My first meeting with Jay was a surprise. Before a 1959 race at Three Rivers (Knoxville, NOA) another
AristoCraft/Mark 58A went by me like I was tied to a pole. I ran about 40 mph, he must have been running 45.
There was no body, only a head barely visible from the rear, and the boat looked like mine but strange. Turned
out it was 12', not 14'! That was Jay Blake Cox at about age 12. He was a small kid, took me to meet his parents. He
raced the first time next year, took over for a driver who'd been banned and won the Ft. Loudon 100 mile Marathon
in 40-50 with a Lakeflite/Mark 58A. Jay lived in Maryville and grew up knowing Paul, who was then in Alcoa. Jay's dad,
an Alcoa machinist, made us the first transom jacks in '59. Jay never drove the wooden Allisons but drove the first
13' glass Allison with Merc 500 in 40-50 in 1961. I think he won his class at the Orange Bowl Regatta in the early
1960s. We reconnected in 1976 when i got back into racing and we straightedged many a winning Allison in his back yard
in the Smokies foothills outside Maryville. After I won both EP nationals in 1977 he wanted to drive, so I
bought an old 13' Allison/1975 Stinger from Louis Collins (paid for by Jay) and rebuilt the motor. Meatball had run that rig too, and Meatball
Murray belongs on this list. Jay (#39) ran mainly NOA but won the APBA EP cc Nationals in 1978, and won GP driving Paul's
old 1969 wide pad 14' with a Mariner 80 in 1979. In Oct. 1980 he set the GP record at nearly 74 mph with an AllisonXR-14/Merc 850XS at
Waco. The rest is history.
Photos
1. Eufaula 1979, Jay's #39 and my 853
2. Jay's horsetrading position, one foot on the trailer yakking away
3. Jay at age 13 (bermudas, no shirt) at Three Rivers, 1960. Two wooden
Allisons in background, one with Johnson 75, another with twin Scott 60s.
4. Allison factory 1977 before Eufaula. My EP rig and the GP boat Jay rigged
for me to drive. The GP boat was 7 sec/lap faster than anything on the course
but the transom jack broke at the start so I watched the race from the innfield.
Jay's favorite activity was horsetrading with one foot on a boat trailer. He had a good Tennessee sense of humor. His favorite saying of someone who looked
competitive was 'That boy didn't drive all the way down here to go 'bar' huntin' with a switch!'. After following Edgar in a rental car at Guntersville Jay walked up and asked him 'Edgar, did you get your drivers' license at Sears!?' Around 1985 Jay built a tunnel bass boat that ran, then sold the company. The name 'Shadow' belied the origin, it was molded from a wrecked STV. By that time we'd pretty much parted again. One last tale. Jay was a story teller. In 1979 or so on the way home from Guntersville (I was staying over the border in Ky. those summers) Jay started telling a
tale as we left the race site, it went on and on, and as if magically the tale ended just as I pulled into his driveway at 1 AM. I had another hour and 45 min. to go.
