The Vault
Red Be Dell “Showstopper”
Posted on: Sunday October 25, 2020
For this week’s edition of “The Vault” we go back to our 2015 book “Life In The Past Lane – a history of stock car racing in Northeast Wisconsin from 1950-1980”. “The Showstopper” chapter features a guy who was a huge asset to the sport – Red Be Dell. His colorful race cars decked out in our country’s red, white and blue colors drew attention whatever track he’s at. Order a copy of any of our books through joeverdegan.com this month and you’ll receive a FREE COPY of “The Bird & The Bear.”
Red Be Dell’s racing operation included flying the Confederate flag on not-so-politically correct times.
“The Showstopper”
When it comes to colorful characters from the local racing scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Allan Burr “Red” BeDell most certainly takes the cake.
BeDell ran with colorful, eye-catching Ford convertibles, decked out in red, white and blue lettering. He carried the Confederate flag on his car and hauler in times that weren’t as politically correct as today.
“I always felt the sport of stock car racing basically originated in the South,” explained BeDell. “It had a birthplace down there. Out of respect for that, John Zilles (one of BeDell’s longtime crew members) discovered that General Robert E. Lee’s horse was named Traveler. So we decided to name the race car ‘Traveler’ and painted it on the car.”
BeDell got his start hanging around the Renier brothers’ garage in the outskirts of Green Bay’s side in the early 1940s.
“I was ten years old at the time,” recalled BeDell. “Marvin Renier ran the garage. I learned how to grease cars and change oil. I learned a lot from him and his brother, Don Renier.”
The Reniers raced at a dirt oval carved out of some farmland in Brussels.
“That was a neat track,” said BeDell. “That’s where I snuck up on Red Isaacson. He ran the family’s bus service out of Sister Bay. Red was a great guy, very classy. He was a great man to look up to.”
BeDell’s first time behind the wheel came in a ’57 Ford in Shawano.
“I was fourteen and snuck into the pits,” he said. “The car owner I drove for at the time, they called him ‘The Hook,’ because he had a hook for a hand. His name was Walter. Somebody loaned me a helmet and I was racing. My first lap, I got hung up in a wreck. The car was crude. We had half of an iron tractor wheel for a bumper.”
By that point, BeDell’s father gave up on trying to track him down on Saturday nights. He was all into motors, cars, speed and racing. He had a penchant for Ford products.
“I ran Ford products because it was the hotter car that was out there at the time,” said BeDell.
BeDell was drafted into the Army in 1958 and became part of the 101st Airborne Division – one of the most highly decorated units in the U.S. Army. He returned to the local racing scene after completing his military obligation in the early 1960s.
They were still running old coupes and sedans at the time yet, “so I basically picked up where I left off,” explained BeDell. His core crew members included Tom Erler, Zilles and Al Reynolds. “None of us had a degree or anything. We just learned stuff on the fly, through trial and error,” said BeDell. “Back then, it seemed everyone built a majority of their stuff, including the haulers.”
Erler worked at Eddie Herlick’s gas station on Washington Street on Green Bay’s east side.
“It was a Sinclair gas station with the dinosaur on it,” recalled Erler. “Red stopped in one day and asked if I wanted to be on the crew. He went to high school with my brother at Green Bay West in 1954.” This was in 1970. Erler had recently graduated from Green Bay West himself. Erler describes BeDell as eclectic. “Red just had to be different in many ways,” said Erler. “Thus, we ran the convertibles. Red felt it would be much more entertaining if you could see the driver fight the wheel. Fans also liked the fact that we were running Fords when most everyone else was running Chevrolets.”
Erler chipped in on the pit crew, handling everything from metal fabricating to body and engine work.
“We had quite a variety of guys. Half of us were single, half of us were married and had children,” said Erler.
The shop was in an old garage behind BeDell’s house on South Maple on the west side, a few blocks south of West Walnut Street. The house is still there, but the shop has since been torn down.
Erler shared the following story about BeDell:
“Red was leading a heat race at De Pere one time when it was red-flagged. He came in with a flat tire. We changed the tire with a four-way wrench. There were no electric impact wrenches back then. He went back out and finished second or third. He came out of the car and was thrilled. Then we showed him the two lug nuts we still had in our hand. He went back out with only three lug nuts on the car. Nobody could believe it.”
BeDell ran weekly under the Wolf River Racing Association (WRRA) rules and competed weekly at the dirt, half-mile ovals at De Pere, Seymour and Shawano.
“We ran there as much as we could. I remember we were running a 427 Ford motor with side oilers,” said Erler. “It was an engine developed from NASCAR so they could compete with the Hemis back then. That oil galley would collect oil going down the straightaway. Sometimes the motors would pop.”
Milwaukee-area car owner and racing parts salesman Bill Behling took a keen interest in BeDell’s racing exploits.
“Bill took me under his wing from a motor standpoint,” BeDell said. “We had a ’64 Mustang convertible. Everyone kept their speed secrets to themselves, unlike today. That was around 1967.”
BeDell became one of the first to bring a Boyce Trackburner chassis up to the area. “The WRRA had a fit about it,” said BeDell. Earl Ness was president of the WRRA at the time, and there were allegations that BeDell was running illegal fuel. “Earl confronted us and told us that some driver or drivers had complained,” BeDell continued. “Sure enough, there was a foreign substance in my racing gas.”
As it was, BeDell had been playing games with the competition.
“He put castor oil in the fuel. He did it just to piss people off,” said Erler. “They knew something was wrong because it smelled funny. He added it for upper cylinder lubricant. A couple of shot glasses of it in the gas tank was all it would take. It cut down on the volatility of the gas. It was fun. It got everyone all wound up.”
Running exclusively Ford products, including the engines, often posed its own problems.
Erler explains: “By the time we got the 427 (cubic-inch) blocks from Ford, they were done manufacturing them. So whatever we came from was used and had to be rebuilt. Red supposedly bought six brand new heads for them, and three of them were bad. We had a ‘Tattle Tale’ tachometer. If you hit a certain RPM, it would freeze the needle. Off the track, we could tell how high he hit. He would hit 7,200 RPM once in a while. If we’re getting to close to that red line, it was time to change gears or do something different. The Fords couldn’t handle the RPMs.”
As a result of BeDell running his motor into the “red,” he suffered a lot of blown motors along the way.
“We had multiple grenades,” said Erler. “We were doing really well one night at De Pere. In the trophy dash, he’s running in front and another crew guy looked at me and said, ‘How long will this motor last?’ And then BOOM. It blew up. Bad.”
In addition, BeDell was not immune from wrecking the car itself.
“Red had multiple wrecks,” said Erler. “An old Thunderbird was a 1958 Ford frame with a Holman and Moody front stub. It was a tough car for the most part, except for the steering gear. We robbed every steering gear within twenty minutes of Green Bay. We had a lot of practice with those, because we were putting new ones in so frequently.”
BeDell picked up feature wins on occasion and financed his racing 100 percent along the way. He was brutally honest with his sponsors and potential sponsors – almost to a fault.
“He would flat out tell them we could blow up tomorrow and we could be sidelined,” said Erler. “He was careful. We always monitored the RPM of the engines. We weren’t professionals by any means, but we tried to do the best we could and we always had fun with it.”
One year, the crew went out and put on curb feelers in order to keep him off the fence.
“We didn’t even tell him about it,” recalled Erler. “He went out at De Pere. JJ Smith was in the race. Red bounced the car off the guardrail in a heat race. JJ comes over and looks at our car, and sees the curb feelers. He said, ‘Yep, that pretty much explains it.’ Then he just walked away shaking his head.”
For the most part, BeDell got along with his fellow racers. Some drove rougher than others.
“I loved racing against Roger Paul,” BeDell said. “He was a top shelf guy, super nice.”
But another famous driver from that era named Roger seemed to find BeDell’s No. 3 car with certain frequency. While BeDell declined to name Roger “The Bear” Regeth as an archrival or nemesis, Erler did not mince words.
“Regeth was one helluva talent, but honestly the guy drove like an ass,” Erler stated. “We had more of that pink Les Stumpf Ford color on our white car from him always riding Red up into the guardrail. And it seemed to be pretty frequent with that guy. Thing is he didn’t have to drive like that with the talent he had. He just chose to.”
To say Red BeDell was a true ambassador for the sport of local dirt track racing is an understatement.
“When we were out there, we had fun. Plain and simple,” explained Erler. “At every track Red went to, he made a point to hand out racing decals to the kids after the races. And it was usually a mob scene. Our whole operation was an eye-catcher. At the end of the night, we’d have to hustle to load the car, strap it down, and put all the tools away, because the mob scene was coming. Red loved it and was great with the kids.”
“My theory,” BeDell said, “was these are all new potential race fans down the road.”
One night, the race car actually fell on crewman John Zilles while he was working on it at Seymour.
“Somebody tagged his axle and broke the rear end in the car,” said Erler. “John jacked up the car. I ran in and out of the bus getting tools or whatever. And at that time, we thought we were more safety conscious than most teams.
“Roger Paul was pitted next to us. I was in the hauler. I heard the noise. The car fell. A pin on the brake drum fell on the side of John’s head. Red, I and Roger Paul picked up that car off of John. You could hear John say, ‘Red, I’m under here.’ He stayed pretty calm, actually. John was tough; he was a Vietnam vet. He had lost an eye in Vietnam. The pin went into the side of his head where he didn’t have an eye.
“My fiancée and John’s girlfriend were in the stands. They called a rescue squad. Red and I drove the hauler back. We stopped at St. Mary’s Hospital, but he wasn’t there. We stopped at my house and made a bunch of hospital phone calls. There were no cell phones then. We pulled up to Red’s house on South Maple Street, got out of the hauler, and the first thing we heard was the sound of a beer can cracked open. Out walks John with this big grin on his face, his head all bandaged up. You can’t make this stuff up. They had put twenty-eight stitches in his head to fix him up.”
For Erler and crew, the Confederate flag BeDell flew on the hauler served as a marking point of sorts.
“That flag sure helped us find the hauler at the end of the night,” Erler said. The pits were packed back then not only with haulers, but they pretty much let everyone bring their regular street cars in the pits, too.”
Once the mid-seventies hit, BeDell began to race less frequently. He wound up selling one of his convertibles to Green Bay’s Gary Stankevitz, who put a Chevelle body on the car, and another to Del Keup, who put a Camaro body on that one.
In 1976, BeDell threw his hat in the ring and put in a bid to promote the half-mile clay oval at the Brown County Fairgrounds. He was awarded the contract and renamed the track Speedway USA.
“I came up with the name while at the RPM Promoters workshops in Las Vegas,” said BeDell. “I was hanging with (NASCAR legend) Ned Jarrett for the day when I came up with the name. It just sort of flowed.”
It was also the bicentennial year for our country and patriotism was flowing everywhere. BeDell faced two major obstacles with Speedway USA. One was choosing the best night.
“I switched to Wednesday nights because with Paul (Kaczrowski) and Jack (Peters) in that feud both running Sunday nights the year prior, I thought it was a crying shame that drivers had to choose what track to run,” he explained. “So Wednesdays it was.”
The other issue was noise. Although some people who lived along the backstretch had actually built mini-grandstands atop their garages to watch the races for free, others didn’t like the horrendous racket the cars emitted.
“I developed a decibel limit,” BeDell said. “If your car could stay under 100 dba, you were good to go. Some guys ran mufflers; others did whatever they had to do to bring their cars into compliance.”
BeDell ran a total of eight nights that year. He wound up having to load up only one driver for being too loud.
“Cliff Ebben came up from the Valley and he hit 104 dba during time trials,” said BeDell. He couldn’t get that car of his to meet the limit, so we had to do what we had to do. He was a class act and understood why I had to do it. Not only was there pressure to get done in time (a strict 10:30 p.m. curfew was enacted for the weeknight show), but the pressure was mounting with the neighbors and even into the village of Allouez to quiet the cars down.”
The business burned out BeDell fairly quickly.
“It just seemed no matter what, some of those drivers would never, ever be happy,” recalled Erler, who chipped in at the track on occasion. “The pay was never enough. I’d see some of those guys from the Fox Valley get out of the cars and literally throw temper tantrums like two-year-olds. We wanted them to have a tow chain spray painted orange on the cars to make it easier and quicker for the wrecker crews to hook the cars and keep the show moving. They even bitched about that. I think Red just had enough.”
After Speedway USA, BeDell began attending more sprint car races as a fan and tinkering with powerboats, something he hadn’t done since his youth. Erler chased down shows at Hales Corners Speedway near Milwaukee with Del Keup on occasion.
“The promoters down there didn’t put up with the whining you had up here,” Erler said. “The rules were the rules, and if you didn’t follow them, you were gone.”
Still BeDell said the good times outweighed the bad. They made for a ton of memories.
“I remember we used to race haulers with (Milwaukee-area driver) Ray Bolander from Shawano Speedway on Saturday nights to a bar called Doc Ebben’s,” recalled BeDell. “Or one time, I and Oneida’s Dan Johnson, another Ford driver, decided one night to race our cars against each other on the quarter-mile school track at Bonduel High School. You can’t make that kind of stuff up.”
BeDell is a vintage car buff, with a handful of restored gems tucked away safely in his garage.
“I was at a muscle car show with Red a few years ago,” said Erler. “People would come up to him all the time and say, ‘I never met you, but I used to watch you race all the time.’ That stuff would happen all the time.”
BeDell, 78 years young when interviewed for this book, spends his retirement days at his home with his wife, Peg, on the bay of Green Bay. Erler is retired after serving as general manager for PDQ car washes in Green Bay for twenty-five years.