Running North Wilkesboro Speedway’s scoreboard is a family affair again for NC couple

The Brooks family can’t really hear each other over the revved up engines, screeching tires and grandstand cheers.

But that’s fine.

They’re old pros at this by now.

It’s sometime in the late 1980s, and the family that has called Wilkes County home for generations is busy operating the analogue scoreboard that hovers right above Turn 3 at North Wilkesboro Speedway. Everyone is filling in wherever they’re needed: Judy, the mother, might be updating the Lap Number. One or both of the kids, either elementary-school-aged Tracy or a slightly older Julie, is probably in charge of the leaderboard. And Ken, the father, is communicating with NASCAR officials over a radio with a bulky headset — commanding the whole enterprise with aplomb.

“It was chaos, really,” Ken recalled last week.

“It was,” Judy chimed in with a smile. “And it was hot.”

“Oh yeah,” Ken added. “Ain’t no night racing back then.”

Judy remembers going down to the racetrack with clean clothes on and coming back covered in dirt and soot from the tires. Ken remembers how often the board needed to change because of all the passing on the 0.625-mile track. Tracy is now a firefighter in the community he grew up in — a guy who jumps into flames and saves lives for a living — and even he remembers the pride his younger self took the few times he updated the scoreboard correctly while NASCAR officials lagged behind.

“Oh and right there in that turn? There were always wrecks,” Judy said. “It would just be so exciting.”

The NASCAR Cup Series will make its triumphant return to the once-abandoned, once-forgotten North Wilkesboro Speedway this weekend. The All-Star Race will run Sunday night at 8 p.m. — bringing new life to an old racetrack that for so long stood at the cultural center of NASCAR.

And just as NASCAR is making its return, so is the Brooks family.

The highly anticipated race will feature a manually run, analogue scoreboard, similar to the one that the Brooks family ran during the racetrack’s heyday. The bright red structure stands just above Turn 3, right next to the newly planted aluminum grandstands, and a digital video board on the side of a big truck will sit right next to it.

The manual scoreboard, then, will serve as an emblem of nostalgia that the racetrack has carefully tried to maintain as it has made renovations ahead of the big race.

The scoreboard will be run by Ken and Judy, surely — as they did for dozens of years before the racetrack built a digital scoreboard sometime in the early 1990s. They’re hoping to get some help from their children, and maybe a few of their grandchildren, too. Those grandchildren include Morgan, who’s 18; Josh, who’s 16; and Cam, who’s 7.

“My family is all grown up, but my grandkids are not, and we are certainly looking forward to doing this,” Ken said, a smile poking out from underneath a mustache that’s decidedly whiter than it was the last time he climbed the scoreboard ladder. “I know at least the 7-year-old is just thrilled to death to get to come. But he’ll only get to look. The 18 and 16 will help us flip the numbers.”

He added: “All our kids, they liked (helping) then. It was an enjoyable thing. I mean, this is a big thing for Wilkes County. This is a big event — the biggest event.”

It’s a big deal for the family, too.

A chance meeting at North Wilkesboro Speedway

Racing fans might look at North Wilkesboro Speedway and see a racetrack that has roots to the beginning of NASCAR. For decades, after all — from when it began hosting Cup Series races in 1949 to the last Cup Series race in 1996 — the 0.625-mile track has meant so much. It meant Richard Petty. Dale Earnhardt. Moonshine. Small-town Southern Americana. It was the birthplace of The Last American Hero (Cup driver Junior Johnson) and an economic beam of Wilkes County, a land of about 65,000 in the foothills of northwestern North Carolina.

But to Ken and Judy Brooks, the racetrack means something else, too.

North Wilkesboro Speedway is where they met.

Here’s the short story of their chance meeting, as they tell it:

It was 1969, a few days before one of the two NASCAR races of the year at the racetrack. Holly Farms Poultry, in an annual tradition, was hosting a cookout at the speedway. Judy had just graduated from East Wilkes High School and was a student at the local community college, and she and two of her best friends decided to go to the speedway.

Something caught her eye. It was a dune buggy. Or, as she and her friends called it, “a really sharp little car.” Van Johnson, a classmate of Judy’s and the nephew of Junior Johnson, offered to introduce her to the guy who owned that dune buggy.

That guy was Ken.

Ken had just returned home. He’d served four years in the U.S. Air Force after graduating from Wilkes Central in 1965. He built houses with his Dad through high school and found a job with Holly Farms Poultry as a civil engineer upon his return from the military in 1969. He could build anything. He even fixed up that dune buggy that had caught Judy’s attention.

“So Ken comes walking up,” Judy said. She chuckled: “He was about this big around” — making a tight circle with one hand — “and he had his sunglasses on, and I’m sure he was thinking he was really sharp.”

Van asked Ken if he’d mind taking Judy and her friends for a ride. Ken agreed.

And the ride, in a way, never ended. Their courtship and their lives certainly didn’t: Ken and Judy got married the following May. They honeymooned at Daytona Beach. With his construction experience and connection with Holly Farms (a primary sponsor of North Wilkesboro Speedway), Ken helped build a new scoreboard in the early 80s at the racetrack and operated it with his wife and his kids on race day thereafter.

They had two children. They built the house they’ve now lived in for 35 years. Ken was diagnosed with cancer three separate times and survived them all. And on Sunday — three days before their 54th wedding anniversary — parts of their community’s past and professional past and personal past return to their lives.

“I’m getting old,” Ken said with a smile. “But I’m so blessed. I got a wonderful wife. A wonderful life.”

Relishing the past and present

This past Friday, the Brookses took a five-minute drive across town and knocked on an old friend’s door.

That friend was Mike Staley.

And that door was an entrance into history.

Mike Staley is the son of Enoch Staley, one of the charter members of NASCAR and the longtime president of North Wilkesboro Speedway. The son has an office and a garage filled with memorabilia from the racetrack’s heyday.

Framed newspaper clippings and photos smatter the walls. Old programs are yellowed by time. There are credentials hung on office cabinets and die cast cars neatly strewn on desks and posters and books and trophies and mason jars of moonshine covered by a quilt. In the garage, specifically, there hangs a menu from an old North Wilkesboro Speedway concession stand — a chopped barbecue sandwich and a Sun Drop cost a handsome sum of $4 back in the day — and there sits the pace car from the last Cup race North Wilkesboro Speedway ever saw in September 1996.

The Brookses had visited here before. But they wanted to visit again ahead of Sunday.

“Oh my goodness me,” Judy said occasionally, walking through the garage that felt like a museum.

“Would you look at that?” Ken added.

Mike Staley, while providing a short and simple tour, casually remarked that he likes coming in here every once in a while. He said his late father would be ecstatic to see the race come back.

“Every time I come in here,” Staley said, “I see something I had forgotten about or hadn’t seen before.”

At one point on this visit, Staley handed the Brookses a photo. It was a picture of the old scoreboard, looking out over Turn 3, sprouting above all the campers and fans who were sitting on top of their cars in the infield.

In nine days from that Friday visit, the Brookses would be there again. Over Turn 3. In the sun. They’ll be stepping over each other like they once did on those chaotic and sacred Sundays.

Ken carefully grabbed the photo, and the couple quietly scanned it in contented quiet. They did so for a while, as if, after all this time, they saw something new.