By MONTE DUTTON

When writing about stock cars became my principal way to make a living, one of the surprises was Howard Augustine “Humpy” Wheeler Jr., known for his flamboyant promotion of events at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

I was expecting P.T. Barnum. What I found was the Wizard of Oz, a mild-mannered fellow behind the curtains, twisting his knobs and conjuring up great and garish spectacles.

Humpy was at the head of the table, listening to great, whimsical proposals offered mainly in jest, until someone said, “Well, we can’t do that,” to which Humpy said, “Well, why not?”

Wheeler died on Wednesday, but I had ballgames for which to get ready, meetings to attend and brainstorming that took up the time I needed for sleep. To quote an old song, he walked the furrowed fields of my mind for a while.

Had Humpy not fallen, NASCAR never would have. Now that he’s dead, I don’t think there’s anyone out there left. Now the sport is ruled by marketers, branders and negotiators. Every proposal “goes through legal.” The best and brightest can’t fix their problems because they can’t admit they’ve made mistakes.

When I first met Wheeler, I expected Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard. He was sort of stately, scholarly even, bespectacled and soft spoken. He made bold remarks softly. It was boss and longtime associate, Ollis Bruton Smith, who matched the stereotype. When Smith, who died at 95 in 2022, split with Wheeler in 2008, it was as significant in NASCAR as Dean Martin breaking up with Jerry Lewis in Hollywood.

Wheeler ran Charlotte Motor Speedway. He wasn’t in charge of dealing with the media, but he staffed the speedway with PR operatives who matched his aggressive style: Tom Cotter, Eddie Gossage, Ed Clark, Jeff Byrd, Jerry Gappens and others. Most moved on to spread the Humpy gospel at other outposts in the International Speedway Corporation empire.

Each May the onetime World 600, NASCAR’s longest race, began with a version of The Longest Day. In the fall, the onetime National 500 brought crowds in early for a death-defying thrill show of one sort or another: School buses jumped ramps over a line of port-a-johns. Wheeler placed a huge water tank in front of the grandstands and dubbed it Man Versus Shark: One Must Die!

Wheeler invigorated The Winston All-Star Race, championed Legends Car races and the Sportsman Series and installed a high-tech lighting system so that the races could be run at night on a high-speed track. Not everything worked, but he succeeded and failed on a grand scale.

A native of Belmont, N.C., amateur boxer, son of a football coach and a player at the University of South Carolina, Wheeler got his style from his beginnings as a short-track promoter. One of his failures was scattering detergent flakes around a paved Legends track to simulate dirt. Only Humpy would try to make a dirt track clean.

Most of my dealings with Wheeler about racing were formal: media conferences, interviews, etc. Most of our one-on-one interactions involved books, movies and literary pursuits. I’d recommend fiction to him. He’d recommend non-fiction me. I once read a massive book on the development of civilization —  Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond – on Humpy’s recommendation.

I have tried and failed to recommend Wheeler’s PR style to innumerable other flacks. In the worst of times – an Indy car once leaped into the grandstands at CMS, a pedestrian bridge collapsed and several drivers died in Sportsman and ARCA races – he was honest in divulging the details. He knew how to steer the narrative by creating compassion in those writing it. Mistakes were made, but good people made them.

No one is like that anymore. The tone has grown confrontational. You’ll write what we say, and what we don’t say is none of your damn business. What the powers that be don’t realize is that journalists are competitive, too. Like a cornered porcupine, a journalist, once challenged, will find out what tyrants don’t want him or her to hear. He’ll fire his quills.

The Statler Brothers once recorded a hit song called “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?”

Everybody knows when you go to the show / You can’t take the kids along / You gotta read the paper and see the codes of G, PG and R and X / And you gotta know what the movie’s about before you even go / Disney’s gone, Tex Ritter’s dead and the screen is filled with sex.

Humpy Wheeler was Randolph Scott, and now I trust he is riding the high country.

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