Jackie Boggs

[HoosierDirtFan]

While it's cool to hear everyone's stories with Jackie. I think the best way to honor a fallen driver and you see tracks all over the country do so and that is to have a memorial race in their honor and have a Boggs.
20 years ago Jack passed away, a few years back Randy Boggs passed away, and now Jackie.
Just think it would be cool to see a track do a Boggs Family Memorial race.
Always will carry a certain amount of respect for the Blue Collar Racer that bust their butts weather it's a good night or a bad night.
It's suck when you lose some one; but it's event harder when you lose good hearted people like Jackie was to the race fans.
There are a bunch of driver auctioning off door panels. Hope to see folks go support them as we do for any fallen member of the racing community - Dustin Linville being one of them auctioning off a panel from his 2012 car he ran during the World 100 weekend.

[HoosierDirtFan]

Jackie Boggs - Eldora - 2014 World 100 Heat Race #1 win.

https://www.facebook.com/DirtonDirt/videos/vb.185724052735/273987463882887/?type=2&theater

[3 wide]

Great heat race his father Jack was a real runner too

[Bill31]

Graphic Creations
YehteiSrrtcspteemrdnoahufnny nacst ohr12:l4t0t lSPedSM ·
($2800 current bid/ anonymous)
Jackie gave me something that was very important to him. We designed and wrapped his 30th Anniversary car, and when it came off he gave us the left side door. The left side was the most desirable side (in my opinion) - and he let us have it. There is only one other left side door in existence, and it resides in Jackie's shop. I told Andi that I felt like Jackie would be pleased if that door could help his family in some way. We have decided that we are going to part ways with the door.
From now until Sunday we will be taking bids here on Facebook. Simply leave a comment with your bid amount. We'll start the bidding at $400. I'll post updates of the current bid as often as possible at the top of this post. The highest bid at 6:00pm on Sunday evening will win the Jackie Boggs 30th Anniversary door. Every dollar that is raised will go to Jackie's family. Every tried and true Jackie Boggs fan knows the significance of this door, and the 30th Anniversary car. You now know that the time has come that it can have a significance/value far greater to his family. This is your chance to own a piece of Jackie Boggs history....a part of his legacy. It's also your chance to make a difference in the lives of those he cared about the most.
Bids posted here are valid. If you prefer to bid anonymously, send us a private message with your bid amount. We will post it for you. Once the auction has ended, you can make arrangements with me to get the door. You can pay in cash, paypal, or with a credit card.
Lastly - please feel free to share to your page so that we can make sure that every 4B fan has a chance to participate. Thank you all for being so generous at a time that it matters most. #4B4Ever

[Bill31]

^^^^^ Go to Graphic Creations facebook page ^^^^^

[bc12]

RIP. That's far too soon.

[chupp n bloomer fan]

Audie Swartz DoD article

Man, that’s a dam good article. Right at a tearjerker too.

[francisfan]

That was a top notch article.. Thanks Audie..

[MadDad Racing]

That was a top notch article.. Thanks Audie..

Any chance of someone posting that article on here for the non-subscribers of DoD? Thanks..

[Kromulous]

Ive been to several of Swartz's Chassis Seminars, and he always told stories of Jackie with great fondness. Im sure Audie is really tore up over this news. Prayers to all, RIP Jackie Boggs, you were one of a kind !

https://www.dirtondirt.com/story_11365.html

I dont think that was a members only thing, posted as a free to read...

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Monday was an absolutely excruciating ordeal for Audie Swartz. The veteran racer and chassis builder tried to go about his business in his Minford, Ohio, shop, but all he could think about was the heartbreaking fact that he wasn’t going to pick up his phone and hear his best buddy Jackie Boggs’s voice. | Slideshow

Boggs — Swartz’s dear friend, a Dirt Late Model driver he considers “closer to me than my own brother” — had died two days earlier, on Oct. 24, of an apparent heart attack at the age of 51. The tragic news that was hard enough for Swartz to grasp on Saturday became even more real when he didn’t begin the new week by conversing with Boggs.

“It’s rough,” Swartz said, his voice cracking and tears welling up in his eyes as he spoke on Wednesday morning. “That phone call … I told my wife, I said, ‘This Monday was one of the first Mondays that I never got a call (from Boggs).’ I talked to him every week, sometimes every day. And sometimes the call wasn’t about racing. A lot of times it wasn’t at all. Sometimes he’d just have to unload about family or other stuff, but he didn’t have anybody else to talk to and he wasn’t a people person. He had his own little circle more or less, and you were invited into it if you’d accept it.”

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Swartz, 56, was one of those select people Boggs included in his circle of trust. They first became acquainted some 35 years ago, in the mid-‘80s when they were fresh-faced youngsters who had famous fathers — dirt-track legends Charlie Swartz and Jack Boggs — and similar upbringings. Their fathers were bitter rivals on the track but they became fast friends, and for the better part of the last three decades they’ve been virtually inseparable with Boggs almost exclusively driving race cars built by Swartz and Swartz guiding his pal from Grayson, Ky., to a successful career filled with victories big and small.

Their special bond meant that Swartz was one of the first to receive word of Swartz’s passing on Saturday. Answering his phone to hear the circumstances surrounding Boggs’s death knocked him down with the force of a head-on trip into a concrete wall.

“He actually had a car in his trailer — not his, just a customer car — and I think they were going to take (the client) down to this little racetrack in Kentucky,” Swartz said. “He got down around Winchester, Ky., and I guess just got to feeling really bad — I’m not 100 percent because I didn’t want to bother Andy (Boggs’s longtime girlfriend Andrea Kelley) and them this week (for more details) — so he let Ashley drive, his girl who takes care of the video footage for him, and he said, ‘I’m gonna go back there and lay down.’ ”

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Boggs’s condition prompted those accompanying him to stop at Clark Regional Medical Center in Winchester, Ky., where he was pronounced dead.

“They were headed to a racetrack,” Swartz said with no small bit of irony. “I always said to him, ‘You’re late for everything,’ and I was just thinking about it — he actually passed on race day, and he was always last to get there, and he passed on the last day of the week. And he was going to help somebody. He wasn’t racing his own car. He took his own rig and put somebody else’s car in it.”

As Swartz noted, “That was Jackie — always helping everybody.” It’s also why his loss will hit the local racing community so hard.

“Everybody is gonna miss him,” Swartz said. “Everybody at the racetrack, if they’ve met him before, or borrowed something from him, they’re gonna miss him.”

Swartz will certainly think of Boggs every day. It’s impossible for him to feel any other way after all they’ve been through together.

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

Their connection transformed from racetrack friends to something much more in 1991. With Boggs attempting to find his own way in racing — his Hall of Fame father applied the tough-love approach to his son’s aspirations — he looked to Swartz and his fledgling chassis shop for assistance.

“I had been building cars since ’87, but in ’91 he called me and he said, ‘What do you got over there for a car? I just need something to get racing with,’ ” Swartz recalled. “I said, ‘Jackie, I’m not in a position to do anything. I don’t have that kind of money.’ He said, ‘I didn’t ask you to give me something. Just … what do you got?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have any new ones. I’m backlogged right at the minute.’ And he said, ‘Son’ — we’re like brothers and he’s about five years younger than me, but he’d always call me son — ‘Listen, it don’t got to be a new one. You got something wrecked that you can fix for me?’ I said, ‘Well, I got a car sitting here out of Mansfield that Jim Cushing drove and it needs a front clip on it.’ And I didn’t say a word, and he just said, ‘Well, if you just put a front clip on it, I’ll give you 20 percent of my winnings (earned with the car).’ I thought there for just a second, and I said, ‘I’ll tell you what … I’ll get it done.’ I got this thing done, and that 20 percent at the end of that year … I never put an amount to it, but it was a lot.

[MasterSbilt_Racer]

And from that point … I told him when that year was done, I said, ‘Jackie, here’s your deal — as long as you’re with me, as long as you’re alive, the only thing that will change it is if you die on me. I’m gonna take care of your chassis from here on, and anything else I can do, I’ll do if I can. And that was his deal, and we just took off. I never took another dime (from Boggs). I thought, I’m just gonna try to help this guy.

“He was just so persistent about wanting to go race,” he continued. “He knew he could do it, he felt like he could do it, and he was gonna do it. So I got him that car, and the very next year we won a bunch of races.”

Boggs even began to “go in Jack’s back door on a local weekend and wear Jack out,” Swartz said of Jackie, whose success racing against his father on the home front prompted the elder Boggs to put Jackie in one of his cars for short stretches. “Jackie left me like twice there (during the ‘90s),” Swartz said. “Well, he didn’t leave me, but he had to because I knew his situation (racing for his father).”

Come the winter of 1999, Jackie placed another call to Swartz that would effectively lead them to racing together for the rest of Boggs’s life.