🏁 A Fictional Historical Interview with Marty Himes
Travel in Time with Dan | Bay Shore, Long Island, New York
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. Marty Himes was a real person who passed away in October 2023. This imagined conversation is written as a tribute to his life, passion, and legacy. The facts about racing history and the museum are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, inspired by Marty’s remarkable story.
📍 Setting: The Himes Race Car Museum (Nostalgia Museum), Bay Shore, Long Island, New York
I pull up to a modest house on a quiet street in Bay Shore. But the moment I step out of the car, I realize there is nothing ordinary about this place. Full-size race cars line the yard. Vintage signs, ticket booths, and decades of memorabilia spill from every corner. Before I even reach the front door, a weathered, warm-eyed man with grease-stained hands and a wide grin waves me over from beside a gleaming old racer.
Dan: Marty! Thanks for having me. I have to say, I wasn’t sure what to expect pulling up to a regular neighborhood, but this place is absolutely incredible. Where do I even look first?
Marty: (laughing) That’s what everybody says! They think they’re coming to see a house and then — boom — history hits ’em right in the face. That’s exactly what I want. I want people to feel it the second they get out of the car.
Dan: How did all of this start? When did you first decide your home was going to become a museum?
Marty: You know, it wasn’t really a decision I made one day sitting at the kitchen table. It just… happened. I’d been racing my whole life. I loved everything about it… the cars, the smell of the fuel, the roar of the engines, the people. And then one day, I started noticing that people were forgetting. The younger generation had no idea what Long Island meant to racing history. No idea about the Vanderbilt Cup. No idea about board track racing. And that bothered me deeply.
Dan: So you made it your mission to preserve it.
Marty: Somebody had to! (smiles) I figured, I’ve got the space… sort of… I’ve got the passion, and I’ve got the connections. So I started collecting. And once word got out, people started showing up at my door with donations. Other racers, collectors, families of old-time drivers — they’d bring me things and say, “Marty, we don’t want this to disappear. You take it.” And I never turned anyone away.
Dan: That’s remarkable. You built most of this collection without spending a fortune on it.
Marty: Almost entirely through donations. People gave me their prized possessions because they trusted me to do right by them. That’s not something I ever took lightly. Every single item in here… every trophy, every photograph, every old ticket stub… somebody loved that once. I’m just the caretaker.
Dan: Let’s talk a little history, because I know you love this stuff. Most people don’t associate Long Island with racing. What do you want visitors to understand about Long Island’s role?
Marty: (eyes lighting up) Oh, this is my favorite part. Long Island was the place! We had the Vanderbilt Cup races right here. William Vanderbilt is the guy who had money, and he had vision, too. He created the Motor Parkway, the first road in America specifically built for automobiles and racing. Not for horses. Not for wagons. For cars! Long Island was ahead of everybody.
Dan: And before organized tracks, racing was happening right out on public streets, wasn’t it?
Marty: Absolutely. People raced horses on the streets for centuries, and when cars came along, drivers just did the same thing. You can imagine how that went with cars, horses, and pedestrians all sharing the same road. It was chaos. (shakes head and chuckles) Eventually, sanity prevailed, and they moved things to proper tracks. But that wild, rebellious spirit never left the sport.
Dan: What about board track racing? I’d never heard of that before I started digging into this history.
Marty: Most people haven’t! They built these massive wooden oval tracks — inspired by bicycle velodromes — with steeply banked corners so cars could fly around them at high speed. Beautiful engineering. Terrible idea with fire. (laughs) Most of them burned right down within a few years. But while they lasted? Spectacular.
Dan: And then came the bootleggers.
Marty: (slaps his knee) Now you’re talking! The moonshiners from Appalachia! Those guys were the best drivers nobody knew about. Running through mountain roads in the pitch dark, engine souped up, cops on their tail. You either learned to drive fast and smart, or you went to jail. When Prohibition ended, those boys brought that talent to the tracks. That’s where stock car racing really came from. Don’t let anybody tell you different.
Dan: Marty, I have to ask you something a little more personal. You poured your heart, your time, and your money into this place. You hoped someone would come along and help you put it in a proper building. That never happened. Does that weigh on you?
Marty: (pauses, looks around quietly) Sure it does! I won’t pretend otherwise. I always dreamed of a real building — somewhere that could hold everything properly, with room for schools to come and kids to walk through and really learn. That would’ve been something.
But you know what? I don’t measure what I did by what didn’t happen. I measure it by the people who walked through that gate and left knowing something they didn’t know before. The kid who went home and told his dad about the Vanderbilt Cup. The old-timer who saw a car he used to watch race and got tears in his eyes. That’s what this was for.
Dan: Passion over profit.
Marty: (nods slowly) Every single day. Nobody paid me to do this. Nobody’s going to put my name on a fancy building. But this history — this history — it mattered. And for as long as I could, I made sure it wasn’t forgotten.
Dan: Marty, what do you want people to take away when they leave here?
Marty: I want them to leave understanding that history isn’t just in textbooks and fancy museums. It’s in backyards. It’s in garages. It’s in the things ordinary people saved because they cared. And I want them to ask themselves… what do you care enough about to preserve? What legacy are you building? Because someday, somebody’s going to be looking back at your life the same way you’re standing here looking at these cars.
Dan: That is a leadership lesson right there.
Marty: (grins and pats the hood of a vintage racer) Everything in life is, if you’re paying attention.
I spent another hour walking the property with Marty, listening to story after story about cars, drivers, and a Long Island that most people never knew existed. As I drove away, I looked in my rearview mirror at that modest house surrounded by history. It hit me then. The greatest museums aren’t always the ones with marble floors and vaulted ceilings. Sometimes, the greatest museum is built by one person who simply refused to let the past disappear.
Rest in peace, Marty Himes. The race was well run. 🏁
Travel in Time with Dan is where travel, history, and leadership come together. Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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