Any way you look at him, John Marcum was a remarkable individual — likely one of the smartest and most insightful pioneers in our sport.
He knew what he wanted early; when he was 14, he borrowed the family car, stretched his age a few years and drove it at a southern Indiana track. In the mid-1940s, he entered a pre-NASCAR race on the original beach-road course, where he crashed and rolled the car.
Another driver in that race was a tall, lanky Daytona Beach service station operator named Bill France. France wanted to promote some races, and he found Marcum to be smart and knowledgeable about racing. He convinced Marcum to give up driving and help him. Thus, began a lifelong friendship.
After NASCAR was formed, Marcum managed many events and details. In 1951, he returned to his Toledo, Ohio, home to implement his plan for a Midwest sanctioning body, first called MARC (Midwest Ass’n for Race Cars). When France opened Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway, Marcum was invited to run a preliminary race the day before the NASCAR opener.  
When France faced a boycott by a newly formed “driver’s union” that claimed the track was unsafe, Marcum put together a rag-tag group of every kind of race car they could locate, and a truly strange event was staged.  It was won by Richard Brickhouse, his one and only NASCAR victory. With that event, Marcum earned France’s undying gratitude, and the MARC cars — later renamed ARCA (Automobile Racing Club of America) were rewarded with their own day of racing at Daytona during pre-500 week.  
It has run every year since and its wild action has earned it the tongue-in-cheek title, “the crash-and-burn race.”
What I remember best about Marcum was his great sense of humor. He was a very funny guy. At a Midwest dirt track event, while cars were stopped for an accident cleanup, Marcum approached the car of Les Snow, a rough, tough driver of the era. He said, “Les, if I see you bangin’ any more cars around, I’m gonna pull you out of the race and you and I are gonna talk.”  Snow replied, “Yeah, what are we gonna talk about?” Marcum: “About five laps.”
Marcum was a great storyteller, and while he undoubtedly embellished some tales in the retelling, his audiences were never bored.
My favorite Marcum story (from my recall of hearing him tell it) was this one: The Marcums lived in a big old house in Toledo.
They had a very old dog that was suffering badly in a summer hot spell. John decided he would use a small spare room as the dog’s room. He showed Mildred: “See, there’s a panel right under that window that we can take out and put in a small air conditioner.” He bought the air conditioner, and found a local handyman who said he could install it.
John showed him what he wanted done, and left for a meeting. Half an hour down the road, he suddenly remembered that he had stashed thousands of dollars in cash behind that panel, for “safekeeping.” He recounted, “I swear I did a 60-mile-per-hour bootlegger’s turn in the middle of highway traffic, broke every speed law on the books and did a full-bore dirt track slide into our driveway... but it was too late. The handyman and the cash were both gone, and were never seen again.
We did get the air conditioner installed, and our old dog enjoyed a room that was now worth more than our house.”
John Marcum, great promoter and storyteller, died in 1981, leaving a considerable void in racing’s cast of unforgettable characters, and his exploits became the stuff of legends.