His name was J.C. Elder, but virtually everybody who knew him called him Suitcase Jake.

Elder, one of the most successful crew chiefs in the history of NASCAR, died Wednesday. He was 73 years old and had been in failing health since suffering a stroke in 2006.

Elder was the top wrench for driver David Pearson when Pearson won Sprint Cup championships in 1968 and ’69. Over a career that began in the late 1950s and stretched over the next 40-plus years, Elder worked either as a crew chief or leading mechanic for some of racing’s best drivers, including Dale Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip, Fred Lorenzen and Benny Parsons. He attended public schools for only three years, but he might have been the best “shade-tree” mechanic ever in NASCAR racing.

During Elder’s crew-chief years, the job was more about preparing the car and less about organizing and scheduling, as is the case today. Elder’s main task was to produce durable, winning race cars.

Elder also is remembered for one of the best quotes in the history of the sport. It was been repeated in numerous versions over the years, but after crew-chiefing for Earnhardt in his first win, Elder told the young driver: “Stick with me, kid, and we’ll have diamonds as big as horse turds.”

Ironically, it was Elder who did not “stick with” Earnhardt. A season after helping Earnhardt win the Sprint Cup Rookie of the Year title in 1979, Elder left the Earnhardt team for other pastures. It was a process, Elder, a committed perfectionist, would repeat many times during a career that saw him in more jobs than a normal resume sheet could hold. His frequent job-hopping earned him the nickname Suitcase Jake.

If he soured on a situation, he would pack his tools and head down the road, sometimes with only a moment’s notice.

“I have a problem getting people to understand how I want things done,” he once said. “Usually, I can get it done myself quicker than I can explain to them how I want it done.”

Earnhardt, then a rough-and-tumble, hard-core racer still trying to figure out the top level of the sport, later said Elder played a key role in his racing education.

Elder, whose success in stock car racing could be linked to his expertise in developing winning chassis combinations, started work at Petty Enterprises in the late 1950s. He made a name for himself in the 1960s while working for the giant Holman-Moody Ford factory team, based in Charlotte, N.C.

Elder and Pearson were both rising quickly through the sport during that period, and they teamed at Holman-Moody to win 27 races and the national championship in 1968 and ’69, seasons in which Pearson started 48 and 51 races. The toughest competition during that period came from Elder’s former employer, Petty Enterprises, and its lead driver, Richard Petty.

While at Holman-Moody, Elder also led Mario Andretti, one of the world’s best racers but an infrequent visitor to NASCAR, to victory in the 1967 Daytona 500.

In the early 1970s, Elder hooked up with young driver Darrell Waltrip and was pit boss for Waltrip’s first Cup victory at Nashville, Tenn. in 1975.

“He could hook up whatever horsepower they had to a chassis and make it work,” said long-time NASCAR broadcaster Barney Hall. “He knew what made the cars work underneath. Teams would see him coming down pit road and let the jacks down on their cars because they knew he could take a glance at the springs and know what they had.

“And he was a man of few words. I remember several radio interviews with him after his car fell out of a race. Somebody would ask him what happened, and he’d say, ‘Blowed up,’ and walk off.”

As racing got bigger, more impersonal and more sophisticated in the 1990s, old-timers like Elder often were passed by as engineers and specialists began to dominate the sport’s shops. Late in his career, he moved away from high-level responsibilities and worked as a team mechanic and in various other jobs.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.