- When he was just 13, Bob Korn wanted to build a race car, just like his dad, Red, had been doing for years. But there was one problem.
He had no money.
“I baled hay for a penny a bale to make the money and my cousin, Frank Jones and I, built the car,” he told Dayton Daily News racing writer Leal Beattie in 1992. “It was a 1940 Ford Model A roadster with a flathead V8 engine.”
Korn rose from that modest start in Miamisburg and eventually became one of the most respected and successful mechanics and car owners in Miami Valley stock car racing history.
In 1957, with Harold Smith driving his car, they won 40 features and were crowned Ohio’s Champion, a triumph for which he got an engraved stopwatch that he carried with him from then on.
The following year, with a different car, he and Smith teamed for 34 victories.
Then on Feb. 22, 1959, they were part of a team that competed in the very first Daytona 500 at the new Daytona International Speedway.
Their No. 69 Studebaker Lark finished 31st of 59 cars, ahead of such notable drivers as Buck Baker, Tiny Lund, Fireball Roberts and a young Richard Petty, whose dad Lee won the race.
- In the 1970s, Korn was helping his dad on the farm when tragedy struck.
“Dad was helping grandpa pick field goal,” Bob’s only child — daughter Robin — remembered the other day. “It was January, and he had gloves on. When a stalk got jammed in the picker, he tried to pull it out and his glove got caught and it got his right hand.
“I remember they ended up sewing what was left of his hand to his stomach and he stayed in the hospital for over a month. They ended up taking some of the meat off his stomach and wrapping it around and he ended up with enough of a hand that he could grip something.”
She used her hand to mimic a crab claw type pinch.
For most mechanics that would have been the end of their career, but not Korn.
“He could have gotten frustrated, but he was very strong-willed and he just never gave up,” she said. “The year after he returned, he won a track championship with Dick Dunlevy driving.”
There would be other racing titles at Kil-Kare and Shady Bowl Speedway.
He was named the Craftsman Heartland Regional True Value Mechanic of the Year four years straight from 2000 through 2003 and, in 2002, he was named the National Mechanic of the Year.
After the 83-year-old Korn’s death in 2011, his final race car — the No. 72 Late Model 2003 Ford Taurus that had last raced in 2006 — was put in the garage next to his house in an old neighborhood on the northeast side of town.
The house has since been torn down and the neighborhood is in decline. The garage remained, but it was so filled with family belongings — “there’s some of my stuff in there, and my friend’s and some stuff of my cousin’s and even things belonging to my son’s ex-girlfriend,” Robin said.
The car was back against the wall and all but forgotten for some 14 years.
And yet, Saturday it will the focal point of a new Miamisburg Historical Society exhibit — Three Generations of Korn Racing — that will be unveiled from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Miamisburg History Center in Veterans Park at 35 S. Main Street, Miamisburg.
It’s part of an ongoing campaign to recognize some of the forgotten stories of Miamisburg’s most accomplished people.
Along with the car, there will be many of the awards Korn won over the years, some mementos — including that engraved stopwatch — and a slide show.
Robin will be there, as will be her son Gary, a couple of her dad’s former drivers — Donnie Mahaffey and Dick Dunlevy Jr. — and some local civic and political figures.
“I haven’t met really anyone except one guy from church who knew the Korn story,” said Kim Izor, the curator of the Miamisburg History Center.
“Miamisburg has so many of these stories, but many of them have never been handed down so that’s something we’re trying to correct. We need to tell the stories.”
In the past the Historical Society has had similar events to honor Ralph Harrell, the original Bozo the Clown, and Hobby Kinderdine, one of the stars of the Dayton Triangles who played in the first-ever NFL game.
“The coolest thing this time was to find out from Robin that that the old race car was still around,” Izor said. “That gave us a real centerpiece for the exhibit.”
Racing six nights a week
Harold “Red” Korn started it all during the Depression. He was an owner, builder, mechanic and driver, racing at places like Dayton Speedway, Frankie’s Forest Park and the Indiana tracks in Salem and Winchester.
That all changed in 1938.
“He was trying a car out, I believe it was on old Central Avenue between West Carrollton and Miamisburg — I think it might have been a dirt road then — when a tooth in the rear end broke and his car flipped over,” Robin said. “He broke his back and was in a body cast.”
With his dad unable to work on cars, 11-year-old Bob started to fill in and two years later — after a lot of hay baling — he had his own race car.
Bob never drove his cars.
His drivers were like a who’s who of Midwest short track racers, including: Harold Smith, Dick Freeman, Dick Dunlevy Sr. and Dick Dunlevy Jr., Bill Chambers, John Vallo, Donnie and Jason Mahaffey, Jerry Stapleton, Dave Brandenberg, Carol O’Harold, Larry Moore and Ed Benedict.
In his prime, Bob raced everywhere.
“We used to race six nights a week and take Mondays off to get the car in shape for the next week,” he told Dayton Daily News writer Dave Long in 1996. “We’d go to Lima, Fort Wayne, New Bremen, Eldora, Winchester, Ind., Salem, Ind., Dayton Speedway, two or three races in Cincinnati, and some places in Illinois and Michigan.”
Eventually his grandson, Lil Bobby, began helping him on the cars.
Lil Bobby died unexpectedly in 2018 at the age of 31.
A few years before he passed away, he paid a glowing tribute to his granddad at Shady Bowl Speedway, the fast, 3/10ths mile paved oval in DeGraff where Bob Korn had so much success.
After Bob’s death, the speedway held the annual Bob Korn Memorial Race and that’s when Lil Bobby was asked to drive that No. 72 late model Ford that’s now part of Saturday’s exhibit around the track as the pace car.
On a parade lap, he unfurled a big American flag that waved from the driver’s window as he drove.
A spotlight for the No. 72 Ford
In his later years Bob Korn ran Bob’s Transmission Service in Miamisburg.
He eventually would be enshrined in the Dayton Speedway Hall of Fame, Shady Bowl Hall of Fame, Kil-Kare Hall of Fame and the Dayton Auto Racing Fan Club (DARF) Hall of Fame.
And yet around Miamisburg, few people — especially of the next generation — knew his story, Izor said:
“The family didn’t really talk about it that much and we didn’t know that car existed.”
Robin said her dad was diagnosed with cancer late in his life and when his health began failing, she asked him if he wanted to put the car in a museum somewhere.
“He liked that idea, but a friend who is an attorney, told us to be careful about who we give it to,” Robin said. “He told us how he had an old ARCA car and had given it to someone and then couldn’t get it back.
“But this opportunity was good and Gary was all for it, too. So, we moved all the stuff out of the way and took the tarp off of it. It was pretty dirty for being covered.”
Now the No. 72 Ford has been washed and polished and is spotlighted for everyone to see.
Just like cream, Korn always rises.
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