Reins Sturdivant: Who He Was and Why People Still Talk About Him
I've been following dirt track racing in western North Carolina for decades, and Reins Sturdivant's name comes up in conversation at least once every few months. He passed away recently, and his obituary has been making the rounds among people who actually knew him, not just people who read headlines. If you're unfamiliar with who he was, the short version is: he was a mechanic, a racer, and a fixture at Old North Wilkesboro Speedway for most of his adult life. Not everybody gets to say that about someone from a small town, but in this case it's accurate. The full obituary covers his life in reasonable detail. He was born in the Wilkes County area, spent his career working with engines and suspensions more than competing in them himself, and was known for keeping older race cars on the track when most people would have written them off. That's the kind of thing that doesn't show up in any official record but gets repeated in every story about him because it happened so many times. I remember watching him work on a 1960s-era modified at the old speedway when I was in my twenties. The car had been sitting in a barn for three years. He pulled it apart, rebuilt the rear end by hand, and had it running the next Saturday. No fancy equipment. Just experience and stubbornness, which apparently was the local specialty. What makes his obituary stand out compared to a lot of these things is that it was written by people who actually shared time with him. There are specific details about his habits, the cars he favored, the crew chiefs he worked alongside, and the racers he mentored. That level of specificity is rare in local newspaper obituaries, which tend to list surviving relatives and church affiliations without much color. The Sturdivant piece gives you a sense of what the pit area looked like on a Friday night in the 1980s, which is worth something on its own.
One thing worth noting if you're trying to find more information: the obituary has been shared through the Wilkes Forum, which is the main online gathering place for North Carolina short track fans. There's also a copy on the Speedy's Speedway website, though that version is slightly abridged. If you want the complete text, the Wilkesboro News Sentinel's archive has the original print version digitized. I found it useful to compare both because the online version leaves out a paragraph about his early work at a local machine shop that actually explains a lot about why he became the kind of person people sought out for help. There's also a minor edge case worth mentioning. Several people tried to verify the date of his final race appearance because the obituary mentions it indirectly. I ran into this when someone on a message board claimed he raced as recently as 2019, which turned out to be wrong. He was still attending races, but his last competitive outing was in the early 2000s. The distinction matters if you're researching his racing record specifically. I resolved it by checking the Old North Wilkesboro Speedway program archives from that era, which list entrants by name. It took about twenty minutes to confirm he hadn't started his car after 2003. What strikes me about the whole situation is how much of his story lives in the heads of people who were there rather than in any formal record. The obituary does its best, but it can only include what the family and close friends provided. There are entire chapters of his life that will never make it into print, particularly the period when he was working as a road crew member for various touring stock car teams in the late nineties. That's not unique to him, obviously. It's just how these communities work. You show up, you do the work, you don't keep a diary.
If you're looking for additional context beyond the obituary itself, the document called "Legends of the Old Dirt" has a chapter on North Wilkesboro mechanics that mentions him by name alongside a handful of others who operated in the same circuit. It's self-published and not widely available, but a copy circulates through the speedway's visitor center and occasionally shows up at swap meets. The information there overlaps with the obituary but adds a few dates and race results that the family may not have had access to when writing it. The obituary also notes his involvement with the Wilkes County High School automotive program, which is something I hadn't heard mentioned before. He spent several years volunteering to teach basic engine diagnostics to students who had no prior experience. That's a detail that matters because it explains why a generation of younger mechanics in the area knows his name even if they never watched him compete. It's the kind of contribution that doesn't generate headlines but shows up in the quality of people entering the trade. One practical note for anyone trying to locate a physical copy of the obituary or related materials: the Wilkesboro Public Library keeps a file of local death notices going back several decades. They're not digitized in a searchable format, but if you visit in person with the name and approximate date, the staff can pull the relevant clipping within fifteen minutes. I've done this more than once and it's been reliable. Online searches alone won't get you everything because the obituary was printed in a regional paper that doesn't have its full archive available to search engines.
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