Walter Bowen holds a miniature Richard Petty car from his NASCAR collection displayed in his Rutherford County home. ANGIE MAYES
Walter Bowen is looking through hundreds of NASCAR items in a room in his Rutherford County home.
A fan of auto racing since he was young, he has traveled around the country attending races, collecting autographs and acquiring memorabilia.
“I saw my first race in the 1980s at the (Nashville) fairgrounds, when they ran the Music City 420,” he said. “I went into the pits to get autographs and I didn’t even have a piece of paper to sign them. I ripped a check out of the checkbook and said, ‘Do you want to sign this?’ and Darrell Waltrip and Richard Petty and others signed it.”
He said he has been “collecting for 40 and some 50 years. At that time it was only broadcast on the radio. You could only watch two races a year on television: Daytona and Talladega.
“Then I started collecting and it got out of hand, as you can see from this room.”
The 20-foot by 30-foot room (about the size of a three-car garage) in Bowen’s home contains approximately 1,200 items (Bowen’s estimate), including autographed photographs, 74 plastic car model kits, truck kits trailers, t-shirts and approximately 150 model cars and NASCAR vehicles scaled to a sixty-four, a thirty-five and a twenty-four.
The former real estate agent has Coca-Cola and Sundrop bottles with runners on them. He has also collected figurines, monologues, glasses, newspapers and programs from all the Cup races he has attended.
He even has a jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise that he promoted to Dale Earnhardt Jr.
He’s been all over the NASCAR map from Daytona to Las Vegas. He and his wife, Martha, attend races at the Nashville Superspeedway, where they have seats right at the finish line, he said.
“I love racing,” he said. “I went to my first race in 1972. We were so poor I couldn’t even afford to go. We would stand on the fence and listen to them pass by. And I was hooked. I started listening to the radio.
“Every weekend I was working in a market, turning on the radio and listening to the race while customers came and went. Once they started making them on TV, I never missed a race. If I did, I would record it.”
Bowen ran three races at Smyrna Raceway, he said, but “he got divorced and my father-in-law sold the car for $20.”
He has participated in driving schools at Nashville Superspeedway and Orlando Speedway and said, “I never told them I had an artificial leg. I don’t think they would have let me drive. I asked them how much I needed to brake and they said, ‘right when you enter the pits.’ I said ‘great’. I walked at 124.3 miles per hour on a 125 mile per hour track.
“My wife said, ‘If they kill him here, we’re going to drag him to the interstate because my insurance won’t cover this.’ “
He knows that accidents are part of the sport and says: “I don’t care about accidents. One time at Talladega, there was a 17-car pileup, we were on the frontstretch, it happened on the backstretch, all we saw were those 17 wreckers hauling those wrecked cars.”
I was in Daytona the day Dale Earnhardt Sr. died.
“That was a horrible trip home,” he recalled. “We cried all the way home.”
He said he has “seen a lot of great runners come and go. I hated when JD McDuffee was killed. We have lost many good drivers. Davey Allison. Neil Bonnet. Alan Kulwicki. “All of them in crazy situations.”
So what does a 73-year-old man do with all his NASCAR memorabilia? Bowen wants to sell it. He asks for $10,000 for the entire collection. He said he tried Facebook Marketplace, but not anywhere else. He will only sell it in a single package, but he admitted that he hasn’t had much luck.
“People recommended I take it to the Nashville Fairgrounds to try to sell it,” he said. “How do you pack all this up and take it out to display? They couldn’t see everything. Maybe I’ve waited too long to sell these things. He had posters and other things under the beds and in drawers. I started taking it out.”
Bowen said Rutherford County made a big mistake by not getting the Superspeedway, which is located in Wilson County, just a few miles from the county line.
“They thought it was a peasant sport, but it is a multi-million dollar sport,” he said. Still, when Dale Earnhardt Sr. passed away, that was 30% of the crowd they lost.”
He said of the teams: “If you don’t have millions of dollars, you can’t compete. It began as a redneck sport. “You handle what you brought.” If you got caught cheating, you got caught. Richard Petty will tell you the same thing. The idea of getting in a car and driving at 200 miles per hour two or three centimeters from someone’s bumper. You can’t tell me he’s not an athlete.”
To contact Bowen, email walterbowen1951@gmail.com.
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