Bud Moore was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega, Alabama on April 23, 2009. Carbon Press is proud to be publishing his biography to coincide with the induction - Bud Moore: Man and Machine
In the works for over two years, Dr. John Craft has interviewed all of Bud's living drivers and completed a staggering amount of research for this book that covers every aspect of Bud's life: his government-sponsored trip to the beaches of Normandy and western Europe, his NASCAR career, the storied Trans-Am years and a whole lot more. The hard cover Racer's edition is over 400 pages and over 200 images will help complete the wonderful story Dr. Craft has woven.
You can get a feel for how Dr.. Craft brings Bud's story to life in the excerpt below:
Beginning of Chapter 1
Walter Maynard Moore, Sr. was just looking for a little peace and quiet...the day he chopped his son's car to bits with an axe.
As a farmer, he was up before the sun every day tending to his cows and making sure that all was well at the Moore family farm that was located just outside of Spartanburg, South Carolina. And, if that wasn't enough to keep one man busy, he was also the proprietor of several grocery stores in and around the city. So, once his morning chores were done, he was off to work in town managing his stores. And that was a task that kept him away from the farm until well after dark every night of the week. It was the depth of the depression and a man did what he had to do to keep food on the table for his growing family.
To keep body and soul together, Mr. Moore had adopted the habit of returning home to the farm for lunch and a nap at mid-day on work days. And that's where the quest for peace and quiet arose. To make sure that he would be undisturbed during his afternoon nap he'd left strict instructions with his sons that they were to do nothing to disturb him between 1pm and 3pm, while he was sleeping. And above all else that included not tearing about the farm in the used autos that the travails of the depression often saw him take as payment for groceries from some of his more needy customers.
Boys will be boys, of course, and on this particular day twelve year old Walter Jr. just couldn't resist toying with the cut down model T that he'd made into something of a speedster. Unfortunately, part of the cutting process had involved the car's muffler. And though the young man's modified was far from race worthy, it made a prodigious noise.́ That was the problem.
With his nap abruptly interrupted by Walter Jr.'s noisy skylarking, the senior Moore stormed down the steps from his bedroom with an axe in his hand and blood in his eye. It didn't take long to track the snorting T model down as Walter Jr. raced around the farm. Once father and son were rejoined, Mr. Moore pulled his son off of the offending mechanical beast and took great pains to chop up everything he could reach on the car. He told his son, "I bet that'll keep that dad blasted thing quiet for a while" as he returned to the house.
Today the racing world knows that sleep robbing youngster as Bud Moore. And as history records, Bud Moore went on from that Spartanburg farm to make more than a little noise on NASCAR and Trans Am tracks all across the country in a legendary racing career that spanned half a century.
But that came later.
