Holidays And Racing

 I was at the Fayette County Historical Society the other night doing some research for a project on the history of the Fayette County Farm Bureau.

 As part of my effort, I looked through several years of the Fayetteville Enterprise, the county’s newspaper back in the day.

 The 1941 papers were fascinating. At that time Fayetteville was a small, relatively remote farming community.

 Most of the news was related to agriculture, regular letters from the county’s Congressman, healthy doses of news from the local government and the county’s churches, along with reports from rural communities telling who visited who and when.

  As 1941 rolled along, the number of stories on the war in Europe became more frequent, as did reports of the efforts of the United States to furnish equipment and supplies to those battling the Nazis.

  I doubt many readers of the Enterprise were completely surprised that December when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. was drawn into the war.

 One pleasant surprise was a good bit of auto racing news in the paper.

 Most of the stories were around the holidays that are also traditional big weekends for racing – Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day.

 There was a long story from the 1941 Indianapolis 500 (Maury Rose, who started the race in one car, won driving in relief for Floyd Davis, who apparently wasn’t performing up to his car owner’s expectations). There was good coverage (stories and paid advertising) of Lakewood Speedway, a nationally prominent track in its time. The one-mile dirt oval is not far from Fayette County.

 As Labor Day neared in 1941, there was an advance of a big stock car race at Lakewood. It included an item about Lloyd Seay of Dawsonville, a driver many consider the best to ever wheel a stock car. Seay was headed to Lakewood riding a win streak.

 He wound up winning that race but was shot and killed the next day by a cousin during a dispute over supplies for making moonshine.

  That story also was one of the last about racing for some time, as the sport was paused for the duration of the war.

 Reading those articles made me glad that there will be big races for Fayetteville residents and others to watch this weekend.

 Although professional stick and ball sports  - plus multiple other forms of entertainment - have entered the local scene since those days 80 years ago, racing remains popular with a big segment of the population.

 And it’s much easier to follow that back in the 1940s, when according to stories I’ve heard, people from Fayette County piled into the back of stake-bodied farm trucks for the ride to Lakewood and back.

 NASCAR races from Road America will be on TV and Senoia Raceway is hosting a big Super Late Model race.

  I can’t think of a good reason not to take them all in this weekend.



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