Lucky Number : Smith Has ‘43’ on His Race Car, but 16, 18, 28, 30, 34 and 37 Are What Paid for It

‘When we win the lottery, we’re going to. . . .”

How many times have you heard someone say that?

Followed by, “take a trip around the world,” or “buy a place in Hawaii,” or “buy Mom a new house and put aside the kids’ college tuition” or. . . .

Kenny and Marylou Smith of El Monte hit it big in Super Lotto, winning $22.8 million in 1994. Every Sept. 17 until 2014, they get a check for $883,217 from the state of California.

And so they’re off to see the world?

Nope. They formed Quick Pick Motorsports and bought race cars for Kenny to drive.

“We’ve always gone racing,” said Marylou, the registered owner of the No. 43 Chevrolet her husband drives in Winston West races, and the No. 43 Ford he runs on smaller California tracks, such as Cajon, Madera, Blythe and Kern County. “It’s what we’ve always wanted to do, so why stop now?”

No argument from the family driver.

“If it wasn’t for the race cars, I’d go nuts,” Kenny Smith said. “There’s nothing worse than boredom.”

Kenny was racing--and winning--at Saugus Speedway the night his numbers--16, 18, 28, 30, 34, 37--came up.

At the time, there was a “For Sale” sign on the Ford Kenny was driving in what he feared was his farewell to racing. That night he won the trophy dash, a heat and the main event, clinching the track’s Pro Stock championship.

“We were in hock, about to lose everything, trying to keep our repair shop going,” Smith recalled. “We’d refinanced our house [and] had sold everything we could, except the race car. We were six months behind on our shop rent and about to have our home foreclosed. The race car was all we had left, and it was for sale.”

The Smiths were at work the following Monday morning in their automotive repair shop in Azusa. They hadn’t bothered to check the numbers on the tickets Marylou had bought because they had heard on the radio that the winning numbers were sold in Azusa.

“We bought the tickets at Callahan’s [restaurant] and we thought it was in Irwindale, so we didn’t pay much attention to it,” Kenny said. “Monday morning, I was ordering parts. It was about 10:35 when someone said, ‘Did you hear about the guy in Azusa who won $22 million and hasn’t shown up to claim it? Did you buy tickets?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we get five bucks’ worth every week.’

“Then Marylou got a call from Callahan’s, asking if we’d checked our numbers.

“There was a Lotto guy there who said the winning ticket came from their place. He said he wanted to know if it could be ours. The tickets were in my pocket, so I handed them to Marylou. She’d bought 10, so they started reading her the numbers. When she heard the sixth number--it was on the very first series--she started jumping up and down, screaming. I told her to calm down, I was trying to talk to a customer.

“She said, ‘Listen to this guy on the phone.’ I closed the window, told the customer to wait a minute [and said], ‘I think we won the lottery.’

“[The man on the phone] read the numbers off again--I was just numb. You know, you can’t believe it. You keep checking and rechecking and rechecking some more.”

The winning ticket soon took on a life of its own.

“People wanted to touch it, to look at it, like they look at a new baby,” said Marylou. “We guarded it with our life. It was like it was alive and we had to protect it.”

Then the Smiths indulged themselves, hiring a stretch limo and wearing matching T-shirts from Callahan’s when they turned in their ticket at the state lottery office in Whittier.

“We were blessed, truly blessed,” Marylou says.

Their daughter, Kimberly, who also worked in the Azusa repair shop, was vacationing at the beach.

“Mom called and told me we’d won the lottery,” she said, “I kept screaming, ‘No way! No way!’ I was pregnant and I thought I was going to have the baby right there.”

Winning all that money is nice, and the Smiths aren’t complaining, but there have been some dark moments too.

“After we’d paid off all the bills and taken a few days off, I had to get back to work to have something to do,” Smith said. “One hot day, I finished a brake job and was all sweaty and greasy. I handed the customer the bill and he said, ‘You gonna charge me that? With all the money you got?’ I kept hearing so much talk like that that I closed up the shop.”

Smith then opened a race garage in Irwindale, where he and four or five other car owners worked on their equipment. But as with his repair business, he found that some people were looking for a free ride.

The Smith’s answer was not to move from their roots next to the El Monte airport, where Kenny could remember walking to his grandfather’s house on dirt roads when he was a small boy, but to add a story to their tract house and build a three-car racing garage in the backyard.

“We thought about moving, but we’ve lived in the same house since 1971 and we just didn’t want to leave,” Marylou said. “So we turned a $125,000 tract house into a $350,000 home.”

Upstairs are an office for Kimberly, a game room-museum with a shrine to Richard Petty’s No. 43 for Marylou and a plush place for Kenny to relax after working on his cars.

Marylou Smith is an unabashed Petty groupie.

“All our cars have been No. 43, and they were always red and blue--Petty’s colors--until now,” she said. “We’re still going to be 43, but the new Quick Pick Motorsports colors are teal and yellow.”

The house is yellow with teal trim.

“We’re still in the twilight zone,” Marylou said. “We put some money away for after the 20 years. We took a cruise and bought a place on the Colorado River, where we go water-skiing and ride our Ski-Doos. It’s a racing environment there too. We’re near Robby Gordon, Walker Evans, Parnelli Jones and Paul Tracy.

“Other than that, our lives revolve around the race cars.”

Smith’s car is easy to spot. It has “Thanks, California Lottery” on the hood, surrounded by balls with the winning numbers.

“Going racing is the same as staying in the same house,” Kenny said. “We’ve been married 32 years and we’ve always raced. It’s what we’ve always wanted, so why stop now?

“This has always been sort of a racing neighborhood. I remember, when I was probably 6 or 7, I hung around Billy Wilkerson’s house, and when Ontario Motor Speedway was going, Rodger Ward lived down the street.”

Wilkerson is a former California Racing Assn. champion and car owner. Ward is a two-time Indianapolis 500 winner.

Smith had always been a low-bucks racer, but a winning one.

The Pro Stock title he won Sept. 17, 1994, was his eleventh since he began drag racing at the old San Gabriel strip when he was 16. He drove an A fuel dragster and clocked 7.50 seconds for running the quarter mile at 198 mph.

“I quit drag racing because it got too expensive and tried stock cars,” he said. “In 1971, I started with a claimer stock car at Speedway 605 in Irwindale and the Orange Show in San Berdoo. I was running Friday and Saturday nights and won my first championship in a ’58 Ford at Speedway 605. I ran a lot at Ascot Park and Corona before they were torn down.

“Marylou still holds the one-lap record for women at 605. She did it in a powder puff race and then the track closed. So she’s still got it.”

Smith might have used up his luck in the lottery, because he hasn’t had much of it this season on the Winston West circuit. His best finish was a sixth in a wreck-filled race at Tucson.

“Dad was awesome, dodging cars and driving through all the wrecks and debris,” Kimberly said.

After a couple of top-10 finishes early in the season, Smith bought a Chevy Monte Carlo, complete with a new engine, from former racer John Krebs for $65,000.

In his first outing, at Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield, the engine failed in practice and Smith did not make the race. In last week’s Cactus Clash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, he lost his clutch and finished 19th.

His next start will be Saturday in the Auto Club 200 on the new two-mile oval at California Speedway.

“The bigger the track the better,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to that one. I always do better on the big tracks. I just missed setting fast time for a sportsman race at the old Ontario track.”

After six races, Smith is 11th in points and fifth in rookie-of-the-year standings. Gary Smith of Canada--no relation--leads in both after winning at Las Vegas.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Race Weekend at a Glance

* SATURDAY: Auto Club 200 Winston West Race, noon, Channel 7; Pontiac/True Value IROC Race, 5 p.m.

* SUNDAY: California 500, 11 a.m., Channel 7