From Checkered Flag to Zippo: The Story of Jay Plyler’s No. 79

By Dan DeMato

A Victory Preserved in Chrome

Some Zippo lighters advertise a business. Others recognize an employee, mark an anniversary, celebrate a public event, or preserve a deeply personal accomplishment. The 1968 Zippo featured here belongs to the last category. Its face carries a compact, multicolor image of a modified stock car, the number 79, and the name JAY PLYLER. It is not a generic racing design. The artwork was created directly from a specific photograph of Jay Plyler after a race victory.

In that photograph, Jay sits behind the wheel of his No. 79 at the racetrack, holding the checkered flag. The car’s exposed engine, white coupe body, large door number, driver’s-window profile, and flag crossing the door area all reappear in miniature on the lighter. Because the original photograph survives alongside the lighter, we can identify the precise image from which the Zippo graphic was developed. The specific race represented by the photograph has not yet been identified, but its meaning is unmistakable: this was a winning moment.

Only five examples of the lighter are understood to have been made. One was for Jay, three were for members of his race team, and one was for a sponsor. Jay still has his example. The lighter shown here is another of the five and is now treasured by its current collector owner. Rather than a commercial production run, the group appears to have been a private team issue—five small keepsakes connecting a driver, his crew, a sponsor, and a particular moment in Bradford-area racing history.

Jay Plyler and the No. 79

Jay Plyler became one of the recognized drivers of the dirt-track circuit linking Bradford, Pennsylvania, with nearby western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania. The surviving photographic record places him at Bradford Speedway by 1965 and documents his progression through Sportsman and Late Model competition in the years that followed. His No. 79 became a familiar presence at Bradford, Stateline, Eriez, and other tracks in the region.

At Stateline Speedway in Busti, New York, Jay built an especially distinguished record. Track history credits him with three consecutive Sportsman championships in 1969, 1970, and 1971. The same historical summary lists eighteen Sportsman feature wins, placing him fourth on the division’s all-time victory list at the time the record was published. The Stateline Legacy photographic archive also identifies Jay as an Eriez 150 winner in 1970 and again in 1974.

The year 1971 appears to have been the high-water mark of this period. Archive captions identify Jay as champion in both the Sportsman and Late Model divisions that season. That accomplishment speaks to both versatility and consistency: success in two leading classes during the same year, against many of the strongest short-track drivers in the region.

Jay’s career belongs to the same era as such respected regional competitors as Ron Blackmer, Bobby Schnars, Skip Furlow, Squirt Johns, and Johnny Whitehead. The names may be regional rather than national, but within the communities surrounding these tracks they carried the familiarity and stature of major sports figures. Saturday-night racing was not peripheral entertainment. It was part of the social fabric of the Pennsylvania–New York border country.

Saturday Night at Stateline

A period photograph from 1963 shows the Stateline Speedway grandstands crowded with spectators. The image predates the Jay Plyler lighter by five years, but it captures the setting in which his No. 79 became familiar: wooden bleachers filled shoulder to shoulder, night racing under the lights, and a regional audience deeply invested in its local drivers.

Historian Randy Anderson reported that crowds of approximately 6,000 were not unusual at Stateline during the late 1960s and early 1970s. That scale helps place Jay’s achievements in context. His championships and feature victories were earned before substantial Saturday-night crowds, within a racing culture that connected Bradford and the surrounding Pennsylvania–New York border communities.

A Bradford Community Story

The lighter is also a Bradford story. Bradford is the home of Zippo, but Zippo did not exist apart from the community around it. Its employees, craftspeople, managers, families, local businesses, service stations, dealers, garages, and racing fans overlapped in countless ways. A local driver could be supported by friends who worked at the factory, a business sponsor whose customers attended the races, and crew members who spent their weekdays at ordinary jobs before gathering around the car at night and on weekends.

This helps explain why a small group of personalized Zippos could carry so much meaning. The five lighters were not mass-market merchandise. They were intimate community objects—small enough to carry in a pocket, durable enough to last for decades, and instantly recognizable as products of Bradford.

Fairway Ford and the No. 79

The victory photograph gives us another direct connection to Bradford’s local business community. The words FAIRWAY FORD appear prominently on the side of Jay’s No. 79, identifying the Bradford Ford dealership as a sponsor of the race car. A surviving Fairway Ford used-car advertisement places the dealership at 472 East Main Street in Bradford and shows how the business promoted itself to local customers.

The advertisement helps place the sponsorship within the same close-knit Bradford world represented by the lighter: a local dealership backing a local driver whose winning car was then reproduced on a Zippo made in town. It is not yet verified that Fairway Ford was the sponsor who received the fifth lighter, so that possibility remains an open research question rather than a conclusion.

Linda L. Meabon, Jay’s longtime partner, is herself an important part of the larger Zippo and Bradford story. Over a career spanning more than fifty years, she became closely associated with preserving and interpreting Zippo history, including service as a historian and museum curator. Her connection to Jay brings together two important strands of local heritage: Bradford’s world-famous lighter company and the region’s fiercely competitive short-track racing culture.

Linda’s connection to this story reaches back to the lighter’s own era. She began working for Zippo in 1967, one year before the 1968 Jay Plyler lighter was produced. After a long career with the company, she went on to serve as a historian and curator of the Zippo/Case Museum and to document the company’s history in her published work. Linda and Jay remain longtime partners and continue to live together in Bradford, the Pennsylvania community where both the racing story and the Zippo story took shape.

Jay is now 86 years old, but his enthusiasm for dirt-track racing has never left him. Linda describes him as still deeply engaged with the sport. As a respected senior member of the regional racing community, he occasionally returns to the track, where he is welcomed by drivers and teams and may still be found around the cars and crews. When he cannot attend in person, he follows racing from home through Dirt on Dirt, an online service devoted to dirt-track competition. Nearly six decades after the No. 79 lighter was made, the sport it commemorates remains an active part of Jay’s life.

Why Zippo Became a Canvas for Memory

For generations, the flat metal face of a Zippo lighter has functioned as a miniature canvas. Companies used it for advertising. Military units and service members used it to record places, ships, campaigns, and personal experiences. Employers marked years of service, safety achievements, retirements, and milestones. Public events, holidays, disasters, anniversaries, sports teams, clubs, and private groups all found their way onto Zippo cases.

That breadth is one reason personalized Zippos can be so historically revealing. A lighter may occupy only a few square inches, yet it can preserve the visual language of a company, a town, a team, or a life. The Jay Plyler lighter does all four. It identifies the driver, reproduces his actual car, recalls a victory, represents his race team, and ties the entire story to Bradford through the Zippo on which it was rendered.

The surviving lighter shows a carefully reduced multicolor composition in which the essential elements of the source photograph remain legible despite the small scale.

A Five-Color Etch-and-Paint Zippo

The Jay Plyler lighter was decorated using Zippo's classic etch-and-paint, sometimes described as etch-and-fill, process. The design was first prepared as a simplified piece of artwork suitable for the small face of a lighter. An acid-resistant coating protected the areas intended to remain at the original surface level, while the exposed portions of the design were chemically etched slightly into the plated case. After the case was cleaned, the recessed lines and shapes were filled with paint. The color therefore sits within the etched design rather than simply resting as a flat image on top of the chrome.

This No. 79 design uses five principal colors: black, white, red, blue, and a brown or earth tone representing the dirt beneath the car. The separate recessed areas help keep the colors distinct, which is why the individual colors do not visually flow into one another. The black defines the engine, wheels, outlines, and checkered flag; white establishes the body and wheels; blue forms the side panels and lettering; red accents the number and track details; and brown creates the racing surface below the car.

A five-color etch-and-paint lighter required more preparation, labor, and inspection than a simple one-color advertising design. The complexity did not necessarily mean five separate acid-etching operations, but each additional color required its own carefully controlled application and cleanup. More colors also increased the chance of an error, especially in a detailed composition this small. Here, a full victory photograph—including Jay in the window, the exposed engine, the No. 79, the checkered flag, and the dirt track—was successfully reduced to a clear miniature image only a few inches wide.

That technical achievement strengthens the lighter's connection to the photograph. The design is not merely inspired by Jay's race car; it preserves the identifying features of one specific post-victory image through a demanding period decoration method. For Zippo collectors, the five-color etch-and-paint work is therefore part of the story itself: it demonstrates both the artistry required to translate a photograph into metal and paint and the unusual effort devoted to a private group of only five lighters.

Examples of Zippo etch and paint process on 1968 automotive-related lighters.

Five Objects, One Team

The known distribution of the five lighters gives the group a natural human structure: driver, crew, and sponsor. Each recipient represented a different part of what made the No. 79 possible. Jay supplied the skill and courage behind the wheel. The crew prepared, repaired, transported, and adjusted the car. The sponsor helped provide the resources required to compete. The lighters recognized that racing success was collective even when only one name appeared above the driver’s window.

The Story Still to Be Completed

What is already certain is unusually compelling: a race was won; a photograph captured Jay Plyler with the checkered flag; that exact photograph became the model for a 1968 Zippo graphic; only five lighters were produced for the people closest to the No. 79 effort; and one of those five survives today in the care of its current owner.

Readers who remember Jay Plyler, the No. 79, Fairway Ford, the racing team, or the five Zippo lighters are invited to contact Collector’s Flame. Photographs, race programs, crew names, personal recollections, and other information may help complete and preserve this Bradford racing story.

References

1. Stateline Legacy, “Jay Plyler” photographic archive and tagged pages, statelinelegacy.org.
2. Stateline Speedway, “Sportsmen Tribute this week at Stateline Speedway,” historical championship and feature-win summary.
3. “Stateline Speedway: Jay Plyler (Part 1)” and related 2011 interview recordings.
4. Photographs supplied by the current owner and firsthand oral history, August 2026.
5. Fairway Ford used-car advertisement supplied by the current owner, August 2026.
6. Randy Anderson, “A Field of Dreams in Busti — Stateline Speedway,” The Post-Journal, July 15, 2020; includes the 1963 grandstand photograph credited to the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame.