An Incredible Honor; The Iowa Racing Hall of Fame

This past Saturday night was incredible, a night that I will forever remember as I was honored to be in the Class of 2024 for entry into the Iowa Racing Hall of Fame. And what a class it is! Dale Suhr, Jerry Smith, Doug Haack, Lynn Richard, Harald "Andy" Andersen, Hilbert Schramm, Dave Chase, Ron Hutcherson, Bill Kirk, Randy Smith, Rick Brown, Steve Jackson and Karla Lampe. To be included in this group, and with the other heroes and legends who have been enshrined in the past, is truly a dream come true. And, as I said during my comments last Saturday, that must have been one hell of an essay that Dick Griffith turned in with my nomination!

Marty Pringle, Todd Foster and everybody associated with the Hall of Fame did an amazing job of making this a memorable evening for all involved and the evening was summed up the best when one of my family members who was there to support me noted how obvious it was that our sport really is a tight knit family of its own. I will definitely do my best to attend this event each year going forward in hope of sharing this feeling with others. 

As part of the process leading up to Saturday night, I was asked to write a paragraph or two about my career in racing. As I sat down to this it became so obvious that I have been fortunate to be involved with so many great people along the way. And as I stepped my way through each role that I have taken in the sport, that "paragraph or two" went way beyond what the Hall of Fame was looking for. So I saved it to present here and then did my best to condense this down to one hundred words or less.

Before I copy and paste that in here though I want to again say "Thank You" to everybody who I have been fortunate enough to work with and to come to know along the way. Drivers, promoters, race fans, sponsors, media members, readers, everybody I want you to know how much I have appreciated your friendship, your guidance and your support along the way. If I tried to list all of you individually I know that I would leave somebody out, so please know how much I appreciate you!

To my wife Christine, thank you! I love you so much and I know that I leave you at home way too often, but you know how much those race nights mean to me. And to my three children, Ashley, Kyle and Morgan. I could not be prouder of the adults that you have become and I am so proud to be your Dad! Love you all!

I became interested in racing at a very young age as my parents Larry & Diana Broeg took me to my first race when I was 18 months old. They, along with my grandparents Paul & Velma Swanson, and my cousins Dean & Jean Church made sure that I had a ride to the races at West Liberty, Columbus Junction and Eldon from the age of three until I was able to get my driver’s license when I turned sixteen

At the age of fifteen I introduced myself to Keith Knaack one night at West Liberty and I asked him if he would like to have a columnist in this region of the state. He took my name and address and the next week there was a Hawkeye Racing News Press Card in our mailbox and that was the start of my column, the Back Stretch that has now appeared regularly for forty-six years, first in Hawkeye Racing News and now at Positively Racing. 

With a Press Card in hand and parents who trusted me enough to hit the road, several of my high school friends would fill the car and we expanded our destinations as I looked to visit as many of the tracks, and see as many of the drivers that I had read about in Hawkeye Racing News as I could. Oskaloosa on Wednesday, Cedar Rapids on Friday, West Liberty on Saturday and East Moline on Sunday were our regular tracks and only rain, or one of our high school baseball games would keep us from going. And, while somehow getting the blessing of our parents, we would travel to farther destinations such as Des Moines, Sedalia, Owatonna for the Gopher 50 and Sunset Speedway in Omaha to name a few.

In 1981 I would finally “discover” the track that is closest to my home, 34 Raceway west of Burlington, and in 1982 promoter Larry Kemp gave me my first paying job in racing handling the stories, points and press releases, plus checking in drivers and doing the lineups on race nights. Larry, his wife Kathleen and his sons Kevin, Dusty and Clay, plus all of the team that he had working for him at 34 became a second family to me and enhanced my love for the sport!

Midway through the 1982 season I was given the opportunity to pick up the microphone and add “track announcer” to my list of duties and from that point on I became the regular announcer for Kemp’s Raceway Management Services firm that also promoted events at tracks in Donnellson, West Liberty and Davenport as well as the IMCA Modified swing through Florida during the 1987 Speedweeks. And yes, I was even the weekly announcer at Hawkeye Downs in Cedar Rapids in 1989 when the track was paved. 

With some significant changes in both my personal and work life, I stepped away from announcing weekly races in 1990, but was honored to have the new track owners at 34 Raceway still include me on their special events and I would also fill in for some of my announcer friends as needed. One of the highlights of my announcing days came in March of 1998 when legendary promoter Ralph Capitani gave me a call. I had announced a couple of IMCA Late Model Summer Series events at the Knoxville Raceway the last two years and he wanted to know if I would be interested in being one of his new announcers for the upcoming season. Both Jack Herwehe and Tim Trier had retired and he wanted somebody with experience to be in the booth with this new kid named Tony Bokhoven and I told him that it would be my honor. However, I was working on a new project and it would cause me to miss two or three Saturday nights. He said that he could work around that and I spent the 1998 season at the Knoxville Raceway highlighted by calling the first sub 15 second lap when Don Droud Jr. went 14.934 and introducing Jack Miller for the call of his 25^th and final Nationals A-Main before hustling down to the infield to interview eventual winner Danny Lasoski.

To this day I have the privilege of working with Bill Wright as the announcing team for the Sprint Invaders and I have announced at least one night of racing at one track or another in Iowa for forty-two straight years! 

Inspired by a columnist in the National Speed Sport News who would track the number of feature wins for drivers across the country, I developed the All Iowa Points in 1979 as a way to compare drivers and their results across all of the tracks in Iowa and those not far across the state border. When Keith Knaack caught wind that I was doing this he said that “names sell papers” so he started to run them on a regular basis in the Hawkeye Racing News. They were so popular that he later allowed me to take out the archives of the papers and year by year I calculated the points back to the start of HRN in 1967 and I still do them to this day. The points are just for fun with no payouts of any kind, and for me they serve as a form of “forced research” so that I know what is going on at every track across the region.

I am proud to know that an All Iowa Points Championship, or multiple ones in some cases are listed on the resume of several National Dirt Late Model Hall of Famers and I have been told by several drivers that they have used a successful ranking in the points to score extra sponsorship for the following season. Also, it has been documented that a discussion over coffee of his low ranking in the All Iowa Points Street Stock standings was the starting point for Phil Barkdoll’s foray into Winston Cup racing, but that is a story for another time.

The project that I was developing in 1998 was inspired by a conversation with my brother-in-law Loni Woodley who was on the Board of Directors of the National Kidney Foundation of Iowa at the time. They had presented a one-night fundraising and awareness event at Hawkeye Downs the year before and he asked me if I thought that we could roll it out to another track or two. Loni took care of securing the corporate sponsorship and I went to work contacting promoters throughout the state of Iowa and that was the beginning of a four year run for the National Kidney Foundation Heartland Tour for a Cure featuring both the Modified and Hobby Stock divisions. What started out as twelve events run in 1998 grew to a schedule of fifty-five events in eight different states in 2001 and along the way we were awarded the Fundraising Event of the Year Award from the national offices of the NKF.

With Loni no longer on the Board after 1999 though, the sponsorship money that was promised by the new director did not materialize and with some other issues coming to the forefront as well, the NKF Tour came to a close after the 2001 season, but along the way we raised more than $75,000 that went directly to Renal Dialysis Centers across the state and had many, many race fans sign their Organ Donor cards as well. The full story behind the NKF Tour as well as race results and points payout information can be found in a series of Back Stretch entries starting in December of 2020 on the Back Stretch at PositivelyRacing.com. And, started in 1999 as the final race of the year for the NKF Tour, I would co-promote the event known as “Shiverfest” along with Lee County Speedway promoters Terry and Jenni Hoenig for the next several years. Thankfully, “Shiverfest” still lives on to this day at Donnellson.

I have been a car owner for my good friend John Vantiger in the late 80’s and early 90’s and I took a try at co-promoting the Lee County “All Star” Speedway in 1992. That didn’t go well. Taking advantage of the artistic talents of Dusty and Clay Kemp we started “Iris City Sports” and had a good four year run of producing race shirts for drivers from near and far. Some of the coolest shirts that we produced though were the ICS Collectible Series including a short run of sixty shirts each for Iowa legends Ed Sanger, Curt Hansen, Ken Walton and Roger Dolan. Unfortunately for me, but good for them, the Kemp boys were then scooped up by Arizona Sport Shirts in the mid-1990’s and Dusty is still working for them to this day. 

In late 2008, with Hawkeye Racing News putting a limit on the number of words that could be included in our columns, Barry Johnson and I decided to start our own website and with the assistance of our Webmaster Sue McDaniel, PositivelyRacing came to life. I am so proud of my PR family and the way that they have promoted the sport over the years. Dick and Joyce Eisele, Danny Rosencrans, Ryan Clark, Brian Neal and the Wisconsin SuperFan himself, Ed Reichert all take the same attitude that Barry and I do; the racers are our heroes and we want to do all that we can to present them in that manner to our readers! The website is the home for the All Iowa Points and also features a Special Events Calendar for tracks in Iowa and the contiguous states and we use the Positively Racing Facebook page to let our followers know about new content and to give Barry an opportunity to showcase his racing photography.

Finally, I am proud to currently be one of the voting members for the National Dirt Late Model Hall of Fame and I am also one of the committee of ten that submits a vote each week for the National Dirt Late Model Top 25 Poll at DirtOnDirt.com.

Most of all though I am honored to be inducted into the Iowa Racing Hall of Fame and Museum and to be among so many of my heroes both past and present. And I will look forward to be here again in the years to come to welcome more of those heroes into the fold!

With one of my all-time favorites Curt Hansen!