How the suits took Martinsville's hot dog for a walk

At the risk of releasing the "fat joke" hounds, I come today in praise of the Martinsville hot dog.
I am not going to pretend these culinary delights have any nutritional value. They are most certainly not good for you, but they are good. And sometimes, that ought to be enough.
Here’s the Martinsville hot dog deal. Bun, bright-red Jesse Jones wiener (has to be Jesse Jones, with extra red dye coloring), with chili, mustard, onions and slaw. The dogs can be ordered with no slaw or with no onions or pretty much anyway you want one, but the get the full experience you at least have to do the chili and mustard.
They’re $2 apiece and they come wrapped in wax paper.
A couple of years ago, soon after International Speedway Corp. bought the track from the family of the late Clay Earles, who had founded it, we got here one Friday and something had changed.
The hot dogs were being served in little foam boxes. You got them pretty much plain and had to go apply your own condiments. And they weren’t quite red enough.
It was, quite frankly, an outrage.
Eddie Wood, co-owner of the Wood Brothers team from nearby Stuart, Va., was fighting mad about it. He found NASCAR president Mike Helton and demanded things be put back the way they were. Immediately.
Before long, word of the crisis got back to hot dog connoisseur Bill France Jr. and phone calls were immediately made. This was serious business.
The problem, of course, was symptomatic of what’s happening in our society. Instead of letting the people who’d made the hot dogs here for years keep right on making them, the people from ISC’s concession company, Americrown, came in here and thought they needed to make things "better."
Morons.
By the end of that fateful day, the wax paper was back. Personally, I don’t think the hot dogs have ever quite made it back to the quality they were before the Americrown goons got hold of them. But maybe that’s just my imagination.
Regardless, people still eat them when they come here. In bunches.
I vividly recall walking into the track one cool, foggy morning several years ago at about 8 a.m. and nodding at Richard Petty as he walked by taking a chomp out of a Martinsville dog.
As I was standing behind Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s hauler telling tales Friday afternoon, a veteran of the garage area told the story of a guy showing up one day and having Dale Earnhardt Sr. motion him into the transporter.
"Here’s $20," Earnhardt said. "Go get as many hot dogs as this will buy and bring them to the side door of the trailer. And whatever you do, don’t tell Teresa."
Back before the Americrownistas took over, lunch on Friday for the media consisted of someone bringing in several boxes full of hot dogs. This was done as rapidly as possible, with no prior warning, so as the persons making said deliveries might have hope of getting out of the way safely before the locusts swept in.
Make all the jokes you want about sportswriters and buffets, but watching those hot dogs disappear was better than a Las Vegas magic act. Photographers, who frequently wear vests with all sorts of extra pockets, somehow managed to be particularly adept at cleaning out those boxes.
I hear from race fans all of the time telling me how NASCAR is being ruined because too many things are changing too fast. I don’t always agree with that, but I will tell you that there are some things that ought not be messed with – like Labor Day weekend racing and the true Martinsville hot dog.