During the week, Clifford Turner can usually be found in his optometry office examining the eyes of his clients. On the weekends, however, Turner travels around the country to pump fuel on a NASCAR pit crew.
“I’m gone 33 weekends out of the year,” he said. “NASCAR has tried to expand the sport all over the country. That’s why we race in California and Phoenix and Las Vegas.”
Turner’s love of racing started at a young age. He grew up in Coeburn, Virginia, and when he was 10 years old, a family friend took him to see his first race.
“I was hooked,” he said. “We lived in coal-mining country, and my good friend’s dad was a strip-mine operator. He decided he was going to build a short track. He built a 3/8-mile asphalt track that still runs today. At the time, it was state of the art. It’s still a good track, but back then, there was nothing else around it.”
As a young man, Turner helped construct the track, and then in the summers, he worked there. He said he got to meet “every big-name driver there ever was back in the day.”
“They weren’t big names back then. NASCAR was still really evolving in the early ’70s. You had these short-track heroes coming out of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. There was a little circuit they would run, and they’d come to our track every Saturday night. During the summer months, I’d see these folks and talk to them and get to be their friends. Still to this day, I still run into folks from that time.”
Turner went to Eastern Kentucky University, where he studied geological engineering and earned an associate degree, and he planned to work offshore with an oil company, but around the time he graduated, the oil crisis started, and he couldn’t find a job.
“I had all of the math, science and physics to go into a medical field,” he said. “My dad was an optometrist and had gone to school in Memphis. I couldn’t get the job I wanted, but I didn’t want to settle for just anything, so I decided I’d go back to school and start in optometry and wait to see if the job market opened back up.”
Turner earned his bachelor’s degree and doctorate from the Southern College of Optometry in Memphis. He ended up not pursuing a career in the oil fields but instead turned his eyes west to open his first practice in Arkansas.
The hunting and fishing in The Natural State first attracted Turner to Arkansas, and he settled in Lonoke County’s Carlisle in 1983.
“I travel all over the country and go to some really neat places, but it’s always hard to beat Arkansas,” he said. “It has everything. It really does. It’s not a rich state, but you can’t beat the people and the scenery and the hunting and the fishing.”
Turner practiced in Carlisle for 30 years, and in that time, he added offices in Searcy and Cabot. He moved to Cabot 13 years ago and made his Cabot office his home base. A few years ago, he closed the Carlisle office, but the other two are still in operation.
The great thing about practicing optometry is that Turner has the flexibility to work on a NASCAR pit crew. He works in the Xfinity Series as a member of Eric McClure’s pit crew.
Turner has known McClure for years, and for a while, they had a car that would be entered in smaller races on Saturday nights. The car was orange and bore the name Turner Eye Clinic on the side.
“One season, we won four times and placed no lower than third in every race except for one,” Turner said. “Those were my happy moments. … The track that I helped build and worked at is actually the track that Eric began his driving career at, so we both have ties to that track. We wanted to go back and race at that track because we knew how much fun it was. We had this car and this team, and we’d go back there and smoke everyone.”
With the exhilaration of racing comes some risks, and Turner had an up-close experience with how things can go very wrong on pit lane. As flames spread in the blink of an eye, Turner’s quick action potentially saved one man’s life and prevented a disaster from spreading to others in the area.
It all started with a pit stop under caution in the Xfinity Series ToyotaCare 250 race at Richmond International Raceway on April 24. McClure and his car had not arrived in the pits yet, but racer Brendan Gaughan had arrived in the spot in front of McClure, and Gaughan’s pit crew started working on the car.
“They’d already changed the right-side tires and were putting fuel in the car,” Turner said. “They came around and were changing the left-side tires. During the process of fueling that car, there was a malfunction with the fuel nozzle on that can.”
The fuel was spraying out of the can, and crew member Anthony O’Brien was changing the tires right beside the fuel man. At one point, a spark shot up from a lug nut on the tire, and O’Brien was engulfed in flames.
“It was just the perfect combination,” Turner said. “It just exploded. It probably went up 25 to 30 feet in the air. Of course, the fuel man was in the fire, but the man who was really in it was Anthony. As soon as it went up in flames, Anthony jumps across the wall and starts running behind our pit. You could see his face through the flames.”
In his panic, O’Brien started running away from help and toward the infield, where spectators were standing. Turner made a split-second decision to chase the fire-consumed man in order to save as many people as possible.
“I just happened to have the right angle on him,” he said. “I ran after him and tackled him, trying to get him out. It all happened real quick, but it felt like it was forever. I laid on him, and he was soaked in fuel, so I got fuel on me, and we were both burning on the ground.”
Members of the pit crews wear protective clothing, so Turner sustained minimal burns. O’Brien, however, was on fire for about 10 seconds and got burns all over his body. The men both received medical care, and Turner has since gotten back in his routine of checking patients’ vision during the week and hitting the race track on the weekends.
“I’m back on the circuit,” he said.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.