Poster from 1964 USAC stock car race

Reader Grace Nunes kindly passed along a photo of a cool poster promoting the 1964 USAC stock car race won by A.J. Foyt. Nunes said her father purchased the poster in an antique store. Nunes is a hard-core racing fan herself and continues to watch open-wheel races in Central California. 

As for the race in question, I pulled this detail from my Marchbanks history: 

"The 200-mile season-ending race on Nov. 29, 1964, was called the Billy Vukovich Memorial and drew 6,500 fans and was televised on ABC's "Wide World of Sports." A.J. Foyt took victory, averaging 108 mph in a race full of spins. 

"Joining Foyt in the 25-car field were legendary racers Ron Hornaday Sr., Parnelli Jones,  Joe Leonard, Bobby Unser, Lloyd Ruby, Marvin Porter and Jud Larson (According to Ultimate Racing History, "Marvin Porter replaced Bobby Marshman, who was critically injured in a tire test in his Indy car at Phoenix the day before the race. Marshman died on December 4th in San Antonio, Texas.")"

Thanks, Grace, for letting me share this. As a reminder, this whole Marchbanks history is a collaborative project so if anyone else has photos, stories, maps, etc., feel free to share them with me.  

Interviewed by "Valley Edition"

"Valley Edition" on KVPR/Valley Public Radio interviewed me about the Marchbanks history for a show broadcast this week. 

You can listen to the show here; my segment starts at 42:30. 

One correction to something I said on the show: The track location was southeast of Hanford and Highway 43; not sure why I said southwest, given all the poring of maps I did early on in my research.

Thanks to host Joe Moore for showing interest in the track and for helping further our cause to make this history bigger and better. 

As always, feel free to email me or comment on the main history story to share your own stories or information. 

It would have been nice to get some credit ...

Hanford Sentinel "Hanford History" article posted Dec. 14, 2013... for this short Hanford Sentinel story on the Marchbanks track posted Dec. 14. 

Two things bother me about this piece: 1)They cut and pasted my work without appropriate credit and 2) The Sentinel has all but ignored the track's history over the last few decades. 

Equally annoying is that even though there's only slight rewriting of my original work, they've slapped their own copyright notice on the story and are offering the Indycar photo reprint for sale. All of my work is published under a Creative Commons license that allows others to "copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially" as long as the work is attributed" ... "You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. ..."

This photo The Sentinel posted with the article is apparently of Darlington Raceway, reader Jim Thurman noted in the comments of this post.I published my stories under Creative Commons rather than traditional copyright because I pursued this as a collaborative endeavor and included a lot of other sources, particularly quotes from fan forums. That's why I have so many links to third-party sites to give credit where credit is due.

My frustration is magnified because at the beginning of this Marchbanks project I tried several times to talk to editors at The Sentinel, with no response. My original idea was to pitch a history project for them to pursue and publish, and offer my help if they wanted/needed it. Not that I'm anything special, but it'd be nice if the hometown paper were to invest a little bit in telling the story of this memorable track. The Marchbanks history retains high interest among many people -- I  know because I continue to get lots of traffic to my stories, years after they were first published. This isn't the first time my Marchbanks stuff has been republished verbatim elsewhere. But it's the first time an entity that should know better isn't following pretty basic rules for crediting creative work. 

OK, on the plus side, the Sentinel piece included a photo I have never seen that shows the track from the entry into Turn 1. The caption doesn't provide details, so I'll try to dig deeper. But the presence of what appears to be infield seating would indicate it likely was one of the NASCAR Grand National races. Any of my readers have any idea when this photo was taken?

Update on Sunday, December 22, 2013 at 4:59 PM by Logan Molen

Reader Jim Thurman posted a comment to this post indicating the photo of the stock cars barreling through Turn 1 is in fact of Darlington Raceway, not Marchbanks, as The Sentinel story suggested.

I've updated my original post to reflect Jim's information.

And the search for good photos from any of the Grand National races at Marchbanks continues.