Drag racers and fans lamented the permanent closing of Atco Dragway as one of the most brutal losses they've experienced. Hall of Fame drag racing announcer Bob Frey feels their pain.

For Frey, Atco Dragway was his sandlot. It was the first place anyone trusted the self-proclaimed geeky kid with a microphone.

Actually, trust wasn't the proper definition, as Frey won the role fair and square back in 1965. Who would have ever thought one of the most iconic drag racing speakers would have such humble beginnings?

"Humble's not the word," Frey countered. "It was more like embarrassing. Because I couldn't do anything on the race car we were trying to run. So my friends made me go up to the tower. God's honest truth. When I tell the story, people think I'm joking. We were going to make this big super team, and we had three of us.

"We all made a time run, and my time run was the worst. And they figured, 'You can't drive it."

"And then they saw smoke coming out from under the hood. My friend who owned the car said, 'Go try to find out what's wrong with it.'

"I couldn't find the hood latch, so I couldn't get the hood open. And just as they were doing that, they made an announcement from the tower that Atco was looking for an announcer because the guy that was doing their races had been hired by NASCAR to go announce their races."

 

Unable to work on the car and too light to even qualify as ballast in the trunk, Frey strolled to the Atco Dragway tower.

"I'll never forget when I went up there the first time," Frey recalled. "It was so cool. I was really enjoying it. And the guys gave me a business card, said, 'We're still auditioning people.'"

Frey, whose mind is a steel trap of drag racing statistics, estimates this transpired in April of 1965.

"I kept coming back and announcing," Frey said. "Then around August, I said to them, 'How long's this contest going to go on?'

"They said, "Oh no, you won the contest three months ago."

Frey suggested they could begin paying him for the job then.

"I finally got paid for it," Frey said. "But I think it was $15 a day or something like that. I'm very honest. I got no other skills, honestly."

Frey had another hidden skill, as it turned out. He was also a pretty good celebrity with a vibrant personality that drag racers and race fans gravitated towards.

"People would always ask me when I was at the race, 'Hey, take my car for a ride down the track," Frey said. "I'm going, 'No. Only two things can happen if I drive your car. I can hurt myself or embarrass myself. I'm not driving your car.'"

Frey is arguably one of the most knowledgeable individuals in the straight-line sport, with a brain filled with more useless information to the average human being than one could imagine. It's a badge of honor when he proclaims that he's probably the only member of the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame who never changed a sparkplug or the oil in a car.

"If I didn't wind up announcing, I'd have probably been food for some small animals on the side of the road," Frey said. "The animals would walk by and say, 'Hey, let's eat him. He can't do anything."

Frey considers himself very fortunate in life, even if his luck didn't take him where he wanted to go. He joined the Air Force just out of high school, with the intention of seeing the world and California in particular. Instead, he was stationed in his home state of New Jersey, and it was there that he met his wife, Jan.

 

"I tell people all the time that I was very fortunate. I had the best of every world," Frey said. "I loved what I did for all the years that I did it and made a decent living. And I couldn't ask for anything more than that. But yeah, it was a humble beginning, but it was more out of necessity because my other two partners wanted me to get the heck out of the pit area because I couldn't do squat."

Frey's occupation in its heyday took him all over the country, and because of the breakneck schedule on the big stage of national event announcing, he rarely came home to talk drag racing. He first started out as an IHRA announcer alongside Ralph Hamilton and then transitioned to the NHRA, where he worked his craft with the legendary Dave McClelland.

Surprisingly, Frey, once he hit the big stage, hadn't announced at Atco since 1981. A lot has changed since then.

"It's tough for guys to make a living at a drag strip nowadays," Frey said. "It's not like the 1960s or 1970s when I worked there. My wife could have run a drag strip back then and made money, but it's so much tougher now. The guy ran the track, and you do those things to make a living. And he got somebody that made him a nice offer. And I can't say that I blame him for it. It's the sign of the times."

Unbeknownst to him that the track was going to close, Frey visited his old stomping grounds a few weeks ago.

"They had one of those drive-and-race kind of things like the Hot Rod Power Tour, but the Midwest version or something," Frey said. "So I was down there and went with a friend of mine who, ironically enough, was one of the original starters back at Atco. He had his '57 Thunderbird that he bought brand new. He was the first guy to drive down the track at Atco, which was in1959 before the major opening.

"He still has the car and took it down there last week. He was the last car to run down the track with the exact same Thunderbird. So I thought that was pretty cool. But the track was going to go away. It's not like it's a surprise because they tried to sell it a couple of years ago."

Frey can spout off the memories, such as Ronnie Sox drifting into the grass and one well-known Jungle guy showing up late for a match race.

"I love the track," Frey said. "Out of all the tracks I've been to -- still my home track. It's where I met everybody from Jungle Jim to Freddie DeName, and that's from one end of the extreme to the other. Got to be good friends with a lot of people from Atco. Every time you opened the gates, the track was packed."

And being at Bob Frey's playground was the place to be largely because he was the toughest guy there. He was the one holding the microphone.

 

RELATED STORY - ATCO CLOSES FOR GOOD