Editors note: I grew up in New Milford Ct. and attended the races at Danbury for years, working on the team of popular driver Kenny Webb. As most short tracks today can barely get by, Danbury was jammed packed every Saturday night with up to 10,000 screaming fans. Some 30 years later, former fans still come to the reunions in droves to meet their favorite, but aging stars!
Kenny Webb's #2— I am the 4th one from the left, much blonder, younger and skinnier! click on picture for full size image
DANBURY, Conn. – On Saturdays for nearly 30 years – interrupted only by
a few years fighting the Korean War – Nick Giardina raced Ford
flatheads and overheads around the 1,800-foot speedway that surrounded
the Danbury Fairgrounds, hitting speeds of about 100 mph on the
straightaways, a little less on the curves.
Progress ended all
that in 1981 for Giardina – and for hundreds of other drivers and the
thousands of fans who packed the grandstands to watch them – when the
fairground was paved over to make way for a mall with a similar name.
"It
was the biggest thing," said Giardina, 77, a Katonah resident and a
retired truck driver. "Nothing like it. We were the most popular track
around. They'd fill the stands every Saturday night. I don't know how
many thousands it held."
Yesterday, Giardina joined hundreds of other drivers and fans to relive their stock
car glory at the annual reunion of the Southern New York Racing
Association, which was launched at a dirt track in Valhalla in 1948 and
moved to Brewster in 1950 and then to Danbury in 1952.
The event was held at Western 
State University, where the blue rubber floor was crowded with
low-slung chassis with fat tires and oversized engines poking through
their hoods – some looking like they could go airborne – ogled by a lot
of guys with graying ponytails.
"It's
a young man's sport now," Randy LaJoie, the 1981 champion in the
Modified Sportsman division at the Danbury track and the 1983 rookie of
the year in NASCAR's Busch North Series, said in between autographs.
"You got to be 20 and pretty. My mirror tells me I'm neither."
LaJoie,
47, was enticed to stock car racing by his father, Don, a five-time
champion on the Danbury track, and first raced when he was legally old
enough at 18. He said he misses the Racearena, as it was called, but
credits its demise with launching his NASCAR career.
He
moved from Norwalk, Conn., to Concord, N.C, shortly after the track
closed and now owns a business that manufactures safety seats for race
cars, but he said he misses Danbury.
"There's
no place in the country that had the atmosphere, and I've been to
hundreds of racetracks," he said. "The people – it was like a cult.
Every driver had a following. They sat in groups, and they might have
fought. The purse up here was amazing compared to today."
Winning
purses were based on a night's admission. LaJoie said his father
sometimes took home as much as $8,000 on a Saturday night.
"If they didn't close it," he said, "I'd still be here."
The track in 1982, just before it was bulldozed for a mall.