Yahoo Autos Nobody Carried Dale Earnhardt's Gas Quite Like Chocolate Myers
Danny “Chocolate” Myers comes to his passionate love of stock car racing naturally.
After all, it’s been just about the only thing he’s known and embraced—the good, the bad, the unspeakably tragic—for most of his 72 years.
He was just 8 when his 30-year-old father, Bobby (pictured below left), died in a multi-car backstretch accident driving for Lee Petty in the 1957 Southern 500 at Darlington. Seven months later, his 33-year-old uncle, 1954 NASCAR Modified champion Billy, died of a heart attack while racing at Bowman Gray Stadium in the family’s hometown of Winston-Salem, N.C. Those deaths seemed to have forged an even stronger bond between the family and racing.
There’s been at least one Myers competing at Bowman Gray almost every weekend since it opened in 1949. Brothers Bobby and Billy were first, followed by second-generation driver Gary (Billy’s son), and continues with Gary’s sons, third-generation stars Burt and Jason. And there are teenage and pre-teen Myers kids waiting to extend the family tradition.
Records are sometimes sketchy, but it’s generally accepted that the family has upwards of 200 victories and maybe a dozen championships at the quarter-mile bullring inside a football stadium. Perhaps surprisingly, none of them came from Chocolate, the eldest of Bobby’s sons. (BTW: the nickname came at age 12 from a football coach in recognition of his dark complexion from Cherokee bloodlines. Nobody calls him Danny more than once).
“Yeah, I wanted to be a race-car driver, too, so I tried it,” Myers says of his short-lived career in the mid- to late-’60s. “And I can’t use the excuse that I didn’t have anybody to show me what to do. I enjoyed it and had a good time, but I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing. I started in the $99 Claiming Division, then went straight to the (infamous and highly competitive) Modified class. That Modified car lasted about two weeks before it was destroyed.”
Despite that early setback, Myers went on to make quite a name for himself as perhaps NASCAR’s most famous over-the-wall crewman. For two decades he worked at Richard Childress Racing, earning the unofficial title “America’s Gasman” for refueling the No. 3 Chevrolet for seven-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt. Myers was there for all of Earnhardt’s 65 victories at RCR and each of their six championships together. He retired in 2002 after watching his close friend die on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500.
He’s currently curator of the RCR Museum in Welcome, N.C. and daily co-host on “Tradin’ Paint” for Sirius Satellite radio. He’s done race commentary for ESPN2, appeared in a handful of television commercials, and worked with Burt Reynolds and director Hal Needham on their “Smokey and the Bandit” films. His expansive Wikipedia page calls him “a NASCAR personality.”
People in the garage know him as a big-hearted, gregarious, fan-friendly, easily approachable man who’s fervently proud of his family’s name.
Perhaps appropriately, he and Childress met and became friends working at Bowman Gray. As teenagers, they got in free by selling peanuts and programs in the grandstands. Shortly after Childress began racing a $99 Claimer car, Myers began racing one as well. When Childress went to Modifieds, Myers (briefly) followed suit. In 1969, when Childress made the leap to NASCAR’s fledging “pony car” Grand American class, Myers tagged along to help.
Years later, after briefly drifting from racing, Myers landed a crewman’s job at RCR.
