The 4th Turn: December 12, 2025 (Memories of Lyle)
~ By Tom Boggie
Do you know what I hate the most about getting old?
I keep losing more friends.
That thought hit me again Wednesday when I learned that Albany-Saratoga Speedway promoter Lyle DeVore has passed away after a long and often painful battle with cancer.
I’ve made a lot of acquaintances since I first began covering dirt track racing in 1980, but the number of real friends, people who I hung out with away from work, were few and far between.
Lyle was one of them.
We first crossed paths in the late 1990s. At that time, Lyle thought his future had been laid out for him. He had become good friends with Alex Friesen, who was on a meteoric rise in dirt track racing, and when Friesen took over Fulton and Utica-Rome speedways during the 1995-96 offseason, Lyle moved to the Syracuse area to help Alex run the tracks.
But Friesen died tragically that winter, in a snowmobile accident, and Lyle, who literally grew up at Albany-Saratoga Speedway, found himself back at his “home,” working for C.J. Richards.
I was going through a divorce at the time and was also working part-time at Albany-Saratoga because I needed the extra cash. On Saturday mornings, Lyle and I would both be in Malta, him grooming the track and me faxing out race results from the night before, and we usually finished about the same time. Two single guys, cold beer, a lot of time on our hands. What could go wrong?
I won’t go into a lot of detail about some of the wild (and stupid) things we did together because, frankly, it’s better to leave some things unsaid. But I remember vividly one summer Saturday afternoon. The racing the night before had included an enduro, and one of the things we always did after an enduro was drag all the disabled cars to one end of the pits so a salvage company could pick them up. We had been enjoying a couple of beers while wrangling the enduro cars with Dan Archer and Bob Prunier, and when Lyle found a car with keys still in the ignition, he started it up and headed out on the track.
I jumped into the pace truck and followed him out and we started turning some laps. As we were coming down the backstretch, we saw a woman standing on the edge of the third turn, waving her arms.
That would be Mrs. Dooley. At that time, there was no development off the third turn, and Mrs. Dooley’s house was the closest dwelling to the track. She was a staunch opponent of the speedway and it wasn’t uncommon for her to call the town office if she had a gripe.
Lyle and I quickly pulled into the pits and he figured Mrs. Dooley would be calling C.J. on Monday morning and lodging a complaint about people racing around the track on a Saturday.
I asked Dan and Bob if one of them had a screwdriver, snatched the tool and headed back out on the track. As I was walking down to the third turn, I would occasionally bend down, push the screwdriver into the clay and dig around a bit.
When I got to Mrs. Dooley, she said, “You know you shouldn’t be racing on Saturdays.”
I put on my best innocent face and told her that a lot of fans in the stands on Friday night had complained about getting hit with rocks and the only way for us to find the rocks was to get in a couple of laps at speed and move some of the clay around. Luckily, I looked down and saw a good-sized rock, dug it out and said, “See?” She seemed satisfied, and walked home.
When I got back to the pits, Lyle asked me what I had told her. I told him the story about rocks, and the four of us spent about a half-hour walking around the track, just in case she was looking.
I didn’t see a whole lot of Lyle after 2000, when he went to work for Howie Commander at Lebanon Valley. I was the sports editor of the Daily Gazette by then, so I was in the office on Friday nights and Lyle was committed to the Valley on Saturdays. But on my infrequent visits to the Valley, we would usually get a beer in the clubhouse after the races.
The next time I really heard from Lyle was in the spring of 2012, after C.J. had died in February and Commander leased the track from the Richards family.
Lyle called me to tell me I was fired. Now remember, I had been working for first C.J. and then his son, Bruce, since about 1996. So why was I getting fired? Lyle told me that he could get someone from the Lebanon Valley grounds crew to do the same jobs I was doing for a fraction of the price I was getting from Bruce.
So I was out.
And I stayed out, until 2018. JoAnn Davies had been doing the press releases for the track and decided she didn’t want to do them on a fulltime basis anymore (trust me. It’s not a glamorous job). I don’t remember if Lyle called me or JoAnn called me, but I said I couldn’t take JoAnn’s place until June. I was going to retire from the Gazette in June and couldn’t be at the track every Friday until then. Lyle and I sat down, negotiated a deal which included bringing back The 4th Turn column, and I’ve been there every Friday night since.
And Lyle and I fell right back into step, just like we always did. He was still irascible, I was still cynical and the team was back together.
I’ll think about Lyle every time I watch a Washington Capitals game. It makes me smile to know that he saw Alex Ovechkin break Wayne Gretzky’s record for career goals in the NHL. And I’ll think about him when I see someone guzzling down a can of Coors Light.
You never want to see someone die, but I’m glad Lyle isn’t suffering anymore. All the surgeries and chemo treatments he had since being diagnosed with cancer in December 2021 took their toll on him, physically and mentally. If there was time on Friday nights, we would usually grab a quick beer in the tower before I left the track and one night last year, when he was literally worn out, I asked him why he didn’t get someone else to groom the track on Thursday and Friday. He said that taking care of the track was one of the few things that got him out of bed in the morning. It was the only routine that took his mind off the battle he was going through.
Death is inevitable. No one can cheat it. But I hate losing my friends.
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