dormant, he announced smoky, three-quarter midget races inside armories in New Jersey and on Long Island.
From the many races I attended, I came to appreciate the power of voice to the sport — how an announcer could sort out the chaos on the track and turn it into a cohesive narrative for the crowd, interpreting its nuances and significance. Track announcers had been around forever, back before P.A. systems existed, and “leather lungs,” as the announcers were known, called races through megaphones. In the 1930s, Ronald Reagan announced auto races in Iowa. The more I went to races, the more I realized that the announcer was an indispensable talent.
Knowledge, my father believed, was the responsibility and the reservoir of a good announcer. Always he showed up on race night several hours early. He dallied in the pits with the drivers and car owners, listening to their aphorisms and sussing out nuggets of information. Updates on their successes or failures in recent races. Changes in their cars. Flare-ups between drivers. Marriages, births, divorces, anniversaries and particulars of the jobs they held away from the races, the microevents of their lives. Material that he shared to tickle the crowd’s interest. He told them that a racer had once been Harry Truman’s driver. That another entered the sport after winning a bet with teenage friends over who could flip his father’s car by driving in circles. He told of driver superstitions: peanuts in their shells were bad luck, as were green-colored cars and shaving before a race. He’d learn about a badly injured driver, saddled with hospital debt, and he’d announce that fellow drivers would be passing through the stands with their helmets, and if they had spare cash, please put it in.
My father was gifted with a mellifluous voice. He knew when to bring it to a pitch of excitement, watchful to not overdo it, to avoid exciting the crowd when there was nothing exciting happening. He never oversold a race, but neither did he undersell it.
This separated him from announcers who babbled endless skeins of words, believing that they, not the cars, were the attraction. Other announcers talked too little. Some announcers thought they were Laurence Olivier performing King Lear. Some were screechers. My father recognized when to hush up and when to inject some juice into the evening.
One thing he didn’t countenance was a promoter’s instructing him how to do his job. A prime example was a mercurial figure who would repeatedly hound him with inessential advice. Having reached his boiling point one evening, my father hurled the microphone at the man. It bounced off his chest as my father told him sharply: “If you know so much, you announce.”
I thought my father was going to be fired. Instead, the promoter sheepishly stooped to retrieve the mic, handed it back to my father and shut up.
I liked the fact that my father didn’t have the usual job. My friends had fathers who were dentists and appliance repairmen and factory foremen. They marveled at the fact that my father announced car races. When I was in grade school, he showed movies he had taken of races to my class. This beat a lesson about fractions and put him in high regard. His was a life telling others about men cheating death as they chased each other around an oval. I thought it was an exhilarating life.
[Read about the culture wars of car racing.]
“Some announcers don’t announce the sponsors,” Ahlum said. “I try to. The sponsors like to hear their names, and the drivers want it. The sponsors keep the cars coming back. Some announcers come here and start announcing and never visit the pits. Not me. Why announce the hometown? Someone in the seats hears it and says, ‘Hey, that’s my hometown.’ And there’s a connection.”
This was at Bridgeport Speedway, in Logan Township in southern New Jersey. Bridgeport is actually three tracks coiled inside one another, like nested boxes. The outer track is five-eighths of a mile, inside of which is a three-eighths-of-a-mile oval, which in turn contains a quarter-mile track. Tonight, Friday night, the microsprints would race on the inner oval.
Following habit, Ahlum had arrived three hours before the first race. Under a rippled gray sky, a water truck circled the track, moistening it. Ahlum clumped up the steps to the weather-beaten announcing booth to set up. Opening a laptop, he showed me his copious statistics. The track electrician had written a program for him. He clicked through the pages, and the drivers appeared in alphabetical order along with their points toward the season championship, wins, top fives, top 10s, best finish to date and worst finish to date, to go with geysers of other stats. He also kept the drivers’ hometowns and the ever-important sponsors among his clipboard notes.
We went down to the pits. Drivers approached, asking the usual favors. Announce a mechanic’s birthday. Please welcome my sponsor back from vacation. Touring the pits with Ahlum was like visiting the abeyant ghosts of my childhood. I saw in the expressions of the drivers the stars whom I once worshiped and who were my father’s friends: Tasnady, McLaughlin, Schneider, Beavers, my saints of the dirt.
Ahlum greeted a familiar face: “Hey, that new car’s going pretty good.”
“Rolling,” the driver said.
Ahlum nodded at the identical twins who alternated driving one of the sprint cars. “I can never tell them apart,” he said. “Impossible.”
Instead of abiding by a handicapping system, drivers drew numbered poker chips from an empty can for starting positions in the heats. One driver, bemoaning his awful draws, wanted Ahlum to pick for him, but he begged off. Another driver usually had his girlfriend draw. She routinely fished out superior numbers. But they had broken up, and he lamented that he had to use his untested fingers. Another driver had his mother pick.
“Who has his mother draw for him?” Ahlum said to me. “What if she draws a bad number, do you yell at your own mother?”
Unlike television play-by-play broadcasters, short-track announcers don’t earn cushy incomes — the pay typically ranges from $75 to $200 a race. Even the most prolific also need a day job. Ahlum works at the production facility for Richland Mill, a feed store on the main drag in Richlandtown, Pa., where people come to buy dog food, bird feed, fodder for their steer. He oversees grain delivery and the mixing and packaging of feed.
Ahlum is single and lives with his father, John Ahlum, in his childhood ranch house on the fringe of Quakertown, Pa. John had been a farmer, working a 150-acre farm that had been in his family for generations. He had cows and grew soybeans, hay, corn.
While in his teens, John and some buddies built a stock car, piecing it together from a ’33 Ford coupe. After finding themselves a driver, they towed it to a track outside Allentown. They won the first race they entered, making them think they had found a destiny. They never won another, making them realize they hadn’t. Soon they returned to being spectators.
John began taking Jeff to the races when he was 3. As he sat in the grandstand, the wailing cars amazed him. But so did the announcer. “Some races seemed more exciting than others,” he told me, “and as I got older I realized it was the announcer.”
His own debut came unexpectedly. In 11th grade, he was at a school basketball game. He was taking a public-speaking course. They did no announcing during the games, beyond the starting lineup. The teacher handling it was hoarse and asked Ahlum to fill in. Next game, same thing, and then the teacher said, “Just keep doing it.” That was the beginning, lineups: “Starting at point guard …” Soon he expanded to additional commentary. He first called races in 1991, when he did announcing for video recordings at Penn National Speedway. In 1993, Susquehanna Speedway hired him as the track announcer. He moved to Bridgeport in 1999, adding Grandview in 2014.
The crowd was sparse on Fridays at Bridgeport, barely 200 people and two dogs tonight, the sprints much less popular than the stock cars that ran on Saturdays. This meant fewer officials were on duty. Besides announcing, Ahlum was in charge of flipping the lap number on the infield sign. And he had to work a separate mic that communicated with the drivers in their cars, telling them when they had to be ready to start, when there was an accident, giving them restart positions.
Drivers are expected to tune in to the channel at all times, though Ahlum knows that some switch to the P.A. channel to hear him announcing, looking for an edge. They might hear Ahlum mention that a car directly behind them has sneaked to the inside, so they’ll steer down to block him.
The hour had arrived, and Ahlum picked up the mic and said, “It’s time for racing.”
He gave some news: “Attention all kids 12 and under, the first 50 kids going to the water-ice stand will get a free water ice, courtesy of Dopke Racing Team.”
Through the ebb of the heats, Ahlum made a point of highlighting driver bonuses available that night. Each division has designated poker nights on evenings in which the finishers get a card — ace for first, king for second, down to a two for 13th place. After five or six events, the driver holding the best poker hand gets a cash prize. Once, a driver did no better than three 13th-place finishes, but the set of twos took the money.
The racers looked like oversize spiders on wheels. Ahlum described them “charging into the turn” and “angling into the turn” and “dicing through the turn.” In one heat, a driver made an improvident move and three cars collided, one flipping on its side. Red flag out, halting the race until the mess was cleared.
“All drivers are O.K.,” Ahlum reassured the crowd.
It’s often said that many race fans come to see crashes. Ahlum has seen three drivers killed, one while he was announcing. In June 2013, during a heat at Bridgeport, something broke on the front suspension of Jason Leffler’s sprint car. Leffler smacked the wall and flipped. “I didn’t say much,” Ahlum said. “I said the ambulance crew is extracting the driver. New Jersey police has to investigate.”
The crowd stilled. It was a grisly scene. The racecar lay on the front stretch, a banged-up reminder of a life’s end, until the police arrived. That took about an hour. The rest of the program was canceled.
My father dreaded accidents. He watched friends of his die, saw their coffins go into the ground. He admired a young talent named Bobby Marshman, helped him find a ride for Indianapolis, where in 1964 he led the big race before breaking down. Later that year, he attended Marshman’s funeral after he was killed in a tire-testing accident.
My father told me of announcing a race when, after a grievous crash, he watched in horror as what he feared was a driver’s head rolled down the front stretch. Thankfully, it was a helmet. Weeks later, he witnessed an almost identical incident. This time, it wasn’t a helmet.
I was touring the pits with my father when he fell into a conversation with a young driver about the sport’s dice-roll dangers. The driver made his point by saying: “Ever hear about the honey badger? Scrappy little guy, so brave he’ll attack a lion. That’s what drivers are, honey badgers. We can’t help it.”
One sultry afternoon during the summer of 1966, my father and I were driving home in thin traffic from Trenton Speedway. As he eased our maroon Pontiac LeMans into a tollbooth on the Garden State Parkway, the attendant motioned for us to steer farther right. The left-side tires were squealing against the curb of the toll lane. I thought little of the incident at the time, my father’s uncharacteristic misjudgment. Only later did I realize it was an early symptom of the first of a series of strokes.
On a night not long afterward, I overheard him confess to my mother that he was having trouble summoning the names of drivers when he was announcing, and found himself hesitating uncertainly. A few weeks later, at an East Windsor race night, I noticed my father fumbling over names. Names I knew well. Names he knew well. I felt a quivering in my stomach. His memory, such an important element of his success, was deserting him.
His throat was chronically sore. He tried different sprays. Still he found himself growing hoarse. The most prized possession of an announcer, the feature without which he no longer qualified as an announcer, was being stolen from him: his voice.
Over the next few years, more strokes attacked him, chipping away at his mind. He could no longer announce a race or even drive a car. Men he had mentored took over the microphones at the tracks he once ruled.
Alone, I continued to go to some auto races, but something crucial was lost for me, relegated to the grandstands instead of the announcing booth, listening to a voice that was not my father’s. By the time he was 59, my father couldn’t speak. In 1970, at age 60, he died. He had been a man of a million words. He left this world not having uttered a single one in more than a year.
Almost all the speedways my father worked have vanished, too, those snug worlds of whining racecars now displaced by interchangeable chain stores, housing developments or, in one case, a cookie factory. According to Allan E. Brown, author of “The History of America’s Speedways,” the number of tracks peaked in the U.S. in 1953 at some 1,275 ovals and road courses. Over the last 20 years, they’ve been disappearing steadily, to 900 or so in 2018, the bulk of them short ovals. Racing remains popular, though attendance has dwindled appreciably. Far fewer teenage boys prefer tinkering with engines when they have e-sports. Significantly fewer teenage Americans even bother to get driver’s licenses now. One longtime racing hand mentioned to me how he became troubled when he noticed fans negotiating the grandstands with walkers.
As the crowds have thinned, so have the purses, at least relative to what it costs to race. At Grandview, winning the modified-stock-car feature pays $2,750, and prize money is carved up between owner and driver. (Finishing 30th at the Daytona 500 pays around $350,000.) All the cars are backed by sponsors: Horning’s Archery & Fishing, Merkel’s Shoes, Conestoga Valley Custom Kitchens. Sponsor money, though, only partly defrays expenses. A new modified, meanwhile, costs around $40,000 to $80,000. It could last a few years, or no longer than one unplanned encounter with a guardrail. Almost all the drivers hold everyday jobs during the week. Plumber, welder, electrician, roofer, water-plant operator, fabricator, car salesman, landscaper, postal worker. One driver is a morning talk-radio host. Another manages a nuclear power plant.
When it came time for the Grandview feature, the 28 modifieds crawled around the track on their pace laps, aligned in formation two abreast, their engines rasping. As they did so, Ahlum dove into his familiar pitch. “Who do you think’s got the hot shoe tonight?” he asked the crowd, and that perked them up.
He rattled off name after name, the favorites eliciting whoops and howls of approval from the savvy fans. Craig Von Dohren, Jeff Strunk and Duane Howard, the track’s “Big Three,” were starting deep in the field — Howard in 20th, Strunk in 21st, Von Dohren in 22nd. Their devotees got loud when Ahlum asked if one of them might own the hot shoe. Drivers with slim followings drew mirth or boos that drilled through the night air. It was a mouthy, dressed-down crowd, and Ahlum had them at pulsating attention. By now, they had been here five or six hours and, yes, they were wound up all right.
As the jumble of cars rounded the fourth turn on their final pace lap, Ahlum exhorted the fans in a singsong pattern: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s wave at them as they go by. Get out something white, something bright. Something red off your head. Something yellow that says hello. Something blue off of you. Something black off your back.”
And the crowd did just that, dutifully pulling out and waving handkerchiefs and hats and flags and sweaters and who knows what, while the fire trucks on crash duty flashed their lights and Ahlum himself flapped a handkerchief at the restless racers.
The green flag fluttered. With explosions of power, the cars tore into the first turn, a swarm of flying doorstops, and the earth trembled.
Howling down the straightaways, the racers topped 100 miles per hour, full tilt, circling the entire speedway in just 13, 14 seconds. The swirling dust coated the bulbs in the light stanchions, making for a cindery darkness with the night now all the way in.
Ahlum kept a story going, the contours and drama of the race. He muted his observations when the action was obvious. Short-track races are barely controlled frenzy, and sometimes you just let the frenzy howl. I thought of my father, who would have done it just like that, and more than ever felt hurtled back through time.
Here was Ahlum: “A three-car battle down the backstretch, Von Dohren moving high. We’ve got a big herd of racecars behind him. Gular leads.”
And: “We’ve got a spinout. A spinout at one.”
And: “Four cars under a blanket now for second. Look at that battle for second.”
Power-sliding through the banked turns, the modifieds rubbed against one another, shuffling positions, claiming territory. Ray Swinehart, a grizzled racing veteran stuck in a lengthy victory drought, grabbed the lead.
The feature reached its final laps, Swinehart in control, his challengers fading. As the checkered flag flew, he was the winner. Though they never got near the lead, the “Big Three” had made gigantic moves, rewarding their fans. Von Dohren finished sixth, Howard seventh, Strunk eighth.
The races over, the noisy stands emptied into the milky darkness. The racecars, freckled with dirt as if they’d been through a mudslide, were shoved back onto trailers to be hauled home. Ahlum began packing up.
“Congratulations again to our winners tonight,” he said, having told all there was to tell on a Saturday night at the races. “Have a safe trip home. Thanks for coming. And as always, it’s been our pleasure at Grandview Speedway U.S.A.”
N.R. (Sonny) Kleinfield is a freelance writer and former reporter on the Metro staff of The New York Times. At the paper, he wrote on a wide variety of subjects, and his feature “The Lonely Death of George Bell” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of eight nonfiction books and is currently at work on a book about a New York emergency room nurse.
Source: Read Full Article