Dick Passwater, a NASCAR legend-to-be, was born 100 years ago, and what might've been!

If you’re fated to be a one-hit wonder yet destined to stand out in the record books, it helps to be named Dick Passwater.

Why point out that obvious fact today? Because we’re just a day away from the 100th anniversary of the day (July 24, 1926) Dick Passwater was born in Indianapolis, a place that’s always been adept at injecting a racing bug deep into veins of the predisposed. 

We just passed the six-year mark of Dick’s death, at 93, in his adopted Florida retirement home of Sarasota. 

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He might’ve been more than a passing thought among racing historians if his buddy and fellow Hoosier, Frank Arford, had stuck to boxing and car-ownership instead of scratching his own racing itch. We'll get to it.

As it was, Dick posted 14 top-10s in just 20 NASCAR starts between 1952-53, and cemented his one-hit-wonder status with a 1953 victory at the old three-quarter-mile Charlotte Speedway. His name sits among a Who’s Who of winners on that long-ago dirt track — Hall of Famers Curtis Turner, Herb Thomas and Tim Flock among them.

Dick Passwater outran all of 'em one day in Charlotte

The win came in April and the field of 28 drivers included the kinds of names long associated with NASCAR’s rough-and-tumble days. There was a Pop (McGinnis), Slick (Smith) and Ewell (Weddle) but also a Bub (King), Buddy (Schuman) and Buck (Baker), along with the eventual runner-up to Dick, the part-Cherokee speedster from North Georgia — Gober Cletus Sosebee.

April 5th, 1953, Dick Passwater won @ Charlotte Speedway, Passwater's only NASCAR Grand National (Cup) win. pic.twitter.com/ZoToJx7uZC

— Andrew (@Basso488) April 5, 2024

The NASCAR database has Dick finishing a “quarter-lap” ahead of Sosebee and earning a whopping $1,000 for the effort. Due to rain the previous day, the race was NASCAR's first on an Easter Sunday, a rarity through most of NASCAR history.

Dick, a WWII Navy veteran with the tattoos to prove it, had previously done some short-track racing throughout the Indy area. For his budding NASCAR efforts, he drove the No. 78 Oldsmobile owned by his buddy Arford, who by day sold used cars in Indianapolis while also promoting and refereeing prize fights.

(By the way, 40-plus years later, Dick donated that Oldsmobile to the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing, Michigan, where you can still see it today.)

In six of the next nine races after his Charlotte win, Dick would finish sixth or better, including a sixth-place finish in that ninth race — June 14 at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola.

The following weekend, NASCAR road-tripped to Langhorne Speedway on the Pennsylvania side of the New Jersey line. Along with Dick's car, Arford entered an Oldsmobile for himself, as he’d done four times earlier that season without a decent finish to show for it. He never saw race day.

The tragedy that ended Dick Passwater's NASCAR career

Arford crashed through a wooden fence during qualifying. His seat was dislodged and he was thrown to his death, which was made official at a nearby Trenton hospital. He was 42.

Along with the obvious tragedy for the Arford family, the death also ended the NASCAR career of Dick Passwater, since his friend also happened to be the man who provided his race cars. As happens, the show continued without either man.

In fact, the International 200 went off as scheduled the very next day, and here's some NASCAR trivia for you — the field of 38 featured quite a few foreign makes, including several Jaguars and Porsches. It was part of a short-term NASCAR experiment.

All 200 laps were led by Dick Rathmann, who was really Jim Rathmann, while brother and fellow racer Jim Rathmann was actually Dick Rathmann, but boy oh boy, that’s another story for another day.

Dick Passwater would return to his day job in Indy, where he operated Passwater’s Auto Specialists in Broad Ripple, on Broad Ripple Avenue between today’s Kilroy’s and the Old Pro’s Table.

He’d run one more NASCAR race after Arford’s death, fielding his own Oldsmobile in Darlington’s Southern 500 just a few months after the Langhorne tragedy. He finished ninth in a wall-to-wall field of 59 starters. It was his 11th and final top 10 in his 14th and final race of 1953. He was just 27.

Dick would run a handful of nearby races in the old USAC Stock Car series, but basically stuck to turning wrenches instead of laps before retiring to Florida’s Gulf Coast in the 1990s. As a Florida transplant, he’d regularly cross the state to Daytona Beach, where he’d opened that 1953 season with a sixth-place finish on NASCAR’s beach-and-road course. 

He was a well-liked regular at functions put together by the local Living Legends of Auto Racing organization.

So, Happy 100th to the memory of Dick Passwater, and while you have to wonder just how brightly his legend might’ve blossomed, his NASCAR tenure wasn’t the only racing career cut short by circumstances beyond his control. 

Unlike many others of that era, however, he came out the other side physically unscathed and, for many years, lived to tell of his short-term glory while possibly wondering what might’ve been.

— Email Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Dick Passwater, a NASCAR legend-to-be, was born 100 years ago, and what might've been!