The Vault
A TRIBUTE TO “MR. B” BOBBY BENNETT
Posted on: Tuesday April 20, 2021
(CHAPTER PULLED FROM THE 2015 RELEASE “LIFE IN THE PAST LANE – A HISTORY OF STOCK CAR RACING IN NORTHEAST WISCONSIN FROM 1950-1980.”
Bobby Bennett
“Mr. B”
“Mr. B” Bobby Bennett takes the checkered flag for a ride after a Sunday afternoon victory at the Brown County Fairgrounds in De Pere, Wisconsin in 1974. (Vercauteren family photo)
As a kid growing up, Bobby Bennett would race anything if it had wheels on it.
In fact, it didn’t even need a motor, as Soap Box Derby cars were part of Bennett’s passion, too. It didn’t matter if it was stock cars, snowmobiles or flying airplanes. “Mr. B” had a true need for speed.
When Bennett was a young child, he saw a Whizzer brand motorcycle. “I saw an ad in the newspaper at Grandpa’s house in Hortonville,” said Bennett. “I said if me, Dad and Grandpa all chipped in it would only cost $33 apiece.”
Bennett’s dad, Albert, who was a beekeeper by trade, raced motorcycles across Wisconsin in the 1940s at the county fairgrounds.
“That got me into racing and I got used to skidding them sideways and such,” said Bennett. “A guy had a motorcycle for sale at a race in Oshkosh one afternoon. He wanted $100 for it. Dad bought it. He told me if I help him out with the honey bees in the summertime for the next three summers, he’d give me that bike. So I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ That’s how the need for speed got started.”
Bennett took that motorcycle and went to Rib Mountain near Wausau, Wisconsin, took the fenders and headlights off, and got it ready for racing. Bennett rode the motorcycle home that he raced. The year was 1952.
“I enjoyed racing the bikes – I was a junior in high school,” said Bennett, who upon graduation would work across the country as a storage tank welder.
Bennett made good money with his job, purchased a Jaguar and went road racing for a bit.
“I got drafted into the Army and went overseas,” said Bennett. “Lowell (Bobby’s eldest son) was born in Germany.” Bennett purchased an Austin-Healy that he would drive in competitions against lieutenants and colonels in races and hill climbing events in Germany. When he got out of the Army, he purchased a 1937 Plymouth as his first stock car in 1959.
“I started racing at tracks in Oshkosh, Shiocton, Seymour and De Pere that first year,” said Bennett. “I raced everywhere and anywhere I could. We even raced at 141 Speedway when they first built it. I didn’t care if it was dirt or asphalt – if there was a race track I was there. I loved racing that much.”
Bennett was a welder at Valley Iron Works, where he made $85 a week welding up steel for paper machines.
“I could go out and make $35 a night racing a stock car two of three nights a week sometimes,” said Bennett. “I was making almost as much racing as I was welding at the time.”
When Bennett first began racing, gas cost 20 cents per gallon.
“We’d buy spindles from the junkyard for anywhere from $2 to $5,” said Bennett. “It was cheap to go racing then.”
Bennett and his wife, Patricia, are the parents of ten children – six sons and four daughters.
“I raced as often as I could and Patricia went along with my racing,” said Bennett. “I could not have done it without her. She has stood by me with it all since day one.”
Bennett took on a leadership role as president of the Wolf River Racing Association (WRRA) in its inaugural year.
“Roger Paul was the secretary and Cliff “Squeak” Miller was the treasurer when we formed in 1960,” said Bennett. “Our home base was basically the track at Shiocton initially. The Fox River Racing Club had most of the tracks around. We started it after a few of us got black-flagged at the Fox River-run tracks.
“We wanted to establish a common set of rules and race procedures. Shiocton was a little backwoods track. We had strong support from the drivers. In fact, Roger Olm would drive all the way over every Sunday afternoon from Manitowoc to compete with us. To me, that said a lot about the show we were running.”
Pleasantview Night Club in Bear Creek was the place for the meetings.
“One night at one of our meetings, one of our club drivers mentioned that we should try and race at Shawano,” said Bennett. “We signed a petition. I think sixty or seventy guys signed the petition, and as a club we went in and actually promoted the races at Shawano after that.”
Among the rules Bennett drafted and enforced was no drinking in the pits during the races. “We actually had some drivers who would tip a few back and I helped get rid of that,” said Bennett. “Another thing I’m proud of was I pushed to get us to allow women into the pit area. I was big on racing being a family sport. I had a lot of opposition initially, but it passed and that perception started to change. Drivers’ wives were coming into the pits. It took a while and a lot of guys were mad. But as it turned out, when we were running Shawano we were the first track in the United States to allow women into the pit area.”
When the Shiocton track closed in 1973, so did the Wolf River Racing Association.
When it came to the rivalries with the Fox River Club drivers, Bennett maintains it was the WRRA club that permitted the Fox Valley drivers to come.
“We basically allowed them in with their late model cars,” said Bennett. “Most of our guys had the coupes and that. But the car counts were going down. Eventually, we blended them together, but then the coupes, they faded away.”
Bennett himself had a Hemi-powered Dodge number 48 he competed in both USAC stock car racing and eventually would run weekly at Shawano.
“That car had two carburetors on it,” said Bennett. “That Hemi had 675 horsepower. They’d really fly on the wet tracks.”
While competing in the USAC and IMCA circuits for a time in 1964 thru 1966, Bennett got to trade paint with a pair of auto racing legends on a regular basis: “SuperTex” A.J. Foyt and Parnelli Jones.
“I didn’t hit all of them, but I’d hit the shows that were relatively close in Indiana and Illinois,” said Bennett. “I remember going to Topeka, Kansas, to race. USAC was a very well-run deal. It was very professionally run from top to bottom. It was bigger than NASCAR at that time, in my opinion.”
Bennett, who raced on a tight budget while raising his large family, skimped and saved wherever and whenever he could. “I became really good friends with Bay Darnell from Illinois – he raced the USAC deal,” said Bennett. “I’d end up buying a lot of used stuff from him. He was a real good guy. Bay looked out for me in that USAC deal, too. He is a real good man.”
Bennett saw Foyt’s quick temper firsthand in an incident at the Milwaukee Mile. “We were at a race at the Milwaukee Mile, and (Roger) Regeth had cut off Foyt and Foyt spun. A.J. stormed through the pits, and walked up to Regeth and asked him, ‘Are you Roger Regeth?’ Roger said, ‘Yes, I’m him.’ And A.J. punched him square in the nose and down Regeth went! You just didn’t do that to the big guys back then. Regeth was a native of Milwaukee and he was just used to a rougher brand of driving, I guess.”
Regeth was no stranger to applying the ol’ “chrome horn” to another driver to get past him.
“I counted one year Roger hit me forty-six times on the tracks in one season,” said Bennett. “I remember one night Roger Paul got into it with Regeth at the food stand at Shawano. Roger Paul got so mad he swatted at Regeth and down Reggie went, his toes were up in the air. Roger Paul had enough of his rough driving. When Regeth crashed me, I was mad because that ended up costing me money. I didn’t like that a whole lot. I like Roger. I get along with him to this day. I never got even with him on the race track at all, though.”
Bennett suffered a major setback in December 1968. A licensed pilot, Bennett was flying his plane while a group of people were fox hunting on land near his home in Greenville. The plane went straight down from an altitude of about 500 feet and crashed in a field.
“We had 25 guys hunting fox at the time,” recalled Bennett. “I was spotting for them. I’d see the fox and dive bomb them so the guys would know where the fox would be. The day I crashed, I had 12 or 14 fox located where they generally were. The doctors think I may have blacked out prior to the crash.”
Bennett suffered 210 different fractures in his pelvis, chest, legs and arms in the crash. But even with those broken bones, it did not deter him.
“I was back racing the next April,” said Bennett. “They’d carry me from one car into the race car. I had a block on the accelerator I’d use, because my ankle was shattered. In fact, I won my first race after the crash. I beat Milo Van Oudenhoven for the win. I didn’t let anything stop me back then.”
Bennett could always race door handle to door handle with JJ Smith.
“JJ was always a clean driver,” said Bennett. “So was Roger Paul and Medina Smith. When those front fenders of those guys pulled up alongside of you on the track, you knew you could run fair and square with those guys.”
Bennett acquired a 1970 Chevelle that his good buddy, Jerry “Medina” Smith, had used to win a lot of races and score fast times. “I went to Lynn Blanchard, who owned the car at the time, and I said to him, ‘I see you’ve got your car for sale,’ ” recalled Bennett. “I asked him, ‘How much you want for it?’ Blanchard told me $4,500. I told him I only had $2,500. Lynn said, ‘I tell ya what, Bob. Take the car home and take the motor out of it. Give me the $2,500 you have. I want to freshen that engine up anyways. Back then a Blanchard-built motor was a solid motor. He had a great reputation of building a solid, reliable engine. He was a very solid, Christian man.”
Bob Bennett poses next to his Chevelle at Brown County Fairgrounds in De Pere, Wisconsin in 1974. This car would eventually wind up being Lowell Bennett’s first ever race car in 1976. (Vercauteren family photo)
Bennett blew his motor at Shawano Speedway on a Saturday night.
“I told Lynn in church that Sunday morning I wouldn’t be able to race De Pere that night because I had no motor,” said Bennett. “He told me, ‘I’ve got a blueprinted engine block I’ll sell you for $850. Just put your heads on it and you’ll be good to go.’ ”
After some hasty engine work on a hot Sunday afternoon, Bennett hightailed to the Brown County Fairgrounds in the nick of time for qualifying. “We wound up winning the feature that night and I won $450, and I was able to pay for more than half the motor in just that one night,” he said. “That’s how people worked together back then. They were really good times.”
Bennett, who also dabbled into snowmobile racing for several seasons, estimates he’s got close to 5,000 wins in all forms of racing, including heat wins, consolation wins and main events.
“I even count qualifying and fast times, because by golly, that was always such a big part of the show back then,” said Bennett. “Fast time also paid 10 or 11 points. It also gave you more cash to get back home on if you had problems in the feature or something.”
Among Bennett’s biggest accomplishments was winning a 50-lap feature at Shawano Speedway in the mid-1970s against some of the best drivers from a three-state area.
“I won $550, but that was a big deal for me,” said Bennett. “I also won the Fox Valley track title (which combined points from several area tracks on dirt and asphalt) in 1972.”
Bennett took a hiatus from racing after 1978, but his son, Brady, prompted him to get back into the racing game several years later in 1987.
“Brady was running one of the Kralacar-built (four-cylinder) mini stocks at Shawano, and he convinced me to come out of retirement and run one with him,” said Bennett, who raced at an estimated 257 different tracks in his storied career.
Bennett has kept the racing alive through his kids. His sons, Lowell, Brady, Tim, Dave, Aaron and Joel, all raced in different divisions on dirt and asphalt across Wisconsin.
“Lowell won his first-ever heat race at Shawano when he was 16,” recalled Bennett. “It was 10-lapper. He was so exhausted when he got out, because that Chevelle he ran (Bennett’s and Jerry Smith’s former car) had no power steering in it. Lowell got out of the car and laid on the ground and was
gasping for breath. He was so tired from horsing that car around. It was tough to turn. I remember Bob Abitz was in the pits and he came over and said, ‘Lowell, you have to get up. There are people here who want to congratulate you.’ ”
Bennett’s kids all adopted racing numbers in the order in which they were born. Lowell has taken 2, Brady 3, Tim 4, Dave 5, Aaron 6 and Joel 7. His grandson, Chase, has taken the number 8. His grandson, Braison Bennett, took number 9 and finished second in the WIR late model point standings in 2015. Bennett’s daughters are Rebecca, Rachel, Becky and Ruth.
“My kids all had the racing bug and I never had to push any of them to do it,” said Bennett. “I don’t think there are any other families in the country like mine. I’m very proud of all of them.”
For a time, Bennett teamed up with his buddy, Tom Hallada, to promote the weekly races at Seymour Speedway in 1977. “(Paul) Kaczrowski had left Seymour to go to promote De Pere, so with my experience running the Wolf River Racing Club, we figured we’d give it a shot,” said Bennett. “Hallada talked me into it. We just wanted to keep the show going there.”
While Bennett found people who wanted to chip in and help early in the year, finding people willing to work at the track faded as the year went on.
“We would drill all the postholes around the track in spring and we put in all new guardrail three high all the way around the track,” said Bennett. “I spent my own money buying the posts and the county gave us the guardrail. We tried to get the cheaper, more affordable cars to come out. I think Jerry Smith was the points leader there when we closed up about three-quarters of the way through the season. We were not getting enough people in the stands weekly was the bottom line.”
Bennett even went so far as to pay drivers from the Milwaukee area tow money to lure them north. “I remember paying Russ Peterson and some of those guys tow money so they had some cash to at least go home on,” said Bennett. “We started so early in the year I think fans were burnt out as the season wore on.”
Seymour closed after the 1977 season and wouldn’t reopen until 1982, when four specials were run at the Outagamie County Fairgrounds.