Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Now nineteen and just barely a man, he had transformed himself from the dirt-poor son of a sot into a successful if semilegitimate businessman. Parks remained wary of the country twang in his voice and his lack of education, though. In social settings, he spoke little, for fear of giving away his farmer's pedigree. But his laconic and taciturn pose only added to the impression others had of him as intense, moody, thoughtful, and powerful. “The biggest introvert I've ever known,” one friend called him. “The most secretive, private human being.”

  Parks developed a practice of remaining in the background of his businesses. He gave others his instructions, then kept his distance. Some workers tried to befriend him, but he had never learned the art of small talk and didn't tolerate idleness. A worker named Ralph “Bad Eye” Shirley—who lost his eye on a barbed-wire fence as a kid—finally gave up trying to talk to Parks, and it took half a year before Parks initiated a conversation.

  (Shirley eventually became one of Parks's closest friends, would one day marry his sister Lucille, and worked for Parks for nearly seventy-five years.)

  “Raymond was all business, even though he was just a little boy,” Lucille Shirley recalled. “But I don't know what we would have done without him.”

  With his rising fortunes, Parks bought a large farm south of Atlanta, in a town called Moultrie, and moved a few brothers and sisters there. He bought them new clothes and food. It was partly a selfless effort to rescue them from Dawsonville, but with the added benefit of putting loyal kinfolk in charge of some moonshine stills he'd set up nearby. Parks moved his father to the new farm, too, though the arrangement had its complications. Parks bought farm equipment, a plow and tractor, and then helped his family plant crops. But his father pawned the family tractor and was twice arrested, once when police found shelves of whiskey jars behind the false wall of a clothes closet, and once when they found a stash inside a secret compartment beneath a windowsill. Parks was often apprehensive about visiting. “Every time I go down there I've got a new brother or sister,” he told a friend. Even so, he paid the family's bills, visited now and then, and even began hiring siblings to work with him in Atlanta.*

  By the mid-1930s, Parks had completed the transformation into a self-made and—on the outside, anyway—respectable denizen in the new world order of Atlanta, where he was surrounded by the money, cars, women, and nice clothes he craved. In business, he was sneaky and effective. The city of Atlanta placed a limit on how many liquor stores some-one could own and operate. The limit was two. Parks managed to own six, and briefly eight, usually by putting the stores in other people's names, such as friends or family. Still, he needed the county commissioners to approve those liquor stores. So, to be safe, each commissioner who voted “yes” received a $3,000 “favor” from Parks—along with a steady supply of some good corn liquor.

  Although he had married, and in 1934 had welcomed a son, Raymond Jr., Parks found that married life wasn't for him and divorced. Parks developed an impressive reputation with beautiful women and would marry again and again.

  In other strategic ways, Parks sought to stand out a little, to be a bit different, even if it meant spending some of his hard-earned money. He had no interest in a mansion; the small house on Francis Street was sufficient. Nice cars, on the other hand, sent a message to customers and competitors. When he purchased a gorgeous new yellow Chevy convertible, he had it decked out with extra lights and gadgets. When he later treated himself to a new Cadillac, he went to Montgomery Ward to buy four whitewall tires that cost $100 apiece—almost as much as a new Ford. Like the suit and tie, it was a statement: I'm not a poor country boy, I'm a rich city boy. Atlanta newspapers in subsequent years would regularly praise Parks as a man of “probity and reliability” and “a gentleman of inestimable character and honorable instincts.” Said one writer, “Few men have exceeded him in contributing of their time, energy and finances to the development of Atlanta.”

  In business matters, Parks took risks and sometimes failed, but he treated employees and customers fairly. He expected honesty and loyalty in return. If someone crossed him, he'd cut them out of his life without blinking and was notorious for never again speaking to those who wronged him. Some friends and employees were terrified of getting on his bad side and dreaded being subjected to his silent, probing stare.

  In time, Parks's reputation in certain Atlanta circles exceeded even his considerable talents. A rumor spread that if you wanted someone killed, Raymond Parks was the man to talk to. Not that he did the killing, they'd whisper—but he knew the right people for the job. In truth, Parks knew no such people. But neither did he deny it, which only added to the mystery and mystique of this southern gangster-child. He was like a micro-Al Capone, without the machine guns or thugs. Still, a clock was ticking on his freedom.

  By 1935, the Atlanta police had built up a mound of criminal evidence against Parks.

  They had never caught him in the act of moonshining or racketeering, and that frustrated them. But after arresting many of his number runners and whiskey drivers, the police and the city prosecutor finally felt they had enough evidence to charge Parks with conspiracy. The case was heard in the district court in Atlanta. This time, Parks's attorney, Swift Tyler, wasn't able to protect him. “Bad Eye” Shirley was charged as well, and both he and Parks pleaded guilty in exchange for a lenient sentence.

  They were sent to the federal penitentiary in Chillicothe, Ohio, on the grounds of Camp Sherman, a former World War I army training base named for General William Tecumseh Sherman. The sentence was a year and a day. Shirley was talkative and made friends quickly, but Parks was shy and nervous, and Shirley tried to look out for him. When Shirley was assigned to the mess hall, he sneaked extra food to Parks. And when Shirley—a stellar pitcher, despite the missing eye—was recruited to play baseball for the guards' team, he convinced one of the guards to move Parks to a better cell.

  The two were finally released in 1937. In Park's absence, one of his sisters had kept the moonshine and lottery businesses alive. During his nine months of incarceration, Parks had taken a few math classes and learned a few things he'd missed by skipping high school. Far from rehabilitating him, these new skills gave him a few new tricks to take back home to Atlanta. He'd later call his prison term “going to school.”

  Many southern boys—and future NASCAR pioneers—had childhoods similar to Parks's, and they, too, considered moonshining a noble profession and only illegal on a technicality. Few achieved his level of crime-tainted success, but they possessed a similar desire for a better life. Just as Uncle Benny's gold had called out to men of the gold rush era a century before, the clear-liquid gold of corn liquor held the promise of a better future.

  Southerners over time have been described as hardworking, Godfearing people or bootlegging, delinquent “rednecks”—or both. Men such as Parks wanted desperately to be known for something more. In the South, following the Depression, it was becoming increasingly apparent that cars and speed—in particular, a Ford V-8—were tickets to a better life. A V-8 released a man from the ties to the land that had been his heritage. Parks and his kind needed the land, of course. They needed the corn and the spring water and a secret creek beside which to set their pot stills. But the automobile helped crack open new worlds to them, introducing them to a thrilling, magical, and dangerous new language of twentieth-century words: cams, cylinders, valves, magnetos, flywheels, rocker arms, push rods, crankshafts, and dipsticks.

  A new generation of Ford fans was on the rise. After introducing an improved new V-8 in 1935, Ford sought to create an even better model, to be unveiled in late 1938. It would become the greatest V-8 of all, and the first car of NASCAR.

  It was into this era of collusion between crime and car that two of Raymond Parks's cousins—Lloyd Seay and “Reckless Roy” Hall—came of age. The three were never exactly sure how they were related. Family histories in the South are tangled and complex, and most folks in Dawsonville knew they were all, in some way, tie
d by blood. And by moonshine.

  Parks, after his release from prison, had not decided to quit the moonshining business, but he did feel it was time to let others handle even more of the driving. So he turned to those he trusted, to his closest friends and “cousins.” Parks handed the delivery duties over to “Bad Eye” Shirley and another friend (and distant relative) named “Legs” Law. In time, cousins Seay and Hall came aboard as well. In addition to the tutelage of their older, wiser cousin, Seay and Hall soon received help from a redheaded, ill-tempered mechanic named Red Vogt. Together, that cabal of southern moonshiners began to do something unexpected and remarkable with Ford V-8s.

  * Two of Parks's brothers were still working for him seventy years later, as were two brothers-in-law; “Bad Eye” Shirley was still working for Parks at the time of his death in late 2004. He was ninety-three.

  Most moonshiners weren't criminals at all.

  They were violating a law, of course, but…

  how else could you make a living up there?

  — ERNIE PYLE

  4

  The boottlegger turn

  F rom Dawsonville to Atlanta lay sixty treacherous miles. Long before a four-lane highway made the trip more mundane, driving from the foothills of the Appalachians down into the city required an indirect and jagged route. Culturally, the two locales were even further apart, with dirt-poor Dawsonville lagging decades behind big-city Atlanta. But Dawsonville had something Atlanta needed. And on a good night, Lloyd Seay could cover those sixty crooked miles, and satisfy Atlanta's cravings, in less than an hour.

  Since the automobile's infancy, the advice of every driving instructor had been to keep one's hands at the ten o'clock and two o'clock positions on the steering wheel. But Seay had his own clock: hands at the bottom of the wheel, palms up, left hand at roughly 7:30, right hand at about 4:30. “When I have to turn,” he told a friend who was riding along one night, “I can bring the steering wheel all the way around in one motion.”

  Newsmen would one day describe Seay as “devil-may-care” and remark on his “angel face.” Seay was indeed a good-hearted, laid-back country boy, with a shy face that was handsome bordering on pretty. He was physically lean and slight but had the same simmering confidence of his older cousin Raymond and sometimes boasted that he could make a Ford V-8 coupe “climb a pine tree.”

  That's an important skill when you're traveling one hundred miles an hour down Georgia State Highway 9 toward Atlanta, with a hundred gallons of corn liquor sloshing around in the trunk and the angry lights of a roadblock flashing suddenly up ahead.

  It plays out like this: Seay hits the brake pedal and slows to sixty, then fifty. He releases the brake pedal and spins the wheel, then reaches down with one hand to tug on the emergency brake, which locks the rear wheels. The car twists violently, spinning precisely 180 degrees as it switches from fifty miles an hour forward to fifty miles an hour backward. With his car now pointed in the opposite direction, away from the roadblock, he releases the emergency brake and jams the accelerator. The car slows its backward slide, comes to a barely perceptible stop, unleashes a rocket plume of dirt and gravel behind it, finds a grip on the rocky red road, and shoots forward again, showering the cops with a fusillade of flying roadbed. In less than ten seconds, Seay is traveling sixty miles an hour, then eighty, on his way back to one hundred or more. Before the law has even shifted into gear, he's a mile ahead. In no time, he's out of reach and headed back toward Dawsonville.

  Seay's buddy is sitting beside him, trembling, but Seay just grins. He drapes an arm out the window, asks for a smoke. His days are numbered, but he doesn't know it then and might not care if he did. His buddy is thinking (and would declare as much to a newsman sixty years later): You're the coolest feller I've ever seen.

  They make it back to Dawsonville and ditch the Ford. Maybe they'll try again at dawn. After all, Atlantans are counting on their daily delivery of Dawsonville's finest.

  Dawsonville. The hub of American moonshining in the 1930s. The moonshining capital of the world. And in many ways the taproot of NASCAR's lineage. A town of hard and violent men and their hardworking women, who raised the kids and ran the farm while their men played with cars and booze and rotated in and out of prison.

  Dawsonville, where the water of life brought both riches and death, where the career path of choice was littered with whiskey widows.

  To understand the deep emotions beneath whiskey makers' life-risking disdain for the laws governing their product, it's helpful to follow the route whiskey took to reach Dawsonville.

  That journey begins in the ancient region now known as Iraq, where Mesopotamians learned to distill rotting grain juice into a miraculous, mind-altering liquid they called al kohl—the spirit. From there, the recipe for al kohl migrated across to Northern Africa, where the Moors grabbed on to it and took it with them north into Spain and France, where al kohl became alcohol and then aqua vitae—literally, the “water of life.” The Celts then took over, delivering the secrets of alcohol across the North Sea to Ireland and the Irish-founded land of Scotland, where aqua vitae, in the Gaelic language of the Irish, became uisque breatha. In time, Brits anglicized the pronunciation of the Irish drink, and the moniker stuck: whiskey.

  Scotland and Ireland are where the complicated recipes for whiskey—using barley, rye, or potatoes—were perfected. Future generations of Scotch drinkers, Manhattan drinkers, and bourbon drinkers would owe an enormous debt to the dedicated whiskey artisans of the British Isles, the land where the modern history of moonshine began.

  Whiskey became more than an intoxicating liquid, and America herself would owe great thanks to the Irish and Scotch and their handcrafted drink, without which the young United States would not have survived. Whiskey not only provided a source of tax revenue during America's creation (helping, for example, to pay down the debts incurred during the Revolutionary War) but was also the very force behind some of the antiauthority sentiments that caused the Scots-Irish to flee Britain in the first place, men who then helped the United States break its ties with the motherland.

  In 1610, three years after creating the Jamestown plantation in America, England's King James I—son of Mary Queen of Scots—attempted to create a new plantation in northern Ireland. He supplanted pesky citizens of Ireland's Ulster region with presumably more docile subjects from his homeland of Scotland. The Scottish newcomers swapped whiskey-making recipes with their new Irish neighbors, and the two like-minded tribes intermarried to create a new breed. The British crown came to view the so-called Scots-Irish, just like the Irish, as an undisciplined and inferior race—”the dreamers and daredevils of their lot… an openly sensual people.” When Oliver Cromwell dethroned and then beheaded James's son, King Charles I, Cromwell initiated a brutal campaign in 1649 to quash Ireland's independence, in which thousands of Irish were slaughtered and/or forced to turn their lands over to England (a terror that the Scots-Irish of the American South would relive two centuries later during Sherman's March to the Sea).

  Subsequent British laws sought to quash any uprisings among Ulster's “problem children.” The English crown prevented Irish and Scots-Irish from holding office. It discouraged Catholicism and Presbyterianism and chipped away at their culture, religion, and civil rights. Adding insult to all that, it began taxing their homemade whiskey, claiming that the only legal whiskey would be that which carried an English seal.

  After a century of mingling together in Ireland, and together withstanding the brutal treatment of England, the native Irish and the Scottish transplants felt orphaned and abused. In the early 1700s, beaten down by the poverty, drought, famine, and oppressive British rule, they began fleeing Ireland for America.

  Upon arrival in the new land, however, the newcomers were again spurned, this time by the prissy Puritans and elitist Yankees of the northeastern coastal cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. “Communities in New England and New York wanted nothing to do with them,” writes James Webb in Born Figh
ting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Many of them trekked inland to central Pennsylvania and its cold winters. They fought hard against England in the war for American independence, comprising at least a third of George Washington's army. Those same loyalists then responded with anger and violence to Alexander Hamilton's post-Revolutionary War excise tax on alcohol, which in 1794 inspired an uprising called the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington quashed the rebellion with federal troops—led by “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, father of future Confederate general Robert E. Lee—but not before a few tax agents were tarred and feathered. In disgust, the Scots-Irish migrated south, away from the power hubs, toward warmer, hillier, lonelier climes.

  As Webb writes, “Nonconformity as well as mistrust of central power was now in their blood.” Toward the rococo ridges of the unwelcoming and remote Appalachian mountain range, they traveled down the Ohio River, or along Daniel Boone's Wilderness Trail, far from the snooty and superior leaders in Philadelphia and New York, bringing their whiskey recipes to the hills and hollows of lands whose misty green folds, rocky slopes, cool air, and clear rivers reminded them of their Irish homeland.

  It was America's first and largest mass migration. Among those in the mule-pulled wagons clogging the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road were the ancestors of Raymond Parks, Lloyd Seay, and Roy Hall. They traveled south into Indian regions that later became the states of Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. In particular, it was the rough, knobby, higher-altitude regions that called loudest to these migrants, and they settled in areas where the Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains merged, rippling across western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and northern Georgia, the land where Uncle Benny Parks had found gold.