Once there was a time when the great Dale Earnhardt was a crew chief.
As you might expect, it was before he could legally drive.
From the age of 13 until well after he got behind the wheel of a race car, Earnhardt was the crew chief for Gray London, a Kannapolis sandwich maker who took up racing in the 1960s to escape the stress of producing 60,000 sandwiches a day at his Dainty Maid Foods plant in Kannapolis. The teen-aged Earnhardt also worked at London's Sunoco gas station in Kannapolis.
One night early in his driving career, London's yellow 1957 Chevy was fishtailing every time he came off the second turn on the dirt track at Concord (N.C.) Speedway.
"I came back into the pits and Dale was jumping up and down, raising Cain."
"Quit that!" the 13-year-old crew chief hollered at London.
"Quit what?"
"Boss Man, you're getting out of it too quick and back in it too quick," Earnhardt said. "You got to go in there deeper, and then you got to get on the gas later."
As he headed back out, London was thinking, "Why, you little smart aleck. You ain't never even been on a race track!"
Nonetheless, London took the advice, and the fishtailing disappeared.
"The tires didn't lose their grip. The car didn't lose traction. Nothing," London recalls. "And when I came back in again, he just had that little smirk of a smile on his face ? that same smirk he always had ? and he said, "Told ya, didn't I?"
Most books and histories of Dale Earnhardt all but skip his earliest years in racing and the long struggle he went through to make it into the NASCAR Winston Cup series. Earnhardt did not land a regular ride until 1979, when he was 28 years old. That was the way it used to be NASCAR, with drivers generally serving long apprenticeships.
For more than a decade before his rookie season in Winston Cup, Earnhardt toiled mostly on the short tracks around his native Kannapolis and in the region. Little has been written about these years.
Few beyond those who were there know that London ? the man who kept the food vending machines at all the mills in the region stocked with bologna and cheese sandwiches ? was president of Earnhardt's earliest racing team and was intimately involved in his early driving career. The most extensive and almost only chronicle of London's relationship with Earnhardt was a multi-part newspaper series written by his son, Mike, a sportswriter (now assistant sports editor) for the Salisbury Post, and published by that paper in 1998.
London co-founded the Earnhardt Racing Team, Inc. with the Earnhardt family, and hired Dale as the driver, paying him $140 a week to race full time, except during the offseason, when he was required (and did) work at a job.
"Damn near starved to death," Earnhardt would usually say when asked about those early years.
One detailed account of Earnhardt's early struggles, in his own words, appears in a long interview he did with veteran motorsports writer Steve Waid in 1983, published in Winston Cup Illustrated.
"A good friend of the family's, Gray London, got together with my family, my brothers and I, and decided (in 1974) we were going to buy an asphalt car from Harry Gant and do some asphalt-track racing," Earnhardt told Waid. "I've had a lot of help from a lot of good people. I knew Gray London because he was a friend of the family, but he believed I could drive a car. He helped us buy that car and get us started."
This was in the wake of the sudden, shocking death of Ralph Earnhardt, Dale's father and one of London's closest friends, who collapsed in his garage with a fatal heart attack on Sept. 26, 1973. He was only 45 years old.
London had first met Ralph Earnhardt a decade earlier in 1963, when London decided to take up racing. The man to see in Kannapolis for that was Ralph Earnhardt.
But when London first visited him in his garage next to his house on Sedan Avenue, he saw only Ralph's legs sticking out from under his race car. And that's all London saw, because Ralph never came out. Ralph never said a word, either. The message from this highly independent man was: "I'm working on my car; I can't be bothered right now."
London left after 10 or 15 minutes and tried again a few days later, this time successfully. Ralph agreed to help him find and build a race car. Soon, they became fast friends, and London parked his race car right alongside Ralph's in the Earnhardt garage, where Ralph maintained both of them.
Before long, Dainty Maid was a sponsor emblazoned on the side of Ralph's car, and both Ralph and Dale began calling London "boss man."
"I sponsored Ralph's car from the time that I met him in 1964 until the time that he died, and I sponsored Dale's car after that," London said. "You may see pictures of the cars with some other name on it, too. That's because I told them, 'If somebody will pay you to put their name on it, do it.' Dainty Maid didn't need any advertising. You'd never see a food products company like mine on a race car. It was to help them out. It was to help Ralph out because he was helping me, he was building and maintaining my car."
Like Dale, Ralph Earnhardt was always a prankster, and usually London was the straight man for his antics. London kept the mini-refrigerator in Ralph's garage stocked with free Dainty Maid sandwiches, but that didn't stop Ralph from razzing him about the food.
"Ralph used to say we cut the ham so thin, it didn't have but one side," London said.
"We paid Dale every Wednesday ? gave him a paycheck. But even with the help that I done, he still had it rough. He still struggled. It was an expensive game."
-- Gray London
Their families became friends, too. London was married, with four kids, and when Dale was racing locally in the 1970s, his mother, Martha, and second wife, Brenda, used to take London's daughter, Tracy, with them to the races. "They were very kind to my daughter, even if she did wear a Harry Gant T-shirt just to aggravate Dale," London said.
During the years London raced, from 1964 to 1970, Ralph was mostly away racing on the weekends. London, however, stuck to the local dirt tracks, Concord and Metrolina, with Dale by his side as crew chief.
By the late 60s, Dale was racing, too. "He'd get my car off the trailer, get it in the pits and get it ready, and then run off and go run in one of them rookie cars," London recalls.
In the wake of Ralph's death, during the final months of 1973, Gray helped Dale and his family start the Earnhardt Racing Team, Inc. London saw tremendous potential in Dale, but knew that the race team would have to be operated like his business.
They hammered out the details of a 50-50 partnership, with London as president, Dale as vice president and his brother Randy, as secretary. They drew up a driving contract for Dale that called for a $140 weekly salary and 15 percent of his purse winnings so he could be, for the first time, a full-time race car driver, competing in a NASCAR-sanctioned late model sportsman car ? as his father had done.
"Originally, I put $10,000 into it, and that money was used to buy the car we bought from Harry Gant," London said. "Then we had to turn around and spend another $10,000 to get it ready to race . I never turned him down for anything he ever asked me for. And he didn't have to ask as far as credit cards and stuff like that. And that assured him he had gas and motels and whatever when he was going to Birmingham and Nashville and Asheboro and placed like that.
"We paid Dale every Wednesday ? gave him a paycheck. But even with the help that I done, he still had it rough. He still struggled. It was an expensive game.
In his rookie year in Winston Cup in 1979, Dale won his first career race at Bristol. "He called me that day after the victory," recalls London (shown at right in front of his Dainty Maid plant in the 1970s). "I could hear a big celebration going on in the background. "Boss Man, we finally got it!" he said. "We finally did it! We won us a Winston Cup race!"
As Dale moved up the ladder, London would run into him only every once and awhile. Each time, Dale would talk about settling up the business of the Earnhardt Racing Team, whose operations abruptly ended when Dale moved up to Cup.
On October 17, 1994, London spent an entire day with Dale on his farm in Mooresville, and they worked out a verbal deal to market die cast cars and other collectibles memorializing the race cars they raced in those early years. Earnhardt was at the height of his driving career, and any souvenir with his name on it was a guaranteed success, especially when it came to the popular die-cast race car models.
London says Dale told him to "sell that damn business of yours. You don't need it anymore. You're finally gonna be able to relax." London sold his food products companies in 1996, figuring on a new business and steady source of income from selling collectibles.
But London says he was unable to get a written contract executed until 1999, and after that, the promised products were never produced and he failed to receive all that was guaranteed him. London said he was never able to reach Dale directly and, after he exhausted all other means to resolve the matter, he filed suit against Dale Earnhardt, Inc.
London didn't want to go to court against Dale, and he felt certain Dale didn't want this either. In fact, he says, the two sides had agreed to meet to work it out. The date for that meeting, he says, was Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2001, two days after the Daytona 500. Of course, Dale Earnhardt lost his life on the last lap of that race. The meeting never happened.
DEI fought the suit tooth and nail in a complicated legal fight that was well publicized when it went to trial in March 2002. London largely lost the case, although he did retain the rights to sell memorabilia with Dale Earnhardt's name commemorating his involvement with Earnhardt's early racing efforts.
Today, he spends most of his time working on that with his company, Driver On A Mission, Inc., as well as on a book project with this writer. He lives on a fixed income in a small, income-based apartment in Boiling Springs, N.C.
He thinks often about a moment with Dale back on that October day in 1994, when they were standing together on the deck of the Earnhardt family home.
"In this business, Gray, you've got acquaintances by the thousands, but whenever I count my real friends, you've always been on that one hand," London says Dale told him. "And I want you to remember that."
"It would have been fine," London says today, "if we'd just left it like that."
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