Searching for a not-forgotten Knoxville institution
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 objet d'art on the Internet: a racing poster with 1940s-era cars. The cartoonish lettering advertised SATURDAY NITES / 8:30 P.M. / 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 the 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 the Broadway Speedway in May, 1948.
It took a few calls before I found people who remembered the Broadway Speedway at all, but a certain, and large, segment of the over-60 population remembers it fondly. One is Eddie Harvey, proprietor of the off-Broadway institution, 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 has some yellowed 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."
If you catch Mr. Harvey in a good mood, he might pull out the well-thumbed albums and show you a photo of a handsome young dark-haired fellow in a white leather racing cap, in a small, bulbous sports car.
"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 that as many as 10,000 came to the speedway, but Harvey says the biggest crowds he saw were about 2,500 strong, and that was with most of them standing up. Many of them came to see the wrecks, and he has plenty of photos of wrecks, some catching cars flipping in the air, some showing them landed upside down.
"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."
"I broke my neck," he volunteers, matter-of-factly. "Everybody broke their neck. We didn't have no roll bars. If you mentioned putting a roll bar on your car, you were considered a sissy."
He pauses thoughtfully, and adds, "Or a candy ass." There aren't any of those in his photo albums.
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 suddenly 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" business 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 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 the "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 Asheway 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 farther out than the old Broadway Speedway.
Waddel 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 at least one big difference. If you turn left just past 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 network of cinderblock buildings, and the Stockyard Cafe. The old Broadway Speedway is now the Union Livestock Yards. Its well-attended cattle auctions are another sort of competitive sport.
January 16, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 3
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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