By Bob Gangwer
“Mourning My MARC Times Mentor”
(Reprinted from Wailing with Wing Side Up LIVE internet radio show)
Oswego, NY 02/23/09…..
So I’m sitting here listening to my favorite blues station on iTunes cranking out some Kenny Wayne Shepherd, hoping that Susan Tedeschi or maybe even some hard driving Koko Taylor comes on real soon as well. I’m looking for some inspiration. I know I should be listening to High Speed Radio, but I’m not in a rocking mood right now. It’s an odd feeling I have right now. Not the writers block, that’s pretty common anymore at 41 years old even though I prefer to blame lots of cold beer and methanol fumes for the reasons rather than lack of ability or age. My feeling is remorseful, yet thankful. I feel like mourning, but I am not even sure that is appropriate. I want to write, I feel the urge to write. I know I have something to say, but it seems like it would make more sense only when it stays in my decrepit brain.
I’m sure not all of you know who Dick Beebe was, but there’s probably a few of you who heard of him, many more can thank him for much of what we consider common sense in promoting and safety in auto racing today. Dick was a driving force in all things racing and was a friend to many of the drivers who came to Oswego Speedway to compete down through the years. Dick passed away Sunday morning after suffering a massive heart attack at his home. He was 76 years old.
As I sit here trying to peck out this column, I keep hearing Dick in the back of my unfocused mind saying, “Stick to the facts, and don’t write about crap you don’t know about.” Strange, in a comforting kind of way, that he is still guiding me even in death.
So I’m not going to write about all the stuff Dick did for auto racing because one, it would take up a whole lot more space than we have here, and two, I wasn’t there and privy to all the cool stuff he did. Instead, I’m going to tell you what Dick Beebe meant to me and what he taught me about writing and this business we call auto racing.
Hmm…funny….I’m still worried about space. That was always one of Dick’s pet peeves about my column as well as many others. In fact I can remember calling him one Thursday evening, livid that he would have the gall to cut my column down. If I remember correctly, it was a preview for a pretty big race, it may have been Nationals or even Classic, I can’t remember at this point. What I do remember is being a younger man with more of a temper than I have now getting on the phone and thinking I was going to tell Dick Beebe a think or two about how important I was to supermodified racing. Well by the time I was done, or rather Dick was done with me, I figured out that I would never be as important as I thought I was, that I should count myself lucky that he ‘allowed’ my column in his paper and gave me credentials to get into the races, and that my column ran on too much and took up more room than he should allow because that space was reserved for local race results that people really wanted to hear about. To put it today’s terms; I had been ‘served’ and it was certainly the last time I ever complained about my column being hacked up, at least to Dick.
It’s important for me to say that Dick was responsible for introducing me to many of the people that I know call friends. I grew up reading,(ok from as long as I can remember being able to read), “Dick Beebe’s 5th Turn” column in the ‘Award Winning’ MARC Times Racing News. Thank goodness my dad was a long time subscriber to MARC Times. I remember dad reading MARC Times and saying “Wow Beebe’s on a tangent again.” That seemed to happen about every week. There was a time when I don’t think my father particularly cared to read about who Dick was upset with or what promoter he was currently going after, but it made an impression on me that Dick Beebe must have been someone important, and had a lot of important things to say. I later figured out that it was because he cared. From the bottom of his heart he loved auto racing and did whatever he could to make it better from all angles and many times, as I later found out personally, he would take to task anyone that he felt was a detriment to the sport that he claimed as ‘HIS’.
Really, though, at that point in my life, I didn’t care so much about what Dick Beebe had to say and I was years away from having anything important to say myself. What I really cared about, what made me love the MARC Times the most is the photos. I would dig and dig through the paper for pictures of supermodifieds. I’d sit and stare and try to see if it was someone I knew. A lot of times there wasn’t many supermod photos and I suppose there were many reasons for that. There was a period that I remember people talking about how Dick hated the supermodifieds. I heard down through the years as I got older that it had to do with many of his friends being killed racing them. I never heard Dick say that, but whenever we did talk about them, he never really had much to say about them that would be considered positive.
I have to believe that could be part of the reason that I sometimes couldn’t find those photos I longed for, he simply had a bone to pick and didn’t want to publish them. I also found out later on that there were many times when promoters simply wouldn’t send in their stories or photos and that there were some promoters that did send in releases but he refused to publish because they hadn’t paid their advertising bill. I’m sure Dick floated a lot of people through the years just to try to help out, but I remember him telling me a couple of times that “A lot of these idiots don’t have a clue how to promote and even when I tell them what they can do, like getting their stuff to me in time to print, they don’t care.” Now you know part of the reason that I have said some of the things I have about promoters and their lack of desire to even do the little things to help themselves. I guess I learned from the best.
It was from MARC Times that I first learned about Oswego Speedway. I’d heard of the names of people like Shampine, Ciprich, Coniam, Bellinger and the likes. I didn’t really know who they were and I sure didn’t believe that they could beat my Tri-SAC favorites of Curt Kelley, Sam Sessions, Butch Fedewa or Marv Carmin and there was no way they could hold a candle to my local favorites, ‘Wild’ Willie Stutzman, Ernie Nash or Frank Demske. But I started seeing names like Wayne Landon, and Dean Best, and Bob Seelman in those stories and it was then that I figured out that there was supermodified racing outside of Indiana and Southwest Michigan and that the same guys that I loved to watch in Tri-SAC also raced in other places too. I found out that there was another place to go and watch the race cars that I loved and I began to seek out as much information as I could about Oswego Speedway and what it was all about.
It was because of Dick giving me a break to start writing for his paper that I have come as far as I have and am able to do the things I do now. I had been taking photos for a couple of years and figured out that maybe I could get some pictures of the supermodifieds into MARC Times and maybe bring them back to Michigan. By this time I had finally made it to Oswego and Sandusky and had already started to make a lot of friends. I got to see other trades like Mid-American,(there’s a Beebe story there that we don’t have time for now, but wow I almost couldn’t even type that paper’s name for fear of him showing up and threatening never to print another column of mine as long as he lived), Area Auto Racing News, Gator, and Speedway Scene. I saw how they did things and how much they covered the supers. I felt like there was a real need to get that info back to the Michigan and Indiana fans. Fans, that like me, had been left in the lurch when the supers essentially died out in our area. So I started sending in those shots. Nothing would get published. I couldn’t figure it out. I would get so angry when I’d see photos of the local ‘junk stocks’ and nothing from the worlds most awesome race car from a place far, far away. I found out why stuff from New Paris, South Bend, Galesburg, Kalamazoo, or Dixie got the print and I didn’t. It was because they were local tracks. You see Dick firmly believed in supported the local scene first and if there happened to be room left, he’d throw some other stuff in. Finally though, my stuff started to get published and I started thinking that maybe I could write a little about all of these people that I was taking pictures of. Afterall I was assistant editor for a year on the high school newspaper so I probably knew everything about trade papers. Plus Dick Beebe’s paper needed someone like me because, although, once in a while I’d catch a note about the supers from Gary Lindahl or Mick Schuler, in their columns, there wasn’t anything that really dealt with just the supermodifieds in his paper.
I can’t tell you how nervous I was writing that first letter to Dick asking him if I could write a column about supermodifieds. I really didn’t expect to get anything back. I waited a while and pretty much gave up hope. Then I got a phone call. It was Dick Beebe. THE Dick Beebe and he was asking me why I thought his paper needed a weekly column about supermodifieds. “Well because you don’t have one,” I mumbled. “So what?” was his retort. And frankly, that’s when I got fired up. “So what?” It still rings clear in my ears to this day and I remember thinking that this guy was a real jerk because I shouldn’t have to explain why HIS paper needed my column about REAL race cars. I remained only semi calm and explained that I felt that there was void and that I thought it could help his paper because I thought that there were still a lot of closet supermodified fans within his circulation that had simply disappeared because they had little or no interest in late models. Of course that was pretty scary saying that to a guy that helped bring about common rules for the late models with the American Racing Congress. But I guess I must have made some kind of an impression. Maybe Dick was already trying to shape me and mold me into what he wanted from his writers. Either way he said ok, told me what he wanted, asked me what the column was named and I blurted ‘Wing Side Up.’ I found out real fast about deadlines and how fast you could get on Dick’s bad side when you pushed them. I learned that writing in bold Arial, 12 pt, space and half, justified columns were the only way he’d print my stuff. In the long run though, that column pushed me to be more involved, and for whatever reason, people connected to it because of the Division they could now read about. I started making a lot of new friends and because of that column in Dick’s paper, my network grew. Eventually, Roger Holdeman and Larry Boos knew who I was, and every time Dick O’Brien would see me at The O he’d say to me “You know I read your column in that little paper out of Michigan, you do a good job.”
It was at Galesburg Speedway, a track that Dick, his father and brothers built, that I first met my best friend Robert Gill. Robert had read my column in MARC Times for a long time and before the internet was so popular had written a few letters about the column and sent them to me and had also sent in letters to the editor about the column. How ironic that Robert found out about me from a column published in Dick Beebe’s paper and was introduced to me by a mutual friend at a track that Dick helped build with his family for a race on fathers day weekend with the DIVISION that we both loved. It turn Robert started taking pictures and writing a column for Dick as well. Biggie and I have done some incredible roadtrips together and we have gone far and wide seeking out the perfect shot or the best line to put in a column and to say that we are probably long lost brothers is a bit of an understatement. I blame Dick.
Galesburg Speedway also gave me the worst encounter I ever had with Dick Beebe. I fired off a terse tirade of rants concerning several things that I thought were blatant hazards around the track. I puffed my chest out and said to myself, “Dick’s gonna be proud, I’m standing up for driver and fan safety like he does.” My column went out and I got the paper on Thursday and the column was pretty cut up. I didn’t bother picking up the phone to call and ask why, because it wasn’t more than about an hour after grabbing the mail that my phone rang for me. It was Dick. I can’t really print everything he said, but suffice it to say, the tongue lashing I got that day about my lack of writing skills, not checking my facts, and saying bad things about the local tracks without getting both sides of the story, had a huge impact. He asked me if the race was good. I said that it was one of the best I’d ever seen. He asked me why I didn’t talk about that. I tried to say that I had, but he cut me off midstream with “Not everyone has the money to put into a race track like you think they should, not all the tracks can be like that place in NY you always write about, you need to come down off your high horse and get back to your roots.” Of course there was mention about how his family had poured their heart and soul into Galesburg Speedway, but at the time my shock overwhelmed me and I didn’t put two and two together. From that day on I started thinking a lot more about what I write. I still fail miserably to live up to the standards Dick tried to set for me, my grammar isn’t always the best, my sentence structure kind of stinks, and I’m still not sure what a double intender is, but I do understand a little bit more about constructive criticism and how to do my best to present all sides of the story.
Maybe that’s why when I talked to Linda Bloom, who of course is one of Dick’s daughters, she told me that he was proud of me. He scolded me, not because he didn’t like me, but because he saw potential in me. I consider that an honor coming from a man that many liked to hate because he told it like it was. The thing is there was a kind side to Dick, a human side that his detractors never really got to see. Linda told me a story that shows how big his heart was. “I remember when I was about 10 and our dog Ladybug was pregnant,” she began. “Well she was having problems getting the pups out so dad took her to the vet and she died giving birth and all the pups died too.” I could hear Linda’s voice start to crack as she went on, “Dad came home and we all asked where Ladybug was and he said that after all she had been through that it would be better for her to be on a big farm so that she and the pups could run free.” Understandably, according to Linda, everyone was upset, because not only was Ladybug gone but so were the puppies. That Christmas Dick Beebe sat down and told his daughter to come over and said to her “Little girl, I want you to tell me what you want for Christmas.” “Dad, I want Ladybug back,” said his little girl. Dick Beebe broke down and cried. He wept not only because he couldn’t give his daughter what she really wanted for Christmas, but more so because he had lied to his kid. He had broken his own credo, he had done what he always told his children to never do and what he never expected to hear from any of his racing associates. But you see, Dick’s huge heart wasn’t made of stone like so many people thought.
Perception is a dangerous thing my friends. A lot of people perceived Dick Beebe as a mean, nasty, and hateful man. He was at times, difficult to get along with. But it’s like Linda says, ‘With dad, there was a difference between not liking what you did and not liking you for what you did.” I think there’s a lesson there for many of us in supermodified racing. We sometimes get so involved with our opinions of someone or something they did that we fail to learn to understand why they are doing what they are and we start to dislike the person not the deed. In the end it will tear us apart and make us bitter. There’s not one thing wrong with agreeing to disagree or having differing outlooks or ideas, but let’s get all sides of the story first.
I’d like to think that Dick is looking down on me right now as I put the wraps on this thing. I’m sure he’s saying I went on too long about a bunch of nonsense. I know he’s not happy that I missed another deadline. But maybe, just maybe, the man that did so much for auto racing while he lived understands that even with his passing, he’s still coaching a fellow Midwesterner on how to give back to the sport he loves and specifically the DIVISION he longs to see survive. I’m still learning Dick; I’m not going to forget what you taught me. I’m doing my best to live up to your standards and please just this once, Dick, don’t cut my column. God Speed my mentor.
Popularity: 6% [?]