Fats and the flag man

created, two-driver cruiser class. James steered and handled the brakes and Keri, the gas pedal.

“We were three or four laps in, and she got the stiff leg and had the gas on the floor,” James says. “We spun out between turns one and two and blew the engine. I was done.”

As for what drew him to racing, James, who also built his own engines, wanted to show the other drivers what he could do. He raced dirt and asphalt. And he had a favorite: “Asphalt is for getting there; dirt is for racing.”

He always remembered his Dad’s advice. “I’d get out in front, and he’d tell me to slow down,” James recalled. “He wanted me to let them pass, then me pass ‘em back to put on a show. But I worked hard to get in front, and I wanted to stay in front.”

James had stretches when he was out in front often. “You get out in front, and you win every weekend there for six or eight weekends, it makes you feel good to know that you’re the one they hate the most or get cussed the most. But you just keep on going.”

The flagman

John Garrison Sr. kept racers going – safely –through hundreds of races. A veteran of World War II who served on Okinawa as part of the Army Air Corps, Garrison flagged his first race after volunteering on a dare at a California short track after the war. He had flagged informal drag races on Okinawa after the allies took the island from the Japanese.

He was a master of the flags – every color was racing’s code. But Garrison brought a color all his own to the track, waving each flag with a flourish, like a ballet against the roar of an eight-cylinder symphony. One photo shows him dressed all in white, smiling and clutching a checkered flag and wearing a tam that matched the flag.

And the fans loved it.

“It was a big thing back then,” John Garrison Jr., said. “Dad saw life as an adventure. My Dad and that generation of people were just unique in the way that they were raised. My Dad was the 13th and youngest kid in his family … In the early days, they didn’t have much. Dad was a colorful character all of his life. He didn’t take life very seriously. He always found a reason to laugh.”

Many like Garrison, had never left their hometowns before they went off to war. Survivors returned home “full of vim and vigor” and looking for excitement.

“By and large, that was the fuel for the sport of racing,” Garrison said. “Those guys were daredevils. They were adventurers. Some were pilots, many were infantry. You had a generation that didn’t want to sit on the front porch in abject safety. They lived by risk, and they wanted adventure.”

The elder Garrison, a mechanic, taught his son to work hard and risk as well. Lessons were learned not by talking, but by doing. And though he loved to laugh, flagging was serious business for his father. It could be the difference between life and death on the track.

“As a boy, I remember walking the track with my Dad at BIR (Birmingham International Raceway). Two hours before the race, he would walk the entire track, looking for pieces of metal that had come off the cars or were lying on the track. His concern was a piece of metal flying up. A lot of these cars didn’t have windshields. He didn’t want the drivers to be injured.”

Garrison Jr., who started his own structural steel firm at 40, remembered when at 16, his Dad gave him a crash course in flagging at Dixie Speedway. “Dad said, ‘Get up here. You’re going to flag this race.’

When his son pleaded that he didn’t know