Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  To catch trippers in the act of delivering a full load of corn liquor, revenuers designed a pincer device attached to the front of their cars that could snag the rear fender of a fleeing Ford. This would usually be used in pursuit up a hill, where the whiskey-laden car lost some of its speed. The bootleggers' response was to use wire coat hangers to attach their fenders loosely to the car's rear end. If a revenuer pinched it, the fender would snap off and tangle beneath the revenuer's wheels. Revenuers took the fight up a notch and began welding steel battering rams to the front of their cars. They'd try to catch a bootlegger in a curve and hit him at an angle, so he'd spin out. But the bootleggers learned to slow down just a notch, wait for the revenuer to get close, then gun it, which often sent the lesser-skilled revenuer spinning off the road.

  Some bootleggers attached canisters to their cars that, with the press of a button, spewed smoke screens, laid down oil slicks, or dropped buckets of tire-shredding tacks. Revenuers fought back angrily by shooting out radiators or tires, or just blasting the car full of holes. That's when whiskey mechanics started welding steel plates in front of the radiators or relocated the radiator to the trunk.

  Bootleggers sometimes traveled with a “blocker”—another driver who'd run interference between the whiskey car and the revenuer. (That tactic would later come in handy on the racetrack.) Or, in tight-knit communities, a moonshiner's neighbor would warn of approaching revenuers by firing a gun or setting off a stick of dynamite. One revenuer complained that “the moonshiners found out I was in the mountains before I knew the fact myself.”

  In time, Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall joined the select group of elite bootleggers who came to realize the obvious: the best way to elude a revenuer wasn't to outsmart him but to outrun him. Speed, not guile, became the most effective means of whiskey tripping. If revenuers blocked the road, the best drivers learned to hit the brakes, tug the emergency brake, spin the wheel, and slide into the 180-degree bootlegger turn.

  In downtown Dawsonville, there was just one public pay phone, and it was attached to Harben Brothers Service Station, a squat, white building with a “PURE” oil sign above the gas pumps. It stayed open twenty-four hours a day, and that's where Lloyd Seay could be found loitering most nights, waiting for a customer to call.

  Sometimes they asked coyly if Seay had any “apples,” or “You got any stuff today?” Often, they ordered in code, requesting a certain “bead” or proof by asking for “flash speed” (jars that, when shaken, produced a layer of bubbles that disappeared quickly—about 85 proof) or “hoss eyes” (bigger bubbles that signified the good stuff: 160 proof).

  Because Harben's was near Dawsonville's crossroads, Seay could easily hop onto Route 53 toward Gainesville or onto Route 9 toward Atlanta to deliver his load. His pals, most of them fellow whiskey trippers, would hang around and listen for Seay's return, the sound of his engine slowing and then accelerating as it crossed Gold Creek or climbed Gober Hill, some three to four miles away. If a couple of the trippers were out on deliveries, those still hanging around Harben's would place bets on whose engine they were hearing approach from the east. Seay? Roy Hall? If it was a slow night, the trippers might have some fun right there in town. They'd call the sheriff's office and report a bogus crime somewhere outside of town, then dump used motor oil around the downtown square and take turns spinning donuts around the courthouse.

  In short, Harben's is where Seay became a man, or at least by local definition. He learned to work on car engines, make a buck, survive. Roy Hall was learning the same game down in Atlanta, where Raymond Parks one day introduced both Seay and Hall to an up-and-coming whiskey mechanic named Red, the man who would help them both survive the deadly game they were playing.

  Across Prohibition's thirteen years, federal agents had seized 340,000 stills and arrested just shy of one million men. Even after Prohibition, the aggressive pursuit of untaxed whiskey led to the imprisonment of many a captured bootlegger. Through the 1920s and 1930s, leading every other state in numbers of seized stills and arrests was Georgia. Though Al Capone's machine-gunning exploits received the news ink, more bootleg whiskey ran through Atlanta than any other city in the nation.

  And more than a little blood was shed. During Prohibition, 126 federal agents were killed. Some were gunned down during still raids. At least one was pushed from a moving car by a moonshiner. A few died freakishly, scalded to death after falling into a vat of boiling mash or asphyxiated by the fumes of fermenting corn. One agent was maimed by a bootlegger whose brakes failed and who slammed into a roadblock.

  Moonshiners also sustained horrific injuries or died violent deaths. One South Carolina sheriff was known to fire point-blank into the skulls of captured bootleggers. Untold numbers of whiskey trippers burned to death when their cars rolled and their whiskey load ignited after a failed attempt at a bootlegger turn. As Robert Mitchum sings in the theme song he cowrote for the classic moonshining flick Thunder Road:

  He left the road at 90; that's all there is to say.

  The devil got the moonshine and the mountain boy that day.

  And yet, in certain communities, there was a brotherly aspect to the grim battles. When famed columnist Ernie Pyle spent a day with a Tennessee revenuer, he wrote of the surprising “mutual respect” the two sides had for each other. Revenuers and moonshiners came to know one another's names and families. A federal agent might arrest a man and send him to prison for two years, then help him find a job, a home, or a girlfriend when he got out. Some moonshiners named their kids after revenuers they had feared and fled, but whom they secretly admired. The familial rivalry even influenced children's games. Instead of cowboys and Indians, the children of Dawsonville and other moonshining communities played bootleggers and revenuers. Sometimes they flipped coins to decide who played whiskey trippers such as Lloyd Seay or Roy Hall and who played the feds.

  “The losers had to play the law,” one Dawsonville youth-cum-bootlegger said.

  As Sherwood Anderson noted in an article about a famous 1935 moonshining trial in rural Virginia, southern moonshiners were “mostly kids who liked the excitement… the kick of it.”

  The late 1930s then saw a number of developments occur in accidental cooperation, which changed the rules of the moonshining game: the ranks of revenue agents grew larger and smarter, forcing whiskey mechanics to get craftier. Cars got much, much faster, and the whiskey trippers grew more skillful. The Great Depression weakened, and southerners found a little extra money in their pockets. They wanted a place to spend it and to have some fun. These developments all happened in Dawsonville or Atlanta, or on the byways that connected the two, and began to clear the way for the sport of stock car racing to bloom. The period in history, starting around 1938, was like a trough of calm between two swells. The Depression was ebbing, and World War II would soon rise up and consume the nation.

  But first, for three thrilling years, southerners lucky enough to live near a fairgrounds or a homemade racetrack enjoyed the entertaining by-product of moonshine and its sidekick, the Ford. Leading the way were two bootlegging cousins from Dawsonville named Roy and Lloyd, men skilled enough to drive like the devil and live to brag about it.

  NASCAR pioneers later concurred that Seay was absolutely fearless and, as a respectful revenuer once confirmed, “without a doubt the best automobile driver of [his] time.” One revenue agent later claimed to have caught Seay eight times during his career but admitted that he had only done so by shooting holes in Seay's tires. A popular story about Seay describes him being pulled over by police. There was no whiskey aboard, so the officer fined him ten dollars for speeding. Seay handed over twenty dollars, explaining that he was paying in advance for his return trip. “Maybe you could let me go on through?” he said.

  Revenuers tolerated Seay because he was mostly respectful, polite, and even shy. He seemed like a good kid caught up in a dangerous game for which he had a genetic talent. If it had been football instead of bootlegging, Seay was like the quiet kid in c
lass who suddenly found himself with the talents to become quarterback. Roy Hall, on the other hand, was a born linebacker, bolder and more reckless than angel-faced Lloyd.

  Revenue agents came to admire Hall's driving talents as well, one of them going so far as to call him a driving “genius.” But they were also scared to death of the man.

  For Hall, the trick was to make sure the whiskey was packed tightly in the back. The way he drove, too much sloshing and banging around and he might roll his top-heavy Ford into a ditch. For that very reason, glass fruit jars were not good containers for guys like Hall. Some trippers wrapped the jars tightly in netting or butcher paper, but the way Hall drove, there was still too much risk of splintered glass and loosed liquor. He preferred the tougher gallon-size tin cans, packed six per canvas sleeve—an official six-gallon “case.” Hall could stack at least twenty cases into his Ford's trunk and backseat.

  From Dawsonville south to Cumming was an especially dangerous route. State Highway 9 was all dirt, twisted like a roadkill snake, and was “hot with law every night,” one ex-tripper recalled. Drainage gulches of angry red dirt skulked beside the road; during heavy rains, they filled with water and became rivers of orangey chocolate. Tall pines loomed on either side of switchbacks that cut jagged, dark-copper gouges into hillsides.

  Hall's tactic was the straight-ahead, no-bullshit approach. At the outskirts of town, he mashed the accelerator and avoided the brake pedal. When the curves began, Hall chopped them in half. If a curve bore to the left, he first veered far to the right, just inches from where the roadway dropped off into the pines, then cut hard to the left, hugging tight against the inner arc. That's when the physics got tricky.

  A gallon of whiskey, depending on its proof, weighed six pounds; the tin can another pound or two. Hauling 120 gallons was like having four fat guys crammed in the backseat. Do the math: a half ton of booze plus a three thousand-pound Ford plus eighty miles an hour on a ninety-degree arcing road, banking left and down, plus an unstable surface of red dirt beneath four wheels… well, it equaled a Ford that was going to slide into a ditch and explode, unless you knew what you were doing. But that's when Hall shined, and why moonshiners would soon prove themselves to be natural, intuitive racers.

  With his hands on the bottom of the steering wheel, Hall would throw himself into the turn, spinning the wheel in toward the curve. When he felt the car begin to slip, he would hit the gas, not the brake, actually accelerating through the turn, with the car moving forward and sideways at the same time. When the rear end began to slide too far, he would torque the wheel in the same direction; to the right in a left-hand curve, for example—otherwise, he'd spin out. If his split-second timing was dead-on, just before he reached the road's edge and the steep embankment beyond it, the mechanics and geometry and gravity of the moment converged in perfect synchronicity. Tires somehow found purchase on the dirt, the momentum of the slide yielded to the forward urging of the engine, and Hall and Ford and whiskey all straightened out and rocketed forward.

  Until the next curve. Hall burned through many sets of tires in this manner. Said one thirties-era Atlanta mechanic, “He never knew what a brake was.” The revenuers simply couldn't keep up. And when they tried, they sometimes wished they hadn't.

  One night, two revenue agents spotted a loaded ′39 Ford coupe heading south from the town of Tate, toward Atlanta. The agents sped after the coupe, following it through the tight curves of Highway 5. It was a dark night, and the coupe was beginning to pull away from the revenuers. The agent behind the wheel wasn't familiar enough with the road and took a sharp curve too fast and spun off the road. The car plowed into a jagged pile of scrap marble that'd been dumped there. One agent was thrown from the car and landed amid the sharp rocks, one of which struck his head and knocked him out. The other agent was injured, too, but managed to radio for help, then waited beside his unconscious partner. When backup agents arrived, they said their colleagues were so scratched, bloodied, and scabbed that it “looked like they'd been sortin' wildcats.”

  The coupe, meanwhile, crested a hill and then plunged down the other side. As it entered more “esses,” the driver cranked the wheel left-right, left-right. Only after a couple of rolling straightaways gave way to a few road swizzles that dropped into the paved metropolitan reaches of Atlanta did the driver ease up on the throttle, making sure he'd lost all pursuers, before catching his breath and driving more humanely.

  The injured revenue agent lay unconscious in a hospital bed for the next two days. On the second day, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived, accompanied by a card simply signed “The Coupe.” They learned later that the flowers had come from their prey.

  Roy Hall.

  Pavement and paved speedways were still years away; stock car racing on asphalt wouldn't begin until in 1950, three years after NASCAR's birth. In the late 1930s, the racetracks of the South—like the roads north of Atlanta—were red dirt.

  Not the loamy, coffee-colored soil typically thought of as “dirt.” North Georgia soil was as unique as its citizens. It shined like the color of a new penny; ancient, Martian stuff, thick with clay and tinted deep orangey red by iron deposits. Racetracks that would soon become moonshiners' stomping grounds were ovals of such redness: two red-dirt straightaways enclosed by four red-dirt turns, each a far lesser version of a Dawsonville-to-Cumming curve, which, of course, was handled only at night, with half a ton of liquor, and often a gun-toting revenuer close behind. Future NASCAR racers who, like Hall and Seay, honed their driving skills as whiskey trippers, would later admit that high-speed races on paved ovals were fairly simple feats compared to midnight moonshine runs, that no racetrack could scare them like screaming at 120 miles an hour into the vortex of a red-rutted lane barely wider than a Ford.

  Men such as Hall and Seay found peace on such lanes. But for all their innate skills, talent alone couldn't carry them into the racing world. For that, they needed machinery to match their driving abilities. They needed their Fords to perform as flawlessly as themselves. And for that, they needed a wizard.

  * Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, and most of the better-known American bourbons and whiskeys are still made in Kentucky or Tennessee.

  * The first liquor tax, which paid for the Revolution, was rescinded in 1802, then briefly reinstated for three years to pay the debts of the War of 1812.

  * … and Henry Ford's mother and future NASCAR racer Red Byron's.

  The South produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and

  lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics.

  Let Yankees adopt such low callings.

  — MARGARET MITCHELL

  5

  An “orjy of dust,

  liquor and noise”

  A cross its first decades, the automobile's effect on American culture and productivity was akin to the computer's effect on everyday life many decades later: it changed people's lives, but no one knew how the hell it worked.

  And so, the auto mechanic—like a shaman, who could reveal, interpret, and manipulate the car's grimy inner secrets—became a minor deity. Car-smitten teenagers would loiter outside garages, smoking and talking of overhead cams and piston displacement. At those garages, moonshine culture and car culture merged and, like a chemical reaction, sizzled into something altogether new. It happened right there in Atlanta, right there on Spring Street, where chain-smoking Red Vogt seemed always to be bent at the waist, his buzz-cut red head and his broad shoulders buried deep in the engine cavity of a Ford, with Seay, Hall, and other teens awaiting their sage's prognosis.

  Louis Jerome “Red” Vogt was born in Washington, D.C., in 1904. At age twelve, he got his first job with a local Cadillac dealership, where he fell in love with the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. Vogt also loved the workplace, the solidity of concrete floors and steel-grip tools, and found he had a knack for the job. By sixteen, he was named shop foreman, which sometimes required the burly youngster to fight off older mec
hanics who didn't like taking orders from a freckle-faced teen.

  Vogt's father, Charles, whom everyone called “Louie,” worked for the government printing office in D.C., and young Red—whose orange hair came from his strict, Victorian mother, Caroline—took pains to veer far from his father's dull career path. Vogt's parents were friends with a Mr. and Mrs. France, and during a visit to the France house, five-year-old Red asked why Mrs. France's belly looked so fat. Red's dad explained that she'd swallowed a watermelon seed and that a melon was growing inside her. When baby Bill France was born, Red took to calling him “watermelon.” And a complicated but important friendship began—one that would last eighty years and would eventually bring one man riches, the other heartache.

  As teens, Bill France worked as a mechanic at a local Ford dealership while Red worked at the Cadillac dealership. France and Vogt both traveled on the weekends in search of races, most often to the wooden board racetracks in Laurel, Maryland; Altoona, Pennsylvania; and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Sometimes France secretly raced his dad's Model T, and his father began wondering why the tires wore out so fast.

  Vogt preferred motorcycles, especially the classic beasts manufactured by Indian. Racing them on the steeply banked board tracks was like racing inside a large wooden mixing bowl. The speeds were incredible, as were the spills. At one such race, Vogt lost control of his bike, flew face-first into a fence post, and lost all but a few of his teeth. He'd wear dentures the rest of his life. Another tumbling wipeout on the pitted planks shredded Vogt's leather riding outfit; when he finally came to a stop, he was wearing little more than his helmet and boots. Vogt rotated in and out of the hospital for three months and would forever after carry splinters in his flesh.

  During his rehabilitation, he met a medical volunteer named Ruth, who nursed him back to health. She came from a wealthy family, spoke fluent French, and had begun studying for a career in the growing cosmetics industry. At the time, the muscle-bound, leather-clad biker seemed the man of her dreams. And when Red said he was moving to Atlanta, she agreed to go with him.