Brotherly love… or something like that.
Dale Earnhardt Jr., and his half brother, Kerry, didn’t meet until Kerry was 16, but they certainly made up for lost time when they moved in together as young adults. Kerry, didn’t even know who his dad was until he was in 9th grade. Dale Sr. and his first wife Latane (Kerry’s mom) were married when they were 18 years old, and got divorced a few years later when Kerry was just 3 years old.
He said he didn’t remember much from that time at all, seeing as he was still very young when his dad left to pursue his career in racing.
In the early ’90s, Dale Jr. and Kerry moved in to a double-wide trailer, and they had agreed to split all the bills 50/50. Dale recalled staying up until late at night playing video games, which at the time, ran through a modem, and he had to dial a long distance call to Massachusetts to be able to play it, which was really expensive back then:
“We had a double-wide trailer, played the drums late at night. around 1994, Papyrus came out with their first online racing game, alright. The iRacing game that you know now, they built their first game around ’94 they came out with it. You could race online, but you had to call Massachusetts with a modem.
It does all the squelching and squealing when it wakes up and turns on. So I started doing that, me and Kerry split the bills in half, we didn’t ask questions. When it came in, it was $80, he’s got $40, I’ve got $40, we split it. I started racing on internet, and I’m calling Massachusetts, and I know I’m calling long distance… that would lost from probably 6 at night to 2 in the morning.
I started working at the dealership, Kerry would get up in the mooring to go to work and I’d still be racing. If he picked the phone up, it cut me off. The first month phone bill came, our phone bill was like $20 or something silly, and our first bill was $425 or something. Kerry came in there and threw that thing down…”
Kerry recalled Dale thinking he should still pay half, even though the bill was so expensive because of his brother:
“He wanted me to pay half, that was our agreement… I knew whenever it jumped that high, I had nothing to do with it. How am I responsible? We ended up getting it worked out.”
But eventually, tensions came to a head, when Kerry decided not to pay Dale one time for an incredibly high bill he had run up. He recalled bringing a girl he was seeing to North Carolina for the first time (she lived in Virginia), and trying to get into their trailer to show her around. When he put the key in, it wouldn’t turn, and he knew someone, his brother, had done something.
So, he hooked his truck to the door with a chain and pulled it off the hinges so they could get in. But Dale Jr. was nowhere to be found inside, either:
“I think I didn’t pay you one time, I had met this gal from Virginia, and had her coming down that weekend. And I don’t know if you remember this or not, but she gets there, we go to the house, key goes in, won’t turn. What the heck? Couldn’t open the door, wouldn’t unlock. Somebody had changed the lock or the doorknob. And I ended up putting the chain on my truck and pulling the back door off. You don’t remember that?
And it wouldn’t shut back after that. Yeah, you were still there. I think you changed the lock. You weren’t in the house, I went through and your truck was there, and I went through that house, his bedroom door was locked for a minute, maybe, by the time I kicked it in. He wasn’t in his room, he’d done gone. I guess he was out riding with a biddy or something, because I’m sure he knew if he changed that lock, I was gonna be mad when I got home.”
Of course, he was embarrassed because he had a girl there and he couldn’t even get into his own house, but the funniest part is that his dad, the late Dale Sr., came over to help him, and Kerry says he was “raising Cain” over the door situation:
“And it was more embarrassing that I had this girl down for the first time, that I can’t get in my damn house. I remember dad coming over there, and we had that thing propped, the back door, dad came over there raising Cain about this door not being shut and how it got broken.”
What a scene…
Dale admitted that they were tough on each other, but always moved on quickly:
“We were little s***s to each other, but the next day, it was no big deal. He probably didn’t help me pay half the phone bill.”
Kerry said it was definitely over some sort of bill dispute, but it worked out in the end, because that girl he was bringing home was his now-wife, Rene:
“It was his bill… there was a bill involved, and I’m pretty sure it was the power bill or the phone bill. It was something that I didn’t pay, and he said, ‘You ain’t gonna pay it, you ain’t gettin’ in.’ I showed him. I got in.”
I can see how Dale Sr. certainly had his hands full with those two, and they certainly gave him a run for his money. If those trailer walls could talk…
You can watch them tell the story below:
The post Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Brother Kerry Once Pulled The Front Door Off Their Trailer With His Truck: “Couldn’t Open The Door” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.