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he was a long time derby promotor who was in the west coast stock car racing's hall of fame....
Retiring from driving in the early ‘60s he would become involved in the auto parts business and later gained added success as a garbage company owner.
Pictures of Ron Ail Needed
RON AIL
The truth is, Ron Ail never was that interested in cars.
Nonetheless, when he first saw the crowd go nuts at a demolition derby, the wheels in his head started turning.
Ail was born a promoter - a wheeler-dealer who loved negotiating a deal that would make a buck, and after a half-decade of putting on everything from The Beatles concerts to midget car races, he is being inducted into the West Coast Stock Car Hall of Fame.
"I never looked to be a hero," said Ail, who moved to Salem in the early 1960s to manage Salem Speedway. "The only thing you look for, that's money. Anybody who says anything different, they're a liar."
He got his opening because his father was so successful as a concessionaire that he became the owner of some of the racetracks where he peddled hot dogs and beer.
"Dad had concessions all over God's acres - he had all the grandstand concessions at the Oregon State Fair - and at one time he was the fourth-largest concessionaire on the West Coast," Ail said.
Paul Ail reluctantly allowed Ron Ail to get his foot in the door putting on demolition derbies at Portland Speedway.
"I'd seen demolition derby back East, I wanted to try putting one on, but my folks didn't really want me to do it," Ail said, grinning. "It didn't look good for a nice Jewish boy to be promoting that kind of stuff."
Eventually he was promoting every kind of motor sports race or exhibition he could get his hands on.
Tim Meyer, publisher of Racing News West and president of the West Coast Hall of Fame board of directors, credits Ail - and others like him - with laying the foundation for what allowed NASCAR to become such an outrageously popular sport.
"Our history in the West is so rich," Meyer said. "We had a community of legitimate people who had jobs but wanted to race stock cars, and they weren't just a bunch of bootleggers having a good time. Ron was promoting in the Northwest and was one of the good guys, but NASCAR got its start because drivers were tired of going to races and getting ripped off. They had to watch for promoters promising a $500 purse, then slipping out the back door before the race was done."
"Ron was one of those guys who appreciated the drivers coming to his races, and he made sure they had money going home," Meyer said. "If you came to his race and broke down, couldn't race, he'd come over and talk to you and make sure you had 50 bucks in your pocket. He always paid his purses, supported stock car racing when it was tough to draw spectators, and he always took care of the people who took care of him."
Meyer added: "As I get more entrenched into this, talking to guys from that era, this is one guy I've never heard anything bad about.
"He was interested in keeping stock car racing going when a lot of promoters weren't. That's why he's being inducted."
Ail came home from the Navy in 1947 and thinks he promoted his first demolition derby in 1952. He's 78, and dates are becoming difficult for him to remember. His father eventually owned interests in Portland Speedway, Janzten Beach Arena and Hollywood Bowl, which became Salem Speedway.
"There were no safety rules back then, and cars were hitting and going up in the grandstand," Ail said. "The state eventually came up with rules, but we did it ourselves before it became law, saying we better control things because cars were all over the racetrack. When we first started getting the word out, we turned away 75 percent of the drivers because their cars were dangerous."
He remembers a hardtop race at Salem Speedway in which Wild Bill Hyde and Carl Joiner had a horrendous crash.
"They got mixed up in Turn 1, a steeply banked turn, and Hyde's car tapped Joiner, and he went 65 feet up and landed in the women's restroom," Aid said. "It wasn't funny. Two ladies were injured, and we eliminated that kind of activity and we changed the track."
He said: "I cleaned the sport up and tried to give people a decent show in a decent facility. A lot of safety things were improved, and we put in decent rest rooms, decent parking and concessions. I improved all that."
Nevertheless the Salem track, near Interstate 5 off Portland Road, eventually went out of business and houses are being built over it.
Although he's slowed down, Ail still is working on a half dozen events this year, including a July 2 demolition derby at the Harvest Festival grounds in Sublimity. His Custom Car and Speed Show at the state fairgrounds in January will be the 25th annual event.
So why did a guy who virtually never has been under the hood of a car get so interested in promoting auto-related events instead of, say, concerts?
"Oh, I promoted a lot of different things besides racing," Ail said. "I promoted The Beatles at the Oriental Theater in Portland way back when they started. I had the Grateful Dead, way back. There were a lot of bands like that that were available, but to get them at the right price, you had to have several dates for them, you know, like a date in Portland, one in Washington and a couple in California. I did that, promoting shows back-to-back, and it worked out pretty good."
Most of the Oregon concerts were at what is now PGE Park, formerly Multnomah Stadium and later Portland Civic Stadium.
"That's the place to do it. It's big time, with all those seats, all that room and the concessions," Ail said. "Parking's kind of soft, but other than that, the place was great."
But not every concert went off swell.
"I had Elvis booked, and he screwed me around," Ail remembers. "I wanted him to come in for some promotions, but he kept stalling, then he was supposed to come in the day of the concert. So I go to the airport, and no Elvis. I go to the counter, and he's left a message: he got ill, he won't be making it.
"I got somebody halfway decent to fill in for him, but I had to offer people their money back if they wanted it. We'd sold 23,000 tickets, and 19,000 to 20,000 of them took the refund."
He says he had a similar experience with a singer - he was trying to remember the name - "No, not Sinatra. I had Frank here three times, in Portland and Salem," Ail said. "This one was Neil Diamond, and he wanted to change the parameters two days before the show. You get to hating them so much you forget their names, but I sued his hind end and I won."
Ail promoted boxing - his biggest contract was for closed-circuit telecasts up and down the West Coast - and a few pro wrestling matches.
"I used to put on these exotic car things, auto daredevil kinds of things, where cars fly up over walls," he said. "If you have a good show, you can pack the place."
He shakes his head when asked what's the attraction of demolition derby and such.
"Crash 'em, smash 'em," he said, crushing his fist into the palm of the other hand. "That's basically it, taking a car and seeing it get the heck beat out of it."
The toughest part of the promotion business?
"Tell the newspaper the truth," Aid said. "You have to tell the truth, and that's hard to do. They want to know who'll be there, and sometimes you don't know, but if you tell them nothing, it won't attract a gate. Sometimes you can't answer because one driver is waiting for me to buy them to come. And if I did it to one, then I'd have to start paying the others."
He said he learned to be careful. He was close friends with Rolla Vollstedt, who built Indy cars as well as cars for local races, "but if Len Sutton sees me having dinner with Rolla, then he thinks he has to watch out, maybe I'm telling the flagman to take it easy on Rolla's driver.
"I tried to get certain drivers together to make that war a little softer, but that never worked. They got greedy and went out and made fools of themselves."
Sutton, a Portland native who not only drove in Ail's races but was second in the 1962 Indianapolis 500, also will be inducted into the West Coast Stock Car Hall of Fame. Sutton and Pacific Northwest racing legend Herschel McGriff were the two most famous drivers to race at Ail's tracks.
"But I can't say I ever was friends with the drivers, because that's not a fact," Ail said. "You had to be so careful not to play favorites, and at times they made me so damn mad."
Retiring from driving in the early ‘60s he would become involved in the auto parts business and later gained added success as a garbage company owner.
Pictures of Ron Ail Needed
RON AIL
The truth is, Ron Ail never was that interested in cars.
Nonetheless, when he first saw the crowd go nuts at a demolition derby, the wheels in his head started turning.
Ail was born a promoter - a wheeler-dealer who loved negotiating a deal that would make a buck, and after a half-decade of putting on everything from The Beatles concerts to midget car races, he is being inducted into the West Coast Stock Car Hall of Fame.
"I never looked to be a hero," said Ail, who moved to Salem in the early 1960s to manage Salem Speedway. "The only thing you look for, that's money. Anybody who says anything different, they're a liar."
He got his opening because his father was so successful as a concessionaire that he became the owner of some of the racetracks where he peddled hot dogs and beer.
"Dad had concessions all over God's acres - he had all the grandstand concessions at the Oregon State Fair - and at one time he was the fourth-largest concessionaire on the West Coast," Ail said.
Paul Ail reluctantly allowed Ron Ail to get his foot in the door putting on demolition derbies at Portland Speedway.
"I'd seen demolition derby back East, I wanted to try putting one on, but my folks didn't really want me to do it," Ail said, grinning. "It didn't look good for a nice Jewish boy to be promoting that kind of stuff."
Eventually he was promoting every kind of motor sports race or exhibition he could get his hands on.
Tim Meyer, publisher of Racing News West and president of the West Coast Hall of Fame board of directors, credits Ail - and others like him - with laying the foundation for what allowed NASCAR to become such an outrageously popular sport.
"Our history in the West is so rich," Meyer said. "We had a community of legitimate people who had jobs but wanted to race stock cars, and they weren't just a bunch of bootleggers having a good time. Ron was promoting in the Northwest and was one of the good guys, but NASCAR got its start because drivers were tired of going to races and getting ripped off. They had to watch for promoters promising a $500 purse, then slipping out the back door before the race was done."
"Ron was one of those guys who appreciated the drivers coming to his races, and he made sure they had money going home," Meyer said. "If you came to his race and broke down, couldn't race, he'd come over and talk to you and make sure you had 50 bucks in your pocket. He always paid his purses, supported stock car racing when it was tough to draw spectators, and he always took care of the people who took care of him."
Meyer added: "As I get more entrenched into this, talking to guys from that era, this is one guy I've never heard anything bad about.
"He was interested in keeping stock car racing going when a lot of promoters weren't. That's why he's being inducted."
Ail came home from the Navy in 1947 and thinks he promoted his first demolition derby in 1952. He's 78, and dates are becoming difficult for him to remember. His father eventually owned interests in Portland Speedway, Janzten Beach Arena and Hollywood Bowl, which became Salem Speedway.
"There were no safety rules back then, and cars were hitting and going up in the grandstand," Ail said. "The state eventually came up with rules, but we did it ourselves before it became law, saying we better control things because cars were all over the racetrack. When we first started getting the word out, we turned away 75 percent of the drivers because their cars were dangerous."
He remembers a hardtop race at Salem Speedway in which Wild Bill Hyde and Carl Joiner had a horrendous crash.
"They got mixed up in Turn 1, a steeply banked turn, and Hyde's car tapped Joiner, and he went 65 feet up and landed in the women's restroom," Aid said. "It wasn't funny. Two ladies were injured, and we eliminated that kind of activity and we changed the track."
He said: "I cleaned the sport up and tried to give people a decent show in a decent facility. A lot of safety things were improved, and we put in decent rest rooms, decent parking and concessions. I improved all that."
Nevertheless the Salem track, near Interstate 5 off Portland Road, eventually went out of business and houses are being built over it.
Although he's slowed down, Ail still is working on a half dozen events this year, including a July 2 demolition derby at the Harvest Festival grounds in Sublimity. His Custom Car and Speed Show at the state fairgrounds in January will be the 25th annual event.
So why did a guy who virtually never has been under the hood of a car get so interested in promoting auto-related events instead of, say, concerts?
"Oh, I promoted a lot of different things besides racing," Ail said. "I promoted The Beatles at the Oriental Theater in Portland way back when they started. I had the Grateful Dead, way back. There were a lot of bands like that that were available, but to get them at the right price, you had to have several dates for them, you know, like a date in Portland, one in Washington and a couple in California. I did that, promoting shows back-to-back, and it worked out pretty good."
Most of the Oregon concerts were at what is now PGE Park, formerly Multnomah Stadium and later Portland Civic Stadium.
"That's the place to do it. It's big time, with all those seats, all that room and the concessions," Ail said. "Parking's kind of soft, but other than that, the place was great."
But not every concert went off swell.
"I had Elvis booked, and he screwed me around," Ail remembers. "I wanted him to come in for some promotions, but he kept stalling, then he was supposed to come in the day of the concert. So I go to the airport, and no Elvis. I go to the counter, and he's left a message: he got ill, he won't be making it.
"I got somebody halfway decent to fill in for him, but I had to offer people their money back if they wanted it. We'd sold 23,000 tickets, and 19,000 to 20,000 of them took the refund."
He says he had a similar experience with a singer - he was trying to remember the name - "No, not Sinatra. I had Frank here three times, in Portland and Salem," Ail said. "This one was Neil Diamond, and he wanted to change the parameters two days before the show. You get to hating them so much you forget their names, but I sued his hind end and I won."
Ail promoted boxing - his biggest contract was for closed-circuit telecasts up and down the West Coast - and a few pro wrestling matches.
"I used to put on these exotic car things, auto daredevil kinds of things, where cars fly up over walls," he said. "If you have a good show, you can pack the place."
He shakes his head when asked what's the attraction of demolition derby and such.
"Crash 'em, smash 'em," he said, crushing his fist into the palm of the other hand. "That's basically it, taking a car and seeing it get the heck beat out of it."
The toughest part of the promotion business?
"Tell the newspaper the truth," Aid said. "You have to tell the truth, and that's hard to do. They want to know who'll be there, and sometimes you don't know, but if you tell them nothing, it won't attract a gate. Sometimes you can't answer because one driver is waiting for me to buy them to come. And if I did it to one, then I'd have to start paying the others."
He said he learned to be careful. He was close friends with Rolla Vollstedt, who built Indy cars as well as cars for local races, "but if Len Sutton sees me having dinner with Rolla, then he thinks he has to watch out, maybe I'm telling the flagman to take it easy on Rolla's driver.
"I tried to get certain drivers together to make that war a little softer, but that never worked. They got greedy and went out and made fools of themselves."
Sutton, a Portland native who not only drove in Ail's races but was second in the 1962 Indianapolis 500, also will be inducted into the West Coast Stock Car Hall of Fame. Sutton and Pacific Northwest racing legend Herschel McGriff were the two most famous drivers to race at Ail's tracks.
"But I can't say I ever was friends with the drivers, because that's not a fact," Ail said. "You had to be so careful not to play favorites, and at times they made me so damn mad."
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