Rex White, the oldest surviving NASCAR champion, who grew up in the rural Southeast where souped-up cars loaded with illegal moonshine were part of the stock-car racing circuit’s origin story, died on July 18 in Taylorsville, N.C. He was 95.
His niece Kay Baron said that he died in hospice care at her home, where he had been living for a few years.
White started competing in the Grand National Series (now the NASCAR Cup Series) in 1956 and won two races in the 1958 season. The next year, he won five more.
In 1960, he had six triumphs in his No. 4 Chevrolet. In one of them, at the Old Dominion 500 at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, he was challenged in the last 30 laps by Joe Weatherly.
“We bumped and banged around the track, exchanging so much paint I thought my car’s gold color had changed,” White recalled in “Gold Thunder: Autobiography of a NASCAR Champion” (2005, with Anne B. Jones).
White accumulated enough points throughout the season to take the 1960 Grand National Series championship. He raced strongly and efficiently: In 35 of 40 races, he finished in the top 10, including 25 times in the top five.
“I may be short,” he wrote in “Gold Thunder,” “but I felt tall and I was sitting on top of the world.”
White stood only 5-foot-4, and his right leg had been shrunk by polio when he was a child, which left him with a limp. One newspaper called him a “five-foot-four-inch package of racing dynamite.”
When he was a teenager, a horse track official asked if he wanted to be a jockey and promised him $60 a week, with the possibility of much more if he succeeded.
“But I didn’t want to ride any horses,” he told The Sentinel of Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1959. “What the heck, I was raised on a farm and I didn’t want to see any more horses — even if you do get a little better view racing ’em than you do plowing ’em.”
His size seemed irrelevant; he excelled, especially on short tracks and dirt tracks, against better-known rivals like Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, Ned Jarrett and Fireball Roberts.
Rex Allen White was born on Aug. 17, 1929, in Taylorsville, in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains, one of four children of Wade and Arlie (Moose) White. His father was a farmer, and his mother managed the home.
Rex became fascinated by cars as a child; he learned to drive a neighbor’s truck when he was 6 and would sit in his family’s Model T, playing with the steering wheel and dreaming of what he would do on the road.
At 11, he was diagnosed with polio. But after being treated at a hospital in Gastonia, N.C., and having his leg fitted with a brace, he returned to helping his father on the farm.
Rex’s sleep was sometimes interrupted by his father’s early-morning wake-up calls, or by the sounds from a nearby road of the screeching tires of moonshine-laden cars trying to evade federal revenue agents.
With their speedy cars, the competitive moonshine drivers inevitably challenged one another to races. Some of NASCAR’s early stars, like Junior Johnson, owned, built or drove moonshine cars.
At 15, Rex left Taylorsville and hitchhiked with a friend to Washington, D.C., where he earned money as a dishwasher, as well as a short-order cook and mechanic. He watched races from the grandstand at West Lanham Speedway in Maryland, thrilling to cars that shot fire from their exhausts.
Over a few years, he worked as a crew member for one driver, Frankie Schneider, and built a car for another, Bill Steel. He started racing on dirt tracks in Tampa, Fla., and made his NASCAR debut in 1954 in the Sportsman Division (now the Xfinity Series), a level below Grand National, driving at West Lanham and other tracks.
In 1956, he began his nine-year run on the Grand National circuit.
After winning the championship in 1960, White won seven races the next year, but finished second to Ned Jarrett for the title. He won eight times the year after that, but finished fifth in points overall.
Then, in 1963, he and other NASCAR drivers were jolted when General Motors pulled its engines and other support from Chevrolet and Pontiac cars. About halfway through the season, White switched to Mercury, but with little success.
He had no victories that year or in 1964, when he drove in only six races. In his final Grand National race, the Dixie 400 in Atlanta, he led until his engine stalled, and he finished in fifth place.
In all, he won 28 Grand National races; in 233 starts, he finished in the top five 110 times and in the top 10 163 times. He was named one of NASCAR’s 50 greatest drivers in 1998 and inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015.
White was known as a smart tactician on the track and a savvy chassis designer.
James Hylton, who worked on White’s pit crew, told The Atlanta Journal in 1993: “If he was driving today, he’d be so far ahead of these other guys that it would be unreal. He’s Earnhardt caliber” — a reference to Dale Earnhardt Sr., the Hall of Fame driver known as the Intimidator, who won seven top NASCAR titles.
White leaves no immediate survivors. His marriage to Edith Byrd ended in divorce, and their daughter, Brenda, died. His marriage to Jeannette Adamson ended with her death.
In November 1964, White fractured a vertebra in a car accident in Mexico. He returned to racing a few months later in the Sportsman series, wearing a crotch-to-neck brace. But at the end of the season, he wrote in his memoir, he was broke and left racing to be the service manager for a Plymouth dealer in Georgia. He later worked as a trucker and a forklift operator.
“It is incongruous,” The Atlanta Journal wrote in 1999. “A former NASCAR champion now drives a forklift that can’t go faster than 15 m.p.h.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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