According to Cram, family was a central part of Brownfield’s life.
“He’s my mom’s brother,” she explained. “My mom’s family has always been super close. He and my dad were best friends in high school. (Fred) really stepped up as a patriarchal figure. I remember as a little girl he came over and played the Easter Bunny. I remember he got my brother started in go-kart racing. I’d always wanted horses. He helped my mom out with so many things.
“After the debacle with him getting Skagit pulled out from underneath him, he ended up at Elma trying to promote that venue. With his promotion of (the Wild Wild Northwest Tour with the World of Outlaws), the first time he was at Billings he put us on a Horizon Airlines flight and we flew into Billings. It was literally my entire family and his friends and we showed up to work it. That was one of my most favorite trips with him. My aunt was the one that single-handedly ran the ticket sales. I’ve always had a niche for promoting so my uncle had me doing a few items, especially when he went with the National Sprint Tour.
“One of his ideas was to have me target some 360 drivers to help drive the car count,” she continued. “I did that for him that year the NST was here and helped him organize push-truck personnel, just anything I could do from a managerial standpoint. It was super fun working with him. I had a blast. It was such a gift he asked me to do that and six months later he was gone.”
The 53-year-old Brownfield sustained a fatal head injury when he was struck by a race car while lining up the D Main during the Northwest Modified Nationals hosted by Grays Harbor Raceway on June 16, 2006.
“I had gotten a call from Steve Heeb saying, ‘I was at the track tonight. There was a bad accident. Fred got hurt and I don’t think he’s going to make it,’” Murphy recalled. “He was helping to line up cars for a restart. It was the Northwest Modified Nationals and they drew cars from all around the West Coast. It was 80 or 90 cars that showed up. He was out giving the one-to-go signal. A car went down inside the other cars and didn’t see Fred and hit him. It ended up being a fatal impact.
“I made some calls and found out he hadn’t made it. That was tough. For a couple of weeks there was a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to happen to the series, the track in Elma, the Northern Sprint Tour. One group took over the Elma track, another the Northern Sprint Tour, and then like three teams helped take over the National Sprint Tour,” Murphy continued. “A lot of people had to take on these roles Fred had. It showed how important Fred was. He was doing all this and after his passing so many people had huge shoes to fill.
“The first (National Sprint Tour) race we did after was in Sedalia, Mo. They had the drivers line up on the frontstretch for a moment of silence. I have a picture of Steve Kinser crying. He’s this tough-as-nails guy, nothing could ever bother him. Here he is on the frontstretch crying. I think that spoke for all of us.”
This story appeared in the May 31, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
