The Vault
THE ‘FLYING FARMER’ ROGER PAUL
Posted on: Monday December 14, 2020
The “Flying Farmer” Roger Paul was a top flight late model driver in NE Wisconsin in the 1970’s. (Bob Bergeron photo)
One of the most popular drivers at Shawano Speedway from the 1959 through 1980 was known as “The Flying Farmer.” Roger Paul was a cash crop farmer from New London, Wisconsin. Read about his chapter in “Life In The Past Lane – a history of stock car racing in northeast Wisconsin from 1950-1980.”
At the height of his racing career in the early to mid-1970s, New London’s Roger Paul, dubbed by area track announcer Jerry Rhode as “The Flyin’ Farmer,” was racing four, sometimes five nights a week across Wisconsin.
The challenge for Paul was he still had cabbage, soybeans and corn to tend to in his fields.
“Five a.m. rolled around pretty early,” recalled Paul, who at the age of 80 still tends to his farm twelve minutes north of New London. “I remember quite a few nights from those mid-week specials out towards Eau Claire, and that
we’d be rolling in the driveway around 3 or 4 a.m. We still had to get up in the field in the morning.”
Paul still operates the tractor and hauls crops on the 1,200-acre farm he runs with his son, Chad Paul, and his son-in-law. Paul admits he’s moving “quite a bit slower” these days, but moving slowly certainly was not the case when he made his debut racing in 1959.
“We ran the coupes back in the day, primarily at Shiocton and Shawano in the early going,” said Paul. “Those were some pretty wild times. You could throw together a car real cheap. I think we had $75 invested in our first car.”
Violent wrecks and rollovers were commonplace during the coupe era. Paul was involved in one of the worst spills in track history at Shawano in the mid-1960s.
“I remember I had a ’34 Chevy Coupe,” Paul said. “It was in the feature and somebody got into the back of me. I was near the front and I went airborne. I bounced off some other cars and never actually touched the ground down the whole straightaway.”
The motor flew out of the car and Paul emerged unhurt.
Paul got into the political end of the sport when served on the board of directors for the Wolf River Racing Association (WRRA) in the late 1960s. At the time, there was friction between the Shawano-area WRRA and the Fox Valley Racing Club based in Appleton.
“They wanted to switch the night they ran at Outagamie County Speedway to Saturdays,” said Paul. “Some pretty big-name drivers used to sit outside the Shawano track and protest for a while.”
Paul declined to name the drivers.
The WRRA went to the Shawano Fair Board with its proposal to run the races on Saturday nights.
“At first, just Shawano was sanctioned with the WRRA,” Paul explained. “But soon thereafter, Seymour followed our rule book.”
In time, the club dissolved as all tracks eventually came to run the same rules package in the early 1970s. Over the years, Paul earned a reputation for being a hard-charging, but clean driver.
“Roger Paul is a true top-shelf guy,” said Red BeDell, who raced against Paul for several seasons. “Class act top to bottom.”
Paul won dozens of features during the course of his career at Shawano, Seymour, De Pere and Shiocton.
“Once he got out front, Roger Paul was very tough to beat,” noted local race historian and former track public relations man Pete Vercauteren. “He was very hard to pass once he got the lead.”
Paul earned three track championships at Shawano. He raced his own Chevrolet Novas for several seasons and also drove for many car owners. Among them was a man out of the Fox Valley named Crooks Schultz.
“Crooks was quite the guy,” recalled Paul. “One time, he ended up pulling a motor out of his mother’s car and we used it to race at the Wausau Fair. His intentions were good, but he didn’t quite have the funding to make it go big. I remember some shows we’d time in third or fourth quick. I’m pretty sure we could have nailed fast time if we’d had better, newer tires under the car.”
Paul also raced for Green Bay’s Bob Heinritz, who dabbled in race promoting for a short time. Heinritz reopened Seymour Speedway with four specials in 1982 after the track had been closed since 1978. He also promoted races at Luxemburg Speedway at the Kewaunee County Fairgrounds in the early 1980s.
“Bob was a real good guy,” said Paul. “He ran a junkyard at the time. Sometimes we’d keep the car out by my place, but most of the time I was too busy tending to the farm. I’d just show up on race nights for the most part. The car was always ready for me to go. He let me pick what type of engine I wanted to run for the car. We ran that car on the asphalt at WIR in Kaukauna, too. We had real good luck when we raced out of town.”
Paul relishes the battles he had with fellow drivers over the years.
“I had the best memories probably at Shawano,” said Paul. “I remember racing against the Bear (Roger Regeth), and he was like a battering ram the way he’d drive. He was a toughie. He’d run you up into the guardrail.”
Paul recalled Shawano having full grandstands and a full pit area as well, filled with a cast of stout drivers and some colorful characters.
“Red BeDell had that hauler with the big Confederate flag in it, that was something,” chuckled Paul. “I remember he’d usually roll into the pits with a couple of chicks in the hauler with him. It was pretty wild.”
Paul remembers Paul Kaczrowski recording a television commercial with JJ Smith for Paul’s Super Speedway in De Pere in 1978.
“We did that at Channel 11,” said Paul. ‘That Paul was a pretty flamboyant guy. He was a true go-getter and a good promoter.”
Paul won a feature race at Seymour one night with one major obstacle inside the cockpit.
“The steering wheel mount underneath the dash fell out on the second lap of the feature,” he explained. “I had to hold the steering wheel in my lap the whole time. I hung on and won the race with my Nova. That was unreal.”
Paul was a frontrunner at WIR in Kaukauna when he ran Thursday nights, but had more success and preferred racing on the dirt.
“You can correct a mistake on dirt,” he said. “If you do a little something different, it’s pretty easy to correct it. On blacktop, you make a mistake with your setup and you were gone.”
Paul’s biggest payday came in the mid-1970s when he won a $1,500 race at the Colby Speedway in Central Wisconsin.
“I remember that one well,” Paul said. “It was a third-mile. I lapped the entire field except for one guy. That one guy was JJ (Smith).”
In 1979 and 1980, Paul raced for De Pere’s Bob Herrick.
“With Bob, the car was always immaculate,” said Paul. “He leaned more toward the asphalt racing with that car.”
That ride eventually would go to NASCAR driver Alan Kulwicki in 1980 and 1981.
Paul’s career came to an end at a race at the Yellow River Speedway in Marshfield in 1980.
“I got caught up a wreck with one of those guys from down in the Milwaukee area – I cannot recall who, though,” said Paul. “I got my bell rung. I got hit in the driver’s door. I spent the night in the hospital from that one.”
For Paul’s wife, Karen, the concussion was the final straw. “She wanted me to hang it up,” he said. “The concussion was enough for her.”
Photo courtesy of Vercauteren family
Paul has slowed down over the years, with three back operations, both knees replaced and rotator cuff surgeries. The body does pay the price from twenty-two years of racing and farming your entire life.
Paul’s son, Chad, launched his own career in the early 1980s, racing for a bit in Shawano’s old Sportsman class. Later, when the IMCA modifieds began appearing at area tracks in the late ’80s, Chad raced the fenderless class for a handful of seasons before he pulled the pin on his own racing career.
After his retirement in the early 1990s, Paul had a couple of opportunities to wheel Chad’s IMCA modified at Shawano. “Both times that happened, we got rained out,” Paul explained.
Paul is a member of the Shawano Speedway Hall of Fame. He’s quite content with his racing career.
“I met a lot of great fans and drivers over the years,” he said. “It was a great ride.”
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