Florian continued

WHAT KIND OF GUY WAS JIMMY? "I tell you one thing, he was always happy. He always had a smile. There was nothing that ever got him down. Cancer finally brought him down, but I knew him pretty well. Our telephone bill over a period of 50 years was out of sight. Even though I lived down here (in Winston-Salem, N.C.) and he lived up there (Cleveland, OH), sometimes three times a night he'd call me. That's the kind of friend he was."

DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE JIMMY FLORIAN STORY? "There would be too many. You could write anything in the world about him. As the nights go by I always seem to dream about him a little bit."

THE THING ABOUT JIMMY IS THAT HE RACED EVEN INTO HIS SIXTIES IN VINTAGE CARS, RIGHT? "We did that every year. We've always done that. We'd take a sprint car and go somewhere and run oldtimers races. We did that all the time. As old as he was, with a sprint car he'd still make some of them look like they didn't belong there. He was pretty good."

TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF? "I drove a truck most of the time when I wasn't racing. I ran the Grand National Circuit down here in the fifties and sixties. You'll find me stuck around the record book in certain places. In the old days I had some 10ths and some eighths and even one time I think I had a third behind Weatherly and Ned Jarrett. You don't get very close unless you've got a lot of money behind you. Even in the old days when the Flock boys came out, they had a factory deal, and Petty had a factory deal."

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN IN WINSTON-SALEM? "I've been here since about 1957. I came through here. I was on my way back to Ohio from Florida and I stopped off here because my brother-in-law was working here. I stopped off here and went to work for Ford for awhile and started fooling around with racing again. One thing led to another and I ended up buying one of Rex White's old cars, his old championship car and I ran that for awhile."

DO YOU GET TO ANY WINSTON CUP RACES? "No. If you know anything about old race car drivers, they never will sit in the stands. I've never sat in the stands in my life. We used to say if you want to go see the race get on the track so you can see what's happening up front."

NANCY ROSE (FLORIAN'S SECOND DAUGHTER)

YOUR DAD DID RACE HIS WHOLE LIFE, DIDN'T HE? "Yes, all the way through. That was his passion. That is what he loved. He loved racing and flying and when he couldn't fly he could still race with the Vintage Auto Racers. They didn't have an age limit and he still wanted to go fast. He still had to beat everybody and be the fastest and that's the way he was until a couple years before he died."

WHAT AGE DID HE STOP RACING? "He raced until he was 70. When he was 72 he sold the car (a vintage auto racing sprint car). He had a sprint car that he sold to somebody in the northern Ohio area."

DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH YOUR DAD IN RACING? "My first job was in the body shop. This was back in the early sixties and that was unusual for a girl, but that was my first profession. My job was working in his garage cleaning and doing stuff. He would paint and I would just prep the cars, get the bondo on them and sand them and prime them. Then, he would just do the final finish coat. We always had vehicles up until the day he died. I think he had a station wagon and a pickup truck and he always had more than one car. He was constantly working on stuff."

DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU WENT WITH HIM TO A RACE? "From the time I was a baby that was all we did. We have pictures too. We followed him on the southern circuit for a while. We lived in Massachusetts and then when that circuit was done we went to Florida and did the Florida and south circuit for a while. Then we came back up here (to the Cleveland area). I was in kindergarten so that would have roughly been in the late fifties. Then we moved around and he mostly did New York, like Little Valley, and the speedways around the area here. Then he just mainly did Cloverleaf and the tracks around Cleveland in the early sixties. I would travel with him at that time and that was our weekend thing. That's what we did. I can remember when I was traveling around with him in my early teens and he was racing for other people. He could go anytime anywhere and not even have a car. He would just show up and they would put him in a car when he got there."

WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO WATCH HIM RACE AT AGE 68 OR 69? "These VARC (Vintage Auto Race Cars) cars were exhibitions with just some heat races. There were no features or anything like that because these guys didn't have that kind of stamina. They were all my dad's age, but the races would be mostly held at fairgrounds that had dirt tracks because they were the old midgets, the old sprint cars with wheels different sizes."

YOU WERE BORN SHORTLY AFTER HE WON FORD'S FIRST RACE IN 1950, WEREN'T YOU? "That's right, it was about a week after. He won that race on June 25 and my birthday is July 9. But the earliest recollections I have are of getting up at the crack of dawn and he would pack us up and we would go driving in the car. It was nothing for us to drive from Cleveland down to Florida non-stop. That was the regimen. We'd just get up and we'd be up and down travelling all over the place. We lived in the car. The backseat was not a seat. There were three of us girls and they just set it up as a bed because we spent a lot of time in the back of the car."

IT MUST HAVE BEEN FUN WHEN YOU WERE LEARNING TO DRIVE YOURSELF. "I had my first car when I was 11 and it was one of those Jeep's with a four-speed on the floor. We had 10 acres and lived next to the airport in Willoughby (Ohio) and our 10 acres ran parallel to the runway, so we had all this space to just drive. We would just ride it around in the yard, so I could drive way before I could reach the pedals. I remember having to sit on the edge of the seat, I wasn't able to sit all the way back because I was too small. When I did go to take my driver's test I remember the instructor said, 'You've been driving a while haven't you.' It was just natural. I wasn't nervous, I just got in the car and drove. The thing is all of us in our family drive with our right and left foot. We don't drive with just the right foot and that just comes from the way my dad drove. He taught us the right foot was gas and the left foot was brake and that's how we all drive. I think if I had to take the test now they'd flunk me."

JIMMY FLORIAN FAMILY BACKGROUND

Lived in the Cleveland, Ohio area and had four children -- three daughters and a son. Terri Ritz, his oldest daughter, lives in Longwood, FL; Nancy Rose, middle daughter, lives in Medina, OH; Chris Nelson, youngest daughter, lives in Salem, OR; son James II also lives in Medina, OH.