Posted: Thursday, January 21, 2016 8:00 pm

By Randy King randy.king@roanoke.com 981-3126

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — By all accounts, Curtis Turner never found a party he didn’t enjoy.

Flat out, wide open. That’s how the late stock car racing legend drove on the track and how he lived life.

That said, it’s too bad he won’t be around for the bash they’re throwing Friday night at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, where he will be inducted posthumously among the class of five 2016 inductees.

The shebang might never end if the man who was often called the “Babe Ruth” of stock car racing in the 1950s were still around.

Unfortunately, Turner’s fast-paced life ended too short at age 46. The Floyd County native who lived most of his adult life in Roanoke was killed Oct. 4, 1970, when the plane he was piloting crashed into a hillside near Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Blue Hills Golf Club professional and close friend Clarence King of Roanoke also died in the accident.

Turner, who would have been 91 years old now, made the Hall of Fame in his sixth year on the ballot.

“It’s very fitting. Yes, he would have enjoyed this,” said Turner’s oldest daughter, Roanoker Margaret Sue Turner-Wright, who spearheaded the campaign for her father’s bid into the Hall for the past half-decade.

Turner-Wright, 68, the oldest of the four children that Turner had with his first wife, Ann Ross Turner, launched an online memorial website in her father’s honor in 2000, plus has been the linchpin behind a display honoring her father at the Virginia Transportation Museum in Roanoke.

Carolyn Jean “Bunny” Turner, the driver’s second wife who resides in Christiansburg, said: “I think it’s fantastic he’s going in the Hall of Fame. It’s long overdue. It’s sort of a vindication in a way that they’ve finally recognized him. This is his day, his time, that’s what’s important.

“He deserves it. He was a good man. That end of it doesn’t seem to come out very much. I mean he did a lot of things for a lot of people that nobody knows about.”

The couple’s son, Curtis Morton Turner Jr., was born 18 days after he father perished in the plane crash. Today at 45, he could be his father’s identical twin.

“I just wish I had gotten the chance to know him. I was cheated, I think,” the younger Turner told The Roanoke Times in a story published June 19, 1988.

Turner Jr., 45, now employed at Shelor Motor Mile in Christiansburg, was reluctant to say much else about his father last week.

“I used to hear it a lot … now, it’s less and less,” he said when asked if people still made the connection through the names.

Growing up fast

Curtis Turner was born April 12, 1924, on a small farm in Floyd County. His father, Morton, was one of the biggest moonshine operators in the county.

In the Feb. 29, 1968, issue of Sports Illustrated, Turner became the first stock car racer to make the cover of the magazine. He was portrayed in a lengthy feature story titled “King of the Wild Road.”

Turner told author Kim Chapin that he made his first moonshine run at age 10 on the dangerous back roads of Southwest Virginia. Four years later, he dropped out of school to work at his father’s sawmill for 10 cents an hour. By 16, he was hauling liquor at $50 a keg and started making his own a year later. At 18, he had made enough money to buy three sawmills and several thousand dollars worth of equipment.

“Runnin’ was a lot of fun,” Turner told SI. “You enjoyed it. And usually you got run a time or two by the police. You get a feelin’ after you haul a load of liquor similar to what you do when you win a race. … Hell, that’s where I got my practice.

“You have to run good, otherwise you get caught. Of course, you always took the back roads, and the handlin’ was just like a dirt track.”

Dugspur native H.L. “Peanut” Turman, a winner of 230 Modified and Sportsman division races through the years, is 75 now. He recalled meeting Turner a few times back as a teenager. Turman’s father fed his family with the help of Turner’s product.

“Curtis used to bring some stuff up for my dad [Troy] to peddle,” Turman said in a phone interview. “My dad never had enough to bankroll the stuff, but another fella did and he would pay Curtis to bring it up to my Dad, and then Dad would distribute it out over the next few weeks.”

Turner turned to timber for his next primary source of cash flow, which turned out to be more lucrative.

Ahead of his time

Sure, Turner loved to party and have a good time.

Still, the man was quite a visionary for someone with his background. Often described as a wealthy lumberman in news accounts from a NASCAR racing career that spanned from 1949 to 1968, Turner could see things that others couldn’t.

Figuring NASCAR could use another showcase race venue to go with Daytona and Darlington, Turner picked out land 20 miles north of Charlotte in 1959 to build Charlotte Motor Speedway.

“See, Daddy was kind of a dreamer,” Turner-Wright said. “He never thought there was anything that he couldn’t do so he just went forward with it.

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, you have to have a business plan and you have to check out the marketing scope and see if this is viable.’ Well, he didn’t do any of that.

“He was an entrepreneur from the get-go because he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.”

In 1959, Turner and partner O. Bruton Smith, who also is among this year’s Hall of Fame class, built the 1.5-mile track, but financial difficulties plagued both Turner and the speedway in its early years. Turner told Sports Illustrated that construction costs soared when excavators hit granite.

In debt and in serious need of cash, Turner tried to recruit his fellow racers to organize a driver’s union in 1961. NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. quickly rebuked that move and issued Turner a lifetime ban from big-league stock car racing.

After being reinstated by NASCAR in 1965, Turner won his final big-league NASCAR race in a Ford prepared by the Stuart-based Wood Brothers in the first 500-miler ever staged at North Carolina Motor Speedway in Rockingham, North Carolina.

The race car driver

Many of those who ever witnessed Curtis Turner drive a race car at countless numbers of venues, including Roanoke’s Victory Stadium and Roanoke County’s Starkey Speedway, from 1944 to his final race in 1968, contend the man called “Pops” was the best wheelman ever.

Even France, the man who robbed him of five years of racing via the suspension, said in 1972 that “Curtis Turner was the greatest race car driver I have ever seen.”

The strapping 6-foot-3 Turner, one of the biggest and strongest drivers back in the day, likely possessed the heaviest foot that ever climbed in a race car.

Turner is credited with more than 350 wins — back in the 1940s and ‘50s many drivers raced as much as three or four times a week on the old dirt tracks. He won 18 Grand National races — then the name for NASCAR’s elite division — and captured a series record 38 NASCAR Convertible Division victories in only 79 starts. He also posted numerous wins in other divisions of NASCAR, ARCA or non-sanctioned events.

By today’s standards, Turner’s biggest victory would be his triumph in the 1956 Southern 500 in Darlington, South Carolina.

Turner was almost unbeatable in his heyday, particularly racing on dirt, recalled driver Ned Jarrett, who was inducted in the Hall of Fame’s second class in 2011.

“Boy, was he fun to watch on dirt,” Jarrett said. “I was a fan of his there, throwing up the roostertails and everything. I always thought that Curtis Turner, as far as physically handling a race car, was as good as there ever was. …

“He raced everybody hard as you can go throughout the race track. And you knew what to expect if he came up on you … that he would move you out of the way if he needed to.”

Ask longtime Wood Brothers crew chief Leonard Wood, a 2013 Hall of Fame inductee.

“Curtis was just one of the most talented race car drivers as far as controlling the car of anybody I’ve ever seen,” Wood said. “I mean he could just seem to pick a car up and sit it where he wanted it. It was just an unbelievable show to watch him drive. …

“I can tell you one thing — if you were on the last lap he was the last man you would want on your tail going into the last lap. He just loved winning, loved driving. He drove every lap as hard as he could go.

Wood then started laughing and added one more story.

“We took him out I think to the Riverside, California, road course and I said: ‘I would like for you to get in the car and see if the seat fits. And he put one foot through the door and said: ‘It’s just right!’ ”

Turman got to race only one time against “Pops” — Turner earned that nickname for his penchant of pounding the rear ends of cars running in front of him to make a move — in 1966 at the old Pulaski County Speedway, now known as Motor Mile Speedway.

“I’ll never forget it,” Turman said. “Curtis was driving a car for Bruce Sweeney out of Floyd. Well, they had a hell of a pileup … and when it was over, cars were stacked about three deep on top of each other and there was Curtis’ car sitting on top! Only figured, I thought.”

Richard Petty, the longtime renowned King of NASCAR, said Turner was definitely one of a kind.

“Curtis was really from the old school. Curtis was just flamboyant,” the 78-year-old Petty said Wednesday.

“He didn’t own any of his cars, he didn’t get into the building of cars. You just put him in the car and he didn’t complain about the way it handled it or nothing. He just drove it to his ability.”

Last laps

Turner drove his final NASCAR race in 1968 at Occoneechee Speedway in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Then he retired to his Roanoke home and started to drive something else — a golf ball and a plane.

Turner played most of his golf at Blue Hills, where Clarence King tried to help him with his game.

“Dad was trying to get him to where he could break 100,” said King’s son, Billy. “He and my Dad played a lot of golf.”

On Oct. 4 ,1970, Turner hopped in his twin-engine Beechcraft with King to play golf in Myrtle Beach with a Pennsylvania man who said he had property filled with coal. After the round, Turner flew the man back to Pennsylvania and dropped him off, and then he and King took off to return home to Roanoke.

The flight didn’t last long as the plane went down in an abandoned strip mine. According to news reports, an eyewitness saw the plane went out of control before crashing.

“You heard all kinds of rumors, but it had to be bad fuel or something,” Billy King said. “The FAA investigated it. I didn’t even want to know what the final report was. It’s very unusual for two engines to go out on those planes at one time. I know it wasn’t pilot error.”

Turner-Wright said she had been invited by her father to make the trip earlier that morning. However, she stayed home to study for a physics exam she had coming up at Roanoke College.

“He said: ‘Well, I will just meet you at 6 [p.m.] and we’ll go to dinner, and I will give you a tuition check then,’ ” she recalled.

“What’s crazy is after I got off the phone that morning I sobbed and I didn’t know why. For some reason, I just felt this deep sadness.

“Then, about 8 o’clock that night I got the phone call. But I already knew.

“Hey, Daddy kept his appointments with me.”