Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine Detroit Wheels and the Birth of NASCAR Read online

  ALSO BY NEAL THOMPSON

  Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard-America's First Spaceman

  For Mary

  Contents

  PREFACE

  PART I

  1 “NASCAR is no longer a southern sport”

  2 White lijhtninj

  3 Henry Ford “created a monster”

  4 The bootleer turn

  5 An “orjy of dust, liquor and noise”

  6 “All the women screamin' Roy Hall”

  7 “Yesterday his luck ran out”

  8 “MIRACULOUS DEATH ESCAPE”

  PART II

  9 Body bajs and B-24 bombers

  10 “It's too late now to brinj this crowd under control”

  11 Henry Ford is dead

  12 “Next thin? we know, NASCAR belongs to Bill France”

  13 “Racing Car Plunjes into Thronj”

  14 An “ambience” of death

  15 The first race, a bootlejjer, and a disqualification

  16 “It's not cheating if you don't jet caujht”

  PART III

  17 “No way a Plymouth can beat a Cadillac. Noway”

  18 NASCAR is here to stay: “Like sex, the atom bomb and ice cream”

  19 “Ihadto start making a living”

  Epilogue: This is what NASCAR has become

  NOTES

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

  —FLANNERY O'CONNOR

  The notion to uproot my family, move to the South, and investigate moonshine, NASCAR, and the cultural and historical tethers that bind the two simmered inside me for nearly twenty years. It all began with a college course on the irreverent southern writer Flannery O'Connor, taught by a wonderfully foulmouthed, half-drunk Jesuit priest, which introduced my New Jersey eyes and ears to the mysteries of the South.

  After college, I hitchhiked around Ireland for a month. The nation's typically rainy spring weather gave me a brutal cold. So when I arrived, coughing and sneezing, at the remote dairy farm of a classmate's relatives, Farmer Quinlan pulled from the cabinet a jar of clear liquid he called “the mountain dew.” He poured some into a cracked mug, added a lemon slice, a cinnamon stick, and topped it with boiling water. The concoction, at once warm and icy, bludgeoned my cold—and I asked for more, please.

  A year later, while I was working at a newspaper in southwest Virginia, a laid-back photographer named Gene Dalton gave me my next taste of moonshine. Gene's moonshine looked like red wine and tasted of plum. He explained how some Virginia moonshiners soaked fruit in their liquor to mellow the taste. He also explained how his moonshine had descended from the “poteen” I'd tasted in Ireland. A law-enforcement source of mine, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent (and occasional drinking partner) named Jim Silvey, provided the next puzzle piece. Silvey explained how moonshiners—whom he and his ATF colleagues still chased through southern Appalachia—had actually created NASCAR, which in rural Virginia was as popular as the Mets I'd rooted for in exur-ban New York City.

  The South's visceral love of NASCAR was unlike anything I'd seen. The sport transcended class the way baseball did; it attracted working class, middle class, and upper class alike. My friends and neighbors attended a few races a year, alongside businessmen and bikers, truck drivers and farmers, preachers and Boy Scouts and felons; they wore NASCAR T-shirts and slapped bumper stickers on their cars declaring their favorite cars (Ford or Chevy) or favorite racers (usually Dale Earnhardt).

  As a New Jersey kid, except for a brief affair with Speed Racer cartoon episodes, I'd been more interested in skiing, music, and the Mets than cars and racing. But my father—an engineer and amateur mechanic—loved cars and sometimes took my brother and me to Watkins Glen or Pocono Raceway. His hobby permeated my youth. (Thirty years later, I still have the black Penske cap he brought home from a race.) Sunday afternoons blared with TV races, and his fingernails seemed always stained with engine grease. Car and Driver or Road & Track magazines littered the coffee table. My mother would shriek when he drove home in another sports car—a Lotus, a Porsche, or an Alfa Romeo— and she'd fret when he went off to weekend driving classes.

  Over the years, I found myself occasionally wondering how such devotion to the automobile came about and how, exactly, moonshine begat the sport called NASCAR. Memories of my trip to Ireland and my days in rural Virginia, sipping moonshine with Gene Dalton or listening to Jim Silvey talk about a bootlegging arrest fermented inside me for years; something about the links between Ireland (of which I am a naturalized citizen), my car-obsessed father, and the Virginia hill country that I'd learned to love. My curiosity finally reached full boil in the summer of 2001.

  My wife and sons and I were vacationing at a South Carolina beach town. One Saturday afternoon, my father-in-law and I went driving in search of a drink and a baseball game on TV and found ourselves inside a nearly windowless roadside pub, where eighteen televisions hung above the lengthy wood bar, with two big screens at each end. All twenty TVs were tuned to various auto races. With only a half dozen other patrons at the bar, we asked the barmaid if we could switch one TV to a baseball game. When I changed the channel—on just one of twenty televisions, mind you—a long-haired guy in a tank top slumping against the bar a few stools away, who had seemed dead asleep, suddenly roared to life. “Hey, I was watching that! Where's my race?”

  Two weeks after that, on September 11, 2001,1 was about to drive to a luncheon near the Pentagon to speak to a group of navy veterans when the phone rang. My wife and I then watched CNN in horror as the towers fell in the city that was once our home. Until that terrible day, I'd been a creature of the blue-state Northeast, a lover of New York, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania. Six weeks later, my wife and I decided not to cancel a long-planned trip to Ireland, where Dubliners bought us drinks and empathized with surprising emotion over our nation's loss on 9/11. When we returned home to Baltimore, it felt somehow in between—not north, not south, but middling.

  I felt disconnected and decided to make a change. In mid-2002,1 left my job at the Baltimore Sun, and our family moved south to the mountainous heart of NASCAR country, to surround ourselves with the history, the culture, the people of NASCAR. We now live a mile from the twisted lane used in Thunder Road, the film in which Robert Mitchum plays a too-cool southern whiskey tripper. One of my sons' teachers supplies me moonshine that he buys from a dude named One-Eyed Ronnie. My search for corn whiskey's history, its Irish roots, and its role in creating NASCAR has taken me to the homes of aging racers and bootleggers as I traversed the jagged hollows of northeast Alabama, western North Carolina, and North Georgia, particularly the town of Dawsonville, the former moonshining capital of Appalachia, which produced the nation's first and best stock car racers and still hosts an annual Moonshine Festival.

  A few months after we moved to North Carolina, a friend bought for my birthday (which happens to fall on the anniversary of Prohibition's birth and death) a book called Our Southern Highlanders, by Horace Kephart, a St. Louis librarian with a serious taste for moonshine. In 1904, Kephart abandoned his family and moved to Appalachia because he “yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality.”

  Likewise, I have settled in a strange yet charming land, where my neighbors' attitudes, their taste for adventure, their pickup trucks and lawbreaking and speed, and their unslaked thirs
t for homemade whiskey seventy-three years past Prohibition are all part of a story that's never been told in full. A story about fearless southern bootleggers and the sport they created, but also a story about the South and its cultural impact on America.

  Neal Thompson

  January 2006

  Asheville, North Carolina

  The American really loves nothing but his automobile.

  — WILLIAM FAULKNER

  We have found God in cars, or if not the true God, one so satisfying, so powerful and awe-inspiring that the distinction is too fine to matter.

  — HARRY CR EW S

  Me and daddy and my uncle,

  we took her home and tore her down,

  Checked her out real good and cleaned her up

  and bored her out.

  Took out all the seats, pulled the carpet off the floor,

  knocked out all the glass and we welded up the door.…

  See, it ain't about the money, or even being number one.

  You gotta know when it's all over,

  you did the best you coulda done.

  And knowin' that it's in you, and you never let it out,

  Is worse than blowin' any engine

  or any wreck you'll ever have.

  It's anybody's race out there

  and I learned to run my own.

  — THE DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS, “DADDY's CUP”

  Tell about the South. What's it like there?

  Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?

  — WILLIAM FAULKNER

  1

  “NASCAR is no longer

  a southern sport”

  The old man has seen a lot. Sometimes too much. Police in his rearview mirror. The inside of jail cells. Friends and family lowered into the ground. Race cars carving deadly paths into crowds. He's seen stacks of money, too—some coming, some going.

  Those visions, those memories, all link into a story. The real story.

  The old man sits behind his orderly desk sipping a Coke, almost as if he's waiting for someone to come through the door and ask, “Tell me what it was like.” It is the start of the twenty-first century, but he is dressed in the style of an earlier era: white shirt and narrow black tie, a gray jacket and felt fedora on a nearby hook—the same uniform he's worn since FDR's first term, except for summers, when the fedora is swapped for a straw boater. Raymond Parks is a creature of habit. He doesn't need to be here each day. With moonshining profits earned as a teen, he bought liquor stores, then vending machines, which funded real estate deals and other sources of income (some legal, some not quite). Far from his squalid youth, Parks is worth plenty, more than he could have imagined. He's sold off most of his empire—the houses, the land, the nightclubs, the vending machines, and all of his liquor stores except one. Still, he arrives each morning to putter around the office, make phone calls, check his accounts.

  Next door, customers trickle into the one package store Parks has kept, the one he's owned for two-thirds of a century. They buy flasks of Jack Daniels and fifths of Wild Turkey from a brother-in-law who has worked for Parks since World War II. Even now, it's an ironic business for a teetotaler who—as a so-called moonshine “baron” and “kingpin”—used to make, deliver, and profit nicely from illegal corn whiskey. Outside, crews of Georgia road workers jackhammer into his parking lot, part of a road-widening project that brings Atlanta's Northside Drive closer to the bespectacled old man's front door each day.

  Parks is ninety-one, though he looks two decades younger. In his twilight years, this office has become a sanctuary and the place he goes to rummage through the past. The room contains the secrets of NASCAR's origins. On cluttered walls and shelves are the dinged-up and tarnished trophies and loving cups, the yellowed newspaper articles, the vivid black-and-white photographs of men and machines, of crowds and crack-ups, which tell part of the story of how NASCAR came to be.

  Take a look: one of Parks's drivers is balanced impossibly on two right wheels in the north turn of the old Beach-and-Road course at Daytona; the wizard mechanic who honed his skills juicing up whiskey cars poses on the fender of a 1939 Ford V-8 coupe outside his “24-Hour” garage, wearing his trademark white T-shirt, white pants, and white socks; a driver stands next to his race car in front of Parks's office / liquor store in 1948, a dozen trophies lined up before him and Miss Atlanta smiling at his side.

  Parks is proud of the recent photos, too. It took many years for him to return to the sport he abandoned in 1952. When he did, NASCAR stars such as Dale Earnhardt—his arm affectionately around Parks's shoulder—embraced him as their sport's unsung pioneer.

  There were good reasons he'd left the sport a half century earlier. That world contained dark secrets like prison and murder, greed and betrayal, the frequent maiming of friends and colleagues, their innocent fans, and the violent death of a young child. Parks keeps a few mementos from that chapter of the NASCAR story tucked neatly inside thick black photo albums, home also to faded pictures of whiskey stills, war-ravaged German cities, and a sheet-draped corpse being loaded into a hearse.

  The corpse had been Parks's cousin and stock car racing's first true star. He had been like a son to Parks. The day after his greatest racing victory, just as his sport was about to take off, he died. As usual, moonshine was to blame.

  Except for Violet—the most beautiful of his five wives, whom he married a decade ago at the age of eighty—Parks is often alone now. He survived his previous wives and his lone son. He outlived all the racers whose careers he launched, including his friend and fellow war veteran Red Byron, who, despite a leg full of Japanese shrapnel, became NASCAR's first champion. He outlived Bill France, too, his wily friend who presided dictator-like over NASCAR's first quarter century. A handful of racers from the 1940s and ′50s are still kicking around, but none of the major players from those seminal, post-Depression days before there was a NASCAR. Even Dale Earnhardt, the man who brought NASCAR to the masses, is gone, killed at Daytona in 2001.

  After abruptly leaving the sport in 1952, Parks watched in awe as NASCAR evolved into something that was unthinkable back in those uneasy years before and after World War II. In the late 1930s, at dusty red-dirt tracks, a victor would be lucky to take home $300 for a win—if the promoter didn't run off with the purse. Now, a single NASCAR racing tire costs more than $300, and a win on any given Sunday is worth half a million.

  Over the years, a few hard-core fans, amateur historians, or magazine writers have tracked Parks down. They stop by to scan his photographs, to tap into his memories of the rowdy races on red-clay tracks, the guns and women and fistfights and white liquor, the days before NASCAR existed. Most days, he works in his office alone, or with Violet by his side. He is the sole living keeper of NASCAR's true history, but his memory is fading, and Violet frets about that. In his tenth decade, Parks—the ex-felon, the war veteran, the self-made millionaire and philanthropist—has finally begun to slow down.

  The “sport” that Parks helped create became a multibillion-dollar industry. It evolved from rural, workingman's domain into an attraction— often an obsession—for eighty million loyal fans. Today's NASCAR, still owned by a single family, is a phenomenon, a churning moneymaker— equal parts Disney, Vegas, and Ringling Brothers—and the second most popular sport in America, with races that regularly attract two hundred thousand spectators. No longer a second-tier event on ESPN2, races are now televised nationally on NBC, TNT, and FOX and in 2007 will begin airing on ABC, ESPN, and other networks, part of a TV contract worth nearly $5 billion.

  With the help of sophisticated merchandising, marketing, and soaring corporate sponsorship, NASCAR continues growing beyond the South, faster than ever, becoming more mainstream by the day. NASCAR's red-white-and-blue logo is splashed on cereal boxes in supermarket aisles, on magazine covers, beer cans, clothing, even leather re-cliners. Try driving any major highway, even in the Northeast, without seeing NASCAR devotions glued to bumpers. Recent additions to the list of $20-million-a-year
race car sponsors include Viagra and, reflective of NASCAR's growing female fan base, Brawny paper towels, Tide, and Betty Crocker. In a sign of NASCAR's relentless hunger for profit, it even rescinded a long-standing ban against liquor sponsors to allow Jack Daniels and Jim Beam to endorse cars in 2005.

  In 2004, NASCAR's longtime top sponsor—cigarette maker R. J. Reynolds, which had been introduced to NASCAR in 1972 by a convicted moonshiner—was replaced by communications giant Nextel. That $750-million deal symbolized not only the sport's modern era but the continued decline of the South's ideological dominance of the sport. As Richard Petty has said, “NASCAR is no longer a southern sport.”

  Today, NASCAR's fan base has found a happy home in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, Kansas City, and Chicago. Plans are even afoot for a racetrack near New York City. Most fans are college-educated, middle-aged, middle-class homeowners; nearly half are women. At a time when some pro baseball teams play before paltry crowds of a few thousand, attendance at NASCAR events grows by 10 percent a year. Average attendance at a NASCAR Nextel Cup race is nearly 200,000, three times bigger than the average NFL football game. The sport's stars are millionaire celebrities who appear in rock videos, date supermodels, and live in mansions. When Dale Earnhardt died, millions of Americans wept, as did Parks, who was there that day in 2001 when Earnhardt slammed into the wall at Daytona. The prolonged mourning for Earnhardt—the sport's Elvis—opened the eyes of more than a few non-NASCAR fans. As NASCAR's popularity continues to spread, the sport is becoming a symbol of America itself. But how did NASCAR happen at all? And why? The answers lie in the complicated, whiskey-soaked history of the South.