MORGANTOWN — When Kaleb Kelly cranked the engine of that ’67 Barracuda, and all that combustible chaos made it sound like Detroit was having a tantrum under the hood, his sisters, Vaneesa Charlton and Cassie Tudek, looked at each other and smiled.
They were some distance back from the garage, and hadn’t even seen their brother or the car at that point, but not matter. (Sonic recognition, you know.)
“Hey,” Tudek said. “The ’Cuda.”
“Sounds good, huh?” Charlton replied.
They grew up hearing that sound. Kaleb, especially.
Said rumble makes a personal soundtrack for their dad, Mike Kelly.
It also makes for a fun irony.
That’s because Kelly, a longtime member of the Monongalia County Board of Education and CEO of a local fuel distributorship, is known around the community as a measured guy.
Doesn’t talk too fast, nor too slow. Chooses his words carefully. Never gets mad.
Anytime he’s behind the wheel of that ’Cuda, though, the doors of his inner Id are blown off, as he rockets down quarter-mile straightaways in Pennsylvania, Tennessee and other locales were RPMs rule.
The “Christmas tree” start-lights click down to green.
Kelly punches it.
And the race car responds appropriately.
The 500-cubic-inch engine, with its nearly 800 horses, glues Kelly’s shoulders to the back of the seat while actually lifting the front wheels off the track at the same time.
Kelly muscles the steering wheel to keep the ’Cuda from jumping its lane.
Nuuur-r-r-r-RU-U-UN-GG-G-G-G! In a high-octane romp that takes less than 10 seconds’ time — OK, 9.94 seconds, to be exact — it feels like the run is over before it even starts. The electronic readout at the finish line tells it.
“Yeah,” Kelly will say, grinning. “I tell everybody I like to relax — at 135 miles an hour.”
He’ll likely slow it down today for Father’s Day.
Lest we stall out at the starting line, we probably should have told you sooner: This story is just as much about the above-mentioned day that honors Dad as it is drag racing.
Except when it isn’t.
Throwing a wrench in the works
Kelly raised his kids the way his dad, Oliver F. Kelly Jr., raised him.
The elder Kelly, who died in 2000, was a guy who could fix anything. That was out of necessity for a farm kid who grew up during the Depression, his son said.
“If you couldn’t fix it, you did without, because you couldn’t afford a new one, whatever it was,” Mike Kelly said.
When WWII hit, Oliver Kelly turned wrenches for Uncle Sam when he wasn’t shouldering a rifle in Europe with the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry.
He picked up work as a mechanic when he came back home, and young Mike was right there with him.
Mr. Kelly delighted in the fact that his kid displayed the same aptitude.
“I was all the time working on something,” his son said. “He would always say, ‘I’m not gonna fix this for you — but I am gonna tell you to do it.’ ”
After that, the budding mechanic was on his own. The lessons took. If it had wheels, a motor and could be steered, the Kelly kid was all over it.
Dirt bikes, which he and buddies tore up and down on, in the hills behind their neighborhood where Morgantown Mall is now located.
Drag races at the former Eldora Raceway, right down the road in Fairmont.
Along the way, he bought his first Barracuda — a sleek, black 1970 model, not the above dragster — that would accumulate lots of family history on its odometer.
He and Marjorie drove from the church to the reception in that car after the wedding in 1975.
Bumping the box, quantum physics (and other dinnertime lessons)
Marjorie Kelly still laughs about how earnest the man she would marry was on their first date.
“He said, ‘I just want to tell you that I like cars and that I do a lot of racing,’ ” she remembered. “I just kind of laughed and said, ‘Well, I like cars, too.’ ”
To a point, she said.
She has yet to peg the Enthusiasm Gauge whenever Kaleb shoots the ’67 ’Cuda down the quarter-mile.
“That’s still a little nerve-wracking,” she said. “But you give it to God. And his dad taught him about cars and how to race, so I’m definitely comfortable with that.”
Kelly mainly taught his kids how to be lifelong learners, his daughters said. Growing up, fast cars on sanctioned race tracks were just the delivery system.
Charlton said her dad would quickly shift into the learning gear himself, if his kids expressed an interest in something, be it music, sports or mechanics.
“He was always encouraging,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Now let’s research this, and learn how to do it the right way.’ ”
Having a methodical drag-racer teaching you how to parallel park for your driver’s test was a uniquely effective exercise in car-confidence and muscle memory, Tudek said.
Two giant cardboard boxes that once held appliances were enlisted.
“Dad set them up like barrels for the driver’s test,” Tudek remembered. “He’d make you bump the box on purpose the first couple of times, so you’d really know where it was in relation to the car. It was like you could sense it.”
Every Kelly kid passed the test on the first try.
When all three kids were still living at home, dinnertime meant mini-seminars on quantum physics, presidential politics, torque ratios — whatever percolated up.
Marjorie Kelly still marvels at that.
“I used to say, ‘How many families are having these kinds of discussions at the dinner table?’ ”
A couple of years back, Kelly told his wife he was buying new appliances for the kitchen. Time for an upgrade, he said, in his mechanic’s lexicon. She balked, and told him to buy a new roll-cage for the racer, instead.
Now, it was time for her husband to marvel.
“I just said, ‘What did I ever do right to deserve you?’ ”
Cruisin’ at The Greenbrier
In May, Kaleb Kelly helped his dad get the 1970 ’Cuda ready for a special car show. The latest Kelly wrench-turner spends lots of time under the hood of this one, also.
And, like his parents before him, he used the car in his wedding to Marilyn last year.
The Kelly ride was shown in the first-ever Greenbrier Concours d’Elegance, at The Greenbrier, West Virginia’s famed resort. Everything from the industry’s first “brass cars” from the early 1900s to luxury sport models with $1 million price tags was parked there.
Kelly the younger said he was glad to represent the car and the family in the show’s Muscle Car category, even if he did need a wardrobe for the occasion.
“Yeah, we had to buy new clothes,” he said, drolly. “No blue jeans allowed.”
That’s the thing about the son in this brood. His sense of humor is more dry than two racing slicks after a burnout.
When asked how he maintains his focus at 135 mph when he runs the quarter-mile, he didn’t blink or crack a smile.
“The nonstop screaming,” he said, with a comic’s timing, “really helps.”
He did, however, sneak in some sentiment in on his Facebook page recently.
He had posted a snap of him and his father at a race. The Kelly boys were slouched against the ’Cuda, unconsciously striking the same pose.
One of his buddies picked up on that and commented how much the two looked alike in the photo.
“I’d be honored if I turned into half the man he is,” Mike Kelly’s son typed back.
