Remembering Del..............You will be Missed

After battling homelessness and drugs, a former racing champion reaches out to others in need.
GARDEN GROVE He is slowing now, this man who prefers to race, the pickup truck barely creeping. This is a ride that asks for your patience.
   If the details were checkered flags, three-foot tall trophies and Saturday nights spent spinning around flood-lit ovals, that would be one thing. That would be easy. But these details? They require a little time.
   Here, the one-time star of a Taco Bell commercial is talking about dining from a Dumpster. He is telling you it wasn't the alcohol, but the drugs. He is recalling the nights when he marveled at the splendor of Crystal Cathedral, looked into the distance, between the trees, traced the silhouette of that glorious tower puncturing the moonlight, then rolled over in bed, lowering his head onto the dirt.
   "That's the Italian place where I used to get the spaghetti out of the garbage because it was still warm," Del Dalrymple says. He turns a corner. "That place over there used to put bags of doughnuts in the trash." Turns another corner. "I slept in that parking lot one night, right there, against that fence."
   You're in the passenger seat today because he wants you there, wants you to understand the scorching shame of having to defecate outdoors, then bury it like a dog.
   More than that, though, you're there because no matter how heavy, the details don't outweigh the lesson he learned and now wishes to teach you.
"To come back from where he was, from not knowing where his next meal would come from, from not even eating for days, it's pretty much a miracle." -- Childhood friend Earl Stubbs.
   The ride starts back at the beginning, back to Buena Park High. With the kid who played baseball growing up with future Angel Mike Witt. With the nephew of Clay Dalrymple, a major leaguer for 12 seasons starting in 1960.
Clay's brother, Dal, wasn't into baseball. He liked cars, especially ones he could make go fast. He raced stock cars all over Southern California, fell in love with his sport and, along the way, out of love with his wife, Betty. The two divorced when their son was still young.
   But there was one thing Dal didn't like about racing -- the idea of that son, his only son, the kid everyone called "Little D," doing it, too. He had crashed often enough, snapped enough bones, to realize no father should wish this fate on his boy.
So, when Dal was out in the garage working on his cars and Del would try to join him, "Little D" always knew the door between them would be locked.
"He was afraid for me, I guess," says Dalrymple, now 47. "He thought racing was too dangerous. My dad was a great man, but you know how kids can be. All I wanted to do was race. I got into it to impress my dad...that didn't work out so well."
   By 17, Dalrymple was racing, and his father even began to help. But one month after the accident, the one in which his seat broke loose, resulting in Dalrymple losing his helmet and breaking three bones, one of which was in his neck, his dad left for good, heading to Idaho. Spooked, he was, maybe by the injuries or the fact he had been the one responsible for welding the seat in place.
   After months of recovery, Dalrymple returned to racing, becoming a Late Model stock champion at local tracks and winning points titles. He was good and he knew it, more than anyone else did.
After races, when his mother would thank God her son was safe, Dalrymple would tell her: "God wasn't in that car, Mom. That was me, just me." Speaking now, he says, "I was a jerk, a flat, all-out jerk."
   He had a girlfriend, Bobby Lippen, the blond, green-eyed daughter of a racing family, and plans to marry her. It was the spring of 1988 now, another race season still young, and as far as Dalrymple had it figured, he was living life in front of the pack, the view every driver wants.
   Within a couple weeks' time, however, this man who says he has broken every bone in his body "at least once" was shattered. First, Dalrymple was putting one of his best friends in a box, the result of a racing accident in Long Beach. The two buddies often had talked about making it big, about how if one of them did, he'd bring the other along with him. Then, driving home in Riverside, Lippen swerved to avoid another car, hit a telephone pole and was killed. It was one week before the couple was to wed.
   All this death made it impossible for Dalrymple to see the point of life. He swallowed a handful of pills and woke up covered in vomit. Later, he broke a bottle and tried to gash his wrists.
   He never returned to the house he and Lippen had been sharing. Dalrymple stopped racing the day she died.
   "I saw the crap he went through, the pain. I had people showing up trying to repossess parts from cars I owned, thinking they belonged to him. The word I would use for Del now is 'revived.' He has a lot to prove to a lot of people, and he's doing it today." -- Car owner Kenny Mann.
   Dalrymple next turned to another version of suicide, cocaine. His slide was only sped up by the phone call in 1990 telling him the brain cancer had taken his father. Call his sister or half-sister for support? He'd never felt particularly close to them, least of all now.
   Dalrymple eventually lost everything, including his dying mother, who, battling Alzheimer's, moved to Texas to live with a friend. The family house was gone next. On the good nights, he would sleep in people's garages as payment for doing chores.
   He had a night job, as well, ferrying dope from supplier to buyer in exchange for a small stash of his own. This was important, because Dalrymple learned he'd better be ready to snort or smoke his breakfast if he wasn't going to succeed at killing himself.
   "When you wake up," he says, "I mean, you have a whole other day to face now."
His home most nights was the corner of Katella and Manchester, where he could sleep safely out of sight between piles of dirt. Then a field, the place now holds a ramp to the 5 Freeway. From there, the gates of Disneyland are less than a mile away.
   On the nights it rained too hard, Dalrymple would hoist himself into a Dumpster, falling among the filth, then closing the lid to try to keep dry. The homeless don't generally sleep much anyway, leery of being robbed of their scant possessions. For Dalrymple, this amounted to a few bags of other people's trash tied to a girl's bicycle also retrieved from the garbage.
That's right, the race car driver who always had lived by horsepower was down to the juice of two weary legs.
"You're always cold," Dalrymple says. "And so lonely. You get to where the only people you know are other homeless people. You're just crying, 'Help me. Help me.' "
   One day, an answer echoed back, coming from a charity car wash, of all things, in the parking lot of a Del Taco, of all places. The Victory Outreach ministry of Anaheim was there again, across from the field Dalrymple considered home, for the third weekend in a row. A sign, he concluded.
   So he took the first step, which isn't as easy as it sounds. Programs like the one at Victory Outreach hand out help, sure, but they also take freedom. To start, they demanded Dalrymple give up his bike.
   What? Were these God-squaders crazy? The bike was the only thing on Earth he owned. Dalrymple walked away, back across the street. After a couple of days, Dalrymple relented, the decision beginning a comeback now nearly a decade old, a journey he describes as a question.
   "How would you try to eat a whale?" Dalrymple asks. "One bite at a time."
   "He was probably as low as someone can go. He just disappeared for six or seven years. But he's a remarkable person now. You'd never know how thin things were for him." -- Former boss Butch Gilliland.
   Dalrymple spent nearly 24 months with Victory Outreach, edging along step-by-step. Up at 5:30 a.m. Chores. Prayer group. More chores. Bible study. For those rehabilitating themselves, piecing together years must be done by the minute. By late 1998, the next step for Dalrymple was moving in with another person trying to find his way back.
   Wanting to show his new roommate where he used to live, Dalrymple returned to his parents' old house in Fullerton. Hung on the giant garage next door, the garage "Little D" used to find locked, was a sign: "For Lease."
   The roommates rented the place, turning one side into two bedrooms, installing a bathroom and starting a metal fabrication shop in the space left over. Dalrymple began accepting every job available, something he still does today, still working out of the same shop.
   "If you had asked me eight years ago where I'd be now, I wouldn't have said here," Dalrymple says. "I would have said dead."
   He also has returned to racing, mostly as a car owner. The guy who went years without a home now has two stock cars, with a third close to half-built. His girlfriend, Candace Muzny, does most of the driving.
   And he has bills, which he manages to pay every month, and corporate sponsors and friends like Jesse James, who gave the world two phenomena: West Coast Choppers and TV's "Monster Garage." James also gave Sandra Bullock a wedding ring, and Dalrymple is friends with her, too. He calls her "Sandy."
   "Everything I've lost, I've gotten back 10 times," Dalrymple says. "I'm just more thankful than I can explain. You can't get all of this on your own. God has blessed me. I could make $100,000 a year and not afford all this. Deals just seem to come up at the right time. Blessings just keep coming."
   The Taco Bell ad, for example. Two years ago, Dalrymple was supposed to be paid $500 for one day, mostly to help set up for a racing scene to be filmed in Irwindale. By the time it was wrapped, he had a speaking part, was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and, after the commercial went national, collected nearly $30,000.
   Maybe because he can't explain his gratitude, Dalrymple chooses to show it. He recently donated 200 old trophies to the Special Olympics, removing the racing placards so the trophies could be reused. When the war began, he removed all the decals from his car, replacing them with "Support Our Troops" across the hood and the names of soldiers fighting in Iraq on the quarter panels.
   He once decorated the hood with the face of a missing child. As a result, the girl was found months later, in Korea. Dalrymple does the public -- working with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, speaking to churches and schools -- and the personal -- picking up a homeless man, buying him dinner.
   "If I had stayed straight, I don't think any of this would be happening," he says. "I used to wonder why I couldn't die. Now I have a heart for people. You do good things and good things come back to you. I wouldn't change a minute of it.
   "Because of what I went through, I can reach so many people now. The homeless, people on drugs, people who've lost loved ones. I've been through all that."
Last month, Dalrymple moved into a house with his girlfriend, two blocks from his shop. He, Candace and their four cats -- Ford, Chevy, Mustang and Chassis.
   "A real house," he says. "For me, that's a lot. An unbelievable lot."
   He has taken you on his victory lap today, retracing the years he spent lapped by life. The death, the dumpsters, the drugs. Not the finish line it appeared to be, just a restart.
jmiller@ocregister.com
Restarting his life

Celebrate The Life of a “Friend”

   Please join the Family & Friends of Del Dalrymple Sunday December 9^th, at noon as we celebrate his life. Del, racer, team owner, crew chief, and good friend of Southern California racing passed away Thanksgiving Day November 22nd, 2007.
   Del’s fiancée, Candace Muzny would like to invite Irwindale fans, fellow racers and their families to join her on the Irwindale Speedway infield to say our farewell’s the way Del would have wanted. Racers are encouraged to bring their cars if you wish to participate in a parade lap to conclude the services.
   Following the service at Irwindale Speedway Dec. 9th and Noon, everyone is invited to join Candace at their sponsor’s restaurant Rockin’ Taco, in the city of Fullerton for a celebration dinner.

The Rockin’ Taco Cantina
http://www.rockintaco.com/
111 Harbor Blvd.
Fullerton, Ca. 92832
(714)525-8226

The Celebration of Del’s Life will take place rain or shine. For more information please check ^{www.candaceracing.com}