It was a good time filled with good times. Steve Remington is fighting some health issues, and these are difficult days for him and Barbara.
It was a good time filled with good times. Steve Remington is fighting some health issues, and these are difficult days for him and Barbara.
Age and time and conditions have finally caught up with him, just like they eventually overtake all of us.
Ol‘ Rem. Just saying the phrase takes me back to a time of fun and adventure and education and a whole lot of excitement.
For a small circle of us in Madison County, Ind., Rem was the ringleader. He loved sprint car racing, and a group of us gravitated together in our shared interest in the sport.
Somehow, though, Rem was always a notch beyond everybody else in terms of passion and involvement.
We went to the same high school – Frankton High, nestled in a town hardly big enough for a blinker light. Rem was a pretty good baseball pitcher, and after high school two very fortunate things happened: he landed a good-paying job at one of the GM plants in Anderson, and he married Barbara.
By the late 1970‘s Rem and his friends were traveling great distances to watch sprint cars.
“Great distances” is a relative term; in our tiny orbit, the two-hour ride to Eldora was a genuine, bona fide trip. Through my long friendship with Dennis House, Rem‘s brother-in-law, I started tagging along with the group.
Things got fun in a hurry.
I was younger than most of the group, and quite impressionable. Rem and his friends — Gary Young, Dwight House, and others — amazed me with their knowledge of racing. I soaked it all in, not realizing that the trajectory of my life was changing right before my eyes.
Rem was not one to operate in moderation; nothing was done gradually. When Rem made up his mind to get into something he chucked everything aside and dove into the deepest corner of the deep end of the pool. All in.
He assembled and sold satellite TV systems for a while, and was very good at it. But when he got into racing photography, everything was elevated by several notches.
If you put together all the rolls of 35mm film Rem shot through a couple of decades starting in the late 1970s, the strips of celluloid might stretch from Lima to Knoxville.
He put together his own darkroom and perfected the technique of placing text on images — “1988 Kings Royal” — and you can find examples of his work across the land.
He snapped some of the most iconic images of his generation. For example, the “waterfall” picture from 1990 of Jack Hewitt‘s various race cars was a Remington production, through and through.
Rem was the organizer, and the leader, of countless racing expeditions. The setup was simple, and cast in stone: his vehicle, his timetable, his rules.
“Hey Rem, it‘s pouring and I‘m cold. They‘re gonna rain out. Let‘s go home.”
“Nope. We ain‘t leaving until they call it.”
“It‘s 1:30 a.m. and I‘ve gotta work in the morning.”
“We ain‘t leavin‘.”
There were lots of trips home from someplace, rolling through the Indiana countryside at 3 a.m. Rem had a pickup truck — later it was an El Camino — and several of us would ride in the back.
I recall riding home in the bed of the truck with Phil “Jock” Poor — several years before his reign as a multi-time USAC championship car owner and mechanic — and trying to soak up the discussion on the dynamics of making a sprint car handle properly.
Exciting things always happened to Rem. I don‘t necessarily mean good things, but they were exciting. One night he was pushing sprint cars at Anderson and parked his new truck in the infield. Late in the racing program a jalopy careened off the track and T-boned Rem‘s new truck. It was legendary.
Rem was always expressive, always expansive, and always entertaining, holding court at every occasion.
“Dave, the hell of it is…” he would begin. Or, “Say what you want, boys, but…”
Most of all, Rem was at the center of so much of what we were interested in. Despite his fulltime job commitments, nobody traveled to more races than Rem. Nobody shot and developed and distributed more photos. Nobody knew more racing people.
For some 30 years, Rem‘s home near Perkinsville was the assembly point for hundreds of racing-related trips and gatherings.
Like I said, Rem was the ringleader. And a good one at that.
Through it all Barbara had the patience of a saint, enduring an endless parade of disheveled overnight guests and the inevitable clutter of racing-related photography.
Like a comet that burns too brightly, Rem suddenly hit a burnout point some years ago. He put his cameras away and pursued other interests, turning his boundless energy in new directions. He maintained contact with only a few racing friends, but in recent years finally began venturing out again to a race track every now and then.
I‘d often hear a familiar refrain: “How‘s ol‘ Rem doing?”
Well, he‘s not doing so well. We need to lift Rem up in our thoughts, because he could use some good ones. His fast-paced and frantic days are almost at a close.
Say what you want, boys, but this was a good man. The hell of it is, good men don‘t last forever.
Rem would approve of the way I just said that. I hope so, anyway.