By David McCollum thecabin.net Copyright 2012 The Cabin. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

It began with one of those “my Chevy is faster than your Ford’ type of challenges.

A simple drag race on a remote strip of land in the early 1950s set Bobby Ward of Bee Branch on the road to a hall of fame that includes names such as Unser, Foyt and Chitwood.

“W.A. Humphrey owned a body shop and we got to be friends. He had a Ford and I had a Chrevrolet and we started drag racing. That got me interested in racing,” said Ward, 76, who will be inducted in June into the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Iowa. 

From those drag strip days with a 1954 Chevy and a 1939 Ford Coupe, Ward shifted gears to stock car racing primarily on dirt tracks, which is to modern racing like those rugged, grassy Scottish pastures were to modern golf.

His racing career took him through challenging left turns and the dirt and mud in 14 states, including the dirt track that was once at Brannan’s Landing, the old Benton Speed Bowl, an asphalt track at Lakeland, Tenn., and the first championship race in Arkansas at the Pine Bluff Speedway.

In transitioning from drag racing to the circular tracks, he teamed with Humphrey to build a ‘34 Ford Coupe. “As we gained more knowledge, we built a modified car (characterized by a sprint-type tail section similar to old Indy cars),” said Ward, who now lives in Greenbrier with his wife, Pat.

But he always stuck with the same unique number. Humphrey was a former midget car owner and one of his fellow owners had a simple numbering system for his cars, ME1, ME2, etc. They decided to add another e and the “Mee2” car was born, a iconic number that Ward used until he retired from racing in 1974. 

He remembers the first stock car race he witnessed at Brannan’s Landing. “It was a Sunday afternoon and you couldn’t have tied me to one of those cars after I saw that first race,” he said. “Then, I stayed for the second race and got to liking it. When I got into racing, I was scared until I found out that it was a lot safer than it looked.”

Dirt track racing in those days was often like hardscrabble golf.

It was tricky, demanded creativity and success wasn’t based on just having the fastest car.

“The corners were very important on those tracks,” he said. “You had to drive carefully on those turns so your car couldn’t slide around. You had to set up your slide so you would naturally get into position for the straightway. If you slid too far to the right, you were in trouble. 

“You had to be careful about getting too close to another car because if you hit one of his tires, it was like kicking a football. You were going tumbling end over end. If you hit another driver’s tires, you were going up.”

And every track was set up a little differently.

“I always thought you were only as good as your competitors,” he said. “So, when you went into somebody else’s back yard and you got to play on his turf, it would make a better driver out of me and it did.”

Because he competed in different tracks in so many different states, Ward’s Mee2 car also took on the nickname of “Arkansas Traveler.” 

“I picked that up from the baseball team,” he said. “I decided to use it for my race car. I was known as the ‘Arkansas Traveler’ in the other states I raced in.”

Whether it was his home dirt or in another state, he had plenty of success.

He won four Arkansas state championships at the Benton Speed Bowl. He won three Southwestern Super Modified titles at Amarillo texas (1963, 1964 and 1968, In 1965, he won 27 times in 33 starts. In 1969, he won 36 main events at different race tracks. Also included in his triumphs were the 100-lap Riverside Speedway Sprint Championship in West Memphis, the Race of Champions in Jefferson City, Mo., the Jayhawk Nationals at Topeka, Kan,, the New Mexico State Nationals and the inaugural Rose Bowl 75 in Tyler, Texas.

In his 20-year career, he won 369 feature races and the season title at several Arkansas tracks.

Wrecks?

“You’re aware of those, but I didn’t think about it,” he said. “People liked to see us smash up each other. Crowds got bigger when you wrecked.”

His worst accident occurred in West Memphis when a rock or piece of metal glanced off the wheel of the car in front of him, shattered the face shield on Ward’s car and struck him on his chin, knocking him unconscious. His car left the track, hit a boy in the pits. But no one was seriously injured.

“It was just a freak thing and I was lucky,” he said.

Ward raced in an era with strange-looking vehicles before the onset of modern equipment and modern technology. Compare it to the leather-helmet, no faceguard days of football.

And that caused drivers to get creative in battling the dust, the flying dirt and mud.

“We’ve get these rolls of plastic wrap, cut it into sections and put it on our face shields on the car,” he said. “As the shield got dirty, we’d rip off a layer of wrap. We’d probably do that six to eight times during a race.”

And like jockeys, the drivers wore several goggles, ready to discard on the fly.

“We go to the Army surplus store and buy these packages of goggles with these plastic-coast lenses and we’d put them around our necks,” he said. “As one pair got dirty, you’d pull them off for a clean pair. You need a bunch of them because sometimes, you’d pull off three or four at one time.”

He estimated the cars would travel 80 to 90 miles per hour but slower in the curves.

Helmets?

“They were aluminum helmets; we’d get them them at the Army surplus with the goggles,” he said. “Later, fiberglass helmets came along. We had some drivers race from the (Little Rock) Air Force base at Jacksonville and they’d just race with the helmets they wore in their airplanes.”

With his experience at the grassroots of automobile racing, how about today’s NASCAR racing?

“I like to watch NASCAR, but I won’t watch the race all the way through,” he said. “I’ll watch the first 25 or 30 laps, see how it’s going in the middle, then watch the last 25 or 30 laps.”