So I didn’t make it to the Jackson County Fair this year.  A couple things got in the way.  Plans to visit Topsail Island, NC and look at the Atlantic Ocean with my dear wife, Carrie, will always win out.  We did get home in time to perhaps make it up on Friday.  Too much to do and too blasted hot made this a no-go.  That makes me sad too.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING like THEE Jackson County Fair (my apologies to Ohio State aficionados, but only today).

I know the Paul Crockett Memorial at The Brownstown Speedway on the Jackson County Fairgrounds was held during the fair.  I get wistful each and every time I think about Paul Crockett.  I loved that man.

Twenty-five years ago I wrote a column that appeared in this very publication.  I made an allusion to my childhood growing up in Brownstown being somewhat like that I saw on television in the form of the fictional town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show.   As a child I lived on the last proper street on the East side of town.  That was Jackson Street.  And yes, the old Jackson County Jail was a two minute bike ride from my house.

It really was like Mayberry.  I know the town police officer, Russell Martin, was not anything like Barney Fife.  But I can tell you that Russell pulled me over on my bike once.  He thought I was going to hurt myself flying down Walnut Street as I was heading down the hill toward the Library and Town Hall.

That library was so important to me.  Miss Maude McMahan was the town librarian.  She was also my next door neighbor on Jackson Street across from, well, Cross Street.  Miss Maude broadened my literary horizons.  Though I was only ten, she led me to a book by George Plimpton called Paper Lion.  Plimpton was a participatory journalist.  He found a way into experiences like no else before or since.  In this case, he was invited to the Detroit Lions training camp.  He played quarterback, sort of.  Years later a film starring Alan Alda by the same name was made.  I have seen it too.  But you better know that I was thinking of Miss Maude, though she was no longer with us, when I met George Plimpton in 1987 some nine years after Maude turned me on to his work.  Plimpton gave me advice I carry to this day.  I wish Maude would have lived long enough to hear about it.

Just like Mayberry and Floyd’s Barbershop, I had my barbershop.  It was Paul Crockett’s Barbershop.

Paul Crockett, if you don’t know, was a dirt track racing legend.  I can’t begin to tell you all the tracks he raced or all the personalities he encountered in racing circles.  We don’t have enough time for that here.

What I can tell you is that as a child, when I was not getting my haircut in Crockett’s Barbershop, I was in Paul’s shop listening to the old men in the shop and the stories they told.  I’d get a bottle of pop out of the old chest soft-drink machine and sit and listen so intently that on some occasions my pop would be warm before I had even gotten to it.

But for me, the best part of those visits was when Paul Crockett would grab a rag and whip it about the seat of the “second” chair in the barbershop that was empty.  Only then, at Paul’s behest, would I beamingly take my place in it.  I never asked.  He invited me to sit there.  I sat there and listened intently to Paul’s stories about racing against Jim Curry, Russ Petro, Ira Bastin, and more.  It fills my soul today to know I was there.

I moved from Brownstown in 1979.  More than a decade later I was walking through town just looking around and reminiscing.  As I was walking through an alley that led toward Paul’s shop, I walked on toward the main drag.  A voice called out to me.  It was Paul.  “Hey John Henry!  Where have you been keeping yourself the last ten years?”

And one last time, I was in the presence of greatness that was Paul Crockett.