Driving with the Devil Page 14

  He wouldn't return to racing for six years.

  Meanwhile, Lloyd Seay had been working his way toward the lead but, in the north turn, caught a rut and flipped and rolled. The Ford incredibly landed back on all four wheels, and Seay jammed it into gear and took off. A few laps later, he was again up on two wheels in the north turn. The crowd gasped as he wobbled, but then managed to drop softly back onto four wheels and tore down the paved straightaway.

  Seay tried the two-wheeler move a few laps later, but just as he'd done in two previous races that summer, he flipped and lost valuable time. He managed to turn his badly crumpled Ford back over and rejoin the race, though his efforts were only good enough for fourth place. Hall, after his crack-up with Fonty Flock, had another crash later in the race and finished eighth. A Dawsonville moonshiner named Bernard Long, in only the second (and final) race of his career, celebrated his win with a cold Coca-Cola.

  A reporter asked Seay afterward, “Was it a hard race?” “It feels a lot harder to me when I don't win,” Seay replied.

  The biggest year ever for racing at Daytona Beach continued seven weeks later, when the Georgia Gang returned to Florida for yet another 160-miler, the final beach race of the season. This time, Seay intended to get the best of his cousin, and Bill France.

  Seay had always been a modest young man, and he was proud to consider cousin Hall part of what he called “the racing team”—but he hated to lose, especially to Hall.

  “Seay and Hall have a bitter rivalry on the track,” a reporter once said.

  All summer long, Seay had been winning, fulfilling the promise of his championship performance three years earlier, in 1938. He won at Lakewood in May; in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Memorial Day; in High Point, North Carolina, in June; in Greensboro in July. With so many wins, a Philadelphia newspaper called Seay “the hottest stock car driver in the land.” And yet, while it was satisfying to regularly trounce his cousin Roy, the big prize for a stock car racer in 1941 (and to this day) was to take the checkered flag at Daytona, something that had eluded Seay. By his count, Seay had won races at every other track in the South, and a few up North, too. Seay had raced at Daytona nearly a dozen times during the previous two seasons. But, as he told a reporter prior to the August 24 race, “something would always keep me from winning.”

  This time, he planned to scrap his cautious approach and go for victory right from the start. Before twelve thousand fans, Seay shot out to the front to take an early lead. It was an aggressive Roy Hall-style tactic that Lloyd had previously deemed too risky.

  It was riskier still on August 24 because, with all the activity on the Beach-and-Road course that summer, the northbound straightaway along the beach had become seriously corrugated. To avoid those washboard ruts, Seay drove at the hard-packed outer edge of the course, the narrow strip where the ocean kissed the sand. Drivers had tried that technique many times over the years, with mixed results. The slightest turn too far right, or an errant wave that washed higher than the others, and Seay's right wheels would be sucked into the softer, waterlogged sand, pulling his car into the surf.

  In the treacherous north turn, Seay never let up on the gas and arced through on two wheels with “alarming regularity,” a sportswriter said afterward. France tried to keep pace but got stuck once in the north turn and lost valuable minutes. Hall also took the north turn on two wheels, twice, but late in the race cracked the frame and had to pull out.

  Which left Seay all alone up front. He never slowed and never looked back. Seay drove so fast and so cleanly that he lapped many of the slower racers. His bicycle move worked perfectly—no flips or rolls this time. In fact, he led the entire fifty laps, start to finish, averaging between seventy-eight and eighty-five miles an hour, a new course record.* Seay took the checkered flag a full lap ahead of the rest—3.5 miles from the number two driver. One reporter called it “one of the finest exhibitions of driving ever witnessed on a race track.”

  “It's about time I won here,” Seay said afterward.

  Hall's cracked car frame and failure to finish were enormously gratifying to Seay, whose other rival, France, ended his summer of bad luck in seventh place. Though he would compete in a few more races, France's days as a winner were mostly over. That summer of 1941 marked the acceleration of his transition from racer to promoter.

  In the pits after the race, Seay was giddy. So was Parks, the two of them giggling, as one sportswriter noted, “as tickled as a couple kids with a stick of candy.”

  It would forever gall France that Atlanta's moonshiners got the best of him that summer of 1941; he would subsequently lash out at moonshiners with increasing frequency, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Then again, France knew that if he was to attract the crowds and make stock car racing the success he believed it could be, he needed entertaining drivers, the best drivers, and that included bootleggers.

  Late in life, when asked about the best NASCAR drivers of all time, France often put Lloyd Seay on his list, even though Seay never competed in a single NASCAR race.

  He never got the chance.

  * Facing liquor and conspiracy charges against him in 1948, Watson refused to testify against Wrigley but agreed to join the Marine Corps to avoid indictment.

  * France was later known to carry a pistol with him to enforce his ever-shifting rules. At a race twenty years later, he bullied racers into signing a pledge to reject a unionization drive, threatening to blackball those who didn't sign. “If you don't sign this form… I'll use a pistol to enforce it. I have a pistol, and I know how to use it.”

  * Reports varied on Seay's actual speed. The Daytona paper said it was 78.5; the Atlanta paper said it was 80; another report called it 85.

  Death, that cruel leveller of all distinctions…

  — DAVY CROCKETT

  7

  “Yesterday his luck ran out”

  A week after his stunning victory at Daytona in late August of 1941, Seay faced off against Bill France and twenty others at a gdirt track in High Point, North Carolina. A year earlier, Seay and France had collided on the same track, and France's car flipped seven times. He was lucky to survive. This time, France hoped to repay Seay. Retribution was a common tactic, and some successful drivers even earned bounties—payoffs to a driver, from gamblers or pissed-off racers, to put the favorite into the wall.

  Earlier that summer, a driver from Macon, Georgia, had vowed to put Seay into the lake at Lakewood, but Seay heard about the bounty and halfway into the race sneaked up behind him and bashed repeatedly into his left rear fender. Seay disabled the driver's car, but then his own car slid off the track and into the lake. Fellow Dawsonville moonshiner Gober Sosebee knew Seay couldn't swim and pulled off the track to save Seay from his slowly sinking car. After the race, the two went looking for the driver from Macon, but he had disappeared, and they never saw him at another race.

  At the High Point race of August 29, Seay managed to stay clear of trouble and finished just ahead of France for his seventh victory of the year. “Lloyd Seay looks like a timid choir boy, but on the speedway he's a hell-bent-for-election dare devil,” one newspaper declared. Seay had finally found his place on the racetrack, emerging from cousin Hall's substantial shadow, and France's.

  Three days later, on September 1, 1941, Seay lined up at the start of the annual one hundred-mile Labor Day race at Lakewood, his hometown track, where his career had begun.

  Atlanta's road superintendent spread forty thousand pounds of calcium chloride on the track, “to guarantee a dustless track for Labor Day.” Speedway officials had also added a new scoreboard and extra grandstands and had groomed the dirt track to perfection, anticipating “the greatest stock car race ever held here.”

  The day's lineup was among the strongest in stock car racing's short history. In addition to Seay, the field included Eddie Samples and Gober Sosebee, both products of the Dawsonville-to-Atlanta school of whiskey driving, and other well-known Atlanta racers such as Bob Flock, Carson Dyer, Jap Bro
gdon, and Harley Taylor, who would race with two broken ribs sustained in an earlier accident. France even decided to join up, to try to beat the Atlanta boys on their own track. The only one missing was Roy Hall, who was in Alabama trying to avoid an arrest warrant with his name on it. Sportswriters speculated over whether Seay could compete in his hometown against one of the strongest fields of the year. Said one reporter, “Seay has an outstanding reputation in other parts, but in a town of hot, lead-footed stock car drivers, he's just one of the boys.”

  For reasons he would never get a chance to explain, Seay chose to race a convertible instead of a hardtop and—odder still—changed his car number from 7 to 13. Racers are a wildly superstitious bunch. A green car, women in the pits, even peanuts were all considered bad luck. Racers spited their enemies by tossing peanut shells into their cars. But number thirteen was considered the unluckiest of all. Racers dreaded having to start in the thirteenth position, and no one willingly drove a car numbered 13.*

  As fifteen thousand fans rose to their feet, Ed Samples and Harley Taylor, despite his broken ribs, raced to the lead, scraping and nudging each other so much, their cars became locked together in the first turn. The two cars threatened to choke off the entire field, but they finally veered off in tandem and into the rails, allowing the rest of the field to pass.

  Carson Dyer led the first half of the race but then pulled into the pits with a flat tire and an oil leak. Seay, Bob Flock, and Skimp Hersey raced bumper to bumper for a few laps until Seay pulled away and into the lead. He lost a lap during a much-needed pit stop, and Red Singleton enjoyed a short-lived lead. France then took a stab at the lead and in one turn tried to duplicate the two-wheel “bicycle” move that Seay and Hall had perfected. He twitched too far right and flipped over.

  After his pit stop, Seay proved that his unlucky number 13 had no effect on his driving. By the eightieth lap, only twelve cars remained on the track, and Seay pulled away from them all. His tactic of driving carefully, letting the other racers peeter and putter out, worked brilliantly. Then, on lap ninety-five out of one hundred, Seay's motor began hissing and spewing, and it looked as if it might betray his significant lead. The field began to gain on Seay's slowing car, but the Vogt-built engine had just enough life in it. Seay sputtered across the finish line, just barely victorious, his engine dying with a final cough.

  Seay spoke briefly to the crowd, thanking Parks and Vogt. Despite the calcium chloride, the red dust had still swirled wildly and now covered every available surface. Seay's white overalls were tinged red, and sportswriters described how “the parked cars were red-topped and the dust-draped crowd was rust-colored.”

  Seay pocketed one-third of the $450 winner's purse, gave the other $300 to Parks, and climbed into his personal car—a shiny maroon rag-top Ford with six spotlights. As the sun began to set, he drove the curved dirt roads back toward Dawsonville, skipping the fireworks display that would shower over Lakewood that night.

  Seay spent the night at his brother's place on the road north of Dawsonville, a few hundred yards from the house where Raymond Parks had been born. Seay was stiff and sore from the previous week's racing. He had blisters on his hands, a crick in his neck, and bruises all over. He had hoped to sleep late. But early the next morning— September 2—he was awakened by a knock at the door.

  Seay's cousin, Woodrow Anderson, was a short, wide bulldog of a man. After knocking on the door of the Seay household that morning, he nodded solemnly to Lloyd's brother, Jim, and Jim's wife, then walked back to where Lloyd slept and roused his groggy and sore cousin, demanding to go for a ride and “settle up.”

  Despite his success on the racetrack that summer, Seay had never distanced himself from his chief source of income. And what happened next would continue to reverberate through NASCAR's creation and infancy, as if to prove Bill France's belief that moonshining and stock car racing don't, can't, shouldn't mix.

  About a week earlier, before heading to Daytona, Seay had purchased a few fifty-pound sacks of sugar for the family stills that he, brother Jim, and cousin Woodrow operated in the dense hills outside Dawsonville. Instead of paying for the sugar on the spot, he asked the grocer to tack the cost onto Woodrow's credit account.

  Woodrow was a well-known moonshiner, part of a notorious family of Dawsonville-area lawbreakers. He and his uncle—named Ford— were once charged with beating a neighbor to the brink of death simply because his cows had gotten loose and wandered into the Andersons' yard. A friend of Woodrow's once went hunting with him and watched him shoot his own dog. Woodrow had also served two prior prison sentences for manufacturing illegal whiskey. He was a mean, bitter, and dangerous young man, and Lloyd and Jim Seay knew to be careful around him. But driving race cars was no way to earn a living. Not yet. To make money, Lloyd Seay did what he'd learned to do as a child. He ran moonshine, often in wary alliance with some unhinged kin.

  A three-way business partnership had begun earlier that summer: Jim Seay and Woodrow made the stuff, and Lloyd delivered it. They were supposed to split all costs.

  Lloyd and Woodrow had recently bought a load of sugar together, but Woodrow was short of cash so Lloyd paid for it with his own cash. To balance out the transaction, Woodrow told Lloyd to get the next batch of sugar at a different store to and charge it to a credit account Woodrow had there. But when Woodrow checked that account later, it seemed to him as though someone had charged an extra $120 to the account—over and above the amount that Woodrow owed Lloyd for the previous transaction. Woodrow accused Lloyd of taking advantage of him and using his credit account to buy extra sugar.

  This is the matter that Woodrow now wanted to “settle up.” But Lloyd's brother didn't like how Woodrow was acting and insisted on coming along. Lloyd and Jim started walking toward Lloyd's maroon Ford convertible, but Woodrow suspiciously insisted they all ride in his car, a beat-up Model A.

  “How will me and Jim get back home?” Lloyd asked.

  “I'll bring you back,” Woodrow said.

  They got into Woodrow's car—Jim up front, Lloyd in back—and headed north toward the town of Dahlonega. Jim suggested they stop at their Aunt Monie's and have her act as impartial mediator. “She's aunt to all three of us. Let her do the figuring,” he said. But they'd never make it to Aunt Monie's.

  On the drive up Highway 9, Woodrow asked Lloyd if he still thought 13, the number of his winning race car, was lucky.

  “I reckon so,” Lloyd said. “Why?”

  “Don't be too sure of that,” Woodrow replied, then swerved off Highway 9 into the driveway of his father's house, claiming he needed to add water to his radiator.

  When the car came to a stop, Woodrow turned around and laid into Lloyd, badgering Lloyd to pay him for the sugar and accusing Lloyd of stealing from him. Lloyd argued that he had already delivered to Woodrow all the sugar he'd charged to the account and didn't owe him a goddamn thing. What happened next depends on which version of the story is true. According to Woodrow's version, all three men started arguing and fussing. Lloyd slapped him, so Woodrow ran into his father's bedroom and grabbed a pistol from under the pillow. When he got back outside, Lloyd and Jim were waiting for him. They jumped him and wrestled him to the ground, Woodrow claimed.

  Jim's version—the story a jury would later accept as true—unfolded like this…

  After pulling into his father's driveway, Woodrow got out of the car, walked to the front, and opened the hood, then pretended to unscrew the radiator cap. He then reached into the engine compartment and grabbed something. Jim couldn't see what it was, but he saw Woodrow stick it into the front pocket of his overalls. Woodrow then walked around to the passenger side and told Jim to get out of the car.

  “If you don't want to get mixed up in anything,” Woodrow muttered.

  When Jim refused, Woodrow yanked a .32 pistol from his overalls, waved it over his head, and yelled, “By God, get out!” Jim slowly opened the door and got out.

  Woodrow then reached into the backseat and beg
an slapping Lloyd in the face and head. He shoved the gun in Lloyd's face, yelling and cussing about the money he felt he was owed, then pistol-whipped his cousin across the face. Lloyd stumbled out of the car, but before he could run clear, Woodrow punched him again, and again.

  Jim stepped between the two men, screaming at Woodrow to “Put the gun up!”

  “You black son of a bitch,” Woodrow yelled. “I'll shoot you first.”

  He lifted the gun and fired. Jim screamed as the bullet burrowed into his neck, nicking his jugular vein, and passed through his right lung. He dropped to the dirt, grabbing his neck with both hands as blood spurted through his fingers.

  A split second later, Woodrow turned the gun on Lloyd, and without another word, he fired. The bullet slammed into Lloyd's chest, just under his arm, and pierced his heart. Lloyd fell backward, flat on his back, with Woodrow looming over him, still cursing.

  Clutching his chest, Lloyd looked up at his cousin and whispered, “Why;”' Woodrow finally stopped yelling and grew suddenly quiet, as if emerging from a dream.

  Lloyd asked again, this time in a soft, gurgling rasp, “Why'd… you… shoot me?”

  “Goddamn you,” Woodrow growled. “You know what I shot you for.”

  As Lloyd lay dying in the dusty driveway, he asked for water. Woodrow acted as if he didn't understand him, the words were mere whispers. Lloyd asked again, and this time Woodrow heard him but callously refused. Finally, Seay lifted his head, looked over at his wounded, bleeding brother, and said his last words.