Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  General Sherman—”Uncle Billy” to his troops, a modern Atilla to the Confederates—ravaged and humiliated southern cities, burning homes and churches, freeing slaves, his troops gorging themselves on southern crops and livestock. As Rhett Butler says in Gone with the Wind, Sherman's March brought the South “to its knees—It'll never rise again.” One in four Confederate men of military age died in that war. Among Federals, it was just one in ten. In other parts of the divided nation, people moved around more, migrating from town to town, and there was less of a connection to the land beneath their feet. In the South, families typically stayed in one place, sometimes for generations, so there was a deep, emotional connection to the land. “It's the only thing that lasts,” Gerald O'Hara tells his daughter, Scarlett. “This is where you get your strength—the red earth. …”

  But it was on that land, their home turf, that they'd lost the big fight. Afterward, the land continued to remind them, day after day, of defeat. Just like fistfights, a Civil War historian once observed, you remember most the ones you lost.

  At the start, it wasn't even their war. Far north of Atlanta, few Georgians were slave owners or plantation barons. Like other Appalachian mountain people—in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee—they had little in common with those in other parts of the Confederacy, especially the chief instigator, South Carolina. In towns such as Dawsonville, Georgia, loyalties were split between North and South. Some men, inspired by regional pride and an inborn distaste for government, volunteered for the Confederate States Army, believing (as one general told his men on the eve of battle) that northerners were “invaders of your country… agrarian mercenaries sent to subjugate you and to despoil you of your liberties, your property and your honor.” But many other Dawsonville men and North Georgians enlisted with the Union Army, often firing against their southern brethren and aligning themselves with the reviled General Sherman.

  “You are bound to fail,” Sherman had taunted the South, and losing to Uncle Billy's mercenary invaders bred in southerners a bitter sense of tragedy. Subsequently living under the enemy's laws made them feel oppressed by the unwelcome government of another nation. Then came the equally tragic and humiliating era of Reconstruction, when carpetbaggers from the North took their land and their jobs. For the next decades, widespread illiteracy, terrible schools, limited railroad service and electricity afflicted the South, which came to hold a quarter of the nation's population but only a tenth of its wealth. President Roosevelt ultimately declared the South to be “the nation's number one economic problem.” Even into the 1920s, the sting of loss remained so sharp that many towns refused to celebrate Memorial Day or Independence Day—those were northern holidays. Plus, July 4 was the day Vicksburg fell, and there was little to celebrate in that.

  To distinguish themselves from the mannered, elitist North, rural southerners took pride in an earthy, homespun worldview. Men became masters of cars, machinery, and firearms—”all of which,” one southern writer said, “can be operated stone drunk.” Gun toting and whiskey drinking became the proud traits of southern men such as Raymond Parks's uncles. Southern-born writers such as Erskine Caldwell wrote of “lewd, crude, half-starved sharecroppers… hare-lipped Jezebels slithering in the dust.” And, as one Scots-Irish historian observed, “The barefoot, turnip devouring creatures of Erskine Caldwell's novels were only one click away from true reality.” It troubled Caldwell that his homeland “purposely isolated itself from the world in retaliation for defeat, and [has] taken refuge in its feeling of inferiority.” His wildly popular tales of unsophisticated Georgians earned him accusations as a traitor to the South. But Caldwell empathized with his homeland, which “has always been shoved around like a country cousin.”

  Outsiders, lacking such empathy, could be merciless. When the famous curmudgeon and Baltimore Sun columnist H. L. Mencken came to Tennessee in 1925 to cover the Scopes Monkey Trial (which pitted evolutionists against creationists), within twelve minutes of his arrival, he was offered a corn liquor cocktail. He later called the South “the bunghole of the United States, a cesspool of Baptists, a Miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers… and syphilitic evangelists.”

  Raymond Parks never considered his birthplace a cesspool. But neither was it a place to linger. When he left home at fourteen, he did so to take a step closer to the New South, the place that would soon bring riches and slowly lead him (and the nation) toward a southern salvation called NASCAR. He was just a stringy teen in overalls with a sixth-grade education. Then again, textbooks wouldn't help much for the next stage of his life. “Older men,” as he called them, would teach him all he needed to know about snubbing Prohibition, the South's inferiority complex, and the so-called Great Depression.

  As Walter Day's protege, Parks became an apprentice in a craft that allowed him to quickly rise far above the rank of farmhand while still staying true to his southern, antiauthoritarian roots. Parks learned quickly that he was very, very good at moonshining.

  His first job was working the well-hidden stills in the hills east of Atlanta, about forty miles from home back in Dawsonville. A still hand's job was like a sous-chef's—he'd procure and mixingredients, tend to the cooking, making sure the recipe came out just right. He was also a grunt, chopping wood, carrying bags of sugar deep into the woods. Not accounting for the many regional variations, the recipe for southern moonshine basically involved two steps: cook the juice of rotting corn, then capture its potent steam. It speaks to the imagination of the South (and its Irish and/or Scotch forebears) that anyone figured out how to make one from the other.

  Parks and his fellow still hands soaked corn kernels in water for a few days until the kernels germinated and sprouted. They dried the kernels and took them to a nearby mill to have them ground into “malt,” which was again soaked in water for a few days, a process that changed the corn's starch into sugar. The resulting mush, called “sweet mash,” was then mixed with water, sugar, and other grains and soaked inside large wooden vats until the corn's sugars mutated into an alcoholic sludge with the consistency of watery oatmeal. Parks and his coworkers set up planks across the tops of those square, wood-walled vats so they could stir the fermenting, bubbling, and stinky brew, now called “sour mash”—named for the dead-skunk odor it emitted. Parks then skimmed the solids off the top—the spent corn kernels and other grains—and transferred the liquid to large kettles called stills, or pot stills, set atop wood fires, where it was brought to a slow boil.

  Because alcohol becomes vapor at a lower temperature than water, the mash had to be boiled at just the right temperature—about 176 degrees— so that the alcohol separated as steam from the rest of the liquid. This ancient process, called “distillation,” had been created by the Babylonians and handed down over the centuries. Distilling took a practiced hand to keep the fire burning at just the right pace.

  Alcoholic vapors would then snake up and out of the still and through a condenser—a curlicue copper tube attached to the top of the still, called the “worm,” which passed through a vat of cool water that returned the spirituous steam back into a liquid. The result, clear and harsh, dribbled from a spout into a pail. That first batch, called “singlings,” had to be distilled a second time, to remove excess water and toxins. The good stuff was the second distillation, or the “doublings.”

  However, even with the second batch, Parks had to make sure to toss away the first few quarts (the “heads”) and the last few (the “tails”), which were both toxic, and to bottle only the pure and perfect “middlings.” Moonshining was an exacting, meticulous process. With terms like thumpers and slop, worm and bead, malt, mash, and middlings, it had a lyrical language all its own. In able hands, the result was “corn squeezin's” or “white dog” or “tiger spit.” In amateur or devious hands, such recipes could produce poison. Some unscrupulous moonshiners could get sloppy about disposing of their heads and tails, and their tainted whiskey sometimes caused illness, blindness, and even death.

  At its
best, the stuff had no smell at all. At its most potent, the stuff was 150 proof—75 percent alcohol. Parks's consumers could tell a potent brew by shaking the jar and assessing the stiff layer of bubbles atop, called the “bead.” The stiffer the layer of bubbles, the stronger the alcohol content, or “proof.” Some private liquor makers added peaches, pears, honey, or plums to mellow the taste. But the customers of Raymond Parks and his employer mostly preferred the bracing, knife-edged, explosive, and fiery jolt of straight-up, no-frills “white lightning.”

  Just a sip, and the Great Depression didn't seem so Great.

  Parks—nearing sixteen in 1930—took seriously the backwoods schooling he received from Walter Day. He worked hard, saved his money, and never took a sip of the whiskey he helped make, determined not to live his father's life. He sometimes missed his siblings, but he never looked back, never regretted abandoning them.

  Parks lived and ate meals with Day and his wife, who both considered Parks a reliable and responsible worker. As Day's trust grew, he allowed Parks to operate his own wooden mash-mixing box to brew his own whiskey. In time, profits from that side venture helped Parks buy his first car, a secondhand 1925 Model T Ford, the car that was nearing the end of its cultlike, twenty-year run as the most popular car in American history.

  At six feet, with a handsome though slightly doleful face, Parks passed for much older than a teen and never aroused suspicions behind the wheel of his Ford. (In fact, many of NASCAR's early racers began driving well before their fifteenth birthday.) But Parks's Model T wasn't a luxury; it was a business decision. He was biding his time until his new car could carry him, geographically and financially, farther from his roots.

  After two years of working for Day, Parks received a visit one day from his father's brother, who'd heard about his nephew's risky new job and managed to track him down. Uncle Miller asked Parks if he'd consider coming to live with him and his wife in Atlanta, to work a legitimate job at Miller's busy service station (called Hemphill Service Station) and adjacent garage (called Northside Auto Services). At the time, less than a quarter of a century into the age of mass-produced automobiles, service stations and mechanic businesses were mushrooming across the South to serve the needs of an increasingly mobile, car-obsessed nation. Atlantans had been buying fuel in buckets from street-side vendors or hardware stores and sloppily pouring it into their Model Ts.

  But the convenience of a drive-through service station, with tidy pumps and nozzles, proved a financial boon to those who first pounced on the idea. Besides gas stations, the continued explosion of Fords during Parks's coming-of-age decade led to the creation of the first drive-in restaurants, motels, parking garages, and traffic lights. It was the golden age of the automobile, and each day brought new advances.

  It wasn't just the idea of working at a service station that enticed Parks, nor was it solely the chance to finally live in Atlanta. Uncle Miller was a part-time bootlegger and needed Raymond's help to expand his whiskey business. So, one morning, Parks said good-bye to Walter Day, climbed into his Model T, and drove west into the big city, once again taking a chance on a better life, once again entrusting his future to moonshine.

  Some southerners may have felt God would save them; others believed more fervently in themselves, and a church called Atlanta.

  It had begun life as a railroad dead end named Terminus, which was later renamed Marthasville, a settlement with more saloons than churches. In 1845, it was renamed “Atlanta”—after a fleet-footed Greek goddess, which also happened to be the middle name of the governor's daughter. Twenty years later, Uncle Billy Sherman and his Union troops spent a full month burning the city to black ash. Afterward, Atlanta took the phoenix as its symbol and “Resurgens” as its motto. Unlike other large southern cities and colonial ports, Atlanta had relatively little history to preserve. So Atlanta started from scratch, re-creating itself as a southern city for the coming twentieth century. The boosterish newspaper editor Henry Grady helped by coining the phrase “The New South” in an effort to reconcile with the North and to lure northern investors.

  Some hated what the Atlanta of Raymond Parks's day came to represent. “Every time I look at Atlanta, I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent,” one southern writer famously bitched. Another remarked: “What is this place? Is this a place?” To others, Atlanta's gaudy rebirth was a justifiable response to the damage wrought by Sherman's torches and shells. For hungry young men such as Parks, who were tired of feeling second-rate, Atlanta was the place to make something of himself, a place where lying, cheating, and stealing—the Parks family way—could be very lucrative.

  But first, he had to get there. Parks had never driven into Atlanta and didn't know how to find his uncle's garage, so Uncle Miller gave him careful directions to Ponce de Leon Avenue. They would meet there, near the Sears, Roebuck, at a designated time.

  Parks's first drive into the teeming city was like seeing the ocean for the first time. He'd always heard about it and longed to see it for himself but could never have imagined how much bigger and louder and more thrilling it was in person. That first drive felt sumptuous and a bit dangerous, with streetcars clanging and kicking up sparks, and clacking noises coughing out from the textile mills, and all the well-dressed and important-looking strangers staring right through him. After all, back home was a sleepy and somber land of clapboard shacks propped atop stone pillars, scrappy dogs sleeping beneath wood porches, laundry flapping on a line. Atlanta was electricity and noisy newness. People hurried in and out of redbrick shops and waded through traffic, busy and determined. Except for the idled mill workers sulking on street corners, smoking and drinking, the men wore suits and ties, and the women wore pretty dresses cinched tight at the waist.

  Occasionally, a shiny new Ford or Cadillac rolled past, the glints of chrome catching Parks's eye. As he rolled down Ponce de Leon, twisting his head from side to side at all the sights and signs, he saw up ahead the stolid brick exterior of the Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant, where his own car had likely been built. Ford automobiles and the city of Atlanta would soon have wondrous effects on his life. Like other adventurous men before him—like Henry Ford himself, who considered the farm-bound life of his youth to be “drudgery”—Parks knew instantly that city life was the life for him.

  As he pulled over at the Sears department store and waited anxiously for his uncle to arrive, his Model T gurgling as it idled, Parks wondered what would become of him, now that he'd reached the shiny city of his dreams.

  Prohibition has made nothing but trouble.

  — A L CAPO N E

  3

  Henry Ford “created a monster”

  Moving to Atlanta gave Parks more than just immunity from the oncoming Depression. It was the next phase of a remarkable transformation from farm boy to businessman. And it was in Raymond Parks's circa-1930s Atlanta that NASCAR's seeds began to germinate. Fertilized, of course, by moonshine.

  Soon after arriving, taking a cue from the fashionably dressed city men, Parks started wearing a suit, tie, and hat—even while working at his uncle's garage. He'd simply hang up his hat and jacket and zip protective coveralls over the shirt and tie. Sartorial flair symbolized putting the country boy behind, and Parks would continue to wear tailored suits and jaunty hats the rest of his days.

  In the 1920s, only a third of southerners lived in cities such as Atlanta; most worked in agriculture, their incomes ranked far below the national average. But by the early 1930s, Atlanta was growing fast, on its way past three hundred thousand occupants. Parks's contributions to that metropolis began slowly, simply. He worked on cars—mostly Fords—at the garage and lived with Uncle Miller and his wife, Aunt Maude, in their small house on nearby Francis Street. Within two years of his first drive into Atlanta, however, and while still a teenager, Parks would own his uncle's business, his house, and most of the other houses on Francis Street. And he'd owe thanks largely to a man very much like himself, a man of Irish blood, under
educated, self-taught, and savvy in ways that teachers couldn't teach.

  As a teenager, Henry Ford had also fled the farm for the city and, by the 1920s, was the richest man in the world, living proof that cars and cities were the means to success, not farms and tractors and mules.

  Henry Ford, like corn whiskey, was one of Ireland's most influential byproducts.

  His father fled the Irish potato famine and came to America to start anew. He and his wife lost their first child as an infant, then welcomed a son they called Henry, born in 1863, the year of Emancipation and the Battle of Gettysburg. Like Raymond Parks, Henry's mother died when he was a child. As a curious, mechanically inclined boy raised on a rural Michigan farm, Henry was drawn to the nearby high-tech city of Detroit and the fascinating potential for the new machine there called the “horseless carriage.” Detroit had become a magnet for inventors and innovators, and by the late 1800s, the streets were filled with experimental motorized vehicles that some named “automobile” and others called “car,” a derivation of the Gaelic word carrus, meaning cart or wagon.

  At seventeen, nearly the same age at which Parks would journey to his own city of hope, Ford walked half a day into Detroit to begin working as a machinist. After a few years of apprenticeship, he began building his own horseless carriages. All his extra money went to buying parts and his free time into solving the problems of his prototypes. When Ford began driving his smoke-coughing “quadricycles” among the bicycles and horses of Detroit's dirt lanes, neighbors shook their heads and said, “there goes that crazy loon again. Some day he's going to blow himself up.” On foot or bicycle, young boys chased behind Ford and his noisy contraptions. Other townsfolk yelled “get a horse” and denounced his “devil wagon.”