THE SOUND OF THUNDER

Hot summer nights and the sound of thunder is in the air of Halls Crossroads.  No – a storm is not brewing – this thunder is man-made.  It’s Saturday night and the reason for those sounds is Broadway Speedway. Old time Halls residents will remember the noise, lights and the dust from Stockyard Lane.  Folks born and/or raised in Halls after its heyday may not.  The Speedway is gone now.  A few years after it closed it became the site of the Knox Union Livestock Yards and later Clayton Homes and the Knox County Farmer’s Cooperative.

Hubert LaRue spoke to some of the folks associated with the Speedway and made copies of their pictures including racing, wrecks and the winners with their cars.  A few of the racers who were regulars at Broadway became regulars at some of the other local race tracks when the Speedway and the Drag Strip closed.  A couple drivers went on to bigger lights and action.

Only a few of those drivers are still with us today.

A few years back, Jack Neely, now the Director of the East Tennessee History Project, and formerly a writer for the MetroPulse and Knoxville News Sentinel, wrote an article about Broadway Speedway.

He has graciously agreed to allow the HCHM website to use his story.

“The Broadway Speedway” by Jack Neely

One of the reasons I flinch when people call me a “historian” is that it’s not unusual for folks to bring up a subject about which I know nothing at all.  After 40-odd years here, I’m still just getting my bearings in this town.

A few weeks ago, Karen Daniel, who’s director of programming for the Knoxville-based Do It Yourself Network, found an interesting object d’art on the Internet: a racing poster with 1940s-era cars.  The cartoonish lettering advertised SATURDAY NITES / 8:30 PM / STOCK CAR RACES / BROADWAY SPEEDWAY / KNOXVILLE.

Around the cars, drawn colorfully and off-kilter like speeding roadsters in a Batman comic, are the words SMASHING CRASHING ROUGHNECK DRIVERS.  She couldn’t resist it, of course, and her bid of $55 got her the poster.

I had never heard of Broadway Speedway.  The dealer, a Georgia antiques merchant, claimed it had been found in a Knoxville attic, but the poster itself, printed in Indianapolis, doesn’t specify a state.  Ms. Daniel, who describes herself as a “closet NASCAR fan,” assumed it might refer to the world’s second-largest Knoxville: the one in Iowa, which is famous in racing circles for its stadium raceway.

Daniel sent an e-mail query to one of the Iowa Knoxville’s raceway historians, one Bob Wilson.  Intrigued he consulted with Tom Schmeh—he’s the director of that other Knoxville’s National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and Museum, a national resource for dirt-track lore—and found a description of the Broadway Speedway in a book called History of the American Speedway.  The book confirms that indeed, there was such a place in Knoxville, Tennessee, half a century ago.

Only it wasn’t on Broadway, precisely.  At the library I located the Broadway Speedway at the Knoxville end of Maynardville Highway.  The proprietor was one Sterling Lafayette Irwin, a Corryton man who was better known by the nickname “Fate.”  A lean, business-minded gentleman, he was a Democratic politician who’d been assistant finance commissioner during Gov. Gordon Browning’s administration. He and a couple of partners established Broadway Speedway in May, 1948.

It took a few calls before I found people who remembered Broadway Speedway at all, but a certain, and large, segment of the over-60 population remembers it fondly. One is Eddie Harvey, proprietor of Eddie’s Auto Parts. The 82-year-old has been in the car-parts business on Broadway for several decades, and I wasn’t surprised that he knew all about the Broadway Speedway.  I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was one of the raceway’s heroes.

He had some old photo albums, which he keeps somewhere in the back, where he keeps his rebuilt carburetors. He’s skeptical about showing his photos of the Broadway raceway, because he’s lost a few over the years. “People will see a picture of themselves, pull them out, put them in their wallet, and that’s the last you’ll see of them.”

“I was just young then” he says.  In its first years, the Broadway Speedway was mainly a forum for midget racing: midgets were diminutive open racing cars with V-8 engines. In those days, some considered midget racing training for Indianapolis.

In photos he can distinguish the speedway by the rough-wood fencing around it.  He says he typically took the quarter-mile dirt track in 17 seconds. It’s under 60-mph, but impressively fast for such a tight circle.

 A match would usually be four races of 25 laps each. Some have claimed as many as 10,000 came to the speedway, but Harvey says the biggest crowds he saw was about 2,500 strong, and that was with most of them standing up.

“All you had was a leather cap, with goggles,” he says. “If you turned over, you’d either break your neck or break your shoulder.”

He points to a pool of fluid beneath an overturned car which still contained its driver. “That’s oil, that ain’t blood,” he says. But there was, on occasion, plenty of blood.

Turning his head up, he says “See this scar?” You can make it out clearly, several inches long in his weathered skin beneath his chin.  They had no shoulder harnesses, and in one wreck, his chin went over the plastic windshield. “Damn near cut my head off,” he says.

He says midget racing “peaked out” as people got tired of it, and yielded to stock-car racing, which had previously been an exhibition event. It had its own set of heroes, like rivals “Tootle” Estes and “Breezy” Waddell.  Estes died of a heart attack just after winning a race in Bulls Gap a few years ago, but Waddell is still with us, and still keeps his car, a ’36 Ford, which he keeps in his garage on Clinton Highway and occasionally shows it off at car shows. The car was known at the Broadway Speedway as “Mr. X.”

Waddell’s a modest man, but he’ll allow that he won his share of races. “I wished I’d had a number, like everybody else.” That Mr. X was his sponsor’s idea.

“The midget drivers thought they were better than everybody else,” Waddell says.  At first stock cars were just a 10-lap “added attraction” at the Broadway Speedway.  Later they were the main event. Breezy Waddell and Tootle Estes, who drove a ’40 Ford, were Knoxville’s most closely watched rivalry.  When Tootle turned him over, everyone came out to see the sparks fly.  Waddell says that he and Tootle were friends who camped up their enmity for the fans.

Waddell says nobody ever got killed at Broadway, but it wasn’t for the lack of trying. “I got scalded once,” he says. He was driving a Ford with the firewall torn out when the radiator hose broke. It put him in St. Mary’s for a while.

The drivers banded together to form the East Tennessee Hardtop Racing Association in 1952; at one time it had over 300 members.  Waddell was, for a time, the organization’s president.  He says he “pit money”—a couple of dollars chipped in by drivers and pit crews—bought some nominal injury insurance for the drivers.

He doesn’t remember exactly when the racetrack closed.  Some say It was because crowds were dwindling, rendering smaller purses; Waddell says it was because Irwin began demanding a cut of the pit money. Stock-car racing gave way to drag racing for a while, but by the late ‘50s, Saturday nights on Maynardville Highway were getting quieter.

There were other places in town, with their own legends: the Asheville Speedway, a.k.a. the Cowpasture, in East Knox County; the 411 Raceway on the south side; and later the Knoxville Raceway, Harvey’s own attempt to establish a NASCAR track on Maynardville Highway several miles further out than the old Broadway Speedway.

Waddell has shared his memorabilia with a new museum on Merchant Drive, in a strip mall near the interstate. The Yow Auto Classics Car Museum exhibits over 60 well-polished automobiles, 80 years’ worth of them, with a sort of wall of fame for local racing heroes.

I got some rough directions to the old track. I wanted to see what was there now. Just past Fountain City, Broadway turns into Maynardville Pike, and it was out there on the left, not far past Black Oak Ridge on the near side of Halls Crossroads.

The near end of Maynardville Highway is a commercial strip just like any other in town, an undistinguished series of chain stores and strip malls. But there’s one big difference. If you turn left just pass the Krystal¸ you’’ll start hearing low, anxious sounds, and right at the end of the short road, about where you figure the dirt track must have been, is a network of cinderblock buildings, and the Stockyard Café. The old Broadway Speedway is now the Union Livestock Yards.  Its well-attended cattle auctions are another sort of competitive sport.

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Since this article was published, we’ve lost both Eddie Harvey and Breezy Waddell and Yow Auto Classics has closed. Almost all of the folks who were part of that era are gone but in Part 2 of this story we’ll talk with a few who are left like H.E. Vineyard and remember Wayne Fielden who raced twice in NASCAR.

Thanks to Jack Neely for sharing this story. Check out the Knoxville History Project where Jack has over 50 stories about the places and people of Knoxville’s past at www.knoxvillehistoryproject.org.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see some wonderful antique cars then plan to attend the Christ United Methodist Men (CUMM) and the HCHM Car Show to be held at Christ United Methodist Church on August 26, 2023 from 9 am until 2 pm. See our Events page for more information.