Meet the Historian and Early Memories

Yes. And all these outuildings here were uh were his, but I spent many a day in there just reminiscing with him. Now, that shop we're looking at with the two windows right here is this blue one on the right. There pictures from cottonwowens.com and it has all kinds of history and explanations and pictures of inside the shops, all the race cars. Highly recommend checking that out. But just to get your bearings to show you exactly what we're looking at here, that building, the tinier one behind the big one. And then up where it says Messa Auto Repair, that is kind of like the big Mopar factory shop. The one that we'll go check out in a minute here. We actually get to go inside this one. He had when he died, they had his auction in that building right there. And I mean, everybody and their brother was down here. He sold everything he had. I know Ray Everham was down here and Junior Johnson was down. A lot of people were here for that. I begged Cotton to let me write his biography on him and he wouldn't do it really. But I had a meeting with him and I thought I was going to talk him into it. Now, you can see the sign here. It's Cotton On's Drive. Yeah. Uh, and so I was all excited and getting ready to go interview him one day when uh it came on the news that famous racing personality's garage burns down and it turned out to be cotton and it was that one right there. Wow. And uh somebody had tried to some genius had tried to kill a beehive, a hornets nest or something. You kidding me? with flaming with a flaming rag on the end of a pole and he burned a whole thing down and I'm like, "Oh, he's going to be in a good mood to write a book now." Which one was it? That one right there. Which one? Well, I was pointing to it, but there's like four buildings over there. That that little one? Yeah, that little one. Was that the original one? Well, I mean, they repaired it, but