Full Throttle

Via AUDREY PARENTE, Staff Writer for News Journal Online.

Dewayne “Tiny” Lund, a NASCAR legend, towered at 6-foot-5, weighed 270 pounds and had fingers big as broom handles.

The North Carolina driver’s son, Chris Lund, was 5 years old when Tiny died in a race car crash at Talladega Superspeedway in 1975. Chris was too young to remember his father pulling a driver from a burning sports car, winning a Daytona 500 and capturing three Grand American Championship titles.

“He was a giant of a guy. When I looked up, he went on and on and on,” Chris Lund says. “He was a great and gentle guy.”

But Chris does recall a diamond championship ring awarded his father for winning the Grand National East division in 1973 — because it was a gift for his 18h birthday from his mother, Wanda Lund-Early.

“I didn’t have it long,” says Chris, who was attending Johnson and Wales Culinary School in Charleston, S. C., at the time. “We went out for my birthday on the weekend on Charleston Harbor on a party barge, and I had it off and we hit a little swell.”

The ring slipped out of his grasp and into the ocean.

“I was pretty crushed about losing something like that. I have a lot of reminders of my father, but none that I could have with me every day,” he says.

Chris and his mom didn’t know that about five years ago the ring emerged from the sea, found by a woman named Dawn, who describes herself as a jeweler and historian.

“I am a lifelong resident of Charleston, and every day I take a walk around the battery — which is a wall that holds back the ocean from the city, put in place centuries ago. It’s several miles long. There’s a tide, but I don’t know how the ring could end up on the battery, out of the water,” Dawn says. She asked during a phone interview that her last name not be used.

“I picked it up and put it in my pocket. It literally would fit on the end of a broomstick. It was heavy white gold — probably 10 times the weight of a regular ring — and inside it said ‘Tiny Lund,’ ” she says. “I tried to find a Lund family, but I never found anyone, so I put the ring in a box with broken and antique jewelry I plan to restore when I am in the mood.”

About a month ago Dawn took some things out of the box, and this time she looked at the ring and got on the computer.

“When I put in ‘Tiny Lund,’ an address came up for the Talladega Hall of Fame for NASCAR,” she says. “I had no idea what NASCAR was at all, but I called and explained what I had.”

Jim Freeman, executive director of Talladega’s International Motor Sports Hall of Fame says: “The lady asked me if I knew anything about it. She described the ring and I told her I knew Tiny’s widow and I put them in touch.”

Jim Hunter, a NASCAR vice president who has been around the sport for 38 years, says it was commonplace at the time to give championship rings. Buz McKim, former head archivist for International Speedway Corp., now NASCAR coordinator of statistic services, says the ring likely was presented during a championship banquet after the 1973 season ended.

Wanda Lund-Early, Tiny’s widow, of Waynesville, N.C., says when her son, Chris, was a toddler, “Tiny would let him play with the ring to calm him.” She thought the ring would be meaningful for her son to keep and was upset when Chris lost it after his 18th birthday.

When a woman phoned her Waynesville, N.C., home several weeks ago and described the ring, she told her: “It couldn’t be Tiny’s ring.” But the caller insisted on mailing the ring to Wanda.

“When I opened it, I fell to my knees screaming and crying,” Wanda Lund-Early says. “I knew Chris was coming home and it was going to be his 35th birthday present.”

Over the weekend Chris traveled to North Carolina from his home in Atlanta to celebrate his birthday. His mom brought out a box.

She asked him to open it.

Chris says he was amazed at what he saw. “It was kind of hard to process something that seemed an impossibility. I said, ‘What? How?’ and then went back to ‘What?’ ”

Chris says he doesn’t think he’ll lose the ring again.

“I’m wearing it, and it fits. I’m 6-foot-2 and 260 pounds.”