Why the hurry.(Dale Earnhardt and stock car racing)(Brief Article)

Martha Earnhardt thought Ralph had lost his mind. All those nights in the garage out back. Three, four nights a week, he'd go racing. Doing good, but he could kill himself. And he takes the boy with him all over Carolina. I'm waiting tables at the Dinette, my husband's racing. We're living in a neighborhood called Car Town. On Sedan Street. Some one of these danged nights, Ralph will just die with that car.

And he did.

Died working on a carburetor. Heart attack, 45 years old. With his son there. Dale was 22, married and divorced, a father, a ninth-grade dropout pumping gas and racing in wood-fence, pole-lit, dirt-track bullrings, $25 to the winner. "Wild and crazy, young and dumb," to quote Earnhardt, he soon built a racer's reputation for talent and terror.

Cale Yarborough once said, "Driving a stock car is like dancing with a chain saw."

Better the chain saw than Earnhardt. He drove with a high and pure disregard for and disdain of safety, either yours or his. "They ain't ever seen the kind of rough racing I've had to do just to survive," he said, adding the promise, "They don't want to mess with this ol' boy."

He had so little money for so long that his third wife, Teresa, hung bedsheets for curtains. "I fell in love with Teresa," Earnhardt told Juliet Macur of The Dallas Morning News, "when I found out she fixed her Pinto when it overheated."

Early on, "Ironhead" Earnhardt scattered wreckage and recrimination from Daytona to Dover. Soon enough, accomplishment made him the more respected if no more genteel "Intimidator," a fire-breathing descendant of the whiskey-running rogues who'd been his daddy's pals.