John Schultz part 1

hello again everybody at vintage iron range dirt track racing I am here today with John Schultz at his shop in Grand Rapids uh John nice to be here how have you been doing good good okay uh John how did you get interested in racing well I was fortunate to be a young man in the 60s and of course going to Grand Rapid Speedway with my bicycle now when I got a car I started racing I was 16 so you loved cars pretty much your whole life then oh yes when you were young oh yes okay when did you actually start driving a race car uh 1966 what was your first race car uh 54 Chevrolet four-door 6cylinder did you race that then in a six-cylinder division or was that a hobby stock division uh it was a hobby stock six cylinder division okay when did did you quit racing uh I quit in like about 74 for a while and then I came back in 77 and then when did you quit for good uh in the 90s when Paul took over Paul being your son yes okay so like many many racers you have tried to re retire but just somehow was drawn back into racing again right unfortunately the fishing was good on uh the Mississippi River by the government Dam west of Grand Rapids on a Sunday afternoon I was sitting in my boat and they were Racers were headed to bermi and got rid of the boat went back racing you seen the guys going to Bidi and just couldn't resist the draw back to the racetrack okay what all classes of cars did you race I ran that hobby stock six cylinders then I ran the V8s that were around and then uh I rised a modifi did you race supers too for a short period of time yes I did cuz you had a car that you handed over to your son I yep I had a superstock that I handed over fall and then they had a class here in Grand Rapids called Street claimers correct and you ran them just on and off I yeah I actually built five cars mhm and one I also built a six-cylinder car or four-cylinder car when you guys were racing four cylinders it was a Monza mhm yeah did you race that I did not Mike Z Mullen ran car so you you owned a lot of your own cars that you raced actually you owned probably all your cars and then during your career you've owned cars for various other people too correct and various other divisions okay when you raced you got out of racing just before the factory uh chassis started coming on the scene around here so all the cars you raced were cars that either someone built or you built correct correct okay now on most of your cars did you build your cars or did you have someone else build them or did you buy them or in the early days I I built my own and then when the street claimers I had built my own otherwise I purchased my modified and I purchased my first super star and that modified that was still a homebuilt car absolutely absolutely and they were not aluminum bodied at that time they were steel bodied okay okay when you first started racing I seen a picture of your very first car and the number was before you correct that was a 54 Chevrolet why did you why were you before you you know you were young 16 years old you look at all the numbers back then they were like 2x4 all kinds of goofy numbers 626 308 yeah back then there was a lot of three-digit numbers a lot of hyphens in the numbers there were strange numbers but then you settled into 101 shortly after that as your number yep and my next year then when I was 17 I uh went to 101 and it was a green car not not knowing not knowing the history of green at that time yet so then you finish your career out as 101 correct was there any particular reason why you picked 101 no not really not really okay I noticed a lot of your cars then were orange correct I have orange as my favorite color and that's just kind of where I went with it it was bright did it have anything to do with orange and black being the colors for Grand Rapids you know I didn't never dawn of me till the later years that maybe that's where I got it from I don't know so subliminally maybe that's how you started to like them colors right my first uh passenger car was a 56 Chevrolet and it was red and white when I purchased it and I painted it orange cuz orange and black are the colors of the Grand Rapids Indians right not the Grand Rapids thunderhawks the Grand Rapids Indians well they're still carrying the colors y yes uh so you owned back in the I think it's late ' 80s early '90s you owned a bunch of what were called street claimers that raced in Grand Rapids yes they were like three or four Monte Carlo type of cars and they were all orange kind of team cars what what made you want to just be an owner of several of these cars and have other people drive uh I enjoyed building them and at that time it was to support Grand Rapid Speedway to keep it going okay and then occasionally you would jump into one of those cars in race yep uh what all tracks did you race at when you were in your racing days uh in my racing days in the younger it was uh Grand Rapids and Hibbing Hibbing once in a while when I could afford to go over there okay but did you travel to any other tracks at times yeah at later times my modified I ran in Princeton uh went to bermi Brock so you traveled around upper upper Minnesota for the part correct now you used to go to Hibbing but not all the time but I understand your trips to Hibbing were a little sketchy yeah yeah they were um I I didn't race that much there it took money to get there but you didn't have a fancy transporter or anything we had a chain a chain yeah John broken and I used to chain our cars pull them with a vehicle another car go all the way down 169 old 169 to heaving and race and if the weather was lousy or we didn't feel like pulling them back we used to park them behind a gas station in Hibbing where uh there's a pizza place there now and um come back and get them the next day but if we decided to take them home we'd get out of hi unhook the chain and one rig would be in front and one in the back and we drive our race cars home all the way through Nash wat b v Corine just chug them along and get them home so you really wanted to race when you oh yes when you pull a car 30 m with a chain you want to race yes sir okay all right well that concludes part one of our interview with grand rapids' John Schultz please stay tuned for part two