Fred Rosner Profile
If you hang around race tracks, drivers, owners and mechanics long enough, you are going to meet a variety of characters with a wide range of personalities. Some of them you’ll forget about tomorrow and others you’ll never forget. For me, one of the unforgettable would be an icon in the Northeast region of our racing world, Fred Rosner.
It seems Fred Rosner has been at the sport forever. Fred was born in Springfield, MA in 1935. When asked how he got started, Fred said “A neighbor of mine ran a car at Stafford Springs, and Century Stadium in Springfield, I guess I was 12 or 13 years old. That got me hooked and the first car I ever built was with Bill Gurney, we went to trade school together. When Riverside Park opened up we built a jalopy. We bought a 37 Ford in the morning and raced it that night.
Stan Disbrow drove it for us because we weren’t old enough to drive, I really never wanted to drive race cars, I just enjoyed building and working on them. I tried driving just a couple of times at Malta New York in a car I built for Ricky Massa and he didn’t have a driver. And one time at Riverside in a late-model 56 Ford for Walt Meisner, who owned Agawam Speed but I was never serious about driving.”
The Champ Rene Charland
When asked how he and Rene met, Fred told the story like this “After high school I worked for Ray Brown as a mechanic, Brown and his dad each had a car, numbered B1 & B2. Rene drove one of them. That’s when I first met him, but I did see him race at places like the Rhythm Inn Speedway in Millers Falls Mass, and the Keene fairgrounds in New Hampshire.
Then Rene bought a house across the street from me in Agawam. He built a garage next to his house and I started hanging around there. That’s when Rene and I teamed up for two years, 1963/64 winning the NASCAR Sportsmen National Championship each year. Then he went with Godfrey Wenzel from Reardon’s garage in Holyoke Mass.
Rene was a tough guy to work for, but he could drive anything. He could drive dirt, asphalt, modified, late-model, anything he got into. He could get into some guys car that never finished a race and win with it. He had the knack, but it was tough to put up with him and he was hard to please. So many times I just rattled wrenches under the car or shot gear lube on the ground to make him think I made changes, and then he was happy with the car, but it just lasted two years. One of those years we ran 109 races, and won 32 times. One night we’d run dirt, the next night asphalt with the same car, just change tires.”
They Weren’t Bad Guys, They Were Just the Eastern Bandits
When Fred was asked about the Eastern Bandits, he said “The Eastern Bandits consisted of Rene Charland, Ed Flemke, Denny Zimmerman and Red Foote, they were the main bandits, once in a while someone else would join in.
We started to race the big money shows in the South and realized we were really competitive. Those southern guys had big blocks with fuel injection and all kinds of power, but they just didn’t handle. Like Old Bridge New Jersey, a half mile with flat straightaways and sharp turns; they would go down the straightaway like a rocket and straight to the wall in the turns. The bandits would drive under them, it might have taken a couple of laps, but they won a lot of the races, and of course Rene was always chasing points.
One season we ran Islip Long Island (NY) Saturday night, Utica Rome (NY) Sunday, Victoria Speedway (NY)Wednesday, Thunder Road (VT) Thursday and Stafford Springs (CT) on Friday, all with the same car. Rene was the Sportsmen Champion four years in a row, I was with him for two of those. In 1964, I was the NASCAR Mechanic of the Year.”
Modified Race Cars and Agawam Speed
Fred remembers his days at Agawam Speed “Walt Meisner owned Agawam Speed and I went to work for him, building and maintaining Modifieds. During the summer I took the Agawam speed parts truck on the road, building cars and selling parts.
For $250 a week, plus expenses, I would usually stay in a motel and build race cars for guys like Dave Lape; I built a couple of cars for Dave McCredy who owned the number 33’s that Bill Wimble drove and Frank Trinhaus’s number 62 that Irv Taylor drove and so many more.
Dave Lape put me up at his house, a huge house in Canajoharie, New York. I slept in a tall Victorian bed with a frilly canopy over it.
It usually took two weeks to build a car and each weekend I’d travel with the parts truck selling parts at tracks like Albany/Saratoga, Fonda and others.
Then Walt sold the speed shop to Vic Mari. Vic rented the speed shop and I rented the garages from Walt and started building Modifieds. We never kept track of how many we built, but we cranked out a lot of them. I built cars for Mario Fiore, Ed Patnode, Tony Marsalli and a lot of the Riverside cars. The last two Modifieds I built was for Roger Raymond and Dave Monaco.
Then we switched to late models and Pro stocks. The first late model I built was a Nova for Tommy Rosati. He finished fourth, the first weekend and then won 12 in a row. They (the officials) tore it down every week but it was perfectly legal.
But then Walt and I had a disagreement and he threw me out giving me 30 days to clear out.”
A New Home, A New Start
“I started looking for a place and 30 years ago if you said ‘race car’ nobody wanted you because of the noise and things like that and the prices of rents were going up in the Agawam area; so I packed all my stuff into 3 forty foot trailers and parked them in John Rosati’s yard. After a short while I met Ernie Hastings at a race track and he offered me his building for good deal. As soon as I drove up to Gill (MA) and saw the building, I knew I found my new home, that was 1985. We started building late models and Pro stocks again and that’s when we teamed up with Jay Brodrick and went north on Tom Curley’s tour with two Chrysler kit cars that we built ourselves. Joey Kourafas drove one of them. Brodrick was heavy into drag racing and had friends at Chrysler, so he was getting anything he wanted at a good deal or no cost.
Then we ran the ACT tour with Severence Fur sponsorship. Lloyd Severence was a fur trapper from Vermont who brought me a modified he used to drive on dirt at Claremont and wanted it changed to run asphalt. There was nothing I could do to help that car so I found him a better car, and rebuilt it for him. Then he gave up driving and put Jerry Dostie and Bobby Dragon in the car.”
Wesley Gets the Urge
“Both of my sons Wes and Mark always worked with me and Wes helped Tommy Rosati on a car we built. Wes decided he wanted to race so we built him a nice car and the first time out at Stafford, he got lapped halfway through the heat race. He learned real quick about racing because the year he got hurt he had already won at seven different tracks, no matter where we went he was a threat to win. Then at Thompson he was injured in a bad crash and that ended his driving career.
Then Mark had an opportunity to make more money elsewhere, so he left first and Wes went on vacation to North Carolina and he met Randy McDonnell, who was from Canada originally and had run Curley’s tour when we did. McDonnell offered Wes a job and Wes moved to North Carolina.
That left me by myself and It was just too much to do so I slowly backed out of the business. I had a few part-time guys around for a while. I stopped building cars, but kept maintaining them, straightening out bent cars and selling parts.”
Hot Rods, Rat Rods & Car Cruise
What is happening these days at the shop? “Now I strictly build and repair hot rods. In 2004, the car cruises started because of the hot rods and about six guys from around this area decided to meet here on a Thursday night and just shoot the bull. Pretty soon it was 10 cars then 15. Now it’s 200 cars and some great people. Everybody enjoys it, I enjoy it.
I enjoy meeting and saying hello to everyone as best I can, because it gets so busy. To deal with people on a personal level really helps. That’s one of the problems I see at the race tracks. Now, nobody talks to anybody. When we ran places like Westboro, Dick Williams was the promoter and each week he would come around and talk to you. ‘How are you doing? How are things going?’ And pass out hamburg’s that weren’t sold at the end of the night. Today nobody wants to get involved and nobody wants to work together. All the tracks have different rules so you can’t take your car from track to track and everybody wants to run on Saturday night. Now it looks like Claremont is going to Friday’s.
Someone ought to pay attention to the dirt tracks and the way they are run. Like this year in Florida at New Smyrna. There were 13 cars for the Richie Evans Memorial with 58 paying customers in the stands, but at Volusia (FL) there were full fields of dirt cars and a packed grandstand, the weather was the same at both tracks, you figure it out.”
The Future
When asked what Fred saw for his future, he replied “My future here? This looks like the last year. I’d like to stay but the traveling of two hours a day and the cold weather, it’s starting to get to me. I don’t know what I will do, but I don’t want to retire yet.”
Epilogue
The number of race cars built by Rosner Race Cars was never recorded. The number of victories Fred has as owner/crew chief is definitely in the hundreds. The number of victories for Rosner built cars is conceivably in the thousands.
In 1964 Fred was NASCAR’s Mechanic of the Year.
In 2011 Fred was inducted into the NEAR (New England Antique Racer) Hall of Fame.
Now this year Fred turns 80 and this May through September, Rosner’s Summertime Cruise-In will probably be the last season for these events
Fred has touched so many people in the racing/automotive world during the past 68 years, and all in a good way. We can only hope he will stick around to keep building, repairing and cruising for years to come.
Thank You Fred.
Sources: Jim Snape/YankeeRacer.com