Mark Martin's Hometown History Tour! Original Buildings & Profound Life Lessons From a Legend

you can learn from history this was the launch pad right here larry shaw said boy i bet that trailer went for a ride back there and claude reed said no it ain't back there i mean i haven't been standing around this place since 1779. that was my father teaching me how to be a man you had to walk to someone's house and knock on the door so get this we're about to go on a field trip with mark to look at some of the old buildings and historic places around here that he had i don't know associations with i'm not exactly sure what he's going to show us but we're going to hop in his uh his denali and see where we go so this is at the famous gmc like if you didn't buy this thing i may not be sitting here right now that's how it first started going back and forth yeah that's right that's right i i i couldn't remember my arlene asked me how i knew you and i said i don't know something he said something to me on social media and that's kind of how and then i started checking you out and now watch all your videos where's the first interesting stop we're gonna go up here to uh where my dad's trucking company used to be in the 70s he built a shop we first a few years we raced out of the garage back you know we had a two-car garage behind our house and so i guess the first three years we raced out of that uh garage at the house and then uh he built us a shop up here uh next to the trucking company and so we raced uh our asa car out of there in 77 and 78 and in 78 we ran for asa championship and so we raced out of here uh to indiana and wisconsin and you know ohio and all those places so every weekend you know we had to drive from batesville through up through st louis and up up there that's the year that we had the ford uh cube van and blew three motors up in the tow truck we blew more motors up in the tow truck than we did in the race car there's lots of tow truck stories man lots of lots of tow truck stories all those cool stories are heavily detailed and documented in his podcast which is absolutely worth listening to for those things you already told them once so i'm going to go through all them again but i really hope people go listen to that because there's a lot more um useful information than just cool stories with like the whole your rise and come back and all that stuff it's it can help people if they're listening to it with that lens i agree i agree you can learn from history i made a lot of mistakes and i had had some tough times one of the things you know you forget about us when we were blowing those engines up in the tow truck we're up on the two lanes in northern arkansas and there were no cell phones back then you had to walk to someone's house and knock on the door and hope that they let you in and let you borrow their telephone to call for rescue so uh yeah it was a crazy crazy time back in the day i do think about that whenever i get stuck somewhere i'm like well you know this really isn't that bad it's it's okay i can call somebody there's triple a or you know it's just time what you're upset about is the time not whether or not you're actually in danger yes did he originally build this he built this yeah before that he had a shop in town in batesville and that's where my uh first race car was built was in that shop um it was obviously smaller than this but this was our racing logo for 1970 uh seven wow that is that's freaking awesome yeah i remember i remember right now you know finishing our car and you know brand new race car you built a new race car every winter and i remember finishing our car and rolling it outside and taking pictures of it before we went to the first race and having there's photos of it sitting on the trailer in 78 as well but we did it in 77 i think we took the picture of the car over here and then 78 the car was on the trailer over on the other side of the building and uh both times were getting ready to go to new smyrna for speed weeks in february yeah those cars were the first two pavement cars that we built the first two years they were a lot different than those dirt cars and they were a lot more sophisticated they were how chassis um nice race cars you know our first uh first two race cars were extremely extremely crude first one was extremely crude um the second one was better and the third one was some better than that because we had uh we took it up to larry phillips uh actually and had phillips put the roll cage and all on it so it had a real road cage that first race car had a water pipe you know for a row cage and was all stick welded and everything by the time we got to our third race car they were starting to be fairly nice you want to get out or yeah hey you said the sign was there i didn't think it was gonna be like like the sign the sign that's awesome yeah still there i didn't even remember the checkered flags i i didn't remember that and as you can see it's faded more where the sun hits it where the trees got it shaded it's a little bit more orange but that was that that was my colors was this building not here it wasn't here originally when we built the shop yeah that got that was built later wow on the bottom half but yeah i didn't even remember that and the mandoor wow yeah that is spent some long hours in this thing so you probably went in and out of this door yeah thousands of times i did i did thousands of times and uh it was really nice there was an upstairs over here at the trucking company and my dad had uh set up a cafeteria up there so they cooked uh for lunch every day for everybody that worked here and so you know we could just walk over there and uh have lunch come back to work and work right into the night so we worked day and night like i said what i worked uh here during the day and then you know maybe uh some of the night help you know some of the volunteer help might come in at night so you pretty much had to be around day and night so you you work all day yourself and then people come help you tonight and you're gas and you want to go home but they're still there and they're still going so you're like i just have to keep moving my feet because otherwise i'll lose the help of three people if i throw in the towel because they're not going to want to work if you stop you end up just just draining yourself completely but that's how you get things done sometimes well yes it is and volunteer help was crucial in the early years you know you couldn't do it without them how did you find the volunteers why did they want to volunteer they loved going to the races so they come and help at night you know after work or whatever you know they might come and help and then you know you'd take them with you to go racing and that was uh that's what it's all about they love being a part of a team in a car and the excitement of seeing the the uh the car you know run up front or go fast or whatever how hard is it to push a broken car up this hill i don't remember it must not we must almost always drove it i can't remember but it would have been certainly hard because we at that time we were running uh spools in the rear end so the rear end was locked so if you weren't going straight those things were really hard to fit actually always when you pushed him around the pits the right rear would always kind of jerk and spin you know because it was we ran spools for forever from 77 until until i went nascar racing that's all we ran well i can't believe this like the sticker's still there and all that stuff it's like just total when was the last time you came back here i mean i haven't been standing around this place since 1779. wow is there anything coming back now that you're like standing here looking at stuff it is you know just i forgot the sticker i forgot that the logo was on the roll-up door um yeah yeah but it's a long time ago but i remember i remember uh being in the shop and working on the cars and having a phone in there um you know and talking to talking to ed howe we had gone up to awaso michigan and raced uh and i ran third junior handling one and bob seneca ran second but i was ran side by side with bob seneca a whole lot of the race and finished third well herb that was uh the i'd call him the general manager of ed howe's place uh was in the grandstands and was so impressed that he called me here in the shop and i was still rookie i was rookie that you know i was actually one rookie of the year for asa that year but you know i was nobody enough you know nothing in that world and he was so impressed that he called me and he says hey uh you know you really ran good yesterday uh i've got a setup that might help you uh because i was running 11 50 and a 600 across the front and a pair of 350s because they gave me the setup and he said you know we got a new gotta got a setup we could give you a 1050 and a 800 and a pair of 250s and all this stuff so i couldn't believe it you know i couldn't believe that somebody from ed house would call me and give me a setup that was supposed to run even better and then later that year when we locked up the rookie of the year herb called again and he says hey we're going to give you a chassis for next year so that was kind of the beginning of getting free stuff so this was like this was your launch pad right here this was the launch pad right here the the dirt racing was got me to here but this was the launch pad we won asa rookie of the year out of this building and then we won the asa championship out of this building and that those asa championships were the fuel that got me into nascar that's so cool so this is this is what makes buildings cool even maybe cooler than cars because you you meet people in buildings you learn things in buildings it's you have your highs your lows you're dragging the broken car with a lawn mower me all that all that stuff it happens in these places and they're kind of like i don't know not really talked about you know you're right that's really important i think to think about because you know now that we've walked around and looked at the cars and talked at the talked about the cars i've really never put a focus on this building and it has more history to it than those cars do you know it's those cars are just one little thing where this is this was the launch pad you really hit it you know hit the nail on the head with that this is what we do this is the kind of stuff that gets me fired up i like digging for it and finding it and it was even like we were driving out here i thought you know i bet there's gotta be like a little garage somewhere where his car used to be or where was the trucking company like i wanted to i was kind of thinking of that and like well you're gonna drive 11 hours i want to see the whole the whole thing like what or even like i don't know even coming up here on that little hairpin thing like wonder how many times he's uh gone really fast up this thing like is this what prepared you for watkins glenn oh yeah the roads around here yeah definitely uh people you know when i first started road racing when people how did you learn to road race like that because we always ran good and i'm like man the back roads of arkansas you know is this this is the same thing as driving i said road racing is the same thing as driving the back roads of arkansas you go as fast as you can and stay out of the ditch did you ever throw any old parts back there or anything you know i didn't but actually when i worked out of this shop my mother lived just across the road and i lived with her and so i most of the time i would walk over here to the shop and walk back over so somehow or another i was getting up and over that right there you climbed over the wall i don't remember how i did it but since we've had so much fun looking at this shop i want to take you and drive you by the the property it's not the exact same shop but they built a new metal building right where the metal building was where we built those first that first race car okay let's go check that out took it to the track we took it down the road and yeah ran it and stepped on it and kind of ran it through its paces on the highway that's awesome when did this property get sold and no longer the trucking company so my dad moved the company from here he outgrew this um in the uh early 80s and he moved into uh another building here in batesville that was a little bit bigger uh property had uh had a lot more room to expand and he expanded from i must say he ran 30 trucks out of this and he expanded over there to to uh well over 50 trucks and uh you know really really expanded but then it got too big too hard to manage uh and so he sold it sold out and then about a year after he sold it sold out he started another one and he started it down in cersei it's about 50 miles from here and he never let it get over 40 trucks because he felt like he could manage it you know drivers and keep his arms around it more he was very hands-on uh and he bought his first truck the year i was born in 1959 and built a really successful business but he let it get too big once and he couldn't couldn't keep control of it like he wanted and keep it profitable like he wanted he could make he could make more money with 30 to 40 trucks than he could with 80 you know 60 or 80. that's interesting did he sell it to start a new one or did he sell it because he wanted to be done and then missed it and wanted to start another one you know i don't really know what his uh motivation for selling out exactly was and what his plan was because that was in uh the early to mid 80s and i was uh really immersed in and i wasn't living here of course i i moved from here in uh march of 79 and you know just once in a while i'd come back and visit uh but that was it you know just for a short period of time is that my career really is taking off and that was uh i was working all the time so we weren't you know as we were real close and in contact during those years so i'm not sure if he had a plan on starting another one or if he was had a plan on he couldn't have been retiring uh i don't know exactly what his plan was when that turn was even banked and everything yeah yeah and they still turn over all the time turn trucks over there all the time my dad was was quite a character he he i went up that thing around that curve way too fast i'm sure plenty but my dad was the real crazy driver uh he once told me that and this is when he was driving 80s vintage trans ams in the 80s uh which really handled really good but any curve whatever the speed limit was for the curve he knew he could do it double so if it said 45 was a 45 degree curve speed limit he knew he'd hit it at 90. he'd be fine wow yeah my dad was uh was crazy he was crazy so much fun uh man he was uh he was pretty loud then uh there was some time when you were going somewhere and he tried to pass somebody and ended up sending your truck and trailer off of the ditch and tools flying everywhere that is right that was 1977 we left here and we left late and he was mad uh because he couldn't get away from the trucking company so we only got about 45 minutes up the road and he was passing on a curve and we all of a sudden we met somebody so he wheeled it off in the ditch we pulled like a u-haul type trailer with spare engine 55 gallon drum of of racing fuel and all our tools and everything were in that and we were headed to a 200 lap asa race in fort smith arkansas so we went through the ditch and we stopped and larry shaw said boy i bet that trailer went for a ride back there and claude reid said no it ain't back there yeah but it broke off there were racing fuel everywhere racing engine in the woods uh tools or 9 16 here and a half inch there i mean it was like crazy crazy all stuff scattered and so we had to go so we drove the truck back out onto the road and he went i was so mad at him i could have killed him and he went into the house and called somebody at the truck company come and get him and we went on without our spare motor and all that stuff to practice and qualify and he got all of our junk out of the woods and loaded up and came up the next day but he had a wreck even even now he came up the next day but he ran off the road there too he didn't wreck but he ran off through he was uh he he was wild he's a wild one you think you learned uh some of your driving ability from riding around with him as a little kid no question i i uh you know definitely became a race car driver because of uh you know the things that we shared experiences that we shared and the passion that we had for uh things that go fast um he was an incredible incredible person right up here we're just about there and like i say i'm not sure why they took the metal building down uh but they put another one up just almost in the identical spot as we come up here it will be here on the right that's it i mean that that's it right there that s in l and this garage door that's open you know that may be that it's the same building because it had a had that mezzanine that's the same building there was where the where you see the refrigerator was a coke machine and my dad and the cokes were 10 cents and my dad gave me a key to that thing because i was always hitting him up for gas money for my minibike and he hit me the key to that and he says you keep that thing full and don't ask me for no more money and so i got the all the change and that was my gas money and stuff but in that stall right there we parked that car that 55 chevy that just drug it out of the woods and parked it right there and we started gutting out the interior and all that stuff and then troy lynn jeffrey the main our head mechanic uh started uh you know welding a roll cage in it and larry shaw had a uh auto parts repair shop just two blocks this way and he would be driving by here on the way home and it piqued his interest what are they doing that car in there so he wheeled in here one one one evening and hung around and started helping and pretty soon he came started coming by here every evening and so uh if you don't know the history of dirt track racing and larry shaw uh you should because larry got his start working at night he worked for for three years he worked every night in the shop with my dad and then uh in 77 the fourth year we raced he sold his shop and came to work for us full-time so he worked for us for a year full-time and it got to be too much traveling for him so uh he quit and did other things uh and eventually moved back here uh and started building race cars and now he builds you know he built 200 dirt cars a year forever uh mostly modifieds and is one of the biggest names and you know modified dirt carve in the nation and all that started he started his career like i did right there in that stall that is so cool you think those snl guys have any idea about anything in there i don't and you know i i think i was right wrong about this building this is the exact this is the building because see where that white pickup trucks park there yeah you used to park the trucks down here and then you would pull them they would be parked side-by-side tractor trailers and you would pull them up there and the pressure washer was just inside that door and you'd pull the hose outside and you'd pressure wash them and so when i was probably 12 11 11 12 i would come down here on saturdays and washed trucks because when i finished washing them i get to back them back in and pull the next one up well by the time the next year rolled around i was like 13. i'd go around the block yeah i'd take it around the block so i you know my reward for washing a tractor trailer was to get to driving around the block you got to air dry it yeah it goes air dry that was cool yeah so what it is is that big door roll-up door wasn't on so they've extended i think they've extended the building and that's why i thought it was a different building is because they've they've added that on where the windows are where…