Jim Cromarty, former co-owner of Islip Speedway, Riverhead Raceway, dies at 91
Riverhead Raceway co-owners Jim and Barbara Cromarty and their dog Candy at the track on July 2, 2005. Credit: Joseph D. Sullivan
Jim Cromarty, who with his wife, Barbara, presented stock car racing — also fireworks, demolition derbies and flame-throwing vehicles — for decades at Islip Speedway and Riverhead Raceway, died Sunday at a Miami hospital. He was 91.
Cromarty’s death was disclosed Monday in a news release on Riverhead Raceway’s homepage and was confirmed by Barbara Cromarty, who said the cause was complications of a heart condition.
The Cromartys, partners in business and romance who were married for almost 68 years, knew little about NASCAR and stock car racing before they took over the Islip lease from 1977 through 1984 when it closed and buying Riverhead in the early 1980s. They ran Riverhead through 2015, when they sold for $4 million to Eddie and Constance Partridge and their nephew Thomas Gatz. Riverhead is now the only NASCAR stock car track in the metropolitan area, according to its website.
“The Riverhead and Islip tracks have a deep history with NASCAR, and the Cromarty family was excellent stewards of [their] legacy,” said Ken Martin, director of historical content for NASCAR Studios, in an email.
Jim Cromarty was born July 2, 1932, in Amityville. He studied business at Hofstra University. Together, the Cromartys ran at least 35 business ventures including the Long Island Ducks hockey team, the Suffolk County Fair, a combination ice and roller skating rink in Copiague and a horse farm, they told Newsday in 1988. Jim Cromarty also ran antiques and auto shows, Barbara said.
In all those ventures, Barbara Cromarty said in an interview, “You’ve got to sell tickets, otherwise you have nothing.” Before the duo took over Islip, she recalled, that belief was cemented in a meeting with Bill France Jr., then the president of NASCAR: “You may not know auto racing, but you know how to sell tickets,” was his judgment, she recalled.
For years, during the spring through fall racing season, they drew 3,000 to 4,000 patrons per week.
Bob Finan, a longtime race announcer at Islip and Riverhead who retired last year, said the duo “grew the sport, not just of NASCAR auto racing, but they added family entertainment events like monster trucks and school bus demolition derbies” to reach beyond the dedicated but shrinking local market for short-track racing. “Who doesn’t want to see a car get crushed by a huge truck?” Finan asked, rhetorically.
With its quarter-mile high-banked track that sometimes ran as a figure-eight, Riverhead promised near-misses and flat-out crashes. "The excitement is that you see every bit of action here. It's right in front of you,” Jim Cromarty told Newsday in 1988.
The Cromartys paid $100,000 to pave the pits at Riverhead, which opened in the middle of the 20th century and is one of the oldest stock car racing venues in the country. They added elevated seats, new paint and a new audio-video system, among other upgrades.
Under their watch, semiprofessional teams whose members’ day jobs tended to be in adjacent industries like auto repair and truck driving from Long Island and throughout the Northeast competed for Saturday night purses of more than $7,000. The prizes were “barely enough to sustain the operation of a car,” Finan said, but talent was high, with a number of drivers graduating to the Winston Cup and Busch Grand National circuits.
The races were cheaper to watch than many other professional sports, with ticket prices in the late 1980s as cheap as $16 for adults and $5 for children; parking was free.
From 1977 to 1987, the Cromartys lived in Amityville, in the house that became known as the Amityville Horror for murders that took place before they moved in; in more recent years, they divided their time between Manhattan and Aventura, Florida.
In addition to his wife, Jim Cromarty is survived by their daughters, Deborah Hallahan of Manhattan, Meryl Cromarty of Charleston, South Carolina, and Joyce Cromarty-Harbaugh of Surfside, Florida and Oceanside New Jersey. Cromarty, an Air Force veteran, will be buried at St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, with viewing and a memorial service at D’Andrea Bros. Funeral Home in Copiague, though arrangements had not been finalized Monday.
In their final years as track owners, the Cromartys turned away real estate developers promising more money than they eventually received, Barbara Cromarty said, because they wanted the place to stay a racetrack.
As Jim Cromarty had told Newsday in 1988, they had come to love the sport and its participants. “Some days you flex your muscles and say, 'Who wants to be president of the United States when you're involved with this.' "
Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.
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