Get out there and have fun

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the Festivals 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.)

Since 1953 the Bishop Tri-County Fair has been a Labor Day weekend ritual for families from Lone Pine (Inyo County) to Lee Vining (Mono County) and Markleeville (Alpine County). But for many, the real cause of excitement is the Destruction Derby, held on the Sunday night of each year's festivities.

Jim Tatum, the CEO of the Tri-County Fair, said the derby's draw is the oddity of witnessing vehicles mangle one another in a large arena filled with people. "It's 2007 and they're tearing up equipment in front of a huge crowd," Tatum said. "That's exciting, people like crashing."

The derby is a place where legends, of a sort, are born, according to Dave Mull, owner of Dave's Auto Parts in Lone Pine, Mull, a ten-year participant and former champion of the event, remembers one night in 1985 in particular as a derby filled with drama, excitement, and for one man, redemption.

Mull's story doesn't start in the tension-filled Mike Boothe Memorial Arena in the Bishop fairgrounds, but, rather, on a spring day in an Independence divorce court earlier that year. Mechanic Dave Daughtry sat across the courtroom from his ex-wife and listened intently as the judge handed over many of the couple's possessions to the woman -including Daughtry's beloved 1972 Mercury Cyclone GT.

The car intrigued the crafty Bill's Automotive mechanic - and his lawyer.

"The judge said I had to give the title and possession of the car to her, that's all he said about it," Daughtry, now an eighteen-year equipment operator for Inyo County, said. The judge's lack of specificity triggered a light in Daughtry, and he approached his lawyer with an idea. Daughtry, a seven-time participant in the derby, decided that the judge had essentially armed him with a soon-to-be-legendary derby vehicle.

"I brought it up with the lawyer, and he said to 'derby it,'" Daughtry said. "That's when things got interesting."
At that point, Daughtry and other mechanics at Bill's Auto Repair decided that they had no choice but to properly prepare the vehicle for its denouement.

"We made it a true hot rod," Daughtry said. "We stripped it down and put in a new engine and transmission. We painted it with about two thousand dollars' worth of paint. It looked more like a stock car than anything you'd see in the derby."

Rick Wuester, a former Lone Pine mechanic who helped build the car, lent credence to the car's alleged class.
"It was such a pretty car, it was smooth as a baby's butt," Wuester said. "We spent a year getting that thing ready. When it was time to take it to Bishop we drove it down 395 and the deputies and police looked the other way, since it wasn't street legal.

"We stopped in front of the local businesses that sponsored the car and took pictures with all of them."
When Daughtry rolled into the arena on a hot, late-summer Bishop night, no one could believe that such a car would be entered in such an event. But for Daughtry, it was his symbolic moment of salvation.

"Everyone starts out the derby trying not to get hit, but I was just looking for collisions," Daughtry said. "After everything that happened, you know, it was total redemption."

After the derby, Daughtry took the wreck back to Lone Pine and prepared the car for its transfer of ownership. The real moment of liberation came, though, when Daughtry's ex-wife arrived to pick up the car with her new boyfriend.
"She showed up looking for it and didn't recognize it in the parking lot out front," Daughtry said. "I told her it was the car right outside that said 'Love you, from Dave,' on the hood. She threw a fit right there and left with it. That's the last I heard of that car."

"I don't remember exactly how the relationship ended - who pissed off who and so forth, but that was a classic example of getting even with an ex-wife," Mull said.

"He didn't win that derby, but he left to a standing ovation. It's a night we will remember around here for a long time."