Buck Baker

“My dad started winning races in 1949, so I was brought up not only in a racing family but in a winning environment… there was a time in the modified division that nobody could beat him. He won 27 features in a row once at old Charlotte Fairgrounds, and the bad part is we were promoters at that track. They’d boo him coming in and boo him coming out, but the next day everybody would be hanging around at his shop.”

So has written Buddy Baker, and it shows how much of a pioneer Elzie Wylie Baker Sr. truly was.

“Up to (the inauguration of NASCAR’s Grand National division) my dad had always run in the modified division, which was older model cars. All of a sudden, here are the latest model cars on the road at a time when the economy wasn’t all that great. I was something to see someone out there (on the racetrack) in a brand-new car with the headlights taped up. They used leather belts to hold the doors shut and there was just one seat belt.” And “the attrition rate back in those days was astronomical.” Of 35 cars in the first Grand National race, 24 fell out. Buck Baker finished 11th in that race.

Buck Baker’s only two injuries of consequence in his life were not
associated with racing cars – one was a broken hand incurred when he broke up a fight where two men were beating up another person. “I didn’t consider the odds fair,” he recalled in 1976, and he broke his hand pummeling one of the two bullies. The other injury came in 1967 when he found himself accidentally locked out of his shop; trying to crawl back in through a window, he slipped and fell through, breaking his ankle. Buddy was called and he bodily carried his father to a hospital.

Buck Baker began as an ice cream truck driver and bakery worker. When his son, Elzie Wylie Jr. came along in 1941, Buck took a job as a Trailways bus driver, but was fired when he kept stopping at a garage owned by Ike Kiser and chewed the fat with Ike for hours on end. A World War II stint in the Navy followed, and afterward he began racing on weekends. He raced for a friend, Bill Long, and teamed with a camshaft specialist named Joe Rump, and was successful despite bad blood between Baker and Rump.

The race that stood out in Buck’s memory was a tragi-comic episode at Pageland Speedway in South Carolina, a half-miler in a pasture. The track lacked basic safety features, “but the governor was there, and beauty queens,” Baker recalled. A stunt pilot wound up landing in a field nearby, and during the race a wheel flew off a car and landed in the spectator area, killing six and injuring many others. After that was cleaned up a car struck a water wagon used to condition the track – and on which some fans were perched. Finally, as Baker put it, “After the race, a drunk decided he was going to show all of us how to drive around the track. Well, he drove his 1940 Ford into a big water hole.” Emerging from the hole the drunk said, “Hell no (I don’t want to be towed out), I’m going to drive this thing out of here.”

At that race Chick Morris, an employee of Carl Kiekaefer, met Buck Baker, a friendship that lasted through their lives – it would also play a role in Baker’s career.

Baker crashed in the inaugural Southern 500. A track worker rushed to his car and saw Baker covered in red. “MY Gawd! Get an ambulance! Baker’s done cut his head off.” Actually Baker was fine; the red was enhanced tomato juice he’d been sipping from a thermos bottle in the car. Baker cracked, “If it had been bourbon, nobody would have gotten excited.”

Baker won the Southern 500 in 1953 after an epic battle with Glenn Roberts for the entirety of the 500 miles. A year later, though, his marriage to wife Margaret, Buddy’s mother, ended. He married a would-be beauty queen at the Southern 500, where he’d been a pageant judge. “I purposely didn’t vote for her,” Baker said. “I wanted her for myself.” And in 1955 Baker was racing in West Memphis, TN, in an event where Ford brass was watching Buddy Shuman. Chick Morris was helping Buck in the pits and amid the typically chaotic action of a dirt track – although this one was nastier than most: in blinding dust Tiny Lund was side-slammed, fell out of his car, and was struck by another – Morris flashed a signboard reading, “We got two of them.” Baker thought he’d run over two people on the track, but afterward
Chick told him the “two of them” were two factory Fords.

Baker’s 1955 season brought him to the attention of Chick Morris’ boss, Carl Kiekaefer. “If you’re as big a son of a bitch and as dirty a driver as everybody says you are,” Kiekaefer said, “I am curious. Drive for me.” Kiekaefer was the sport’s first money-guy owner. “He was a perfectionist,” Buddy wrote in 1998. “He hired the best drivers, the best mechanics, the best cars.” He was such a perfectionist that, according to Buddy Baker, “a guy was making deliveries to the back door of his shop. In the middle of unloading parts, he got tired and sat down on the dock up against the building to rest a little…. Kiekaefer said, ‘Go in and get your check from Rose because you’re done here.’ Kiekaefer fired him and the guy didn’t even work for him!”

But Buck Baker and Carl Kiekaefer got along very well. Driving
Kiekaefer’s Chryslers, Buck won 14 races and ultimately the 1956 title. But it came at a price – wanting Buck Baker to win the title, Kiekaefer rented a track in Shelby, NC to add an extra race that year. Herb Thomas had won for Kiekaefer but quit his team, and Speedy Thompson in another Kiekaefer Chrysler was ordered by the boss to take out Thomas. Thomas was taken to the guardrail thusly, and was nailed by several other cars. The crowd exploded against Kiekaefer, throwing objects at his trucks. It helped Buck Baker win the title but Kiekaefer’s dirty pool never sat well with fans.

Buddy Baker, though, believes that what drove him out of the sport was that he’d reached the pinnacle and thus had no more mountains to climb. In any event, with Kiekaefer gone Buck Baker was without a ride, until he hooked up with Bud Moore in Spartanburg, SC. Moore and Buck Baker won the 1957 Grand National championship.

Buck won the Southern 500 in 1960 amid controversy and chaos. Three pit crewmen were killed when Bobby Johns crashed in the unprotected pits; Ankrum “Spook” Crawford was seriously injured in another crash. Baker took the checkered flag second, but a recheck of scoring showed Baker was actually a lap ahead, and thus the win became his. By 1964, though, his career was on the skids, but he surprised the sport by winning the Southern 500 once more.

With his Grand National career declining, Buck moved down to the Grand American division, winning eight races in five years there.

In 1959 when his 18-year-old son Buddy was making noises about becoming a driver, Buck took him to Darlington for the Southern 500, and when Baker practiced, he thought he was really fast, but Buck jeered, “You’re the worst excuse for a stock car driver I’ve ever encountered.” Buddy was stunned and it was all he could do not to explode back at his father. Buck told him to follow him around the track, and Buddy was even more stunned to find that, by following Buck and thus driving his way, he picked up an astonishing 12 MPH. The lesson ended when Buck’s engine erupted and both Bakers spun, hit nothing, and had to be towed to the pits.

In another early race in young Buddy’s career, at Columbia, SC, Buddy was running dead last. Buck came up to lap him and rammed the heck out of him – “You were in the damned way, weren’t you?” Buddy blamed it on the car, but when Buck’s engine erupted, Buck flagged his son off the track, got in the car, erased the lap deficit it was in, and finished it third. “That pretty well wrote the book: Sonny Boy, you have a long way to go,” Buddy remembered.

Also in Buddy’s first year came his first tumble, on a half-mile dirt track. Buddy had long asked Buck what it was like to get upside down, and Buck would reply, “it’s something you don’t walk around talking about.” After Buddy staggered home from his first tumble, Buck asked, “What’s it feel like, boy?”

Buck was also pals with Curtis Turner, and during Curtis’ battle to save Charlotte Motor Speedway from bankruptcy Curtis and Buck flew in Curtis’ airplane to see Jimmy Hoffa. There were some bottles of Canadian Club in the plane, and Glenn Roberts and Tim Flock were on the plane as well. Roberts and Flock finished off the bottles after Curtis had had his fill, and when a fog rolled in “Buck got scared,” Tim Flock wrote in 1998. “Buck said, ‘hand me that fifth I put in the plane before we left.’ Fireball said, ‘Buck, what fifth?’ Me and Fireball had already drank it! Buck liked to have died.”

Turner got a deal with the Teamsters Union to organize the drivers into a union. Buck Baker was VP, but when Big Bill France vowed to stop a union at the point of a pistol, Buck and everyone else save Turner and Flock went back to NASCAR.

Buck made a brief comeback in the Winston Cup series in 1976, driving selected events for Junie Donlavey and others; he finished in the top ten at Darlington with relief help from Dick Brooks that year. He retired for good after that year, and in 1982 reached the NMPA Hall of Fame and the Int’l Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990, with 46 Winston Cup/Grand National wins and two titles.

The past two decades plus, though, Buck has been more famous for his driving school, operating at Rockingham, Atlanta, and Bristol. Jeff Gordon is the most famous graduate of the Buck Baker school, but is one of many to come out of there. Among the teachers was Buck’s younger son Randy, who has driven in some Winston Cup and Grand National events over the years.

Being “as big a son of a bitch and as dirty a driver as everybody says you are” in the days when being such was a prerequisite just for survival made Buck Baker a champion. The driving school he founded also served as a bridge between the past and the future.

Such is the legacy of Elzie Wylie Baker Sr.