Meet the lady who's been at every single Daytona 500
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - There was a time when ladies attended the Daytona 500 wearing high heels, gloves, and hats more fit for a Kentucky Derby than a NASCAR race. It’s true. Just ask the woman who was at those races … and every one since.
Juanita Epton, who goes by the name “Lightnin’”, has worked in the ticket office at Daytona International Speedway since the very first day the track opened in 1959. Sunday will mark her 57th Daytona 500, and the latest stop on a journey that’s gone from the dirt tracks of Carolina to the high-sheen superspeedway of Daytona. At age 94, she’s one of the final connections to NASCAR’s earliest days, and she’s a reminder of how very much the sport, and the world around it, has changed over the last century.
“I love the people that I work with,” she says, “but I also love the customers. I have people who I’ve been waiting on for years and years.”
Lightnin’ got her nickname from her late husband Joe, who said you never knew when or where she might strike. It was Joe who brought her down here more than half a century ago, accompanying him as they dodged winters in North Carolina.
Shortly after World War II, Bill France, the man who would form NASCAR in the late 1940s, hired Joe to serve as an official scorer at dirt tracks around Charlotte. Joe earned a tidy $20 per race, about $275 in today’s dollars. Joe was also responsible for making payouts to the winners, and in an era when promoters often skipped out during the race with gate receipts in hand, Joe and his cash money were a welcome sight among drivers.
As NASCAR grew in popularity during the early 1950s, France decided to build a track that would challenge Indianapolis Motor Speedway for American superiority. France hired Joe, by now NASCAR’s official scorer, to work at his creation, and Joe brought along Lightnin’. Together, the Eptons watched the historic Daytona International Speedway take shape.
“A lot of people say, if you’ve seen one race track, you’ve seen them all. But if you haven’t seen Daytona, you haven’t seen every race track,” Lightnin’ says. “It was something special, watching them build this. Seeing the dirt piled high on each end for the turns. When you had a swamp to start with … it was like something out of a miracle to be rising out of a swamp.”
At that first race, the one where ladies showed up to the race in their Sunday finest, tickets started at $8 apiece, about $65 in today’s cash. (Today’s a comparative bargain; tickets start at $32 now.) There were only four grandstands, and only the first fifteen rows were even set up for bench seating. But Bill France, who lived every moment of every day with an eye toward promotion, understood racing’s growth potential. When he built those small grandstands, he poured the pilings strong and deep enough to support the much larger structures that would one day be built.
These days, Epton works year-round at the track, which hosts two NASCAR weekends plus a host of other motorsports events. She lives alone, just her and her Chihuahua named Lily, and she still drives herself to work in a new Chevy Equinox. (“People said I was crazy, buying a new car at 94.”) Her grandchild and great-grandchild live nearby. Her voice is as steady as ever, and while her gait is a little slow these days, her blue eyes will pierce you.
She doesn’t watch the races. She’s got work to do. “For my 50th anniversary here, they took me upstairs so I could watch the 125s,” she says. “I couldn’t stay up there. I watch my races at other tracks. Here I’m at work.”
She’s also a long way from the tiny all-in-one building that once hosted all of Daytona’s office buildings. Epton’s ticket office today looks out on statues of Bill and Anne B. France. Across Speedway Boulevard, with a majestic view of the track, sits NASCAR’s gleaming headquarters. All around, Daytona International is in the midst of a gargantuan $400 million expansion that will transform the entire grandstand and position the track for its next half-century. Fittingly, Epton was one of the first people to ride the new escalators that will service the Daytona Rising expansion.
Progress means change, and Epton admits there are elements of the old NASCAR that she misses. “Big Bill France used to make sure the drivers came by here and thank the girls that worked in the ticket office,” she says, and her use of “girls” is charming in a World War II-era kind of way. “Michael [Waltrip] came by last week and brought me some flowers. But now it’s such big business, and they’re so busy with their appointments, they don’t do that any more. It’s a minus. It would be uplifting if the drivers came by to say hello to the girls who are selling their tickets. Maybe one day it’ll get back to the way it was.”
The message couldn’t be any clearer if it was skywritten above the track: this isn’t Bill France’s NASCAR any longer.
Even so, Lightnin’ keeps on keeping on, just as she has for decades, opening mail, distributing checks, waiting on fans buying tickets. She handles just about every ticket the track distributes, and over the course of a half-century, with hundreds of thousands of tickets each year …. you can do the rough math.
“There’s no end to it. When you think you’re at the end, here comes someone with another bin full,” Lightnin’ says. “You do what you do, and you do it with a smile.”
[Footnote: A moment, here, to talk about Joe’s courtship of Lightnin’. Yes, NASCAR is a very different sport, but you want an idea of the world in which she grew up? Let her tell you one heck of a story:
“I met him on a skating rink in Mississippi. He was working in Oak Ridge [Tennessee] and couldn’t get off work to get married. A girlfriend came with me to Tennessee. You had to wait a week [to get married], and he couldn’t wait a week. So we went to Kentucky, but you had to wait a week there too. So we went across the border to South Carolina in a snowstorm. A friend of his walked in front of the car across the Blue Ridge Mountains so we didn’t go off the mountain. In Greenville, South Carolina, we woke the First Baptist preacher up and got married. After that, we came back across the mountain to Knoxville, Tennessee. What a honeymoon!”]
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter.
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