Henry Clay Earles (11 August 1913–16 November 1999), founder and owner of the Martinsville Speedway, Inc., was born in Henry County and was the son of Samuel Tilden Earles, a tobacco farmer, and Jennie Ruth Allen Earles. He attended local public schools but left high school without graduating. After working part-time in a country store while a student, Earles labored in furniture factories in Roanoke and Martinsville. Later he owned a pool room and a drive-in restaurant in Martinsville. On 13 May 1930 Earles married Mildred Lee Warren, who turned fifteen the following month. They had two daughters. Earles owned and operated the Spot Service Station in Martinsville from 1938 until 1954, and he also invested in real estate. For two years during World War II he served in the Naval Air Corps, chiefly repairing airplanes.

Following the war H. Clay Earles, or Clay Earles, as he was known, witnessed automobile races on a dirt track in North Carolina's Piedmont and decided to begin a business promoting stock-car racing. With an initial investment of about $60,000, he and two partners chartered the Martinsville Speedway, Inc., to create an oval, dirt-surfaced racing track, slightly longer than half a mile, just south of Martinsville, an ambitious plan because many tracks at that time were located at local fairgrounds. Earles likely had earned part of his capital illegally as a small-time bootlegger. (He later stood trial in Tennessee in 1950 for transporting 155 cases of untaxed liquor from Illinois.) By about 1950 his partners had left the corporation, and William Henry Getty "Big Bill" France had acquired a 49-percent interest.

The Martinsville Speedway made Earles rich and provided the industrial town of Martinsville with an identity beyond its factories. He worked with France, a racing promoter, to stage the first race on 7 September 1947. Earles recalled later that only 750 grandstand seats had been completed, but the debut contest on the dusty track had attracted a paid attendance of about 6,000. In December 1947 France and others formed the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), which began sanctioning races the following year. Earles immediately brought the Martinsville Speedway's events under the NASCAR umbrella and worked with France to recruit other promoters. France's organization gradually turned into a national cultural phenomenon. He and Earles remained close, tied together by their ownership of the speedway and their shared conservative views. Earles backed France in a contentious battle to block unions from gaining a foothold in NASCAR.

The toughness Earles showed in the stand against unionization came to the surface on other occasions as well. In 1937 he and another man stood trial for the attempted murder of one another after exchanging gunfire in a parking lot. Earles received a $250 fine, suspended for good behavior. Known for carrying a pistol, he shot a man in the cheek with a pearl-handled .32-caliber revolver following a traffic altercation in January 1977. Criminal charges were filed but dropped. Talking with a newspaper reporter in 1993, Earles downplayed his carrying of a firearm, saying, "I'll do almost anything to keep from having a cross word with anybody. I'd rather walk from here to Roanoke than have a disagreement. But I don't want anybody messing with me while I'm walking."

The Martinsville Speedway continued to grow and develop as stock-car racing boomed. An innovator in the sport, Earles was among the first to broadcast his races over the radio. Paving the track in 1955 eliminated the problem of dust and helped to boost attendance. The following spring the facility played host to the first of its 500-lap races, then a rarity for a nonholiday contest. Earles pioneered using concrete surfaces and landscaping his venue with flowers and shrubs. He had also realized early the importance of publicity. Earles hired a full-time representative for the track in 1966, and he cooperated with producers of the 1973 motion picture The Last American Hero, which was filmed in part at the Martinsville Speedway and included an appearance by Earles. Television helped drive the sport's growth beginning late in the 1970s, and NASCAR continued to sanction races at the historic Martinsville track in spite of its distance from major media markets, perhaps because of the France family's partial ownership of the facility.

Earles received the Myers Brothers Award, the National Motorsports Press Association's highest honor, for 1974. His grandson W. Clay Campbell became president of the track in 1988, but Earles continued to have a strong influence on operations as chairman of the board and chief executive officer until his death.

Earles and his wife separated about 1970, after which he lived in a mobile home on the speedway grounds; they never divorced. She died on 30 December 1997. Henry Clay Earles died at his home on 16 November 1999 and was interred in Roselawn Burial Park, in Martinsville. The following year the National Motorsports Press Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. In 2017 the NASCAR Hall of Fame honored Earles's contributions to racing with its Landmark Award. At the time of Earles's death, the Martinsville Speedway had become an important stop in NASCAR's yearly schedule, and it continued to hold NASCAR events in the twenty-first century. In May 2004 International Speedway Corporation, a publicly traded company founded by Earles's late partner Bill France and run by the France family, bought the Martinsville Speedway for $192 million.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Morris Stephenson, ed., From Dust to Glory: The Story of Clay Earles and the NASCAR-Sanctioned Martinsville Speedway (1992), with portraits, and Peter Golenbock, NASCAR Confidential: Stories of the Men and Women Who Made Stock Car Racing Great (2004), 3–10; Marriage Register, Henry Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Virginia Record 94 (Sept. 1972): 61; Danville Bee, 14, 15, 30 Sept., 7 Oct. 1937, 9 Feb. 1950; Kingsport [Tenn.] News, 24 Feb. 1950; Newport News Daily Press, 24 Sept. 1993 (quotation); Roanoke Times, 21 Sept. 1995, 9 Feb., 21 Sept. 1997, 19 Jan. 2000, 15 May 2004; obituaries, editorial tributes, and accounts of funeral in Martinsville Bulletin, 16, 17, 19 Nov. 1999, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Roanoke Times, and Washington Post, all 17 Nov. 1999, and New York Times, 21 Nov. 1999; memorial in House Joint Resolution 76, Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 2000 Regular Session (2000), 3:3786.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Randal L. Hall.

How to cite this page:
Randal L. Hall,"Henry Clay Earles (1913–1999)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2017 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Earles_Henry_Clay_1913-1999, accessed [today's date]).

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