Character: Elder is truly one of a kind

Have you heard the one about the day a bear chased Jake Elder through the Pocono woods on his way to the racetrack?

Remember the day at North Wilkesboro Speedway when Elder took a paint brush and gallon can of rubber softener and proceeded to slather his qualifying tires with the (according to NASCAR) illegal mixture, right there in the middle of pit road, in front of everyone, including chagrined NASCAR officials, to make the point that too many of his team's rivals were secretly "soaking" their tires for an edge in speed?

Or the day at Daytona that Elder announced that, since drivers had already hit 209 mph, his goal was to have the first car to run 210?

Jake Elder. One of a kind. A legend. And quite a character.

"Huh?!" Elder loved to exclaim, as punctuation -- affirmative or negative -- to whatever issue was under debate.

And always looking for the next challenge, which helped him acquire the nickname "Suitcase Jake."

Elder stories are all over the garage these past few days, because Elder, now in his 70s, is in poor health and is being cared for by his sister in Statesville. Actually it's been that way the past few years, but Elder just got through a nasty bout of pneumonia that sent him to the hospital over Richmond weekend. So a bunch of his old buddies have been up to see him, such as Richard Petty, Dale Inman and Tim Brewer, men who worked with him and against him over the years.

In this age of engineering specialists in almost every corner of every shop, it's hard to imagine auto racing in an era when a man such as Elder could dominate -- with just a ball of string, four pocket tape measures, and an innovative mind that served as his notebook and computer.

Sometimes it looked like voodoo, Rusty Wallace said, but Elder, a Hall of Famer, could invariably turn a struggling team around. And he didn't do it with any high-tech engineering or thick notebooks. But he was a Mr. Wizard.

"Jake was old-old school," said Wallace, recalling some of his days with Elder during his own early years on the tour. "He worked for soooo many teams.

"But he was the guy you would call when you needed some help. If your old car wasn't running right, and you were confused, you'd want to call Jake and say, ‘Hey, can you come bail me out?' And he could help you fix it.

"I called him once, when my car wasn't running right, and asked, ‘Jake, can you come over and crew chief this car for me?' And he said, ‘All right, just one race.' And he came over with his tool box -- which was filled with so much doggone prehistoric stuff that it was unreal.

"He had the string out, and the levels, and said, ‘You do this and this.…'

"And I took it to Charlotte and had my best run ever."

A tinkerer

Elder was, ah, observant: He would lay down on a creeper and slide under his car -- and slowly, slyly, slide his way down the garage, under as many rivals' cars as he could, checking out setups.

"I remember Leonard Wood grabbing Jake by the ankles and pulling out from under their car," Wallace said with a laugh.

"Nowadays everything is top secret. But back then, well, it was amazing to watch Jake work like that. And nobody really had a problem with it."

Elder, who with his wife, Debbie, lived just behind this racetrack for years, "was from the old school, like Herb Nab, Buddy Parrott," car owner Richard Childress said. "Now Jake wasn't the most educated person about engineering and geometry, but he could draw it out on the floor and show you what that car was going to do.

"And he just gave a driver that confidence. That car might not be that good, but if you had Jake working for you, you had the confidence you had the best guy out there.

"And if Jake made a change, you weren't hardly about to tell him it wasn't better."

Natural leader

"Jake came to work for us in Level Cross in the ‘60s, down from the Hickory area, and he was a fabricator," Richard Petty said. "Jake was old school. There was no engineering, it was all off the cuff. He'd put something on the car and say, ‘OK, now it's right. Here, you go drive it. And don't come back in complaining to me, because I got the car fixed. You go learn how to drive it.'"

Elder was certainly a leader. He might not always be right, but he was never wrong.

"One thing about Jake -- he was always the same. When you saw him coming, you knew what you were going to get," Richard said.

"He was good enough and forceful enough that when he said he'd fixed something, they had confidence in the car and could go out and get something done."

■ Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.