Charles Marks
Both Lanier and his friend Charlie Marks learned much from hanging around the shop of Al Dykes. Watching Hugh Babb set this car up for Billy Carden, Bo Fields and Fonty Flock taught the two enough to build a race car to run at Lakewood Speedway for friend Carroll Tillman.
“Charlie Marks was a friend of mine growing up in the Mableton area.
“Around 1946 we tried to go up Stone Mountain in his 1937 Ford. We got up pretty high, then realized the trip down would be worse. We eased that car around so it wouldn’t flip over and pointed it back to the bottom of that Mountain, standing on those mechanical brakes while in low gear, and holding our breath hoping nothing gave way. It was fun later on to talk about it, but that day it was a different story.
Clipping from the Spartanburg, SC newspaper. Lanier did not know that his friend Charlie Marks had even started to try his hand at racing.
“October 1948 on a Saturday night at the Greenwood South Carolina Fairgrounds racetrack, his car overturned and as Charlie was crawling out through the thick dust, he was ran over and killed.
“Billy and I were at a race in Augusta, GA the very next morning. Augusta isn’t that far from Greenwood. The week before Billy had won Lakewood, and I had just got back from one of my Merchant Marine convoys. We learned about it at the track when we arrived. Bob Flock, Jack Etheridge and Ed Samples followed each other in after racing there at Greenwood Saturday, then Columbia, SC that same night. Actually being away overseas I didn’t even know Charlie was driving a race car. As I said before, we all hung around together, and we all loved racing.
“I remember Jack Etheridge telling me he was the first one to hit Charlie. Couldn’t stop. Nor could Bob Flock, Guy Waller, Gober Sosebee and several others after that. Jack lived in the Mableton area as did Charlie. If anyone could have avoided hitting him, it would have been professional drivers like those guys.
“We collected about $375 while we were there and I took it by his Mother’s house to give it to her that night. The doctor had given her some medicine and she was fast asleep in her grief, so I left it with his Father. He took the money and went and got drunk on it. Charlie was suppose to have gotten married later that month.
“I brought that up because a little over two years later when I was laying on the track at the Peach Bowl, still strapped in my seat, I instantly thought about Charlie. I knew the same thing was going to happen to me. Again, I was lucky.”