October 2024 – the post about Onteora Speedway is woefully unfinished and the post about Extended Racing Family / Current Racing is woefully not current. I’ll get to them…

A number of years ago I began to go through Mavis Shurter’s voluminous racing collection. In a 6″x 9″ black, hardcovered, looseleaf notebook, she recorded every race. She wrote the date and the name of the track, the lineup of each race by car number and driver, the finish positions and the running time of the event. Some events had little notes describing an accident or breakdown. Some had the name of a driver with the address of the hospital. At the top of some pages was the name of a driver killed and the track name where it happened as it was announced over the loudspeakers.

I knew she had beautiful handwriting, but I became amazed at her hands’ consistency through heat and dust and cold and damp: bright sunny days with the backdrop of mountains or buildings: inside stadiums: under night skies with the dust filled faint light of oval tracks: the aurora borealis we watched a number of times over the back stretch of Victory Speedway. (In 1968 would be renamed Orange County Speedway in Middletown, NY.)

From the notebook, I started figuring Larry’s racing statistics because it seemed like that’s what people liked. Larry would come to the 4’X8′ plywood table I had stacked with memorabilia and boxes of archival plastic. Spurred by a photo, he’d tell a story. I’d scribble it on a scrap of paper. Wishing I had Mavis’ practiced hand, I’d write names and dates on pictures as he remembered. I silently thanked her for the articles and pictures she had identified in her script: to my eye her writing enhanced: mine detracted.

Larry and Mavis were my parents. As a child there was no better place than the backseat of our car and a bleacher bench at a racetrack, where, cuddled in blankets, I’d fall sound asleep to the roar of engines and smell of fuel. My favorite track was the Daytona Beach Course because I loved following the adults to and from the front and back stretch, over the sand dunes avoiding sharp palmettos until they got so tired they’d settle down for the reminder of the race. I was captivated by the thundering race cars propelling plumes of sand, heavy with the scent of sea spray and fuel against the backdrop of crashing ocean waves that became silenced by waves of speeding cars.

It dawned on me that without my mother’s dedication to racing and record keeping, my father’s career would boil down to wins and stats: the numbers game that can make history so boring. His story is really their story and her collection showed me that she didn’t think their story stood alone. Racing biographies become richer when it becomes a “family” racing tree which grows to include not only the winners and favorites, but the others who captured the headlines less often. There is little fun in watching someone “run away” with a race. Without the drivers in back of the leader maneuvering and challenging, there would be little excitement: the lesser-known men: the drivers whose grand skill and luck and good running, good handling car gave the trophy guys a run for their money and thrilled the spectators with their skill and daring. Her collection says: winning or losing, it’s the racing that is important. That she had the eye of an archivist, her collection says history is important.

But what was most important to Mavis was that we all try to be kind and do our best. I know that beyond a doubt because that was what she said to me when I was watching my father and a fellow racer maneuver for 1st and 2nd place. Frustrated, I yelled, “I wish he’d (the other racer) spin out!” She grabbed my hand, took her riveted attention from the track and staring into something deeper than my eyes, said, “Don’t ever wish bad on someone else, only wish for your dad to do his best.”

It is a way of being worth remembering.

This work is dedicated to my Mom and Dad; Mavis and Larry Shurter and my little brother Larry Jr., who watched the cars go round and round.

Acknowledgements: In reverse chronological order:

Months will go by, and I’ll message Thomas Schmeh to ask him if he wouldn’t mind confirming some racing fact or help unravel a contradiction in information or solve a mystery. Much of the time his responses are as fast as the main events in the Golden Age of Midgets and I thank him – Iam racingly grateful! The resources he has unearthed and the hours he spends gathering racing history is amazing and inspiring.

I was introduced to Thomas by Chas Hertica and Joey Lawrence and I thank them for that and their sharing of stories and their encouragement.

I also want to thank A.R. Dick Hansen, Denise Markle, Fran and Cindy Bush, Jim Douglas and Roger Liller for their dedication to racing and the history of racing.

Thank you to my cousin Jim Glass of Jim Glass Corvettes for inviting me to races and events. His (reserved) passion about racing sport cars and now vintage stocks tingles the racing DNA in me and that, I hope, keeps the history I’m trying to share, vibrant.

Thank you to Sal DeRosalia whose interest in racing history brought him to my doorstep in the summer of 2023. This ‘website’ had consisted of scanned material I was dumping on it one after another in chronological order. I had a vision but no tech ability. Sal set up this website and patiently showed a tech dinosaur how to add and expand it. His oval began locally, stretched to Seattle and turned again to the Catskills. He is currently racing and his business, Rue Works, Inc. is an “onsite and remote solutions to make life easier for your home and business.”

I also want to thank Bobby and Judith Albert for all their encouragement and warmth. We met at a racing reunion because their daughter was wearing a Tony Bonadies t-shirt, and I knew I had to meet whoever was involved with that shirt. Bobby and Judith immediately made me feel part of their racing story. Bobby told me a story about my father that made me feel proud and also made me respect Bob for having the unselfish kindness to share that story with me. Bob Sr. and Larry raced some of the same tracks in the late 1940’s and 1950’s.

Thank you to Zoeanne Murphy for inviting me to sit at her kitchen table to register a domain and begin a website. The depth of her commitment to journalism shines through as she is totally uninterested in racing. When I told her a little of the family racing story, she immediately generously offered to get me going on the website. Thank goodness I only knew her as the new neighbor… otherwise i would have been too…

I want to thank Sylvia Rozzelle for her “you can do it” encouragement. Her enthusiasm and respect for my mother’s racing collection and her stories of having good times with my father, gave me a push to find ways to share their racing story. Sylvia inspired me because I watched her through the years of her being the Town Clerk of Olive, doing what no one had done before: digging into old dusty, dirty, mousy boxes of Olive history – some of which were literally in the attic of the old Town building. We should all be thankful for her hard work, dedication, determination and organizational skills. She has preserved local history that was well on its way to being lost forever.

For filling in some blanks for me, I also want to thank Ken “Duffy” Ovens, who as a young boy at the Middletown track watching his own father race, knew a good guy when he saw one. Duffy spent many a weekend at the Shurter garage hanging with guys to work on Larry’s stock car. Duffy later became a sports car driver. (Larry and Mavis didn’t hold it against him). My parents loved him dearly.

I want to thank the ‘cousins’ Mavis Gallup and Bill Gallup for helping me try to figure out the details of our extended racing family that began at Woodstock Legion Speedway in 1938. Bill is an engineer, master mechanic and third generation driver.

I would appreciate any feedback about this site, any stories, and any information from people about Larry’s racing career.