Summit Point Raceway, West Virginia.
On The Summit Café wall, there’s an autographed photo of Paul Newman.
He’s sitting on a lawn chair outside his trailer door. Yes. Paul Newman in West Virginia. He raced his cars right here at Summit Point. He didn’t make a stink, either.
Barb & Patsy at The Summit Café say he was nice. He came in his cutoff-jeans Dad shorts. He always got his bratwurst, his ice cream sandwich & his Dr Pepper.
Patsy said
“Even just last night the television had ads on for Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.
They were so young.
“
Word was in the paddock that he had talent and applied himself like a student. Patsy said
“He was fast.
“
One year Tom Cruise was racing for Paul Newman. Barb & Patsy say Tom stayed in his trailer. No autographs. No photographs with a racer’s daughter. The publicity shot in The Café for sure isn’t autographed.
All the girls at the track, there’s a photo of them with Paul Newman, front & center & smiling softly.
Couple weeks ago at Evanne’s farm, Robin said
“Oh, I used to go to Summit Point!
My Daddy used to take me there.
I bet if I looked hard enough I could find a photograph of me and Paul Newman with his arm around me.
”
Word at the track was Paul Newman, he was the real deal, and real people with real people. He was real enough to smell ripe, for grease in the cuts on his fingers, and for heartburn from that bratwurst he’d been dreaming of in the semi-trailer since Indiana.
3pm, Sunday afternoon, 24 April, 2017. Barb & Patsy are closing up shop, freezering-up their 100 Mile-Per-Hour Chili for next race weekend.
Barb takes the BBQ pork sandwiches home. Those sandwiches won’t age well. Besides, the grandkids are eating her out of house & home.
“Tonight’s a special show just for Grandma.
Y’all run along, now.
Leave me be.
Take a sandwich with you.
”
The grandkids mostly leave her be, but they don’t run along. They stay set right there and spill BBQ sauce on the couch — and they watch Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid right along with Grandma Barb. They listen as she hums
“Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head.
”
Looks out the window. Like the kids weren’t even there, she says
“They were so young.
http://summitpoint-raceway.com/track-information/
Paul Newman ran several of his early races there in a Bob Sharp-prepared Datsun 510 sedan.
He wished to be just another “racer” and did not want to be recognized at racing events as a “superstar” … he and wife Joanne Woodward … few realized they were racing in the company of famous actors.
The only outward clue was the plate on his 510’s front bumper… “PLN”
scrotocycles.rip 