FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) - Danny McDaniel is likely the most devoted racing fan you’ll ever meet.
Who else would load a mo-ped - that’s right, a mo-ped - with clothing, bedding and sundries and travel from his hometown of Darlington, South Carolina, to the dirt tracks in Fayetteville and Dublin, a journey of about 90 miles? Who else would, without hesitation, gladly spend the night in a sleeping bag or on a quilt on the ground, atop a picnic table or under a motor home just to be near the sport and its fans?
But that is the 66-year-old McDaniel, whose boyhood home faced Darlington Raceway. As a child, he watched NASCAR races at the track across the street from scaffolding or from the treehouse he shared with his older siblings Tommy, Edwin and Joan. Their parents, Eugene and Frances, would often rent a bedroom in their home to fans who came to town for the races, and Danny would often wait by the edge of the street for the race cars to arrive.
“If I hadn’t lived there,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t be a racing fan.”
McDaniel’s dedication goes beyond the basic definition of “fan.” He’s a regular at the library in Darlington, where a staffer will print schedules for him at 10 cents a sheet. And before he leaves town for a race, he’ll pay a return visit to the library to procure updated standings to stay as current as possible.
His most recent trip to North Carolina began April 27, when he put $1.50 in gas in the mo-ped and set out for Dublin’s two-night event that weekend. That following Monday morning, May 1, he made the 31-mile trip up N.C. 87 to Fayetteville Motor Speedway, where he set up camp to await the World of Outlaws Late Model race five days later.
The morning after the Outlaws show, he repacked the mo-ped - a second-hand model on which he’s traveled 9,000 miles - and headed home. He guided his mo-ped, splashed with flashy trim, shiny buttons and a custom paint job, down U.S. 301 to Rowland, then across the South Carolina line to Dillon, then on to S.C. 34 for the final 40 miles to Darlington.
Have mo-ped, will travel
Danny McDaniel is a modern-day nomad, and a race track is his oasis. McDaniel is a high school dropout who attended night school and eventually earned his diploma. He won’t confess to any mischievousness as a pupil; at least, not to the degree of a classmate who would draw a “0’’ on test papers and resume his nap, or the one who playfully began a morning Bible reading over the intercom by citing “the book of Possums” rather than Psalms.
He’s had jobs as a car delivery driver, a painter, a mill worker and many more. “Little penny-ante jobs,” his sister said.
When he tired of one vocation, he’d move on to something else. He’s never been married and has no children because “I see everybody else’s and I don’t need none. If I had young’uns, I’d kill ’em,” he said with his constant, hearty laugh. “They don’t pay nobody no attention - they do what they want to do.
“But I bet I was the same way. I don’t need another one like me,” again punctuating his remarks with a laugh.
According to Joan McDaniel, he’s like their father in that he’s an avid conversationalist. He can chatter as long as there’s an attentive ear, be it about motorsports or Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, a serial killer from the Florence area who died in the electric chair after killing a fellow death row inmate with a bomb.
His visits to tracks as far as West Virginia began decades ago. He once owned a souped-up Pontiac Trans Am but blew up its motor. Now, he chooses to stick with the mo-ped, and his journeys to tracks within a hundred miles of home have helped him forge friendships with racing fans.
“I don’t think he meets any strangers,” said Donnie Sulcer, a Michigan native who retired in Fayetteville after 20 years in the military. “If some of us ask if we can bring him something, he’ll say no. Or once in awhile he’ll ask, ’Will you bring me a hamburger - if you feel like it?’ And he doesn’t drink (alcohol), he just drinks sodas.”
When it comes to a favorite driver, McDaniel takes a diplomatic stance: “It takes all of them to make a race, it ain’t just one.”
Home on the go
McDaniel, still sporting red hair under his ever-present cap, is a throwback in a high-tech, 24-hour news-cycle world.
He owns a house in Darlington, but he doesn’t live in it because he doesn’t like the neighborhood. Instead, he lives about a mile away in the garage of a friend for $40 a month in rent.
“He’s got a pretty nice garage,” McDaniel said. “I’ve got cablevision, I’ve got cooking things, I’ve got a thing that I put down and all and pick it up every day - like a rug.”
He used to own a cellphone, but no longer does, his sister said. The mo-ped is as high-tech as he gets.
McDaniel also owns a 15-passenger Ford van, but, like the house, he wants to get rid of it. The $50,000 inheritance left to him by his mother slowly disappeared over “eight or nine years,” he said.
“I was gonna fix up the van, put a bed in it,” he said. “Then I could branch out and go to other races … if I hadn’t throwed my money away, but I kind of got up with a bad crowd. Good times overruled.
“Then I started drawing Social Security and I make it on that.”
Family and friends
The major events in McDaniel’s life seem to revolve around racing. He was 14 when he father died April 12, 1966.
“He died on a Tuesday, buried him on Thursday, and the race at Darlington was on Saturday,” he said. “I can’t tell you when my mama died, but I can tell you when my daddy did because he died the week of the race.”
McDaniel maintains contact with his remaining siblings, mostly with Joan, who lives about five miles away. Edwin, who lives west of Columbia in Lexington and runs a computer business, said he sees Danny a couple of times of year - “maybe, if we’re lucky.” The oldest of the children, Tommy, died about 15 months ago.
Danny, the youngest, is “a bit eccentric, but he doesn’t bother anybody,” Edwin said. “Sometimes I wonder how he actually gets by.”
The folks Danny sees most often are fans at the Dublin and Fayetteville dirt tracks and at the asphalt oval in Dillon, South Carolina. Dillon promoter Ron Barfield, a former NASCAR driver, has grown accustomed to finding McDaniel waiting at the gates for him prior to the bigger events.
“At first, I thought he wanted a free ticket, but that wasn’t it. He doesn’t ask for anything - never has,” Barfield said. “I have seen him come up for a big race, if they were calling for rain on Friday, he’d come up a day early so he wouldn’t get caught in the rain. If the gates are locked and I’m not there, he’ll sleep under the trailers or in a car we use at the racetrack. Hey, you know what? He’s completely welcome to go up and sleep in the control tower if he wants to.”
The feeling is the same at Fayetteville, where promoter Jim Long Jr. has given McDaniel the run of his facility. Early in the week of the Outlaws race, when overnight rain was inevitable, Long told McDaniel he could bunk down inside the air-conditioned VIP suite. But McDaniel, not wanting to be too far from his prized mo-ped, opted for the floor of the concession stand. Long chuckled and told McDaniel to help himself to anything he found in the coolers.
“It struck me, a couple of years ago after a race, that we whine and fuss and complain about a whole lot of stuff in life,” Long said. “We want things just right for our convenience and comfort. If we just loved the sport of racing as much as Danny does, we wouldn’t want things ’our way’ so bad, we’d just want to see the sport do well.”
On the road again
Before he bought a mo-ped - the current one is his third - McDaniel traveled to the races any way he could, whether it was driving, riding with friends, taking a bus, or even hitch-hiking.
He once caught a ride from Darlington to Lumberton, then spent the night walking 18 miles along N.C. 41 and arriving in Dublin the next morning. Back in the summer of 1979, he took the bus to Anderson, South Carolina, for a national-championship dirt race. When he arrived in town, he had enough money to get in to see the race and $14 to spare. Instead of getting a motel room for the night, he spent the $14 on a sleeping bag, which he still has, and walked the remaining eight miles to the track.
McDaniel’s current Chinese-made mo-ped is one of a kind. In addition to its red and yellow paint scheme, add-on bling and a storage well under the seat, he’s mounted a briefcase atop the rear frame. It’s filled with printouts from the library, alcohol for cleaning, a wash cloth, toothbrush, snacks, aspirin, vitamins and a battery-powered radio. A round trip to Fayetteville or Dublin costs him about $5 to $6 in gas. He pays for admission to the races just like everybody else. He’ll accept food as a gift, but won’t ask for it.
He travels during daylight hours, and that’s helped him avoid run-ins with animals, save for one brief encounter with a feisty dog. He’s never been robbed in his travels, but he keeps Mace in a pocket in case there’s trouble. There was a time, he said, when he carried a pellet gun, “but it don’t pay to tote that no more. You pull that out now, somebody’ll kill you.”
His sister, who’s recovering from a mild stroke, worries about him when he’s gone to the races, especially if she hasn’t seen him - or heard from someone who has - within a couple of days after they’re finished.
He dismisses their concerns, saying, “There ain’t nothing they can do about it.”
As long as he - and the mo-ped ) are able and there’s a race within riding distance, he’s hitting the road to be a part of it.
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Information from: The Fayetteville Observer, https://www.fayobserver.com
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