JOLIET, ILL. - Weathered like a favorite leather jacket, crinkled with lines of experience but resilient to the ravages of age, Richard Petty still stands tall.

His face is stock car racing's Rushmore. His wraparound sunglasses and custom-made cowboy hat -- resplendent with feathered accoutrement -- are iconic.

He is a living, breathing trademark.

He is a walking, talking history book.

At 71 years old, "The King" is a fully realized legend.

Petty won 200 Cup races, a number so far beyond logic it almost loses value, and racked up seven championships. The second-generation racer from tiny Level Cross stood for a sporting epoch as the name and the face of his sport, the way Muhammad Ali did for boxing and Arnold Palmer for golf.

It had to start somewhere.

For Petty, the beginning came 50 years ago -- Saturday, July 12 -- on a half-mile dirt track in Columbia, S.C., where generations of the Southeast's finest cut their racing teeth.

Three years earlier Richard had asked his father, stock car pioneer Lee Petty, about driving.

"I'd already done everything there was to do except drive," Richard says. "I'd built cars, I had worked on them, I had painted them, and I had worked in the pits."

He had even attended the first Strictly Stock series race -- Cup's forerunner -- in Charlotte in 1949, having to thumb a ride home after Lee wrecked the car they'd ridden in.

Lee told his 18-year-old son they'd talk about driving when Richard turned 21.

"And if you knew my daddy," Richard says, "you knew that was the end of it."

Birthday celebration

Richard waited until his 21st birthday -- July 2, 1958 -- and brought it up again.

"Daddy said, 'There's a car, you get it ready and you can race in Columbia,' " he says.

The Grand National Series ran that night at McCormick Field in Asheville. Lee took the family's No. 42 Oldsmobile there and won $265, finishing fourth.

NASCAR's convertible series was running at Columbia.

"Daddy just sent me off on my own, basically," Richard remembers. Dale Inman, who would go on to a career as one of the greatest mechanics racing would know, went too as Richard's crew chief. "If you look at it now in the scheme of racing, it was just Saturday night racing. But to us it was major league."

Petty finished sixth, five laps down to winner Bob Welborn, but brought the car home in one piece, along with $200.

Richard's clearest memory of that night is the ride home.

"We were in the pickup truck, me and Dale and one other fellow. I told them, 'You know, I think I am going to like this driving thing,' " Richard says, smiling at his understatement.

His first Grand National start came six days later, at Canadian Exposition Stadium in Toronto, finishing 17th in a field of 19 -- a race Lee won. In 1992, after 1,184 races in NASCAR's top series, Petty retired.

"The winning?" Petty says of what came in between. "No, that never got old."

Not even in 1967, when he won 10 straight on the way to 27 victories in 49 races.

"Plymouth took us to New York, and that was the first time I'd ever been in New York for the press," Petty says. "That was one of the first times that we were exposed to the rest of the world. We were a Southern sport. Every once in a while we'd get lucky and get our name in the paper in Oshkosh or something like that. But once we started winning all of those races, people started covering it.

"I have a clipping some guy sent us from a paper in Canada, and all it says is "Petty runs second." It doesn't tell who won or anything else. It got to that point."

Hands-on operation

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