Ed Otto: NASCAR’s Silent Partner
By his son, Edgar Otto, edited by Joann Biondi
Published by Coastal 181
To order: log on to www.coastal181.com
Cost: $29.95

The course of motorsports history is changing.
The book, Ed Otto: NASCAR’s Silent Partner, recently published by Coastal 181, is seeing to that.
Otto, a native of New Jersey, was very instrumental in helping Bill France, Sr. formulate NASCAR’s national plans in those early days of the 1950s.
More so than NASCAR ever has given Otto, who died in the mid-’90s, credit in the past.
As a silent partner, it was Otto who helped NASCAR bring the Northeast into its fold in those early days.
Otto starting promoting in the northeast and had a stronghold over that part of the country at about the time France was seeing to it that NASCAR would become a reckoning force in American motorsports.
But France needed representation in the northeast and he turned to Otto for that direction.
By that, Otto, who was recognized by the cigar he kept clinched between his teeth, already has promoted just about every form of motorsports from midgets to sports cars at just about every possible racing venue in the Northeast.
 Not only did Otto establish NASCAR in the northeast, but he likely saved  them altogether after meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. When Eisenhower was in office, a series of deaths in auto racing, threatened the sport. After a meeting with Eisenhower, Otto convinced the President not to take any action of curtailing the motorsports industry.
France brought Otto into NASCAR and made him a vice president, giving Otto and equal amount of shares of NASCAR, totaling 40 percent, the same amount as France. At the time, only Bill Tuthill had the same amount of stock until he was bought out by France.
During his tenure, Otto helped put the “national” into NASCAR, increasing its membership and participation by numerous numbers.
After France banned Curtis Turner and Fonty Flock for threatening to bring the Teamsters Union into NASCAR, Otto helped smooth over the situation and get Turner and Flock reinstated because he was aware promoters were complaining because they didn’t have access to Turner or Flock.
  As quick as Otto’s rise to the top in NASCAR came, he dropped just as quick.
France was determined that NASCAR needed to be governed by one person with a strong fist and so he went about buying out Otto and all the others involved in the ’50s.
Richard Petty, one of the many contributors to the Ed Otto book, said, “France needed Otto if he ever wanted to get out of the South. Ed was France’s northern connection…he brought the North into the deal.”