The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 88

SATURDAY, MARCH 15. 198A, 1 facedor 30 years and Ive got nothing to showjor it Scott From Pagt? 1-D The Atlanta Journal WEEKEND Th Atlanta Constitution gine repairing, tapped harder, tapped faster, stared, cioked and wept. "Jus determination," he said in a broken voice. "Racingwas something I wanted to do, and I wasn't going tjet nothin' stop me. I kept hoping for the day.

Hoping for the day. And then it turned out like it did. Tcaced for 30 years and I've got nothing to show for-ft." He pwnposed himself, stared at the engine and got up and fumbled through a mountain of tools. "I'm working -tao much. I know that I'm going to slow down soine day.

But working keeps my mind off Theresa no phone in the garage "I wouldn't have I had a phone, people'd be callin' me. Everybody around here knows where Wendell Scott's place isijThey want me to work on their cars, they A teyr blocks away stood his modest home of 40 years, tfifr-one "I built with liquor money" from his moonshine-hauling days. At the house, his wife of 42 years, $57, slept at midday, having worked the graveyard shift at a nursing home. Surrounding the garage is a briar-smothered junkyard, a jesting place for several of his old race cars, lncludinhis crushed pride and joy, a Ford demolished at'Talladega in 73 in the wreck which finished him on Grand National circuit. 1 4 I) Or Tiiirilll -l 1 1 1 11- 1 v.

RICH ADDICKSStaft Wendell Scott works on an engine in his cluttered garage in Danville. 'I was supposed to be a rich man. I'm way off target' wanted to fight He reached through the window and handed me three $20 bills to help me get back home to Virginia, and told me what a helluva man he thought I was." "But when a guy at the Birmingham track called and asked me not to come that was during the time they were sicking dogs on black people I went anyway. When I got to the track, the black caretaker kept saying, 'Boy, they ain't gonna let you After the race, Johnny Bruner (a NASCAR official) kept saying I better hurry up and go, for my own safety." Not sjnee '73 has a black driver ventured into the realm ofUhe good ol' boys. Now comes Willy T.

Ribbs, a irash young Californian whom Wendell Scott has ncvet met. "He'f going to encounter some problems he's jiot expecting," Scott said. "I don't say for him to go out there and tuck his tail. But I think that if he doo't change his attitude (outspoken and flamboyant) fcom what I've heard about him, he's going to have va rough road to travel. I don't think anybody's going to go out and wreck him.

But if he's too sensitive; he takes some things the wrong way, some of tem may pick on him. And there are some of them that would get him no matter what the consequences are to them. "Th main thing is, he's coming from road racing (where Ribbs was a proven winner) into a siock car on oval tracks. And buddy, there's a whole difference. He was in a form of racing where he just happened to be tetter than the others.

Now, hs coming into NASCAR, where there's a lot of "If he'd come along when I did, with the attitude he's gott he couldn't have made it. I didn't let 'em run oveti me so much but I was low-key. I don't know hqy he feels about me, but I read somewhere where he said he wouldn't race like I did (hand-to-mouth). ell, if I hadn't raced like I did, I don't feel like he'd; be racing today. "I came along about the same time as Jackie Robinsoo, but I came into a sport that was far more dangerofti I can't say stock car racing was any more prejudiced than baseball, but y'know stock car racing was prejudiced.

"Yolook at that incident at Richmond just a couple weeks ago. Dale Earnhardt hits Darrell WaltripVand NASCAR fines Earnhardt. I was wrecked! jjon't know how many times, my car tore all to pieces, and NASCAR ain't said one word about it to this' day. And I know I was wrecked because I was black." He retailed his own Atlanta debut, in 1961. "Whe(i they found out I was black, them fans just went crisy in the infield." Theri might have been big trouble that day had hot Alf 'Knight, the granite-jawed manager of AIR at the in.

A group of whites in the Infield cornereij a small group of blacks. Knight, with a two-by-four Jbd a .38, broke up the near riot. "A1E jCnight was a real nice guy," Scott said. "He helped me a lot. I had a lot of white friends." But just before the next Atlanta race, another AIR official "called me at 10 o'clock one night and asked me not to come.

He said the Ku Klux Klan had been threatening to come and throw bottles and rocks onto th Jrack if I raced there. He was afraid someone might get killed. I didn't go, because he asked me From the outset, Wendell Scott had been willing to tread lightly in order to race. His love of cars had started in 1938 when he bought a Model Ford for $15 and began to tinker with it. By 1939 he was Danville's most notorious taxi driver, the one who'd get you to your destination faster than you wanted to get there.

During World War II, the Army sent him to mechanic school. After the war, married and with a young family, he was unable to regain his taxi license "because I had so many speeding tickets and other violations." Then, "I got involved with the wrong crowd." He began bootlegging. "Charlotte, N.C., was dry. I found out I could buy whiskey for 55 cents a pint in the liquor stores here in Danville, and haul it down to Charlotte and double my money $1.10 a pint. After that, I began hauling moonshine in those five-gallon cans." Caught hauling moonshine in 1948, he got off with a three-year probationary sentence.

And his police record became his ticket into stock car racing. "In 1949, the dirt track here In Danville was in competition with the one down at Greensboro, N.C. The promoter here wanted a black driver to increase local interest Martin Rogers was the guy who got me to race, though a guy named Eddie Allgood takes all the credit for it. Rogers went to the local police, who had the records, and asked them if they knew of any blacks who could really drive fast They told him, 'You want somebody to drive a race car, you git that Wendell Scott' But other local tracks "wouldn't let me run at all" at first. Scott said.

When he initially showed up to race, "people didn't pay much attention to me, because I'm so light-skinned. But I had some black guys working with me, and soon people put two and two together." He set off to tracks in northern Virginia and Maryland, where he was accepted. His first year out, he arrived at a NASCAR-sanctioned race at Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, N.C. "I was turned down. It wasn't until 1954 that I ran my first NASCAR race." Through the '50s, Scott won 127 races on the old "Dixie Circuit" of short tracks, won the Virginia state championship in 1958, and in 1961 decided to try the elite form of stock car racing, the NASCAR Grand National circuit.

"Grand National racing was supposed to have been a different class of drivers," he said. "They were supposed to have been more civilized. Some of 'em weren't. Deep down inside, they were worse." "One Sunday a driver wrecked me, and after the race I was so angry I went to him and threatened to kill him. He's still driving today.

We're good friends now. I'm not gonna go name-calling. He knows who he was." But early on, Scott developed an admiration for Bill France the founder of NASCAR. At one of Scott's first NASCAR appearances, at Raleigh, N.C, the race was rained out. The promoter was handing out $15 to each driver as tow money, but refused to pay Scott.

"The next race was at the Lynchburg (Va.) track," Scott said. "Bill France was there. I told him what had happened at Raleigh. He took not $15 but $25 out of his own pocket and handed it to me and said, 'You are a NASCAR member, and as of now you will be treated as a NASCAR Factory-backed cars dominated the circuit at the time, "and I even went to Detroit to try to get some help. I never got any." As for other corporate sponsorships, "I tried everything I knew.

I got nothing." In 1964, at Jacksonville, Scott got his one and only Grand National victory, but it was hours after the finish until he wa's awarded the win. "When I took the lead, I noticed that suddenly there weren't any numbers up on the scoreboard," Scott said. "When I'd come by my pits, I'd point at the scoreboard and shake my head at my crewmen. And they'd just shake their heads -and shrug. When the race was over, they said Buck Baker had won.

I went to them (NASCAR officials) raisin' hell. They said, 'You think you won the I said, 'I know I They seen I was serious. They said it was a clerical error in scoring. At 11 o'clock that night, they told me I'd won." But, Scott said, scoring "errors" were nothing new to him. "Back before they built the big speedway at Daytona (in 1959), I'd go down there to run in the beach races in the sportsman division.

I ran there five or six times, and no matter where I actually finished, when I went to get paid, I'd finished 33rd (dead last), and I'd receive $25." Was he ever afraid for his life at the races? "I used to think about it I was a little bit afraid at Darlington, places like that. I always hoped there were no snipers no folks with high-powered guns out there somewhere." But there were also the times of endearment, the moments of unexpected warmth on what he'd seen as hostile turf. Once, at North Wilkesboro, N.C, in the heart of good ol' boy moonshining territory, "I'd blown my engine during practice. Another guy let me drive his car in the race. And after the race was over, a white fan walked up to the fence and handed that guy $100 in appreciation for letting me drive the car." During the volatile Talladega drivers' strike of 1969, officials "came to me and wanted me to go ahead and race.

I needed to. I needed the money. But I figured it had taken me so long to earn the respect of the drivers that I'd better stick with them through this. I loaded up my car and started out of the track, amid all the craziness. Then one of the drivers, one who'd wrecked me intentionally years before, jumped up on the running board of my truck.

I thought he In 1973, prior to the Winston 500 at Talladega, Wendell Scott shook hands with Alabama Gov. George Wallace. "Well he'd changed," Scott said. Minutes after the start of that race, there was a 21-car pileup. Scott suffered a broken pelvis, broken leg, and a torn-open left arm that required 70 stitches.

Worse, to him, "the best race car I ever had" was demolished. "I'd hocked everything I had to buy that car," Scott said. "After it got tore up, it took me nine years to pay off the note on that car." That wreck, for all practical purposes, ended Scott's Grand National career. He ran once more, at Charlotte that October. In 1982, Wendell Scott's racing debts had at last been paid.

"I've got some bitterness," he said, walking through his junkyard. He stood still among the briars, and his steely eyes fixed on (he carcass of a 1955 Cadillac which, he said, was Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential limousine. "I won 128 races, y'know," he said. "One hundred and twenty-eight races, and I was never kissed by a white race queen.

One time at Charlotte, I received the Curtis Turner Achievement Award. They had a white girl there to shake my hand, and a black girl there to kiss me. I wonder, if Willy T. Ribbs ever wins a race, what the circumstances will be in that victory lane. "I think it's still basically a white man's sport.

Looks like they're trying to keep it a white man's sport I think it's the companies responsible for it. Lotta sponsorship money going into stock car racing but it's only helping whites. Crisco's helping Buddy Baker. I bet as many black people buy Crisco as whites, but they're not helping no blacks. Years ago I tried to get Miller to help me.

Now they're helping Bobby Allison. Black people are buying this merchandise the same as whites, but whites are the only ones reaping any benefits." In Atlanta, racing enthusiast Les Montgomery is trying to establish a Wendell Scott Racing Foundation to begin a scholarship fund for training of youngsters in auto mechanics. Last year, Scott and Montgomery ran an ad every week in a national racing publication, "and we didn't get one cent in contributions," Scott said. Mary Scott, preparing dinner at home, looked back with less bitterness than her husband. "When my daughters and I would go to the races, we were never treated ugly by the drivers' wives and families," she said.

"Of course, we weren't always with Wendell and the boys, so we didn't see all the things they went through. Oh, there were times when some jerk would say something to us in the grandstands, but that was to be expected. "Through it all," she continued, "you can look back and feel good. You know what you went through, what the obstacles were, and what you accomplished. You can look back and really be proud that you did it.

I get tired of hearing the old sad stories. You read about a Willy T. Ribbs, and you wish him well. Let him get in there and find out what it's like." "I wish," said Wendell Scott, almost smiling, "that it was me just coming into racing." so nice. lit 'k ul I 1 1 iTli Li ffafVin.1,iir 1, WittW 1 1 1 mi.

i inr- i nl RICHAODICKSStaH One of Scott's old tow trucks sits overgrown with weeds in his junkyard. Kindred From Page 1-D So the state's flagship university now flies a flag of momentary shame. So it owes $2.57 million to a fired professor, pending appeal. So its president has quit in a huff when his integrity first is questioned; refusing to quit when her integrity was questioned has made Jan Kemp proud. And yet through all the athleticacademic furor, no one has shown or even suggested that Vince Dooley orchestrated or requested any of it.

So when Dooley says, in denying any thought of resignation, "I don't have anything to defend," we may say it would be nice if he were more contrite. Can't somebody over there say, "I'm really sorry, Still, if Kemp and her lawyers have it right, Dooley truly does not have anything more to defend than what he admitted Friday "were some mistakes, within the rules, in my judgment on high-risk students." No need to quit over that. Just do better. Kemp says Vince Dooley knew little more than vague rumblings of second-hand information. So at her request, specifically to talk about academic corruption involving athletes, Kemp said, Dooley met her for coffee at a restaurant She later would say she made 23 phone calls to Davison's office with the same request; no answer came.

But Dooley met the professor. He wanted to hear her story. "I told Vince everything he wanted to know," Kemp said Friday. That night in '82, already demoted, soon to be fired "and in such deep depression I'm surprised I made sense," Kemp said she did most of the talking. She revealed Friday that she spoke to Dooley about more than academic corruption.

She said she also told Dooley of Ervin's financial corruption, putting athletes on the payroll for a 'project' Dooley's Interest was natural. The athletic department annually makes a grant of about $30,000 to developmental studies. Kemp said, "Vince was shocked. Stunned. He told me he would get to the bottom of it, no matter who it hurt." Dooley's memory is different.

Friday he said he had no recollection of asking that Kemp be kept on and Ervin be fired. As for what Kemp called "financial corruption," Dooley said he immediately investigated two instances in which he said Ervin spent money on athletes. "One involved some basketball players taken off-campus for some seminar," Dooley said. "The other had to do with a couple of seniors, in '82, who were going to do some instructional tapes for future classes and be paid $25 each. I stopped both things.

I told Dr. Ervin that could not be done." Ervin could not be reached by telephone Friday. on the hill heard every word ever Said in pavison's office," Kemp said, "and they told me Dooley'ient to Davison twice asking him to 'retain Kemp aitd Sire Davison refused." Eryjn, head of Georgia's developmental studies program, demoted Kemp as coordinator of the program's English Section on Feb. 3, 1982. She was notified in August Jof that year that her contract would not be renewed, Effective June 1983.

By now, the academic horror story is familiar. But in Junef 1982, three months before she filed suit..