JOE CASPOLICH

By Gerald Hodges/the Racing Reporter

“It didn’t matter to me how many laps the other drivers led, as long as I could lead that last one.”

    Joe Caspolich from Long Beach, Mississippi, is one of the charter members of the elite NASCAR Winston Cup Unocal Drivers Club at Darlington Speedway. Like Gene Tapia, Caspolich served his country during World War II and then switched to racing after the war ended.

   “I turned my fifteenth birthday in the Army,” Caspolich said. “When I came home on my first leave I didn’t have enough money to get a new car and all I could afford was a 1939 Plymouth with a bad motor. Back then parts were hard to come by because of the war. I used a file and sandpaper to grind down the crankshaft. My father, who was a good mechanic, thought I was crazy, and said I would never get beyond Gulfport, which was only twenty-five miles away. But I made it to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and back home, and the old car was still running.”

   Caspolich tells of his first organized automobile race. “On one of my furloughs home I was traveling to Lafayette, Louisiana, to visit some relatives. Just west of New Orleans, I saw these cars racing out in a fenced cow pasture. I went over and there was an old GMC car that was faster than the others. I made the statement, ‘if they had a good driver in that car, it could be a winner.’ The owner was standing next to me and overheard the conversation, and asked if I could drive. Of course, I said ‘yes.’

   “He put me in the car and I did win the race, but when the checkered flag was dropped, I didn’t know what it meant, so I kept on racing. Then they gave me a red flag, and finally, the black flag. By this time all the other cars had pulled into the pits, so I figured the race must be over, and I stopped, too. The officials really talked to me afterwards using some strong language.

   “I think Gene (Tapia) was one of the greatest drivers I ever raced on the same track with.  Of course, we always called him “Pappy” Tapia. Quite a few of the old drivers, along with Gene, used to come over to the old dog track in Gulfport, Mississippi. When we weren’t racing in Gulfport, Joe Fascio, Joe Booker, myself, and more of the Mississippi drivers would get together and go over to Lakeview Speedway in Mobile. The first time I saw Gene, he was in a little six-cylinder GMC ‘skeeter.’

   “I never will forget in the first race at Lakeview how Gene, who was on my right, whipped across the hood of my car and looked at Woodie Wilson’s car. When they got in the corner they didn’t see me because I was in that little ‘skeeter.’ When they came together, I went flying out in the trees. From the track the trees looked like small pine saplings, but come to find out, they were just the tops of tall pine trees. My car went off the track, hit one of those tall pines and when it came down, the old car just broke half in two.

   “I guess that is one of my first memories of Gene Tapia, but I’ve kept the picture of his car, the EZ-1. I never will forget that car. He had it up in Laurel, Mississippi once. We were running on the half-mile Fairground’s track, and to me, I think Gene is a super guy. He’s country and I guess about the only thing he loved to do as much as racing is hunting. He tried to get me to go hunting with him when I first came to Mobile. But we never got together.

     “He and Ellis Pallasini were real good friends. He got in touch with me when Woodie Wilson Sr. passed away a few years ago, but I missed the entire funeral.

   “Back then I think everyone raced harder and had more fun than they do today. Gene was one of the fellows that liked to have his fun, but he raced you hard and clean on the track. I guess you could have called us Gypsies, because we went from track to track and neither of us really had a big sponsor. But in another way, if one of us needed help or anything, the other one was always right there to help.”

   In 1950, after winning a race, Caspolich performed a gesture to a young boy that would save his life in later years.

   “This young teenager came up to me after I had won a race in Louisiana in the late 1940s,” Caspolich said.  “He kept hanging around and so finally I handed him the trophy I had won.”

   During the 1957 Southern 500 at Darlington, South Carolina, Caspolich was involved in a serious wreck.

   “I was leading the Southern 500 when another car came down on me,” Caspolich said. “It took the track personnel over one and one-half hours to pull me out of my Ford. Every bone on my left side was broken. I was pronounced DOA (dead on arrival) at the Florence, South Carolina, General Hospital. After covering me with a sheet, they wheeled me into a room with two other bodies. My wife was standing outside when this young intern from New Orleans came up.

   “He introduced himself to my wife and told her he was the young boy whom I had given a racing trophy to years earlier, and wanted to pay his respects. As he uncovered me, my arm dropped from the stretcher. He discovered I wasn’t dead and wheeled me back to the emergency room. The doctor said afterwards, ‘don’t thank me, thank God, because you were dead.’”

   Caspolich went on to become the second driver inducted into the Darlington-Unocal Drivers Club in 1959 in an Oldsmobile at a speed of 121.808 miles per hour. The other seven charter members are: “Fireball” Roberts, Elmo Langley, Richard Petty, “Speedy” Thompson, Bob Burdick, Marvin Panch, and Dick Joslin.

   Caspolich suffered another blow, when in 1969; his son was killed during hurricane Camille.

   For thirty seven years Joe was behind the wheel of a race car.

   “I ran cars and raced them hard, but my family came first,” he said. “I loved racing so much that I would have paid to drive a car, but if someone needed a part for his car and I had it, then it was his. Cale Yarborough came up to me at Darlington and I let him drive my car, because I saw that the kid loved racing. My philosophy has been that if you’re not sure of something, think about it, and then you can find the answer. I was given two talents in life; being able to build a motor and race car. I used those abilities and never abused myself.”

   In 1991 he was remodeling his home near Gulfport, Mississippi when his heart stopped. He was using an electric skill saw when the attack hit him. As he was falling, the blade of the saw cut his left hand completely off at the wrist. The shock of his hand being cut off was like an electrical shock to his heart and it began beating again.

   “My wife Martha was not home,” said Caspolich. “But a captain from the sheriff’s department was home on his lunch hour. He used his belt to form a tourniquet on my arm and wrapped the severed hand in a plastic bag and packed it in ice.”

   During a six-hour operation by surgeons at Gulfport Memorial Hospital, his hand was reattached. Except for some slightly visible scars around the wrist, nothing is noticeable.

   “If it hadn’t been for the electric saw,” I would have died,” he said.

   However Fate wasn’t finished with Joe.

   On September 22, 1993, the nation's worst train wreck in decades occurred just a few minutes after a towboat pilot, lost in a predawn fog, mistook a railroad bridge for a barge and inadvertently rammed it as Amtrak's Sunset Limited was nearing the bridge.

   The bridge collapsed as the train sped onto it, the investigators said, plunging three engines and four cars into a Mobile River backwater, called the Big Bayou Canot, near Mobile, Alabama at 2:50 A.M. Forty-seven people were killed in the crash, including Joe’s wife.

   Joe was unable to shake off this tragedy. He had battled wrecks, deaths and other misfortunes, but the loss of his wife sent him into a deep depression. For over a year Joe didn’t date, socialize, or mix with friends or family. Finally, a friend talked him into going to a small social gathering.

   There he met a lady, who was also going through the death of a loved one. Her husband had died several years earlier. The two hit it off, and soon, they were married.

   “I don’t always sit on the front pew at church, but God has given me back my life three times,’ he continued. “Once in 1957 at the hospital in Florence, South Carolina, secondly in Gulfport, Mississippi after my heart stopped, and third, here in Mobile, when he sent Dot (his wife) into my life after the death of my wife in the train crash.

   “The old adage that He always saves the best in life for last is certainly true for me.”

   The couple now lives in a little town just east of Mobile.

   “Look back, because yesterday’s still a part of you, but you’ve got to live today, remembering there is a tomorrow,” said Dot Caspolich. “Today I am so much happier with Joe, and my future is brighter with him. He’s eased all my past hurts and burdens.”

   Les Richter a Senior NASCAR Official and Vice-President, said, “Joe was one of the few drivers that could be counted on in the early years of the sport to further racing. He helped not only rookies and other drivers break into the sport, but almost everyone that came in contact with him.

   “I think Petty (Richard) and some of the other boys owe some of their success to him. He shunned the limelight and never seemed to relish the glory of victory, for him taking the checkered flag was enough.”

   For additional information on Caspolich and other early drivers, go to: www.southernsupers.com