I grew up spending all my Saturday nights at Butler Speedway in Michigan (even though we lived in Indiana). Guys like Jack Sharp, Larry Zimmerman, Sparky Young, Don Taylor and Hank Lower were my heroes. My dad was a cousin of Lower and we cheered him on in the days when he couldn't even make the feature and drove a gray 6-cylinder coupe.
Butler has went through a lot of changes since those days and so have I. As a kid I could tell you the number and name of almost any driver that raced there (and the fields were around 100 cars). I remember when I-69 was built and we no longer took the route past "mom's pink house" and I also got to drive a car for the very first time with my dad at my side while going to Butler. (No wonder I log so many miles chasing racing.)
The place used to have an oil surface (wasn't as messy as you think, and so tacky it'd try to pull your shoes off) and also had a wall on the inside and the cars pitted in the middle. The oil disappeared in the mid 90s and the inside wall followed and the pits have moved outside the track.
The track has some cool memories and there are some races that I saw there that are forever etched into my mind: I considered a late model race that I saw between NASCAR driver Tiny Lund and the track's hero the "Pink Panther" Don Taylor in the 70s as the best I ever saw for years and years. Another race where Jack Hewitt drove the Briscoe #5 to a 1984 win coming from the tail still registers as an epic to me.
It's also the place where I experienced one of the neatest moments in my life. I was picked to take the media ride with Jack Hewitt in his 2-seater. So I was lucky enough to ride with my hero on the track that I grew up and also able to tell Jack about my mother and how she was a great fan of his and took care of a family of five kids every Saturday night right here at this track. (And for the record, he scared the crap out of me.)
Anyway, I've had a love/hate relationship with Butler over the years, but the truth is the track that I grew up at helped make me the person that I am today.

Jim Fisher