Owen Kearns serves as the Senior Manager of Communications for NASCAR's Craftsman Truck Series. He resides in Bakersfield, CA with his wife, Kathy.
DSF: Tell us about yourself.
OK: It's a long road in how I got to the University of Missouri. I am a native of California, and had lived in various parts of California up until I was about 16 years old. My father, who was a pediatrician, had some health issues that caused him to get out of private practice, and went back to college and got a Master's in Public Health degree. He took a job at the University of Missouri in the fall of 1958, and of course, that necessitated that the family move. We moved at the beginning of my senior year of high school, and I went to the university, and the family moved back to California.
Later on, in 1965, I decided that I would return back to California because I didn't think that there were many opportunities work-wise in the Midwest, and besides, the winters weren't what a California native was all that keen about, so that's how I got back to Bakersfield.
DSF: What was your degree in from the University of Missouri?
OK: I was an English major, and I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do, but I had been writing some freelance newspaper stuff since the age of 12 or 13, and I just kind of gravitated into that.
DSF: Tell us a little bit about what your time in the Beta Beta chapter was like back in the early 60s.
OK: There have been three iterations of Beta Beta. The original chapter which went inactive, and then the group that I was with, which I believe went inactive at a point, and now the group today which is extremely strong and very much involved in activities on campus. I actually haven't been back to campus since I left in the mid '60s.
We had a very small chapter with some very interesting brothers. The main active when I pledged was Bruce Loewenberg, who is quite active in Fraternity affairs, not only with the chapter but also throughout the Fraternity. He has certainly been a driving force in the Fraternity, and the fact of Beta Beta's position on campus goes back to those years when he lived, breathed and bled Delta Sigma Phi, which carried over to all of us.
Those were great times, and I certainly learned a lot in terms of what life was going to be like in the coming years from my association with the Fraternity.
DSF: Tell us about your early career prior to joining NASCAR.
OK: I took a job in 1968 with the Greater Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce as a Public Relations person, and then picked up from there and went to a twice weekly newspaper in Bakersfield where I became the editor. In 1971, I took a full-time job as a general assignment reporter for the Bakersfield Californian, which is a small-medium sized newspaper. I eventually worked my way up and became the executive editor of the newspaper.
At the same time, I had been a racing fan since childhood, mostly with sports cars, and had a great interest in that. When I had moved back to California, I saw that there was a vacuum in terms of coverage. There were a number of sports car drivers in Bakersfield, but they weren't getting any notice in the local newspaper. The twice weekly paper offered me the opportunity, without paying me, to write a weekly column about motor racing. That started me going to the races, and when I moved over to the Bakersfield Californian, one of the things that they wanted me to do, in addition to covering a variety of things like courts and cops, was that they wanted me to continue the weekly motor sports column, which had gotten me introduced to NASCAR.
DSF: So, how did you then get into motor sports PR from your journalism background?
OK: When I got introduced to NASCAR and stock cars going to races in southern California in 1966, I started going out to a local speedway here in Bakersfield. They had need for a PR person, and so I dovetailed that with my motor sports column, which is how I really got into the motor sports PR business. From 1968, which was my first season out at the racetrack, on through when I started full time with NASCAR in 1984, I had one kind of job or another in motor sports PR, whether it was track PR or announcing, or doing marketing and PR for some small scale racing teams on the west coast, that got my feet wet. When I decided to get out of the newspaper business in early 80s, this opportunity came along.
DSF: So talk about how you got your role with NASCAR in the first place.
OK: Some people I knew from covering NASCAR wanted to develop a PR position on the west coast to work with the weekly sanctioned tracks and their touring series, and they needed someone with background in motor sports, and also a background in media. Luckily, I filled the bill, and went to work for NASCAR on the first of January in 1984. I will have been with the company full time for 25 years the first of January in 2008, which makes me one of the longest-serving members of the company which was extremely small when I went to work there, but is huge in terms of the professional sports scene in the 21st Century.
DSF: So now let's talk about your current role, as Senior Manager of Communications for the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
OK: I am assigned to manage the publicity and public affairs for the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, which is a series for full-sized pick up trucks that compete 25 times nationally from coast to coast. We have a number of events that are in conjunction with the Nextel Cup, which is our primary series. The Truck series was created back in 1995, and at the time, I was doing west coast PR, and it gave me the opportunity to get more involved on the national scene traveling more, and going to places that honestly I probably never would have visited had I not been involved with it.
It's a job that you spend time working with the sanctioning body, with the tracks that stage our events, with the drivers, owners and teams, and also interfacing and merging them together with media opportunities to get more visibility for the events, the sponsors, the tracks, and our drivers. I do a lot of work with all kinds of media, from traditional media to internet, both in advance of a race, during an event and post-race. I write a lot of releases, do interviews with media, and book interviews for our drivers with the media.
It is a pretty large job. It started out as just a one man show, but we have grown a lot over the past 13 years. We have a lot of people who are dedicated, not only to the Craftsman Truck Series, but who help us out in doing the jobs that need to be done because it's certainly gotten large enough that one person can't do it all.
DSF: Do you travel to all of the races, or are you more of a behind the scenes person?
OK: For the better part of 12 years, I went to every event that was held. I think it was somewhere in the range of 287 consecutive races that I had been to before I missed one. I had been around the series since it was thought of in 1994, and went to some demonstration and non-points races in that winter. I went to the first event in February of 1995, and to every event until mid-October of last year, when unfortunately I had a heart attack and missed the event at Atlanta Motor Speedway last October. There were only two of us at that point, one of the crew members and myself that had been to every race, and his streak is still going. At that point, at age 64, I decided that trying to have perfect attendance wasn't the greatest idea.
I have cut back my schedule. We have a 25-race season, and when it's over, I will have gone to 21 races this year. In the future, I will probably cut back a little bit more, not that I am going to stop being involved in working with the series, but at some point, there's no one else in NASCAR's PR department that goes to all of the events.
To just about everybody's amazement, and much to the chagrin of some of our Human Resources people, the week following having a stent put into my heart valve, I was back at the racetrack. Interestingly enough, I was given a prestigious award by the media and NASCAR called the Pocono Spirit Award which is given quarterly to those that go above and beyond. They were gracious enough to give that award to me at the tail end of last season. I guess that if you didn't really have a passion for what you do, you could have easily said, “hey I want to recuperate, and I'm not going to anymore races this year.” I feel like the reason that I do the job is because I enjoy it and have a passion for racing and the people who are involved.
DSF: Can you give a little bit of background for the brothers about the series, and where it is positioned in terms of the overall NASCAR company?
OK: NASCAR exists on a number of levels. We sanction weekly races in 65-70 tracks across the country. This is the grassroots of the sport, where people decide they want to be racers. Many of them are second, third or even fourth generation drivers whose families who have been participants for years and years. Once they decide they'd like to move to a higher level, they would move on to one of our regional touring series, which we have three across the country. Two of them are on the east coast (Busch East, Modifeds) and on the west coast (the Grand National West series.)
We also have three National Series as well. The first of which is the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, which I would certainly call a “bridge series” where drivers who have participated in the regional touring series and perhaps elsewhere like open wheel racing or off road have come into the series. In fact, if you can imagine this, Jacques Villeneuve, the former Indianapolis 500 and Champ Car Series champion, and former Formula 1 World Champion, made his debut in NASCAR this past weekend in the Craftsman Truck Series. He has decided to come down and race trucks for the remainder of this year, with the idea that he is going to go into the Nextel Cup series next season full time. The series is well enough thought of that someone of his stature would come down and compete.
We have had a number of drivers come through our series and move on to the Nextel Cup series. In fact Kurt Busch, a Nextel Cup champion was Rookie of the Year in the Craftsman Truck Series in 2000, and did well enough that his owner at the time, Jack Roush, jumped him directly into the Nextel Cup Series. We've had others like Kevin Harvick, Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards and Jamie McMurray who have gone into the Nextel Cup Series. So, that's kind of where the Craftsman Truck Series is positioned within NASCAR. We are the third most popular motor sport in the country. All of our races are live on Speed Channel, with a couple also on Fox. We draw in excess of 1.1 million fans annually, and have crowds as large as 80-85,000 fans at our races in Daytona and Talladega.
DSF: Talk a little more about the other drivers in the series.
OK: The Craftsman Truck Series exists on a few other levels as well. We have drivers Who have decided that they don't have an interest in going to the Busch or Nextel Cup Series, and we have had drivers who have made a home for themselves who have been here for 10 or 12 years who want to run their whole career here.We also have drivers who have been at the highest levels of NASCAR and have significant Nextel Cup credentials, like Todd Bodine, Ted Musgrave and Johnny Benson, drivers such as this who have decided that they want to finish out their careers in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. Three of these guys, Bobby Hamilton in 2004, Ted Musgrave in 2005, and Todd Bodine in 2006 have come back and won the Series championship.
DSF: What is a typical day at the racetrack for you?
OK: Once you get to the racetrack, you need to be sure of the entry list, who's in what truck, if there are any changes on rosters and crew chiefs. By this time, you have already interfaced with your broadcast partners in terms of the timing and the nuts and bolts of what is going on. You have to manage all of the materials for the media, which means getting out entry lists, practice sheets, qualifying orders and doing qualifying. If you are on a different day qualifying than you are racing, you make sure to manager press conferences with the top qualifiers so the media has access to these drivers.
You also do the event itself, which includes interfacing with not only the media, but also the NASCAR officials to make sure that the complete and accurate story gets told.
Once the race is completed, you have another couple hours of duties to make sure the results get out and all of the post-race news conferences are handled. Once that's done, there is an inspection process to look at to make sure everything is on the up and up regarding the rules. Happily 99.9% of the time, there aren't any issues with the rules.
DSF: I hear that you recently had an interesting small-world experience regarding a fellow Delta Sig who works in your series. Can you tell us about that?
OK: It is ironic, because one of the guys who does team PR for one of the teams in our series, I've known him for a number of years, but had no idea that he was also a Delta Sig until a couple of months ago when we went to a post-practice barbecue, and there he was wearing a Delta Sig sweatshirt. He had gone to the University of Wisconsin, which was a small world. His name is John Close.
DSF: What is some advice that you can give to brothers looking to get into PR?
OK: An internship is the best thing that I can recommend. A number of our most recent hires in the PR Department have been folks who have served an internship with NASCAR. Being able to see the nuts and bolts of how something is done, you're either going to say “that's what I want to do,” or maybe “that's not what I thought it was going to be.” Regardless of who you are, give it a shot!
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