Rednecks & Racing

Pennsylvania pumper Blair Miller and his wife, Sabrena, starred in CMT’s My Big Redneck Wedding, and steer the fortunes of the Cornfield 500 race weekend

The Cornfield 500 started out a decade ago with some buddies getting together for what Pennsylvania pumper Blair Miller calls a “junk fest of racing.” It has evolved into an annual Labor Day weekend event that draws more than 5,500 people to Miller’s Warren County farm.

This September celebration of all things vehicular is the culmination of Miller’s after-hours efforts throughout the year. It has grown to include a full day of racing on a quarter mile dirt track with cars, pickups, vans and motorcycles. There are freestyle demonstrations from motocross, monster trucks and super-buggies. The 2009 schedule included a Short-Course Off-Road Racing (SCORR) Truck Series points competition. Another highlight of the weekend was a 50-lap enduro race that paid $2,000 in prize money.

But the fun isn’t all on the track. About 100 RVs and 50 tents populated a field near the track on Friday night, and a pre-registration party with live music was held in the barn, giving campers “a chance to get to know each other,” says Miller’s wife and business partner Sabrena.

BIG REDNECK WEDDING

If Blair and Sabrena, who met in the woods while deer hunting in 2003, look familiar, it’s because their 2008 wedding was featured on Country Music Television’s reality show My Big Redneck Wedding. Hosted by comedian Tom Arnold, the show documents unique weddings of country couples. Blair and Sabrena’s nuptials had a Wild West theme, with a few monster trucks thrown in for good measure.

“We were watching the show and I asked Blair if he would like to be on it, and he said, ‘our wedding is going to be better than that one’ (the one they were currently viewing),” Sabrena says. “So I e-mailed CMT.”

A few days later the network called back, saying the Millers’ wedding — complete with six-guns, groom and groomsmen in cowboy hats and boots; brides and bridesmaids in Southern belle dresses and a replica of the “Dukes of Hazard” General Lee as the wedding car — would be a perfect fit for the show.

The media attention didn’t end after the honeymoon, however. The Cornfield 500 and the Millers’ story were filmed as a pilot for a proposed series on cable’s SPEED network.

MORE THAN RACING

While The Cornfield 500 is nirvana to racing enthusiasts, the event is more than tires on the track. There are crafters and food vendors selling all day on Saturday and after the racing, more live music, and fireworks.

“It’s just a really fun family event,” Sabrena says. “The name is just so cool sounding people want to check it out, and Blair’s pretty popular around here, so if he’s having a party, people want to come.”

And it was, she says, his popularity that saved the 2009 edition of The Cornfield 500, which could easily have come to a screeching halt when three weeks before race day Blair suffered second and third degree burns on his neck, shoulder, back and arm. He was rebuilding a motocross ramp when he was thrown onto the muffler of his bulldozer. A few more seconds on that hot pipe could have been fatal. He was in the hospital for a week after the accident.

“They wanted to keep me there longer, but we talked them out of it,” Blair says.

The Millers considered canceling the event, but did not want to disappoint local race fans, so Blair says he “corralled” his friends and directed them as they used his equipment … for a while.

“Then pretty soon I found myself in the road grader,” he says. “But I couldn’t have done it without all my buddies who pulled through for me and made things happen.”

A DIVERSIFIED BUSINESS

Blair faced plastic surgery in December and then a long recovery resulting in cutting back significantly on his workload. He trained an employee to cover for him, but Sabrena says there’s no way one employee can do the amount of work her husband was accustomed to doing before the accident.

In addition to Baker Hill Motor Sports LLC, the official name of the racetrack operations, the Millers own Miller Salt Brine & Septic Service, a septic- and brine-pumping business covering a service territory of a 75-mile radius from the town of Columbus, located in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania. Sabrena handles marketing for both companies and, Blair says, “keeps everything together.”

The two businesses have proved as compatible as Blair and Sabrena, with race weekend leading to an expansion of the services offered by Miller Brine & Septic to include portable restroom rentals. Currently the company has 15 Armal restrooms.

“We needed restrooms for the races,” Sabrena explains. “So we saved our money and bought them for the races and now we rent them out. We wanted to cover our own event first.”

In addition to pumping septic tanks, Blair uses his 1998 International service truck to clean out car wash pits and service natural gas wells in the area. The Guzzler Manufacturing Inc. tri-axle rig has a 4,200-gallon steel dump tank and Fruitland pump.

“Salt-water brine is a byproduct of the gas wells,” he says. “I work with the drilling rigs; I haul in freshwater and haul out salt brine.”

Blair has secured permits from local municipalities to spread the brine on 200 miles of rural dirt roads in the summer to control dust. He uses it on his racetrack for the same purpose.

A BRIGHT FUTURE

In the future, Blair and Sabrena hope to expand Baker Hill Motor Sports into a variety race park, with more races throughout the year plus an off-road track, hill climb and pulling track. They have plans for a motel and gas station to accommodate visitors to the track and they want to build an amphitheater in a ravine on the farm.

“We want to bring jobs and tourism into the area,” Sabrena says. “It will all take time and money, but the future looks good.”

Especially now that Blair is healing and soon hopes to be back pumping full time and planning the 2010 Cornfield 500 in his after hours time.

“I’ll never get out of the vac truck business,” Blair says. “It’s in my blood. I worked with my grandpa Al Fox, who started in the septic business in 1948, since I was old enough to crawl into the truck, and my dad was an over-the-road trucker. I knew my destiny was driving something.”



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