“We lived in an old farmhouse that didn’t have running water. We had an outhouse, and our electricity was just a wire running into the house. It’d be a fire hazard today.
“We lived with my grandparents. They had a truck farm and they grew corn and ribbon cane. They had a wagon with horses, and my grandfather delivered coal and sold molasses. It was a real hardscrabble life.”
But every Sunday young Steve would get scrubbed up and head out with his dad for Corinthian Baptist Church.
“We’d get to Euclid and Germantown, and to me that was the greatest intersection in the world,” he said with a laugh. “The light was always long, and as we sat there here would come these race cars on trailers, and they had these big numbers on them and they were painted these pretty colors, and I was just mesmerized.
“They were headed up Germantown Hill to Dayton Speedway, and later in the day you could hear the roar of those cars up there. ... It just drew you to ’em.
“My grandmother loved what she called ‘the big cars’ — the Indy cars of guys like A.J. Foyt, Eddie Sachs and Troy Ruttman who all raced there. My dad liked the stock cars, and I liked ’em all. Sometimes they’d bring me out there to watch, and I was hooked.”
During those days of the late 1950s and early ’60s, Ross said he also discovered Charlie Black’s garage just off Broadway: “He was this black guy who had a race car — an old jalopy — and he had this white guy drive it for him at Frankie’s Forest Park and other places.
“My dad would take me by the shop, and Mr. Black would let me sit in that race car. And I’d hear the guys there talking about how there was this black guy running down there with them boys in NASCAR. His name was Wendell Scott.
“Well, I tried to find out all I could about him. I’d read the newspaper and cut out any mention I could find on him and other race-car drivers. I put all of it in scrapbooks.”
The 58-year old Ross — who now helps teach autistic children at Wogaman Elementary and has coached various high school football and track teams in the city — still has those scrapbooks. And while the clippings are now yellowed and brittle, the memories — especially since they serve as a backdrop to his current racing venture, which is getting him and his Dayton partners national attention — seem richer than ever.
“Back when I was 14, my uncle gave me a ’60 Falcon that I turned into a race car,” he said. “My grandmother and uncle bought a farm out on Dayton-Farmersville Road, and I plowed, disked and then graded a two-lane track around one of the big fields. In essence, I had my own mile oval and I’d take that car out there and slide it around and kick up dust and dirt and just dream.”
As for sports reality, he soon made a name for himself as a standout running back and track athlete at Chaminade High School. That got him looks from colleges, but he shocked his parents when he told them he’d rather go racing than go to school.
They were dead set against it — a kid from Hog Bottom going to college was a big deal — and finally he found a compromise when he was offered a scholarship by Bethune-Cookman, the historically black college in Daytona Beach, Fla.
“That meant the Daytona 500 would be right next door, that was my mind thinking,” he said. “All I had to do was find a way to get in there and I could go watch racing and meet Wendell Scott.”
Meeting a legend
Ross said the opportunity came when a guy who owned radio station WDAT — “The Boss of the Beach” — came to campus hoping to find a black presence for his airwaves.
“No one on wanted to go because it was a white station, but it didn’t matter to me,” said Ross, who became a guest disc jockey on Saturday mornings and eventually got the owner to get him a press pass to cover Speed Weeks.
At the track, the first person he approached was Scott, who not only was the only black driver on NASCAR’s major circuit, but to this day remains the only black to win a top-tier stock car race.
“It was a dream come true meeting him, but I think he liked seeing me as well,” Ross said. “Back then the only blacks at the track were those who sold beer or swept up afterward.”
Although Ross would transfer to Ball State as a sophomore, he remained friends with Scott and would visit him at his home. After three seasons at Ball State, Ross married Karen Andrews, finished school at Central State and started working at Day-Mont.
Soon his fascination with racing roared to the forefront again and after briefly competing in the rough-and-tumble “Run What You Brung” races at Dayton Speedway, he got a ’72 Chevy Caprice Classic and showed up at Queen City Speedway in West Chester Twp.
“The first night some of those guys got together and put me through the wall,” he said. “I went up in the air until a post caught the left rear of my car and flung it back across the track into the inside retaining wall. It destroyed my car.
“A white man come out of the stands later and said, ‘If you want to come back and show those SOBs, I have a race car you can have for $800.’
“Monday, I went to the bank, drew out all our savings and bought that car. I kept it at my uncle’s while I waited to tell my wife. Unfortunately a few days later I get home, and they’d cut off our electricity. My wife had paid the bill, but the check bounced. Let’s just say there were problems in our house for a while.”
When he showed back up at Queen City with the replacement car, he said the man on the pit gate made it clear: “ ‘I thought we got rid of you last week.’ When I told him no, he said, ‘Oh there are gonna be problems tonight.’ Then one of the guys on my pit crew says, ‘Skeeter (that’s what they called me) they talking about killing you tonight.’ ”
Ross said he told them that instead he would start a chain-reaction crash at the start and hurt them all if that’s how they wanted to race. It was a bluff, but they thought he might be crazy enough to try it, so they backed off, and he raced there for a couple of years without incident.
Along the way Ross met Fred Edmonds, the black Dayton businessman who raced with considerable note on the sports car circuit. Eventually, the pair tried starting a race team.
After failing to get sponsorship for a trucks team in the late ’90s, they tried in recent years to field an ARCA team, but again got little support.
“Too often the same mentality from long ago prevails today,” Ross said. “My dad was a Tuskeegee Airman, and it was thanks to them that bias about blacks not being able to fly was proven wrong. The same roadblocks come up in racing.
“It’s about opportunity, not ability, and it gets frustrating trying to push aside those myths. And even though NASCAR started a minority program, it’s moving too slowly and is ineffective. But rather than sit around complaining, you just got to get up and make things happen. You have to take a chance. That’s what makes America great. Anybody with a dream and fortitude can make things happen.”
Race at Kil-Kare
And that’s just what Ross, Edmonds and group of other black men from the area are doing July 3 when they put on a gala racing show at Kil-Kare Speedway. The centerpiece of the all-day event will be the Freedom 76 stock-car race that will promote the participation of minority drivers and pit crews.
The race — for compact cars — will pay $5,000 to the winner, which is almost 20 times what many small car features pay, Ross said.
That opportunity has produced a lot of driving interest from all kinds of drivers — black, white, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian. While Ross said anyone can try to qualify, “our emphasis is on minorities and trying to get a field that is truly representative of America.”
In the future his group hopes to expand this race into a traveling series, but right now the concentration is on the July 3 extravaganza, which also will include an all-day concert, a car and motorcycle show, and a prelim race.
To sign up to race, buy tickets or find out more, go to multicultureracing.com.
“We want this to be so entertaining that people will say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this whole day,’ ” Ross said. “We want people to feel like they just took part in something pretty special.”
Kind of like going from Hog Bottom to hog heaven.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2156 or tarchdeacon@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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