The secret story behind 'Kids Night' at Eagle Raceway

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By COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star

Few drivers, owners or Eagle Raceway fans know this story, even though they are as close as family.

They know Bernie Bryan and wife, Rhonda, of the Bryan Racing Team, started Kids Night at the track back in 2001. They know the Bryans organized the drawings to give away free bikes on Kids Night during intermission.

Not surprising. The Bryans are good people.

View Slideshow

Bernie Bryan, left, talks with Mike Mook, right, after working on Nick Bryan's 360 Sprint Car behind Bernie's home on 26th Street Wednesday. Bernie started Kid's Night at Eagle Raceway. (Heidi Hoffman)

But few know their secret reason.

That first year, the Bryan Team gave away two bikes, two scooters and two skateboards. The next year, they gave away four of each. Other teams and owners and sponsors joined in and in the following years it became 15 bikes, 20 bikes ...

They gave away 82 bikes two years ago, so many that they had to be hauled onto the dirt track by a semi. Last summer, they needed two semis for 262 bikes.

This Saturday, they will need three semis.

The Bryans are a second-generation racing family. Son Nick, 21, is the third. He drives the team’s sprint car now instead of Bernie. The car has fat rear tires, orange and yellow neon paint. It waits in the garage, which smells of methanol, oil and rubber.

“It smells of racing,” Bernie says, smiling wide as he walked inside one recent night.

A friend faxed this story into the newspaper, as a tip, because Bernie and Rhonda aren’t the kind to toot their own horn. So the Bryans tell the story now. They sit with their son at a picnic table outside their home on North 26th Street:

Bernie had a rough childhood.

He and his five siblings lived in a two-bedroom house just a few blocks from here. An uncle got evicted and moved in, adding seven more kids. The kids slept wherever they found a spot.

They shared one bike, a blue Schwinn.

Their dad, a stock-car racer, had been hit by a cement truck and wasn’t quite right after that. When Bernie was around 7 years old, the state took him and his siblings away. He lived in foster care a few years, then asked to live at Boys Town.

He married Rhonda. She was the first female sprint car driver in the state. (She quit after seeing a driver catch fire.) They had Nick. They could tell right away that racing was in his blood, too.

So Bernie built him a little go-cart. They kept it in the garage. When Nick outgrew it and started working alongside the men, they let the son of one of Bernie’s pit crew members ride in it. He was a quiet boy, skinny and blond.

He’d pretend he was going places.

“When he sat there in that go-cart,” Rhonda says, “he never said a word. But you just knew he was off somewhere in his head, had a fantasy going, a thought. … You could tell he was dreaming.”

Meanwhile, Bernie’s heart was dying, had been for years. A welder at Nebraska Boiler, he grew tired and gray. He’d come home from work, out of gas.

The night before surgery, a decade ago, Bernie sat Nick down on the living room couch. He told him he might not make it.

Nick remembers. He’d never seen his dad cry before.

“He told me he didn’t have a good father in his life, and he wanted to be there for me. He said not to quit racing. He said, ‘Don’t quit your dream, just because I’m not here.’”

Rhonda remembers listening from the kitchen, in tears.

Her eyes fill now.

“Bernie told him to stand up for himself — ‘Never let anybody tell you you’re not any good.’”

The heart doctor joked with Bernie that it was his turn to be the mechanic. He said Bernie was like a flat tire that needed to be fixed, and he gave Bernie a new heart valve, from a donor.

His eyes opened. He was alive!

He learned the valve had come from a young man between the age of 18 and 22, that’s all he was told. (Nick guesses it was a car accident.)

Then not long after that, the Bryan Team lost one of its own, the little blond boy. He had a brain tumor and died on his sixth birthday.

The night before the funeral, Bernie broke down. He told Rhonda that he didn’t understand why his life was spared when both the young donor and this little boy had to die.

Why?

That’s when Rhonda suggested they find a way to do something good for kids.

And they did, from the heart.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.