I was looking at a movie on the Old Forty-Fives website, the one called "Cars we used to drive in the 1950s and 60s" and one of the pictures was of a stock car race in the 1950s.



This is my dad's stock car from the early 1950s when we were just little kids. There was some kind of a racing circuit in Colorado that he traveled around to, leaving my mother home with three babies only a year apart in age. She made a comment once about how much she hated that time, and I think it was a case of him pursuing teenager pursuits when he should have been settling down.

What is a stock car?

"A stock car, in the original sense of the term, described an automobile that has not been modified from its original factory configuration. Later the term stock car came to mean any production-based automobile used in racing. This term is used to differentiate such a car from a race car, a special, custom-built car designed only for racing purposes.
The actual degree to which the cars conform to standard model specs has changed over the years and varies from country to country."

Technically, today's NASCAR cars are stock cars, but they don't have much resemblance to something the family would be driving around in.



We never got to see him race. There was a track at the Lakeside amusement park in Denver, and they were going to take us to see a race there one time, but it rained really hard and the event was cancelled.