When John “Pee Wee” Goins, the eldest brother, went off to the Vietnam War — where he flew and maintained Chinook helicopters — Marvin, sidelined by severe hearing problems from childhood chicken pox, remained back home and made good on the romantic promise his brother had extracted from him just before he shipped out.
Later, when Pee Wee had moved to Mt. Sterling, Kentucky and worked three and a half decades with the fire department, and Marvin had an equal tenure at the General Motors Truck and Bus plant in Moraine, they still didn’t let distance or life circumstance separate them.
“Every other weekend or at least once a month through the whole summer, Pee Wee was back up here and he’d go to the races with us,” Marvin remembered.
After both retired, they’d go to Daytona Beach, Florida every year and over a two-week span they’d attend nightly races — sometimes traveling over 300 miles round trip — at places like New Smyrna Speedway, Bubba Raceway in Ocala, Volusia County Speedway in Barberville, East Bay in Tampa and Desoto Speedway in Bradenton.
When Pee Wee finally moved back to Miamisburg a few years ago, he bought the old house he once had owned so he could live right behind Marvin.
And soon after that they teamed up on their dream project.
By then Marvin — who had an impressive resume filled with the race teams he had worked for both locally and on the Winston Cup circuit — was in the DARF (Dayton Auto Racing Fans) Hall of Fame. Pee Wee was partial to riding motorcycles, especially a Harley Davidson chopper, and that’s why you often found him in a black t-shirt from the Boot Hill Saloon, the well-known biker bar in Daytona Beach.
The pair had once campaigned an old stock car in the early 1970s. Pee Wee had been the driver while Marvin and their dad, Ernie — who everybody called The Old Man — were the crew.
Then a few years ago they got the chance to buy two race cars — a Champ car and a long-forgotten sprint car with some real historical significance — that had belonged to Ray Smith, the late racing legend who ran Smith’s Speed Shop in Eaton, made motors for numerous teams across the country and had had a who’s who list of well-known drivers behind the wheel of his own cars over the years.
The sprint car the brothers got — long abandoned beneath a tarp in a barn — had only been on the race track four times. Three of those trips had come with Tom Bigelow, the National Sprint Car Hall of Famer, at the wheel. The car itself held the last engine Smith ever built.
They moved both cars into the double garage behind Marvin’s house that he had converted into his race shop. And for a couple of years they spent most of their efforts on the problematic Champ car.
Recently, at Pee Wee’s urging, they finally switched focus to the sprint car and planned to have it back running for this coming weekend’s ARCA/Old Timers Racing extravaganza at Winchester Speedway.
The Friday, Saturday and Sunday event draws a large crowd and racers and machines from across the nation.
Marvin would provide their effort’s mechanical genius and John again would drive.
On June 6, they had put the reworked engine back into the car and were caught up enough with their work that two days later they planned to go to the midget races at Lincoln Park Speedway in Putnamville, Indiana.
They had decided to leave about 1:30 pm., but just after noon Marvin had gotten a call from one of Pee Wee’s friends who told him his brother had failed to meet him at lunch. They both wondered if Pee Wee had forgotten to tell them about an appointment he had at the Dayton VA Hospital.
Marvin said his brother had suffered the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam and after several heart bypass surgeries, diabetes and other problems was on 100 percent disability.
Marvin and his son decided to go to the races by themselves, but once outside they noticed Pee Wee’s truck at his house. Marvin called and got no answer, so at the prompting of his wife, Linda, he went over to check on his brother.
“I found him in his bed,” he said quietly. “He had passed right there.”
John “Pee Wee” Goins was dead at 68.
The next days — from the viewing at Newcomer Funeral Home to Pee Wee’s burial at the Dayton National Cemetery — were mostly a blur for Marvin.
“It really knocked me for a loop,” he said the other day, his voice breaking with emotion. ”I couldn’t come back in this garage for a month. I just couldn’t do it.”
He motioned to another garage just across the alley from his Miamisburg home. It had been his late father’s race shop:
“My dad worked in there for 20 some years and even though he’s been gone a good while, it was the same. I step in there now and I can still smell his cigarettes.”
Finally, he said Linda pushed him to go back into the garage — and the world — he loved:
“She told me, ‘If you don’t do it now you never will.’ ”
So two weeks ago he forced himself to return to the race shop where the familiarities — from the radio turned to country music to the old photos on the wall, the banners advertising Bike Week in Daytona and, of course, those two waiting race cars — reminded him of Pee Wee,.
“I pulled my chair up to the front, right by the tool box, and I just sat there and cried,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t do nothing but cry.”
Always together
“The story I’d always been told by my dad and mom was that I was born in September of ‘49 and by May of 1950 I was at my first race at Dayton Speedway,” Marvin laughed. “After that I went there every year that it was open.
“My dad had stock cars back then, too. He worked on them and his brothers drove ‘em at places like Forest Park and Middletown Speedway and down at Washington Court House.”
He took a scrapbook off his work bench and turned to an old black and white photo from the mid-1950s. It showed him and Pee Wee crouched down with their Uncle Charlie in front of an old coupe their dad raced. Sitting on top of the car was their little sister Beverly.
“Pee Wee and I were always together and all through high school we pretty much run around with each other,” Marvin said. “But Pee Wee had problems in school. He just didn’t like it and it came to a point where the school said, ‘You either settle down and go to class and get your grades better or we’re gonna turn it over to the government and they’ll send you to the Army.’
“And Pee Wee goes, ‘Well, I’ll do you one better!’ And he walked out and went straight down and enlisted.”
It wasn’t long after that that he made Marvin promise something.
“When he was in the service he come home one weekend,” Marvin said. “I already was going out with Linda and we all went out for supper. We all drank back then so we went to the local hangout, Heck’s High Spot, over on old Central Avenue. And that’s when Pee Wee goes, ‘Here’s the deal. I got to go to Vietnam.’ He hadn’t told nobody yet
“So he looks at Linda and me and said, ‘There’s one thing I want you guys to do for me.’
“We said, ‘Yeah, what’s that?’
“And he said, ‘You guys are a perfect match. I want you to get married before I leave. That way I won’t have to worry about neither of you when I’m gone.’
“But Linda said, ‘Hell, we’ll worry about you!’
“Pee Wee said, ‘Don’t worry about me. If it comes to that, it comes to that. That’s just the way it is.’ ”
A month later, 19-year-old Marvin and 17-year-old Linda were married. And in a few weeks they’ll celebrate their 48th wedding anniversary.
Early on Marvin worked at Frigidaire and on the weekends he would help out various race teams. Then he was laid off in 1980 and 1981 — and that led to a chance meeting with NASCAR Winston Cup car owner Nelson Malloch, who campaigned a car that was prepared at the Moraine Body on Dryden Road and driven mostly by Dick Brooks and then Ricky Rudd and Lake Speed.
When Marvin figured out why their race car had twice twisted off an axle — he said the wrong rear end had been put on the car — he was hired to oversee the racing operations and work in the pits on race day,
Once at the Truck and Bus plant, Marvin continued to work for race teams, serving as a mechanic on cars driven by the likes of Don Wilbur, Bruce Gould, Jerry Poland, Larry Moore and Dick Freeman.
In the mid-1990s he and Pee Wee teamed up on a Legends Car — an affordable down-sized version of a pre-World War II coupe or sedan powered by a 1200 cc Yamaha motorcycle engine — and they raced it in the area.
By then Ray Smith was gone and his wife Cissy was running the speed shop. Eventually she saw to it that her husband’s longtime pal, Gratis-area racer Paul Fortney, got that last Champ car in the shop.
Years later that forgotten sprint car was found. It was the replacement car Ray had built after a 1989 incident when Bruce Fields went over the backstretch wall at Winchester with the previous No. 14, hit a tree and collapsed the roll cage.
But after the new car kept blowing the V-8 engines he put in, Ray switched to a V-6 , only to have USAC come along and change the rules about using that engine.
“I heard this from a couple of good sources,” Marvin said. “They told me, ‘Ray got so mad and he finally said, ‘Put this SOB in a back room and cover it up. I don’t want to see it again!’ ”
Soon after that Ray got sick and died and the car was forgotten.
When Cissy finally found it, she gave it to Fortney and then, as his health failed, he called up Marvin and asked if he was interested in the long lost car.
‘All about Pee Wee’
As he worked on the orange No. 14 sprint car in his shop the other day, Marvin was feeling some pressure:
“It’s been going slow and now I’ve just got a week to finish this.”
He’s having the headers redone, is dealing with a fuel pump problem, is getting some radiator hoses made and has to bleed the brakes. Finally, he’ll mount up a new set of slick tires.
“If I can get it done and fired up before (this coming) Friday, then I plan on running it on the track at Winchester,” Marvin said. “I mean, that had been our plan all along.”
The one thing that has changed is Marvin’s motivation.
“This isn’t for me anymore,” he said quietly. “It’s all about Pee Wee now.”
He hopes to have a decal made honoring his brother and he’ll affix it to the car.
He said he did have another indelible reminder of his brother right after Pee Wee died. It came a half an hour into the wake at the funeral home
“All of a sudden a pizza guy walks in carrying four pizzas,” Marvin laughed. “He said he had a delivery for John Goins. Well, people just freaked out. Nobody knew where they came from. But for me, I thought ‘That’s the kinda guy Pee Wee was. He’d a done that. He was always doing something you wouldn’t forget.”
And now Marvin hopes to follow suit:
“I’m sure when I go out there on the track, the tears will be flowing”.
He said that will be fine, though, because he won’t be alone. He figures his brother will be riding with him.
The two always were close.
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