All of it, p.3
All of It, page 3
The whistle blew, but we continued to wrestle and display our displeasure with each other. The officials and players came over and broke up the scuffle. Immediately, I was ejected from the game. As I exited the field, my teammates and classmates in the bleachers roared with approval for what had just happened. I’m not a troublemaker, but I just liked DeeDee.
In my senior year, our football team had a perfect record. We lost every game, but we still had fun. Our team was in a position to win our final game that year; all we needed to do was have our field goal kicker, Mike Steck, make the game-winning kick. On the sidelines, my teammates and I were screaming and hoping, along with the fans, that “Stecky” would miss the kick. The center hiked the ball, and the holder perfectly caught the ball and placed it on the tee. Stecky approached the ball with grace and determination. His right foot made contact with the football; it was on its way. The football went wide to the right, and he missed. My teammates and I, the opposing team fans, and even our team’s fans all cheered. We had our perfect season!
After football season, during the senior-faculty basketball game, I tried to get back at Coach H. I tackled him, trying to make it look like an accident, but it looked more like I did it on purpose! I brought my linebacking skills to the basketball court. It only cost me several days of detention. It was worth it.
I learned that trying hard, working hard, and doing your best—win or lose—is all you can do. The sports both taught me that you have to learn how to lose gracefully because you could lose more than you can win.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t race because I was too young. In order to drive a racecar at the Speedrome, you had to have a driver’s license. Additionally, my parents’ requirement for me was to have graduated from Waverly High School. Uh oh.
Shh…I might have figured out a way to get around those rules.
Doing What It Takes
The monthly Powder Puff Derby at the Speedrome was such a wild event and probably one of the most exciting to watch. This women’s only race was fantastic, allowing women to drive the racecars of their husbands, boyfriends, or friends.
I wanted to race, so I came up with this crazy, ridiculous scheme to compete in the Powder Puff Derby. A friend of mine, Mike Casterline, who happened to be my cousin Pam’s boyfriend, had a late-model car. I asked Mike if I could drive his car in the Powder Puff Derby.
He looked at me with an “are you crazy?” look.
“I just want to race,” I told him. “But I can’t until I’m eighteen and graduate.”
Mike had confidence in me and said yes, even though I was missing two key requirements. I wasn’t a woman, and I wasn’t even eighteen!
There was one more thing that I needed to do before I could enter the Powder Puff Derby. I needed a disguise just in case someone saw me up close while in the car.
It was dark in the pit area that August evening at the Speedrome. My cousin Pam brought me a wig that I had asked her for: long, brown hair. I climbed into the car and buckled up. I put on the wig and then the small helmet, one not like today’s helmets that cover your whole head. I buckled it under my chin, fired the engine up, put the No. 588 in gear, and drove out onto the racetrack just as the women were starting their first pace lap.
The crowd didn’t know who was in the white No. 588 1956 Chevrolet because it wasn’t even in the program. It didn’t matter. I had the crowd fooled, and it was just a late entry for another woman who wanted to race. They had no idea it was Geoff Bodine, future NASCAR driver, disguised as a woman and behind the wheel of the No. 588 car.
I positioned the car at the end of the lineup of the other ten racecars. We circled the track two times as a warmup and came by for the third lap to start the race. There were no nervous thoughts or emotions, but rather, excitement and anxiousness to begin the race. Allen Dillon waved the green flag to start the running of the prestigious August 1965 Powder Puff Derby. Like any form of competition, not everyone involved was a superstar driver or had a great racecar. At the beginning of the race, it was easy to pick off a few cars. Of course, the further up the field that I drove, the better the cars and drivers were. I started moving my way through the field in the twenty-lap race. By lap fifteen, I found myself in first, leading the women’s Powder Puff Derby.
The final laps were winding down…four, three, two laps to go. I realized I couldn’t win. What a dilemma. My father always presented the winner with a trophy, posed for a photo, and kissed the winner on the cheek. So what should I do? Do I hold back, or do I just go for it and give my dad the biggest shock of his life?
The fans didn’t know, and my parents didn’t know I was driving the No. 588 in the derby. I was a teenage boy, not a woman. On lap eighteen, I had to make a decision—finish the race and suffer the possible consequences from my parents of winning the Powder Puff Derby or shut the engine off, coast off the track, and act as if something had happened to the car.
So, with great disappointment and hesitation, I reached up to the dashboard and turned the ignition switch to shut the engine off. There was silence. The car was coasting. I coasted off the track into the dark pit staging area. Mike and my cousin Pam came to the car as I was exiting it. They had big smiles on their faces. I thanked Mike for letting me trick everyone that night.
I took my helmet off, and the wig came off with it. I gave my cousin a hug and a kiss and told her, “Thank you. I hope you can wash the mud out of the wig.”
I had a moment after the race to think that I was emulating Uncle Earl. My uncle was smooth, calculated, and didn’t push it. I knew I had done the same that night in my first race.
I never entered another Powder Puff Derby disguised as a woman again or thought about sneaking into a men’s race because I knew I had pushed my luck. My time would come. I really thought someone was surely going to tell my parents what I had done by entering the Powder Puff Derby. That finally happened years later at their fiftieth wedding anniversary party in Elmira.
With family and friends present, my brother Brett told the ol’ Powder Puff story. People were shocked, amazed, laughing, and crying in disbelief that I had done that. My mother, with her arm raised and her finger pointing and shaking at me, told me, “Geoffrey, you shouldn’t have done that!”
“Mom, it was a long time ago; I wanted to race,” I said.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.
The story was finally exposed that I dressed up as a woman and entered the Powder Puff Derby—the beginning of the racing career for Geoff Bodine. Looking back, maybe I should have won the race just to see my mom and dad’s reaction.
The Caveat
The deal my parents had with me was that I had to be eighteen years old and had to have my high school diploma in my hands before I was allowed to race at the Speedrome.
I graduated from Waverly High School in May of 1967. During the warm, sunny commencement for graduation on the football field, racing that very night at the track was the only thing on my mind. We had a small graduating class of ninety-five students. My classmates all knew what I was up to and where I was headed after graduation. I had to wait until everyone got their diploma before I could leave, but once the ceremony was complete, I took off to the track, only a six-mile drive away. While some classmates were partying, a few of my buddies came up to watch me compete for the “first” time.
Because the graduation was on Saturday and also race night at the Speedrome, I couldn’t get to the track in time for warm-ups or the qualifying heat race, a preliminary event to determine the starting order. Uncle Earl volunteered to drive my No. 99 car in the heat race, and he won!
As I anxiously arrived at the track after graduating, I was informed that I had to start last in the main event because I was a new late-model driver. This field was bigger and much more competitive. Good luck, Geoff.
By the end of the twenty-lap race, I worked my way up to a second-place finish. I was happy with the result of my first race. But it wasn’t a win. I found out after the race, talking with my uncles, that Uncle Maynard adjusted the carburetor linkage to only open three-quarters of full throttle. He didn’t think I could handle the full power of the Slant-6 engine. We got a good laugh about it, but if I would have had full throttle, maybe I would have won that first race. After the race, I parked the car on the outside of my uncle’s shop, covered it up with a tarp, and then went back to Waverly to be with my friends to celebrate our graduation. Even though I just competed in my first race in my car, I was still a teenager wanting to hang out with friends and have fun (and we did have fun).
We partied at a friend’s house and enjoyed each other’s company with some ice-cold beer. I eventually got home after midnight and woke up the next morning to a championship-caliber breakfast: an egg sandwich with scrambled eggs.
In future races, I planned on making sure my racecar would have full throttle.
Diploma in Hand
During my senior year in high school, my friends and I partied whenever possible, and one night stands out clear as day. Our group of friends went to a party at the Red Brick Inn. I drank a little too much that night, so I had a girl drive my Plymouth—and I would never let anyone drive my car—to grab a bite to eat at Nocchi’s Hoagie Stand in Sayre, Pennsylvania. But I fell asleep on the way there, and my friends left me in the car while they went inside to eat. When I woke up to find out they left, I was all by myself in the restaurant parking lot at three in the morning, long after the restaurant closed.
I drove home very carefully and slowly on the ten-mile drive across the state line back home, wondering what kind of trouble I was going to be in. As I neared the house, I didn’t want to wake Mom and Dad up, so I shut off the car and pushed it to the driveway. The lights were on in the house, so I snuck over to the living room window and peeked in. The eyes of my mother were looking out at me. We ended up scaring each other.
I ran back to my car, pushed it back out onto the road, started it up, went over to a friend’s house, and slept the rest of the night. Thankfully, I never got in trouble for that incident.
I had a solid ten friends in Chemung, and we played football and baseball often. In Waverly, I had more than enough friends at school, too. But when we finally became high schoolers, all we wanted to do was drive around and cruise for hours into the night.
My aunt, Myrtle, and uncle, Jimmy, gave me a bulky 1951 six-cylinder Plymouth when I was a teenager before I even had my license. It had hydrostatic shifting, just like an automatic-standard combination. My friends tagged along as I drove through the fields on the family property, but we wanted to go downtown Waverly, about six miles away. I was pretty nuts and found an out-of-date license plate, changed the date on it, painted it up with my artistic skills to look up-to-date, and stuck it on the Plymouth. We cruised to Waverly and, on countless occasions, drove the car past the Waverly Police Station and by the high school. Today, you could end up in prison for that and end up making the plates themselves.
On one occasion, on the way to a party, my friends and I were cruising along the backroads and noticed a car trailing us, getting closer and closer. Was it a police officer? With booze in the car, we all panicked, and a friend threw the alcohol out the window. It turned out that we wasted good booze because the car in question was not a cop. Maybe I should’ve made him pay for the next round.
I never got pulled over in that car, and my parents never said anything. But that would change.
A Big Break
Legendary racer Donald “Dutch” Hoag was a great modified racer. Having won the prestigious Langhorne National Open on multiple occasions, Dutch was a well-known racer in the region, even having run some races at NASCAR’s top level in the 1950s. Dutch was a very smart and very funny guy, but he was very serious behind the wheel.
Dutch was scheduled to race down at Shangri-La Speedway in Oswego on one Saturday night in June of 1968. The track was washed out from rain, but Chemung was still racing that night, with no rain actually falling on the racetrack. On his way home, he decided to stop by and watch me race. I won the main event that night, and after the race, Dutch told me, “You looked pretty good out there. Come on down tomorrow to Oswego, and you can warm my car up.”
I knew one day I would have an opportunity to start climbing the racing ranks, and here was a big opportunity to jump on. I didn’t sleep much that night, too excited about what the next day at Shangri-La Speedway would hold.
I made it to the track, a half-mile asphalt oval. As practice was underway, he took the car out—a 1936 Chevy Coupe modified body with a 427 big-block engine—and ran a few laps. When he came back, he told me it was my turn to turn to strap in and hit the track.
I was a Mopar guy, but the manufacturer did not matter to me. A racecar is a racecar. I put his white fire suit on, jumped right in the car, and turned some fast laps. The feeling was oh so similar to when I drove Pat’s car at the Speedrome a few years ago.
Having raced primarily on dirt, I was surprised at how well I adjusted to his car on asphalt, and his good setup couldn’t have hurt. It was an experience I was not expecting so early in my racing career.
A gentleman who heard of me testing Dutch’s car by the name of T. K. McLean from Waverly had an asphalt modified. T. K. himself was a former racer. McLean lost an eye in an accident. He had a fast car, but he always kept bumping into walls. So his team wasn’t doing that well, and he approached me about running the last couple of races of the asphalt modified season in his car. This was a 1936 Chevy Coupe with a straight axle in the front with half springs in the rear and front with a 427 engine in it. I made my first start in Fulton, and they immediately hired me for the full season in 1968.
Carl Baker, a local guy from Chemung, was our mechanic. He built the engines and cars, similar to my uncles. We put power steering in the car, redid the suspension, and a better seat made from fiberglass. We won some heat races and ran well, but the racecar was not at its full potential. We found another garage in Chemung and started building a new racecar. We needed a frame and ended up finding an International Scout frame. My uncles and I were even crew members for Dutch at Daytona in 1969 for the Permatex 300, the season opener for the NASCAR Late Model Sportsman Series. Uncle Maynard worked on the engine while Uncle Earl and I were the gasmen. The gas cans didn’t have the quick-fill nozzles back then—they had to slip the hose over for the gas. Imagine five-foot-eight, 160-pound me filling up the gas tank. Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. It was hot, I was sweaty, and I loved every minute of it.
Although he had a car that could have won, Doug finished second in that race. His heart wasn’t in it at the end. Fellow competitor and friend Don MacTavish was killed in a crash during the race. It was tragic and is an unfortunate part of motorsports.
Graduating to
Real Life
After I graduated with my diploma, I worked over the summer during the week and raced on the weekends at the Speedrome. I worked at Stroehmann Bakeries in Sayre, Pennsylvania, for a few weeks. I had a friend working there who told me to apply for a job with them, and they somehow or another hired me that same day.
Work began at 3 a.m., a nightmare for a guy who just graduated high school. My duties included running a packaging machine where I’d put bread on a conveyor belt to be cut and then packaged. It was too early to be smelling fresh bread and bacon. I wanted to be the breadwinner on the track. After the morning shifts, I spent afternoons working on the racecar in preparation for the next weekend’s race. I also helped my dad at the racetrack with various duties whenever I could and helped by spending time with my younger brothers, Brett and Todd.
It was very economical to race at the home track. I continued to work outside my uncle’s shop and didn’t have to pay to rent space. A set of tires would last me an entire racing season. I ran a set of recapped tires with a softer rubber compound. By not being rough on the car and taking home prize money after racing on the weekends, I was making a little bit of money from racing in the summer of 1967.
The job at Stroehmann lasted about one month. But the summer flew by that year. I wasn’t a “straight-A” student in high school. As a busy teenager who had a lot to do, I squeaked through high school. I even had to take an art course in my senior year to get enough credits to graduate on time.
All I wanted to do was learn how to build things better and stronger. I knew learning more about engineering would help me build better racecars, so I signed up for classes at the Corning Community College in Corning for the fall semester of 1967. I needed to work out formulas and equations. Fortunately, I was decent at math. The slide rule was my computer. Before enrolling in college, I had only read books about Indy cars and Formula 1.
Monday through Friday consisted of going to school during the day, taking down notes, and absorbing as much as I could until my hand would cramp from all the writing to turning wrenches with calloused, greased-up hands on the racecars at night. I continued racing at the Speedrome, something I did following my first two years after high school. But the urge to race across our great country continued to get greater and greater.
I lived in Corning during the week in a trailer park called Hanwell Village. The trailers were not state-of-the-art. The first one I rented had a few bedrooms, and four of us lived there. It was tight but cozy. A friend, Russell “Tink” Kellogg, and I eventually got our own trailer, a smaller one, but it worked.
With Chemung being only thirty miles away, there were plenty of times I went home to work on the racecars and drove back to go to school the next day, sometimes running on just a few hours of sleep. It was not unheard of to be in bed by midnight to be up at 6 a.m. the next day. I put a lot of miles on my Dodge Dart driving back and forth on Route 17 back then.
