He’s got a comfortable chair in his trailer, but 80-year-old Bob Devine’s favorite perch is on the left-front tire of his DIRT modified.
He can keep an eye on the “youngsters” preparing his car, and the physical connection with the car seems to energize his memory bank.
Seems like the perfect time to ask the longtime racer if he raced inside New York’s fabled Kingsbridge Armory.
“Yeah, we ran there in the winter of ’49. They’d start 24 cars on a fifth of a mile that was flatter than a pancake. They had one door, about 20 feet wide and maybe 30 feet high, and that was the only source of ventilation,” Devine explains. “The pits were at that end and down in one and two, at the other end, the fumes were so bad that you couldn’t see the turn.

"They’d start 24 cars on a fifth of a mile that was flatter than a pancake. They had one door, about 20 feet wide and maybe 30 feet high, and that was the only source of ventilation,” Devine explains. “The pits were at that end and down in one and two, at the other end, the fumes were so bad that you couldn’t see the turn."

“Going down the straightaway, you’d see people hanging out of the balcony, puking on the floor. Because of the lack of ventilation, you couldn’t warm up the car inside, so I’d run down Jerome Avenue about a half-mile, turn around, and come back. Today they’d lock you up and throw away the key, but back then, nobody said anything.
“A lot of midget guys were there — Rex Records, Ted Tappett, Tony Bonadies — because stock cars were just coming into existence. It was great racing.”
When asked if he won any features, Devine laughs and launched into a commentary on some of his contemporaries.
“Some guys I know would tell you that they won two or three because they know nobody has the records to prove differently and they take any opportunity to pump up their win totals,” Devine says. “I think we ran about a dozen races, but I didn’t win any, though we ran up front most of the time.
“I remember one of the midget guys spun me out going into three and I went all the way to the end of the building. That was the last race there, so the first night at Riverside Park in Agawam, I parked him out in the rocks. He came down and told me we were even now.”
When asked if the tow from central Connecticut was tough then, Devine pauses briefly.
“I don’t remember any big problems,” he says quietly. “We towed with my brother’s pickup truck, but a lot of times we left the car there, in the end of the armory. One week, we came back and somebody had taken the ignition wires off of it. We had a homemade deal and I figured we were in trouble, but they left the cap, so we made some new wires and got it going again.”
The obvious question, then, is what did the “outside” tracks pay back then?
“At Rhinebeck, I think a clean sweep was good for $350. Wednesday nights at Menands, near Albany, N.Y., we got $25 if we showed up and it rained, and $300 to $400 for a win. My 40 percent was never less than $50 and I won a lot of races, so I did OK. I was making just over $1 an hour then, working as a carpenter, and that’s why I raced five nights a week.
“I’d go from Menands right to the job and sleep for a couple of hours. The boss would wake me up and I’d work until noon, then sleep during my lunch hour. We were done at five, so I’d jump back in the car and go to West Haven.”
All of those speedways are gone today, but Bob Devine soldiers on, never missing a week at Lebanon Valley Speedway.
He is, and has always been, a racer.