Curtis Turner, Southwest Virginia's stellar contribution to the history of stock car racing, was a native of Floyd County, Virginia, who lived much of his life in the Roanoke area. He is buried across the road from the Roanoke Airport in Blue Ridge Memorial Gardens beneath a flat bronze marker inscribed "The Babe Ruth of Stock Car Racing."
The elder statesmen of NASCAR say he was the best driver they ever saw. And back in an era when NASCAR drivers made today's bunch of drivers look as innocent as Cub Scouts, Turner was the wildest, hardest-drinking, most party-going troublemaker of them all.
He won 350 races in his career, 17 of them in the NASCAR Cup series, and some in convertibles raced on the sands of Daytona Beach, but in 1961 Turner was banned from the sport for trying to unionize the drivers with the Teamsters Union. (Because of his enormous popularity with the fans, the ban was lifted in 1965, but NASCAR drivers never got their union.)
In 1960, Turner founded the Charlotte-area track now known as Lowe's Motor Speedway—and then he lost it to creditors in a labyrinthine episode of high finance and corporate cabals. He wanted to use his connections from racing to build an empire in business, and he succeeded—several times—but ultimately he ran out of time or luck or both.
The first driver to make the cover of Sports Illustrated (Feb. 26, 1968), under the heading "The King of the Wild Road," Curtis Turner was named one of the sport's 50 greatest drivers, and—along with Fireball Roberts and Junior Johnson—one of the best drivers never to win a national championship. He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, posthumously, in 1992.
Turner made and lost a couple of fortunes along the way—from Daytona Beach's earliest races on the sand to his 1965 comeback win at Rockingham (which he made while driving with a broken rib), from his wheelings and dealings in the burgeoning multi-million-dollar sport of NASCAR to his many business enterprises and turbulent personal escapades.
Life, for Curtis Turner, was a wild ride.
Born April 12, 1924, Curtis Turner began working in his early teens in his father's timber business, making his first fortune as a lumber dealer. But he also dabbled in his father's former money-making enterprise: transporting bootleg whisky from rural Virginia into the populous eastern cities.
Running moonshine on the back roads of Virginia in the 1940s gave Turner the skills and experience he needed to parlay his driving ability into a successful career in stock car racing, which was in its infancy in post-war America.
His formal racing career began on a local dirt track in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, in 1946. He came in last, but the experience convinced him that it would be an adventure to forge a career in racing. From there Turner went on to win 22 races in the sport's now-defunct convertible division, and finally Darlington's Southern 500 in Cup racing, where his nickname was "Pops," because of the way he would flick (or "pop") off the track competitors who were blocking his way in a race. As an aggressive and talented driver, Turner is considered the precursor of Dale Earnhardt.
He is remembered as much for his daredevil adventures as he is for his skill in stock car racing. One of his escapades has passed into legend. On July 23, 1967, while Turner was piloting his plane back to Charlotte, he and three friends along for the ride discovered they had run out of booze. One of the passengers joked that he had several fifths of Scotch in his liquor cabinet at the house and they were just about to fly over his home town: Easley, S.C.
"You could just land and taxi to my house and pick it up, Curtis."
Never kid a thirsty man.
The next thing they knew, Turner was nosing the plane down toward Easley's Main Street. It was a Sunday afternoon and the two Baptist churches on Main were letting out. As the parishioners went out into the street, they saw a low-flying Aero Commander swoop low over their heads. After a couple of passes, it landed in a nearby field. They watched in amazement as the aircraft taxied out onto the road and merged with traffic. Turner spotted angry citizens and a sheriff's car bearing down on the plane, decided to abandon the "refueling" mission and get back in the air. He stepped on the gas, hop-frogging over a car or two, and left the ground, clearing the intersection stoplight by inches, but clipping the telephone wires in the process, costing Easley a day of phone service.
Turner flew low all the way back to Charlotte, hoping not to get caught, but before he even landed, everybody in aviation knew who had buzzed Easley, and the Federal Aviation Administration suspended his pilot's license for two years.
This tale is recounted in Robert Edelstein's biography of Turner, "Full Throttle: The Life and Fast Times of Curtis Turner" (New York: Overlook Press, 2005.)
On Oct. 4, 1970, only weeks away from his planned racing comeback driving in the National 500 at the Charlotte speedway he'd built and lost, Curtis Turner was killed when the plane he was piloting crashed near Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.
His legend lives on.