Motorized Beginnings
Jimmy's homeplace in Northest Atlanta, 474 Calhoun Street. His dad had a quartet that practiced here before the war. Since there was no television then, it became a nice place as a neighborhood "hangout" in the evenings.
After finishing grade school at Home Park, he started O’Keefe High School next to the Tech campus. At thirteen, he bought his first vehicle, a 1937 Ford pickup. Being tall for his age, Jimmy drove the truck to all the shops he had been walking to for years.
Then came his first car – a 1934 Ford 5-window coupe for which he paid about $10. It was no jewel, but with hard work and a few parts he could scrounge it became one.
“I never finished the car,” Jimmy said. “The sport in those days was to drive your car around with several spots of primer and nobody said anything about it as long as it had a nice set of wheels and tires.”
Next was a 1939 Ford Deluxe 2-door.
“I bought the car at Bishop Brothers Auction. I don’t remember what I gave for it but it was probably $200 or $300. It was bone stock but nice looking. I would drive it around to all the local shops –Gober’s (Sosebee’s Auto Service) or E & S (speed shop on Walton Street) – anywhere there was a race car, I would hang around to learn whatever I could.”
Then came the decision to leave formal training at O’Keefe High and go to the real school where you learned the trade of “auto mechanics” – the School of Hard Knocks. His freshman year he worked as a “grease monkey” for Marietta Auto Sales just south of the town square of Marietta, Georgia.
“I started out on the grease rack and worked myself right into a regular job,” he said. “I’d help anybody when I didn’t have anything to do and I would learn the other jobs. When I left there after about two years I could do just about anything – nothing major but tune-ups, alignments, brakes, shocks and such.”
His sophomore year he went to work at Walt Coleman’s Texaco service station, which was not far from the family home.
“It was across the street from Atlanta Muffler Shop and down the street from Raymond Parks’ station at Hemphill. I was only there about a year. Then I went across the street to the muffler shop. Fred Wheat owned it. He was the car owner of Tim Flock’s Hudson Hornet,” (that they ran on the NASCAR Grand National circuit). He also owned the Dodge that T. C. Hunt would drive on the same circuit in 1960.” But that was some years later.