By Doug Smith
Wave the checkered flag for “Squirt,” new DVD which purports to biographize a legendary Southern Tier stock-car driver but winds up defining an era before it returns to the pits.
Stanley “Squirt” Johns hails from Brockway, PA (“far-away Brock-away,” as the late announcer Lloyd Williams used to put it) and made his mark mostly on the tracks of the western Southern Tier, particularly Stateline Speedway south of Jamestown. He about wore a groove just running victory laps.
“Squirt,” produced and edited by Randall Anderson, Greg Peterson and Randy Sweeney, opens with the discovery of the ruins of one of his distinctively orange cars on some farmer’s back 40. “They didn’t know what to do with it,” one commentator observes, “so we bought it for $25.”
Working backward from the unearthing of the pumpkin-colored treasure, “Squirt” shows how a garageman mostly interested in the “challenge” of proving the worthiness of Fords worked tirelessly and drove fearlessly to become the driver by whom all others were judged in the 50s and 60s. He was, as one announcer puts it, “the orange ogre of the ovals.”
But “Squirt” is as much about the times as it is about the driver, and interview after interview speaks to the camaraderie of those dirt-track pioneers who would run each other off the track in an instant but remain friends forever. “He couldn’t drive a wheelbarrow,” says rival “Bud” Phearsdorf with an impish smile.
NASCAR, in its infancy then, would on occasion deign to visit the locally-operated dirt tracks of hinterlands. Several drivers speak of NASCAR’s haughty disregard for fairness and ethics. Johns, for example, won a race, outduelling the likes of Junior Johnson, then was denied his prize money for the presence in his car of an unauthorized pump which had been: 1—Disconnected; 2 – Inspected and approved by NASCAR before the green flag fell.
In comparison to today’s highly commercialized and wildly popular NASCAR, “Squirt” depicts a bunch of guys working just as hard to have a good time. The film clips are grainy, to be sure, but they are exquisitely edited and blended in with contemporary still shots. “Squirt” has virtually no narration, daring and unusual for a documentary of this sort, the story line being, instead, carried along by clips from what have to have been exhaustive interviews.
Eventually, Squirt (real name: Stanley; his mother thought he was “a cute little squirt”) retires after a bone-breaking collision with a stalled car on a dusty track. “I realized then, if I didn’t have the sense to not race on a track so dusty, it was time to give it up,” he says.
“Squirt” has had two screenings so far, to a sold-out house in his hometown of Brockway (Squirt, now near 85, comes along to answer questions) and then to a robust audience in the Robert Jackson Center in Jamestown. It provides transportation to what many will contend were better times. For further information, visit www.statelinelegacy.org.
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