Driving with the Devil Read online

  “Tell Raymond…,” he began.

  Before he could finish the thought or whisper another word, Lloyd lost all strength, breathed one last breath, then laid his head back down and died.

  Woodrow reached into Lloyd's pocket and found the money Lloyd had won the previous day at Lakewood—$217 in one-dollar bills, plus a silver dollar that Lloyd carried for luck. Woodrow counted out $120 and put the blood-covered bills in his own overalls, giving the rest to Jim, who lay beside his dead brother.

  Lloyd's older brother and another cousin arrived to find Lloyd still lying on the ground. They carried his body inside Woodrow's father's house and laid him on a cot.

  After his arrest, Woodrow peddled his version, even claiming that Lloyd's dying words were, “Woodrow, I done you wrong, and I'm sorry.” He told newsmen that Lloyd and Jim attacked him and he shot in self-defense. “It looked like they were about to give me a whuppin' so I started shootin',” he said. “The first thing I knew we were quarrelling, then I was runnin', then I was shootin'. That's all there was to it.”

  A jury later convened in the Dahlonega courthouse—not far from where Raymond Parks's great-great uncle Benny had found gold—and decided there was more to it than that.* They sentenced Woodrow to life in prison. (Woodrow was released ten years later, after working on a prison road crew that repaired Dawsonville-area highways. In an ironic twist, he later worked at Ford's new postwar factory outside Atlanta.)

  At almost the precise moment that Seay's corpse was loaded into the county coroner's van and the scrawny sheriff, Joe Davis, carried the still-warm murder weapon to his car, the huge loving cup for Seay's victory at Lakewood arrived at Parks's office at the Northside Auto Service Station on Hemphill Avenue in downtown Atlanta.

  Parks learned that afternoon that Lloyd had died.

  The next day's newspaper showed a photo of Seay's Ford convertible sputtering across the finish line two days earlier. The cutline said “Unlucky 13” in boldface, and beneath that read, “At Lakewood, it brought him luck. Yesterday his luck ran out.”

  The Atlanta journal story continued:

  Lloyd Seay, lead-footed mountain boy who didn't care whether he was outrunning revenuers or race-drivers just so long as he was riding fast.… Lanky blond and youthful, he was well known in Atlanta and all along the highways and in the mountains. Federal, state and county law enforcement officers knew him as the most daring of all the daredevil crew that hauled liquor from mountain stills into Atlanta. They had many a wild chase when they hit his trail, but they had caught him only rarely, for he hurled his car down the twisting black-top hill-country roads at a pace few of them cared to follow. He will be missed by racetrack fans as well.

  A caravan of cars surrounded Seay's funeral—”liquor haulers and race fans and thrill seekers and reporters.” As one southern writer said, you'd have thought ex-Dixie president Jefferson Davis himself was in the coffin. Seay's story captured the imagination of Georgians in need of inspiration. The drums of world war had begun beating louder and louder. Atlantans knew, as the nation knew, that it was just a matter of time before they started sending their boys overseas. But Seay had given them a brilliant distraction, a poignant, folk hero story line of triumph and tragedy, a tale with a bloody ending that would have made Erskine Caldwell blush.

  Standing among the hundreds of mourners were a few revenue agents and sheriff's deputies, men who had tried so hard to put Seay behind bars but who respected—envied, even—the young man's driving skills.

  None of the mourners was more distraught than Raymond Parks. He looked dignified and serene in his fedora and brown suit. On the inside, he was devastated. He'd nursed such high hopes for Seay, whom he considered a better racer than his other cousin, Roy. Better than Bill France or the Flock brothers, too. If Seay had lived, Parks felt he would have become “one of the great drivers.”

  The cemetery sat three blocks from Dawsonville's town square. A few weeks after the funeral, a four-foot-high granite monument was installed at Seay's grave. It read, “Winner National Stock Car Championship, Sept. 1, 1941, Lakewood Speedway.” A bas-relief ′39 Ford was etched into the granite and a glass-encased photo of Seay glued into the driver's side window. For many decades to come, Lloyd Seay's photograph would peer out onto nearby Highway 9, the “Whiskey Trail” he helped blaze.

  The headstone was ordered and paid for by Parks, who kept asking himself, What the hell am I going to do now?

  * The next person to drive Seay's number 13 car, popular “Cannonball” Bob Baker from Daytona Beach, would wreck on the final lap of a race and sustain injuries that would leave him crippled.

  * Neither cousin was very good with numbers, and the subsequent trial revealed that the dispute actually came down to a difference of five cents. At that trial, witnesses and attorneys also speculated that the sugar story was concocted afterward, and that the whole argument may have been over a woman.

  I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in a

  significant glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

  The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.…

  — JACK LONDON

  8

  “MIRACULOUS DEATH ESCAPE”

  S eay's death left a gaping hole in Raymond Parks's young racing team and threatened to derail the fast-growing popularity of a sport whose rules and rituals Seay himself had helped define. How would the shaky-legged new sport survive without its first star? Parks knew that Roy Hall, who spent more time fleeing police than leading races, was no successor to Lloyd Seay, regardless of his ample driving skills.

  While Parks, Vogt, France, and the other pioneers of stock car racing mourned the loss of Seay, another intrepid racer was positioning himself to fill Seay's shoes. The man who would take up the flag of southern stock car racing would turn out to be a sullen, brainy, prematurely bald cigar chewer born in the South, raised out West, and now settled back South where he belonged. Another man named Red.

  Robert Nold Byron had been a soft-spoken, curious, happy little redhead. Born in 1916 to Scots-Irish parents, he would live a hard-luck life, a life darkened—in eerie similarity to Raymond Parks, Roy Hall, and Henry Ford—by the death of a parent.

  At first, home was a company town in southwest Virginia called Plasterco, where Byron's father, Jack, worked as a mining engineer for the U.S. Gypsum Co.,* creator of wallboards and ceiling tiles. The family lived in employee housing, which at that time consisted of large tents. Jack, who as a child had worked the mines in his hometown in Ohio following the death of his own father, would return from the gypsum mine to his canvas-walled home at night, hacking and wheezing, spitting up blood and thick white globs of coagulated gypsum. After many months of this, the company doctors diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis and suggested that the Byrons move west to the cleaner air of Colorado, Arizona, or California. Jack chose Colorado. Bob was just a toddler.

  Jack spent his first months in Colorado at a sanatorium until he recovered from his TB and was hired again by the Colorado branch of U.S. Gypsum. The jagged peaks and pinnacles, the red-rock cliffs and lush pine forests full of wildlife made an idyllic boy's playground. Bob, as Red was known as a child, now eight and adventurous, attracted a gaggle of friends. They played war games and hide-and-seek, explored caves and rock formations. One boy's pet pig followed them everywhere.

  The Byrons moved to Boulder in 1924, and for a while, life was good. Jack got a better job. His wife, Elizabeth, gave birth to a daughter, Virginia. Bob was well behaved, mechanically inclined, and bookish, although starting to show signs of increasing energy and daring. He joined the Boy Scouts, played football, and in summertime disappeared into the mountains, rock climbing among the sheer-faced Flatirons. In winter, he waxed the steel runners of his sled and flew down snow-covered streets, sometimes at night.

  Bob was an industrious boy, too, delivering newspapers and shoveling snow from neighbors' driveways. At night, the family gathered in the den, in front of a fire, to read books a
nd listen to phonographs or Amos and Andy on the radio. Jack was a college-educated man and had filled the house with books. Bob loved the boyhood adventure stories of Jack London and Ernest Thompson Seton, especially Seton's Rolf in the Woods series about a boy who escapes a drunken aunt and uncle to join an Indian tribe.

  In time, Bob's daredevil side began to emerge more boldly. Hand-drawn pictures and clipped-out photos of automobiles began to cover his bedroom walls. He maintained a growing stack of Popular Mechanics magazines. Teachers noticed that Bob was scribbling sketches of racing cars into his notebooks and textbooks. They warned his parents that Bob “wasn't applying himself.” For Christmas one year, Bob received a mechanical drawing set and drafting table, which became his pride and joy. He kept the drawing instruments neatly lined up in the proper slots of a blue velvet-lined box. He also built a ham radio and took up Hawaiian guitar. Then, through Boy Scouts, Bob was introduced to “soapbox” derby car racing. That's when trouble really began.

  Not content to create simple rectangles on wheels, Bob spent many hours crafting streamlined, meticulously painted boy-sized racing machines. Pieces from his sister's toys began to disappear, particularly the wheels, “borrowed” from her tricycle, baby buggy, or wagon. Bob won many soapbox derbies in his little homemade racing cars.

  In high school, Bob got his driver's license, which led to further trouble. He and his friends, after school or after Saturday football games, gathered on the outskirts of town and raced one another on dirt roads or in a cow field. Bob was already one of the more popular kids at school. He dated one of the prettiest girls, and everyone knew about his musical group, which played Hawaiian songs at church parties and school dances. His car-racing prowess raised his social stock even higher.

  One Saturday, a farmer complained about kids racing recklessly and without permission in his field. The police were called, and Bob was arrested. His parents took away his driving privileges. Bob responded by pooling money with his friends to buy a secondhand Model T, which he kept in the backyard. If he couldn't drive a car, he could at least play with one. Bob spent many hours dismantling and rebuilding the Ford. He stripped off the fenders, stiffened the suspension, and beefed up the engine, with plans to start racing other boys once again in a nearby cow pasture. Every now and then, he'd get the engine running, only to have it splurt, sputter, and die. He became obsessed with the uncooperative Ford. He'd absentmindedly leave his father's tools in the rain and snow, where they'd rust. Grease and oil covered his clothes, hands, and face. His parents, frustrated by Bob's sudden irresponsibility, finally told him to get rid of the car.

  The household grew edgy with the tense rift that was developing between father and son. Bob's mother, Elizabeth, and sister, Virginia, tried to act as buffers between the two headstrong men. Life in the Byron household grew tenser yet when the Depression forced Bob to leave school and start earning money. He got a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Potato soup became a family staple.

  Then, in the winter of 1934, Elizabeth came down with the flu, which devolved into pneumonia. She was rushed one night to the hospital, but it was too late. Her death plunged the family into a fog of confusion and grief. Jack remarried a year later, and Bob knew he would have to leave home soon.

  Jack Byron was a stern, devout Catholic; he and his new wife did not want a rule-breaking, thrill-seeking gearhead for a son. Jack felt Bob should be focusing on his education—pursuing college, not cars. His mother had been his advocate and confidante, but Bob openly shunned his father's conservative advice. When the elder Byron threatened to disown him, Bob decided, like Rolf in the boyhood tales of his youth, it was time to seek out his dream of a robust life built around cars and speed. Bob was seventeen, the same age at which Henry Ford had left home. Like Raymond Parks, he latched onto Ford's Model T as his vehicle for escape, catching the bug that infected many young men his age.

  Bob moved out and got a job working in a coal mine south of Denver. His coworkers thought he was so laid-back they once bought him a leather whip as a gag. But on the weekends, he hooked up with a rowdy gang of teens who sometimes delivered moonshine, drag-raced, and bob-sledded in the mountains, a dangerous sport that killed two of his friends. Bob lived in the shadow of Pike's Peak, which hosted the annual hill-climbing races he'd read about as a child. Those races had been inspired by Henry Ford's former driver, Barney Oldfield.

  During the earliest days of American racing, Oldfield had been the first daredevil showman, but also a natural, gut-level driver who felt more at home on small-town dirt tracks than on paved speedways such as Indy (where he never won). Among Oldfield's many feats and firsts was, in 1915, becoming the first man to race up the new 12.5-mile dirt road leading to the top of Pike's Peak, a feat that led to annual races there.

  Pike's Peak lured a band of racing groupies who turned the region into a small community of Oldfield wannabes. Oldfield always drove with an unlit cigar clamped in his jaw, a cushion of tobacco that prevented the ruts of a racetrack from chipping his teeth. That cigar and his dark-tinted goggles, to keep dust out of his eyes, had been the notorious speed demon's trademarks. Bob Byron decided they'd be his trademarks, too.

  After spending a year or so in and around Pike's Peak, Byron decided to follow a hunch. He'd heard that some of the best racing of the day was happening down South. A friend's cousin had recently moved to Alabama, and Byron decided to join him, in a little town called Talladega. He found a job as a mechanic at a Chevrolet dealer and on weekends sought out other race-minded young men at the scrappy, unruly little dirt tracks of Alabama and nearby Georgia. He was a bit of an outsider—a westerner among southerners—but his enthusiasm for racing quickly earned him a group of pals.

  Byron befriended a jittery, chatty dude named Shorty, who soon became his infamous sidekick. He also frequently visited nearby Anniston and the shop of an eccentric, one-legged mechanic named A. J. Weldon, who'd lost his leg to cancer. His disability had no effect on his renown for supplying souped-up flathead Ford V-8 engines to many of the top Alabama racers of the 1930s and 1940s. Weldon had an immaculate room full of spare parts on the second floor above his shop and an obsession for cleanliness and tidiness to rival Red Vogt's. Unlike Vogt, Weldon's expertise was mainly in creating open-wheel cars, the specially built racers that competed in the AAA circuit, including full-sized Indy cars and the smaller “dirt” and “midget” versions.

  Outside the South, AAA's championship circuit was the pinnacle of motorsports, as Major League Baseball is to Little League or stickball. Stock car racing was still an unproven novelty. As with most racers of the day, Byron's goal was Indy. He drove made-from-scratch, bullet-shaped, open-wheel racers known as big cars or three-quarter cars. The number painted on his first racer was “99”—a tribute to the Barney Oldfield / Henry Ford creation, the “999,” which Oldfield had raced into the history books in 1902. Through the mid-to late 1930s, Byron and his pal Shorty became regulars at dozens of dirt racetracks, traveling all across northern Alabama and into Georgia in search of races. Those tracks were part of an informal AAA minor-league network, whose racers dreamed of reaching the big leagues. Byron clipped out news articles about his occasional victories and mailed them home to his family.

  By 1937, Byron—now known as Red—had aligned himself with other drivers and mechanics, who together founded the Alabama Racing Association. But car racing in Old South Alabama wasn't as welcome as it was at that time in New South Atlanta, and Byron's racing club had a hard time finding a home. The group hosted a few open-wheel races in 1937 at a track in Oxford but was soon chased out by a court injunction, due to the noise and unruly crowds. Occasional races at the Birmingham Fairgrounds attracted as many as eight thousand, but other tracks—such as the half-mile track in Gadsen called Melrose Park, near Byron's home—attracted more controversy than fans.

  In 1938, after a few Sunday-afternoon races, northern Alabama church leaders began to complain that the Melrose Park races were, in short, sinful—a
nd “a disturbance of their peace.” The religious leaders brought their complaints to county officials and other elected leaders who, preferring not to alienate their churchgoing voters, asked Sheriff P. W. Cotton to look into the matter. Sheriff Cotton had no problem threatening to arrest anyone racing on a Sunday. After all, many of the racers were well known to Cotton as whiskey trippers. A local judge upheld the sheriff's threat, citing the state's “blue law,” which prohibited any business activities on the Lord's day that weren't necessary for “life and health.” Byron worried about the blow to his club's nascent racing program, which had already begun advertising its races and stood to lose money. “You might as well write our obituary,” he said. Byron was then warned by the sheriff's office: Call off the races or face arrest. “We haven't made anything off racing here yet,” Byron complained to a reporter. “We had hoped to keep at it until we built up a following.”

  Byron and his association then tried racing on Wednesday nights instead of Sundays, but the crowds were paltry. So he and the other Alabama racers began looking for new racing venues. On July 3, 1938, Byron and three other Alabamans drove eighty miles east into southside Atlanta for Byron's first-ever race at Lakewood Speedway.

  Lakewood had not yet hosted a stock car race but offered a highly publicized series of AAA-sponsored Fourth of July races in 1938, featuring open-wheel big cars and some of the nation's best-known racers. The July 4 races taught Byron that he still had a lot to learn.

  After finishing second and third in two ancillary “heat” races, Byron qualified to start in the main twenty-mile event, which attracted twenty-five thousand fans, the biggest crowd Byron had ever seen at a racetrack. An Atlanta racer named Crash lived up to his reputation and kicked off the race by smashing dramatically through the fence and rolling his car onto himself, one of a handful of thrilling collisions that inspired the newspapers to call it “easily the greatest race meet ever conducted in Atlanta.” Byron watched it all from the pits with an engine that died a few miles into the race.