May 12, 2009
By Kim Roberson
Kim Roberson
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Continued from yesterday, 5-11-09...
I find it ironic that for a man whom many believed had no heart, it was ultimately his heart that led to David Poole’s departure from this earth. Even more interesting is that, for a select few, it was that heart that made David so very special to them.
“We were the Oscar and Felix…we was the grumpy curmudgeon and I was the free for all hey let’s have a good time kind of guy” described Poole’s co-host on Sirius NASCAR Radio’s “The Morning Drive”, Mike Bagley. “He always had a lot of bark…sometimes had a lot of bite.”
“I was not gonna marry that mean old grouchy thing! He was the best friend in the world, but I’m not gonna marry that mean old grouchy thing!” joked David’s wife, Katy, when asked why she and David waited so long to get married.
Theirs was a relationship that Katy described as “35 years of love and 10 years of marriage.” She saw a side of David that many didn’t even know existed.
“David and I are 10 months apart in age, we went to the same church, and we met in the toddler/baby department. We have been friends since then. We have played ball together, we kept score for softball leagues across Gaston County, church rec leagues, and we went through 1st thru 12th grades. He went away, I went away, but we always talked and stayed connected, and saw each other at Christmas” Katy explained a few days after her husband’s death. “In September of 1998 we went out to dinner, and by January 29th of 1999, we were married, at the age of 40. It’s been a lifelong love.
“He loved me from the time we played softball and I beat him out for first base position, and we put him at shortstop. He’ll tell you I was the better ball player. But, you know, our lives had calmed down and I just think we were more mature and we knew that we loved each other and it was the right time.”
Then, Katy announced something that virtually no one knew, certainly not within his NASCAR family. “I knew that David needed a heart transplant, I just wished for all the years I could have with him, in my mind, 4, 5, 6 years, oh that will be wonderful, but we made it ten years, we just had our 10th anniversary, and I had him for 10 wonderful years.”
“I never knew. I had no idea. He had heart trouble before, and he had heart surgery before…but he never told me he needed a heart transplant” Bagley admitted last weekend in Richmond. “The unexpected nature of that heart attack caught a lot of us off guard because we didn’t know really how sick he was. And if I knew he was I would have clamped down on him at the race track and I would have made sure that he and I would eat every meal if I could to make sure he ate right and took care of himself. “
Mike and David’s friendship evolved from acquaintances to the best of friends in the 16 months they shared on TMD. “My relationship with David was slow to start. He and I in ’08 never really spent any time together away from the track. We never spent time getting to know each other except for on the air. I occasionally would visit him in the Media Center. David for me was a hard guy to get to know, and we finally at the end of ’08 started getting closer together. We would call each other at night, we would encounter something funny and we would text each other or give each other a call. He met my parents and always asked for mom and dad, and then at the start of 09 we started texting each other when we got to our destination, he would say ‘give me a text and let me know you got in.’”
When Rocky Ryan, spotter for Jeff Burton, joined us, I started hearing stories about just what a softie Poole was behind the scenes…something I wouldn’t have expected from a man that many saw as a cranky malcontent who was as opinionated as he was cantankerous.
“David is responsible for so many elements on that show. Rocky is one of them. David felt it was very important for the fans to get a totally different perspective. We could talk to drivers and crew chief’s until we are blue in the face. That’s fine, and people like to hear that, but you have someone like Rocky come on who can give a different perspective, you get the view from the spotters stand.” Mike explained as the three of us, along with Rocky’s wife Kathy, tried to stay dry during one of the many rain showers in Richmond.
Rocky Ryan is just one of many show regulars that appear throughout the week on TMD.
“David is totally responsible for the Drive for Diversity thing that we do. When we visit with the Paulie Harraka’s of the world…no one in this world, for the most part in NASCAR, knows who Blair Addis is, at least on the Cup or Nationwide or truck (series). But by him coming on our air, it allows us to spotlight the upcoming talent, and David was all about that. He even a lot of times would take the task on his shoulders to fight the fight for either the unspoken driver or the underprivileged driver, because he wanted everyone to be able to participate and have affair shot at doing it.
“He thought NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program is good, but it could be better. He rolled out a proposal a couple of weeks ago, that NASCAR could take 5% of the money it gets, and he had this elaborate plan of putting money here and putting money there and creating this series that these drivers could compete in and in the end they could get a truck ride. He had this whole thing he went in to, and it took a lot of thought, and he sat down and crunched numbers and, the thing of it is he always did the research, and he was always poking around to see how he could do stuff better. He was responsible for a lot of the elements on the show. A lot of people just think that people like Rocky just show up and call in, but he brought Rocky to the dance, he brought the diversity thing to the dance, he brought Bobby Hamilton junior…he doesn’t have a ride but, for one thing, Bobby is hysterical as hell, and number two it gave us a chance to talk about the Camping World East (series) and put the spotlight on that. There was a whole lot more to it than Cup racing at Richmond and truck racing at Kansas, and Nationwide racing at Nashville. He wanted to go a lot deeper and then we wove that in and out of the show.”
When 13-year old Ford Martin lost his job as a cub reporter for “Tony Stewart Live”, Poole recruited him to work with them.
“He saw Ford in the off season, and Ford was all upset because TSL was cancelled, and he didn’t have a place to work…”
“He was fired at 8…” interjected Rocky with a chuckle.
“Yeah, exactly…so Poole walked up to him and says “What’s wrong with you young man?” and Ford said “TSL is not coming back and I’m upset” and something about not being on the air…and David is like “We can change that…you can start in Daytona” and bam, it was done. Anything that David brought that he wanted to do on the air I just let him do because he’s so passionate about what he did.”
That passion carried over to charities. Last February, David decided to do a story on a girl named Wessa Miller. Wessa was on a “Make a wish” trip when she decided Dale Earnhardt needed “a little luck”, and gave him a lucky penny in Daytona back in February of 1998. Dale glued that penny to the dashboard of the 3 car, and then went on to win his first, and only, Daytona 500. Earnhardt credited Wessa with bringing him luck, and that lucky penny led to a friendship between the Intimidator and the little girl with spina bifida that lasted until the day Dale died. (You can read the original column here: http://www.thatsracin.com/158/story/4229.html).
After doing the story, David realized that the Miller family needed help. So quietly, David went about setting up a charity to help them cover the costs of Wessa’s care. (Penniesforwessa.org).
"In working on an anniversary story from Dale Earnhardt's Daytona 500 victory in 1998, something made me wonder how the little girl who gave him his lucky penny before that race was doing 10 years later,” said Poole in a NASCAR.com story earlier this year. “What I found was Wessa Miller and her parents, Booker and Juanita, deal with day-to-day challenges that most of us can't even dream of. The Millers meet those challenges by being a wonderful, loving family with deep faith in God and in each other. As soon as my story was published people started asking if there was anything they could do to help the Millers, so we set up Pennies for Wessa to provide that opportunity."
“The (Pennies for) Wessa thing was a project that was very, very important to him, and I think somebody is going to have to step up…I don’t know if that is going to be me, I don’t know if that is going to be somebody in the garage, in the media center, to step up, because David did so much, and he didn’t talk a lot about it” explained Mike when I asked who was going to take over the running of the Wessa charity. “You know David was involved in so much…not just that, but so many other little things, that we haven’t even had time to…I think he was involved in stuff that we have yet to find out about.”
Children were Poole’s Achilles heel, from the babies of people in the garage to his own beloved grandson, Eli.
“(David) did such a good job with our guys, he did such a good job with that book (about the 31 team) that never got published. He dedicated the book to two guys that had babies during that season, he dedicated it to their kids, and that was the coolest thing. If it had something to do with Kids, Poole would be right in the middle of it” explained Rocky.
Katy knew exactly where she stood as soon as Eli came into the world. “A lot of people have said “Poole worshipped you”, but a little bit of that went to little Eli when we looked at him in the NICU incubator, and Poole’s heart has never been any bigger. And if he was running over to Eli’s for 30 minutes, I just stayed home, because Eli didn’t see Nanny on that day. If Pawpaw was in the yard, it was all Pawpaw…Pawpaw was the stuff.
“A lot of times (Katy’s daughter) Lori would bring him over just before the show was over so he could spend some time with Pawpaw before he had to run to wherever, and he would say “Paw Paw radio?” and I would say “Yes, go knock on the door honey” and he always allowed Eli into the room…we would never go into the room and bother him but if Eli was there, he went in and sat on Pawpaw’s lap and sometimes he would say hello (on the air), but he knew Pawpaw was on the radio, and he wanted to sit with him.
“We’re not sure how we’re going to handle (explaining this to Eli), but we are going to have a lot of written words and we are printing every word that every fan has sent us into a book, every article that everyone has written will be in the book. Eli will never forget his Pawpaw.”
Bagley says it will be the softer side of his co-host that he will carry with him.
“There was this one day last year in Kansas on a Monday morning, and the media center was locked we were both locked out and it was raining and he was HOT. He gets on the phone with then producer Adam Bernard and he says “Adam, put me on the air now.” It was 7 and it was time for us to be on the air and the security guy didn’t have a key and there was no way for us to get in and it was just miscommunication… “PUT ME ON THE AIR NOW! (Kansas Speedway President Jeff) Boerger’s pants are coming down now.” And I am just like “oh my gosh, David don’t do this…” and David says “Roll the open and put me on the air” and Adam and Zach rolled the open and put him on the air and I just walked away and I’m like “Nothing good is going to come of this” and when he went on the air, and I’m thinking “This is gonna be bad” but he comes on the air “Good morning everybody, welcome to Kansas Speedway, I’m David Poole, co-host of the Morning Drive. Mike Bagley is here as well, and we are locked out of the Media Center and we’re just waiting for someone to come and let us in…” and he softened up so much that it became like a joke.
“We finally get into the media center…and we get settled in and we’re having to run extended commercials as we get our computers booted up, getting this plugged in…and we had a bag of McDonalds breakfasts and we had Egg McMuffin's and bacon egg and cheese biscuits, and he sits down and takes a deep breath and he looks at me and he’s going through the bag and the bag is melting, the paper is so saturated with water, and he pulls out an Egg McMuffin and he hands it to me and he says “Michael, here’s your breakfast, here’s your Egg McMuffin with a side order of rain.” And I just looked at him and I just howled in laughter.”
“For someone to have the persona that David did, it’s rare, because until you got to know him, he would not let that wall down. He knew who you were, he would recognize you in the garage and say hello, but that was it” added Rocky. “But once you knew you got through that wall, you knew about his family, you knew how he felt about things, that was a really special thing. That’s what I’m always going to remember, that I was one of those few that got behind that wall…and I’m never gonna forget him.”
“The phone calls and well wishes…and that is what has blown me away” said Mike, shaking his head in disbelief. “All these people who have reached out to me just because I was associated with him. That’s unbelievable. I’ve never had that happen before. “
Dale Earnhardt Junior summed it up this way “David Poole was as much a fixture in the sport as the actual cars themselves.”
There are so many more stories that I have heard and could share in the last two weeks about David Poole, but I just don’t have the room. What I do know is that while the sport is carrying on…something has changed just a little bit in the way it is shared with us, the fans. The man who spared no bones in sharing his thoughts and opinions with us each week in the Charlotte Observer, and every weekday on “The Morning Drive” has been silenced, but his impact will be felt for a long time to come.
He may be gone, but it is doubtful he will ever be forgotten.
Mike summed it up the best in this simple sentence: “We never truly say goodbye, we say see you later.”
See you later, David Poole. And thank you for everything.
You can read part one at David Poole: Part One, The Arduous, Cantankerous Teacher
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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