Betty Little is on a campaign.
She’s not trying to get elected.
She’s just trying to save a building.
It’s a building that’s vital to motorsports history — namely NASCAR stock-car racing.
At one time, Betty Little and her husband, Fletchel, operated the Apollo Restaurant in this building, which sits on the west corner of Morehead Road and U.S. Highway 29, across from Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Betty Little’s brother-in-law, Buck, owns the building. Four Little brothers own the entire section, which includes the Apollo Mobile Home Park.
The building is alive with motorsports history.
When the Apollo Restaurant was up and running, it was the site just about every morning for breakfast conversation about racing, featuring some of the all-time greats like the late Harry Hyde, the late Robert Gee, racing mechanic Tommy Johnson, and mechanics and crew chiefs from race teams in the area too numerous to mention.
If you were anybody in racing and you wanted to know anything about motorsports, you showed up at the Apollo and listened to the conversation, right outside the kitchen.
When the Littles were running the Apollo, which housed an array of racing memorabilia, D.K. Ulrich had his race shop located in the end of the building which now faces the Speedway Center, a two-story office building. Brian Butler, who now engineers ButlerBuilt racing seats, and former driver Dick May also had offices in the building. The late Tim Richmond got his start in NASCAR Cup as a driver, running a car owned by Ulrich.
The Littles decided to get out of the restaurant business in the early 2000s.
Since the restaurant went under, many have occupied the space where the Apollo stood, including the NASCAR Racing Wives Auxiliary. Red Wing Shoes now does business in the building.
Now that the City of Concord and Cabarrus County have opened up their pocketbooks to Bruton Smith for all types of improvements in and around Lowe’s Motor Speedway, Betty Little is afraid the building might not be spared.
They’re talking about putting in a spur road from some place, just south of the old Apollo building to cross over to Speedway Boulevard, coming out somewhere around the Tom Johnson Camping RV complex where Smith plans to open a drag strip later this year. How much land that will require and exactly where, nobody knows.
“They haven’t told us a thing, yet,” said Fletchel Little. “They’ll just come in one day and take what they need and that’ll be all there is to it. Nobody can do anything about it.”
There are plans for a couple of new walkover bridges somewhere near Morehead Road and U.S. 29 and they plan to reconfigure and widen U.S. 29 in front of the speedway. They also are going to put in a couple of underground pedestrian tunnels somewhere on Morehead Road.
All that work might all of a sudden engulf the building that once housed the Apollo.
Gone will be a part of motorsports history. Gone will be the building that heard legendary tales spun by Hyde and Gee.
It’s where the motorsports world first found out that Rick Hendrick had decided to join the ranks of Cup car owners, taking over Hyde’s property, not far from where the Apollo once was, transforming it into an empire.
“We need to make that building a historical building, so they can’t tear it down,” said Betty Little.
“Motorsports is so important now to North Carolina and this area, in particular. So many things happened in the Apollo when we were there.”
It seems like only yesterday when Hyde won his first Cup race with Hendrick, coming home to find just about every tree in the neighborhood wrapped in white toilet paper as a welcoming home gesture.
The Apollo Restaurant stories go on forever.
Save the building, if possible.