I asked Tom Wieck permission to copy this memorial to his father....


ABOUT BARNEY "BEAR" WIECK Heroes, Dreams And Memories, by Tom Wieck, 2005

Sunday I was in the track office and answered the phone. On the other end, a guy was asking for information about this upcoming weekend events, The Bear Wieck Memorial, and The Big Dawg 100. He then asked,

"Who is Bear Wieck?"

I politely told him that Bear was my dad and he replied,

"Oh, was he a racer?"

I told him, "No, just a fan".

In truth, my dad was so much more than that.

One of the first questions I'm often asked about my dad is why his name was "Bear"? Well, his real name was Barney Wieck, and I actually gave my dad the nickname "Bear". As a kid, I used to go to work with him on Saturday mornings, because he only went in for a couple of hours to get the work planned out for the next week. One day, one of his workers commented to me that he was a good guy, but just acted or growled like a bear sometimes at them. I, of course, found it funny that adults "told on" my dad. So, the next week we were in the garage, and I started teasing him and calling him "Bear". It just stuck...maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was 6'3", 250lbs and while he wasn't much of a conversationalist, but like E.F. Hutton, when he talked....we sure listened.

The BEAR WIECK MEMORIAL was started the first year we started promoting the track, in honor of the man who brought me to my first race at the age of 5 or 6. It was at the old Cincy Race Bowl.

I barely remember it, since I was so young... just little things like a car that had a dark blue top and white stars all over it, or one night, when a lady a few seats down from us was hit with a piece of tire rubber. Just little things. Those little things would add up to a lot, because little did my dad know, way back then, but it was he who would instill the love and passion for racing that I still have today

Shortly thereafter, he started taking me with him to Lawrenceburg. As a youngster I liked all kinds of sports, but nothing compared to going to Lawrenceburg every Sat. night. When I misbehaved, my dad never raised his hand to me, all he had to do was say a few simple words,

"If you want to go with me to the races at Lawrenceburg this Saturday, you better straighten up". That's all it would take.

True to his promise, every Saturday night my dad his work buddy, "Jeep"(his real name was Charlie Leppert) and I would go to The Burg. Even though I grew up in Covington , Ky., about 2 blocks from where Stan Bowman lived, and we used to see his old Modified (which was a Sprint back then) sitting on the trailer in front of his house, he never really had a favorite Sprint driver that i knew of. See, back then, Dick Gaines, Mike Johnson, Ross Smith(he ran both stocks Orange #44 and the black #5 sprint) Wayne Wolf, Calvin Gilstrap, Roy Robbins, Orville Yeaton, Frankie Mack and Bill Dueger ran, so it was hard to have just one favorite. However, my favorite was Cecil Beavers,#57.

My dad, "Jeep" and I would always play a game and make "a pick" for the feature. They knew I ALWAYS would pick Cecil. That was either the highlight or low of the night, either driving home and bragging about Cecil winning... or if he didn't, they were never shy to razz me about it.

After a few years of going to The Burg, a young Stock Car driver named Gene Cleveland and team, rented a garage in the alley behind my house. My dad worked as a foreman at a manufacturing company, giving him access to be able to make some parts for Gene's team. That gave me the best of both worlds, I could root for Cecil still, but my "new neighbor" gave me my own personal Stock Car driver as well. It was then that I started becoming more well rounded in my love for the sport.

My dad would also take me to the Salem Speedway every year to see USAC run, this was before they even had roll cages! Gene Cleveland's uncle, Fred, was good friends with A.J. Foyt, and since Gene knew that I really liked A.J, he took me down to the pits at Salem after the races to meet him. I was in awe. Here I was, a young, starstruck kid, eating chicken with the likes of A.J., Don Branson, Jud Larson, Dee Williams, Roger McCluskey, Bobby Unser and Aldo and Mario Andretti. I just could hardly believe it....and neither could my friends when I went back to school and told 'em.

Back then all my other buddies would want to talk about football or baseball, but not me, all I wanted to talk about was racing. I always said that some day I was even going to be a racer. My older brother, Fred, went to vocational school for mechanics and always had a street hot rod. He and my dad's buddy worked at night on cars, doing odd jobs out of our garage at the house. Dad and I would also hang in the garage, probably getting in the way more then anything. It was in this time frame, that I decided to "make good" on my promise to my friends and see if I couldn't become a racer myself. I knew my mom would have no part of it, so brought this 55 Chevy home to that garage, gutted it out, and started putting a roll cage in it. I told mom I was building it for my buddy. There was one problem, I didn't know how to weld.

Cautiously, I had asked my dad to show me how to weld. He just laughed and said he wanted no part of it. After about 3 to 4 days of watching me struggle, he showed up in the garage with a couple of cans of welding rods. It seemed maybe he had changed his mind.

Dad and "Jeep" started helping me put the cage in the racer. My dad would weld "Jeep" and I would cut and form the bars to go in. The final day of welding turned out to be very funny. My dad was inside the cage welding bars while "Jeep" and I were feeding him all of the bars to weld in. Well, when he got finished he was trapped inside the car and couldn't climb out! "Jeep" and I laughed so hard at him, and he got to growling like the "Bear" that he was nicknamed for. "Jeep" and I finally had to jack the car way up in the air and let him slide out through the bottom(there was no floor in the car yet). We still were laughing hysterically, so my dad announced to me that after that incident, I would have to learn to weld myself. I told him that I had asked him to teach me to weld for this project, and true to form he said,

"Kid, I don't care if you get hurt, but I don't want you to get killed in junk."

I guess the laugh was on me, but shortly after that, with his guidance, I did indeed learn to weld.

As the years went on, after I started racing, he became my consultant. We use to go round and round in the garage during the winters because he always thought heavier was better. If you could make something work using 10ga. steel, my dad wanted to make it out of 1/4". Of course being young and dumb, and thinking the son always knew more than Dad, I'd argue with him, but as the racing years progressed, so did the understanding between us about weight and strengths.

At the track, he'd tell me the stuff crew chiefs do, like

"Get up in the groove ,ride in the black , move up higher."

So, I would go out and ride around the top up against the wall. When I came back in, he would look at me and say,

"You didn't have to get THAT high, you scared the crap out of me".
I guess even as a consultant or a crew chief, he was still "a dad". Win, lose or crash, Dad was always there to support me.

Even when I married my wife, Marty, or had my daughter, Toni, my dad always was there. His relationship with not only me, the youngest of 3 boys, but also my own family, still touches me to this day. He always did the things we liked to do, even if they weren't the things he was fond of. For example, Bear wasn't much of a gambler. However, he'd concede to play cards with my Mom, Marty and Me at home, just because we needed a fourth player.

His dislike of gambling pertained to life as well. When I started a trailer business he thought I was nuts. We traveled a lot across the country on weekends doing swap meets , auctions and shows. He would complain before we left and the whole way home, but he always would go with me.

I guess it is fair to say that Bear Wieck supported his family, no matter what.

I think that is why The Burg is so special to me. I always comment on the tradition it has, but there is so much more to it than that. There are many fathers and sons at the track every week, creating and maintaining the kind of relationship that I had with Bear.

My father passed away before I started promoting this track, and on the day of his death, I never went in and said "goodbye", as that was the understanding we had prior to that day.

I never had to say "good-bye", because, when I'm alone, working on the track or sitting in the infield during an event, I can still see him, sitting in section H, on the end, about 3 rows from the very top.

It seems ol' Bear Wieck never really left at all