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“Don’t let anyone convince you,” warns Bill Blair Jr. of High Point, “that Sam Rice was a saint, because he wasn’t.”

Blair remembers a man who talked big, hauled booze, got caught for tax evasion, gambled and didn’t pay debts, including money owed to Blair’s late father, a pioneer NASCAR race driver.

Indeed, some of those early race car drivers were rascals.

Rice deserves mention in Greensboro’s history because during the late 1940s and 1950s, he owned and worked on race cars in a simple wood garage with barnlike doors that still stands behind a big house at 411 E. Hendrix St. in the Charles B. Aycock Neighborhood.

Blair Jr. concedes that not all of Rice’s doings were shady. He backed some winners. Rice owned and prepared in the East Hendrix garage a 1949 Oldsmobile that future NASCAR legend Glenn “Fireball” Roberts, drove to victory in a ’49 race at a dirt track near Hillsborough.

Bill Blair Sr. won the first of his three NASCAR victories driving a Rice-owned 1950 Mercury at a dirt track race in 1950 in Vernon, N.Y. But Blair Jr. says his dad, not Rice, prepared the car because he was a far better mechanic.

In those days, drivers piloted genuine “stock” cars — the kind the public could buy at dealerships. Mechanics modified the cars to go faster.

Joe Moineau of Greensboro, Rice’s stepson, says Rice “was a good decent man,” and was especially good to his mother. He concedes Rice hauled moonshine at one time but wasn’t a drinker himself.

Moineau is convinced Rice owned and worked on a particular 1953 Oldsmobile Super 88 in the Hendrix Street garage. Blair Sr. drove that car to victory in a 160-mile, 1953 NASCAR Grand National Race, averaging 89.5 miles an hour, on the old beach course track at Daytona Beach.

Not exactly, Blair Jr. declares. He says his father bought the winning Olds from a High Point dealer and prepared it himself. Rice, he says, was supposed to have had some involvement but apparently backed out.

Rice also occasionally drove the cars he owned. He finished fourth, good for $300, at a dirt track race in Charlotte in 1949, one of the earliest NASCAR races. Later that year, he again finished fourth and made $300 in a race in Pittsburgh .

Rice and his wife, the former Mary Elizabeth Poindexter, lived in the Hendrix Street house, inherited from Mary’s father, well-known Greensboro druggist Grover Poindexter. As Rice worked in the garage and under the big shade trees nearby, steam locomotives sped by smoking up the backyard.

“Drivers were always coming through the house,” says Moineau, 73, who works at Bessemer Tire Co. on East Bessemer Avenue. “Sam was a master mechanic.”

Some drivers, particularly another future great, Curtis Turner, often stayed for dinner because “mama was a good cook,” says Moineau. His mother worked for NASCAR in its northern office above Deal Printing Co., still in business at 616 S. Elm St., Moineau says.

Blair Jr. says Mary Rice was a kind, trusting woman. Blair would accompany his father to Greensboro, where they’d made stops at Rice’s garage and at one on North Edgeworth Street belonging to Bill Sockwell, who also prepared race cars.

John Mandrano, who now owns and rents out the Hendrix Street house, says he found trim from 1940s and 1950s era cars and kept pieces as souvenirs.

Few people in the Aycock neighborhood today know that early NASCAR race cars were prepped for races in East Hendrix garage. The fact enhances Aycock’s designation as one of Greensboro’s three municipally approved historic districts.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net