Racing is a Family Affair

By: Travis Naughton

Watching Sunday’s Daytona 500, I couldn’t help but think about my mother Donna, the person most responsible for my lifelong obsession with automobiles and racing. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve watching racing with my mother and my brother Blake at dirt tracks in the 1970s and ’80s.

My earliest recollections of racing are from attending weekly races at Kirksville Raceway. Among my favorite drivers was a man named Larry “Pee Vine” Pipes, who was the uncle of a classmate of mine at La Plata Elementary School. Pee Vine had a long and successful career, but more often than not, a driver named Sonny Findling managed to take the checkered flag—often by putting his competitors in the fence—much to the chagrin of my dear old mother, who booed Sonny so vociferously that she could easily be heard over the sound of the roaring race engines.

See more in this weeks Boone County Journal