Since NASCAR announced Glen Wood as a member of the 2012 Hall of Fame class, his family has been on a hunt for artifacts from Wood Brothers Racing’s earliest years. What are they looking for? Anything and everything that shows how important NASCAR is to the family and what they’ve given back through dedication and innovation.
This week at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Wood Brothers Racing will unveil a Glen Wood tribute paint scheme on the No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion, driven by Trevor Bayne. Bayne and the crew will even wear matching throw-back uniforms.
While the paint scheme alone will show how special this announcement was for the family, it goes much further than that. The announcement sparked an investigation into the items they have from years of racing in NASCAR’s upper echelon, all in an effort to tell their story.
This Week in Ford Racing focuses on five items the Wood Brothers have discovered:
· A wooden filing cabinet
· A 1939 Ford shock
· A wooden toy car whittled by Leonard Wood, with tin-foil “chrome”
· A screwdriver hand-molded by John Walter Wood
· Old racing shirts that chronicle decades at the track
NUMBER ONE: Filing cabinet time capsule
Eddie Wood (current co-owner of Wood Brothers Racing)
YOU FOUND AN OLD WOODEN FILING CABINET THAT WAS MADE BEFORE METAL FILING CABINETS EXISTED. WHAT’S IN IT?
“We’ve got an old filing cabinet at the house and it’s got my initials engraved in it. It’s actually got my full name—like I took a knife and just carved my name right on the front of it, right on top. Why I did that I don’t know, but I did it because it’s my name. It’s got old stuff in it, like, I just opened the bottom drawer and it’s got a checkerboard in it, a deck of cards in it, it’s got old box of Band-Aid’s. It was just a junk cabinet. Just an old wooden cabinet, like a filing cabinet. You didn’t have this nice, pretty metal. This one was made out of real thick wood. It’s probably 60 years old.”
WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?
“It’s kind of like every time we moved, it’d just kind of get moved with us. Once we started this project of hunting stuff, it was just sitting back in the back of our shop back here up against the wall in the truck bay. Just sitting there. I don’t know why it didn’t get thrown away. It had a 1970 atlas in it. Most of the stuff that is in it is from the ‘70’s. It has a lot of Purolator decals in it. Actually it has a decal on the front of it that one of us
would’ve stuck on it in the 70’s.”
DID YOU RECOGNIZE ANYTHING IN THE FILING CABINET?
“Oh yeah! You know when you’re young you kind of go on a plunder? You go to your grandmother’s house and you’ve gotta go through all her drawers and see what’s all in there? Kind of like that. There are some hot rod magazines from 1964. There’s an old Goodyear lap time book, you don’t do that anymore, where you used to keep track of the laps. It’s made by Goodyear. It’s got Wood Brothers Racing on the top of it. There’s an old newspaper from 1967.”
HOW DO YOU THINK IT STOOD UP AND KEPT EVERYTHING IN SUCH GOOD SHAPE?
“I guess one thing that kind of helped it stick around is we’re small, and we’ve always been small, and nobody really messed with any our stuff but us. And if it got thrown away probably I threw it away or Len threw it away. Probably me more so than Len because dad doesn’t throw anything away. And fortunately, a lot of the things that we’re finding and have that we’re going to be able to display eventually is stuff he had. He’s the one who cleaned out the old shop. We were in Charlotte racing, and he and my first cousin Buddy, they cleaned it out because they sold the building to another man and a lot of stuff he just put over at his house. He didn’t bring it over to the shop. He’s got a little garage behind his house so he just kind of put it all there. So he kept most the stuff worth keeping. If it needed thrown away, he’d throw it away. That’s the kind of guy he is. When we were working here in this shop he’d go through the trash cans to see what was thrown away like tire wraps and stuff you could use again. You didn’t throw much away around here.”
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? BECAUSE HE WAS JUST USED TO REUSING AND REUSING?
“Well, he grew up in the Depression. I heard him tell the story to (the crew from SPEED) yesterday, they used to make 75-cents a day working in the field. In his working days he’d have 75-cents. So he grew up with very little money, so everything to him and really to that generation—if you think about just about everybody that age is really smart with their money. They don’t waste anything, much less money. And that attitude I’m sure is what made this race team survive the lean times that I don’t even know about. In the early years, I know there were times it was like ‘Is it worth doing it? Can we pay for it?’ And somehow he always made it work. Yesterday at Ray Lee’s, (SPEED was) doing some stuff out there in Ray Lee’s garden and they were taking some footage of daddy out there in it. And Ray Lee said something like, ‘Oh Glen, he did all right. He had a whole lot of patience to go from where we were to where he is now.’ I think patience was the key word. That’s the way he mentioned it. He just had a lot of patience with things and people. Things going wrong, things going right. He just had a way of dealing with it.”
NUMBER TWO: A 1939 Ford shock (inspired shock display)
Len Wood (current co-owner of Wood Brothers Racing)
TALK ABOUT THE 1939 FORD SHOCK YOU FOUND.
“Well, we were going through some old stuff of daddy (Glen) and Leonard’s, and running through old shirts and things, and Daddy comes out one day with this round thing. I didn’t know what it was, had a little arm sticking out of it. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well that’s a ’39 Ford shock. That’s how it was when we raced in the early days. It was adjustable.’ Hmm… so that kind of led to trying to find a shock from the ‘60’s, then one maybe from the ‘90’s and another that we currently use. So that kind of sparked making some displays for our museum with new and old shocks. That led to, ‘Well, let’s try some carburetors and things like that.’ So we had something from a T-model and the early days like the 40’s and 50’s. We made a number of displays just off the idea of that ’39 Ford shock. The displays, we keep adding to them as we find things. Eddie, he’ll go up to what we call his barn, but his little garage and he’ll come out with something else that just sparks another round.”
HOW WILL THESE ITEMS BE USED IN THE WOOD BROTHERS RACING MUSEUM IN VIRGINIA AND FOR THE NASCAR HALL OF FAME?
“When the Hall of Fame group came up and was asking to look around for things for daddy’s exhibit; they started bringing out different things. There was a shirt that Eddie came in with that was dark blue and it had a ‘31’ on it. I was like, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well that’s a Dan Gurney pit crew shirt from 1966 Indy 500.’ Which Dan wrecked on like the first or second lap and didn’t go anywhere, but a little bit later he comes back and here’s a coat. Well then Eddie gets on the Internet and finds pictures of him standing beside the car in 1966. So that was pretty cool. That led to an old shirt display. We came up with probably 10 shirts from the ‘60’s that are red and white, burgundy and white, solid white, solid red, solid burgundy, different types, some say Ford, some say Mercury, but they’re all old shirts. That led to how many can we find from then until now.”
TALK ABOUT THE GLEN WOOD TRIBUTE CAR YOU’RE RUNNING AT CHARLOTTE MOTOR SPEEDWAY THIS WEEKEND?
“At Charlotte we’re going to have a Glen Wood Hall of Fame tribute paint scheme. It’ll be red bottom and white top, kind of like Tiny Lund drove in the 1963 Daytona 500 when he won. Daddy drove that same car, painted the same way, later that year in July when he won his last race at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston, N.C. We’ve got some old-looking crew shirts, not the fire suits that the pit crew will wear over the wall, but our uniforms that we will have on for pre-race and on Thursday or Friday before the race for qualifying (for the No. 21 team this weekend). They’re old-timey looking shirts from the ‘60’s that we had someone recreate and we added the Motorcraft/Quick Lane to it to make sure we were modern enough, but it’s the old red and white uniforms that they wore back in the ‘60’s. So we’re looking forward to that and we’ve got a special suit for Trevor as well.”
NUMBER THREE: A wooden race car with working suspension and tin-foil “chrome,” whittled by Leonard Wood as a teenager
Leonard Wood, uncle of Eddie and Len Wood (current owners of the Wood Brothers Racing)
THE WOODEN CAR YOU MADE WHEN YOU WERE AROUND 14 YEARS OLD, WITH WORKING SUSPENSION AND TIN FOIL CHROME – IT’S REMARKABLY DETAILED. WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT MAKING IT?
“I wasn’t over 12 or 13 when I made that. I had this little wind up tractor that Santa Claus brought me. A little wind-up Caterpillar trawler. And we were sitting in the living room and all of a sudden this thing stripped a gear and it took off across the floor just flying. Usually it’d just crawl. So I realized if I take this wheel out, I’d have a motor that’d run fairly fast so I decided, ‘I’m gonna make me a chassis and put this wind up motor in it.’ So I made me a chassis and got coil springs because ’49 Fords had come out and they had coil springs. So then after I made the chassis I just decided, well, I’ll just make me a body to go on it. So I decided to make me a ’49 Ford. I used to carve cars out of wood all the time back in the fifth, sixth grade. During the war I’d take them to school and sell them for like 75-cents apiece because you couldn’t get toys back during the war. So anyway, I carved this thing out of wood with basically a pocket knife and sanded it down. It’s been sitting around for years and years in the living room of mom and dad’s house. Then after that I had it in my house and never really thought much about it so one day I just decided I’d get it out and clean it up and give it to the boys for the museum.”
HOW MANY CARS DO YOU THINK YOU MADE WHEN YOU WERE A KID?
“Oh, probably 20 or so. I made a little tractor trailer when I was in the second grade, carved one out of wood. And what you do is you’d use shoe sole. They’re about a quarter inch thick. Rubber shoe sole that you would buy to repair shoes. You used to repair shoes, you know. Then I would cut a round piece of rubber and drill a hole in it and that was my wheels for the little cars.”
“One of the cars my daughter had, it was a little ’39 Ford and it’s carved out of wood. It’s got the little motor in it. You can see the motor sitting in there with three carburetors on it. I guess I need to get her to take a picture of it, up close detail of it. It’s about 4 inches long, maybe five.”
NUMBER FOUR: A screwdriver, made by John Walter Wood (1930-40s)
Leonard Wood, uncle of Eddie and Len Wood (current owners of Wood Brothers Racing)
YOUR FATHER, JOHN WALTER WOOD, WAS AN INVENTOR OF SORTS. TALK A LITTLE ABOUT THE SCREWDRIVER HE BUILT TO WORK ON THE CAR.
“So my dad used to make all kinds of tools. If you had a problem, if you had a tight place where you needed to start a screw, you couldn’t get to it. He made this screwdriver to hold a screw to go up that tiny place. It was about 12 or 14 inches long. He made that thing just in front of the fireplace. He would let it heat up. And he would flatten it, shape it on an anvil and kept working with it. And then all that cut away was just with a hack saw and a file. Like those little holes in there… he didn’t have a lot of tools. He didn’t even have an electric drill. It was just like a little push, called a Yankee drill. But anyway he would get a hole in it then take a file and file it out square. Just made it basically with a file, a hacksaw and a soldering iron he had that he would solder some stuff. But he made this screwdriver and you just put that button and it opened the jaws. You push it the other way and it closes them. It’s a very precise piece to be made back in that day when you had nothing no more than to do with. Of course he made all kinds of tools. To spread a battery cable terminal apart because it corrodes and you couldn’t get it off, a device that would hook on into the slot and pull it apart. But the screwdriver was the most impressive to me that he made.”
DID YOU KNOW WHERE THE SCREWDRIVER WAS ALL ALONG OR WAS IT FORGOTTEN BY THE FAMILY UNTIL RECENTLY FOUND AGAIN?
“When my dad died they just threw things out. I’ve had it in my possession for years. When they started the museum I decided that’s where it needs to be. So it’s never been talked about. Nothing’s been talked about what my dad did until now. Sure he was a great mechanic. He was just kind of the best in Patrick County, you know? I remember people saying that. And his work was always thorough and precise.”
IT APPEARS HE INDENDED TO APPLY FOR A PATENT AT ONE TIME. YOUR FAMILY STILL HAS THE PAPERS.
“I know he aimed to patent several things, but I don’t have any of the patent papers. He didn’t ever get his patent, but he was wanting to get it patented. Of course by this day and time they’ve made screwdrivers of a similar description, but I’ve never seen one yet that was as nice as that one was.”
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