Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  In 1927, Red and his bride-to-be drove south and moved into an Atlanta hotel. Arriving at the height of Prohibition was a fortunate bit of timing for Vogt. Atlanta's illegal liquor industry desperately needed a forward-thinking mechanic. That first week, Vogt met with various bankers until he finally convinced one to loan him one hundred dollars so he could buy tools and rent a garage. He also met with a well-known Atlanta bootlegger named Peachtree Williams, who wanted Vogt to fix some of the cars that his employees used to deliver their product.

  Vogt's hero and lifelong role model—like Bill France's—was Henry Ford. At his downtown garage, Vogt developed a Ford-like reputation as an obsessive, meticulous, strong-willed mechanic but also a capricious and demanding employer. A distinction for quality workmanship lured North Georgia's whiskey trippers to the corner of Spring Street and Linden Avenue, where Vogt became a most trusted ally.

  Sheriff's deputies and federal revenue agents dropped their cars at the garage as well, but Vogt had a saying that he'd use the rest of his life: Money equals speed. “Bootleggers paid better than public servants,” Vogt would say. So it's not hard to guess whose cars received his keenest attentions. “We had the money and the know-how, and the sheriffs didn't,” a famous moonshiner-turned-NASCAR-racer once boasted.

  Creative whiskey mechanics elsewhere focused their attention on guise and guile. They yanked out the backseats of cars and installed 250-gallon tanks. Others transformed hearses into whiskey haulers, which led processions of a dozen black cars full of moonshine, a so-called wet funeral. Vogt felt his job was more straightforward than that, and he focused simply on making Henry Ford's cars strong enough to carry 200 gallons of liquor and fast enough to evade the growing ranks of federal agents.

  He also became very wealthy. Vogt made so much whiskey-soaked money in those first few years that he moved his family—Ruth and two boys, born in 1932 and 1934—to a huge house in a suburb called East Lake, where he and Ruth employed a small staff of servants. Word of Vogt's mechanical prowess spread well beyond moonshining circles. Competitors in the annual five hundred-mile race at Indianapolis wanted his help, and he'd leave Ruth at home to attend the Memorial Day Classic.

  With his massive arms and chest and a huge handshake—with which he challenged other men, sometimes bringing them to their knees—Vogt seemed always to be fighting, sometimes openly, sometimes subtly. He demanded precision and respect from his employees, many of whom were black, a rarity in segregated Atlanta. He sometimes treated his workers—men named Deacon and Half-Pint, nicknamed for the half pint of whiskey he kept in his pocket—like dogs, but he paid them well and they were loyal to him. Vogt took pride in his German heritage, considering Germans the world's most brilliant engineers. But he also voiced racist and anti-Semitic sentiments, even sympathy for Hitler—sentiments that would similarly forever tarnish the image of Henry Ford, whom Hitler once called a “leader” of the Fascist movement in the United States.

  Vogt, like Ford, had left school at a young age and was both proud of and sensitive about his lack of education. As Upton Sinclair once said of Ford, “Henry remained what he had been born: a supermechanic with the mind of a stubborn peasant.” The same could be said of Vogt, who was also intensely proud to be a Confederate: “I'm a southerner,” he'd say. “And don't you ever call me a goddam Yankee.”

  He didn't have a sharp mind for business, though, and was lucky to have his wife handling their finances, collecting money from the bootlegger clients, and hiring and paying the employees. The bootleggers called her Mom, but if they failed to pay on time, they'd meet her wrath and muttered to one another what a “tyrannical bitch” she could be.

  Vogt was also a violent and unpredictable man—taut and quiet, like a spring tensed for release. He could be polite and gentlemanly with women but was socially awkward, defensive about his limited education and social skills, and in general, didn't like people and had few friends. As a parent, he was “terrible, just awful… dysfunctional,” recalls Vogt's son Tom. He spent little time with his sons and sent them off to Georgia Military Academy when they were just four and six. “In private he was a mean, angry, beligerent, violent man,” Tom Vogt said.

  After Raymond Parks got to know Vogt, he would wince at how Vogt treated his wife and kids. Others stopped even asking about the children, assuming that, since Vogt never mentioned them, they must have died. But Parks saw something in Vogt. As his only real friend, Parks was able to overlook his many flaws and accept him for that one brilliant gift, the reason Parks found Vogt in the first place, and possibly the one reason Vogt was put on earth. Like an idiot savant, Vogt was oblivious to most human matters. But he knew all about one thing and knew it better than anyone in Atlanta.

  He knew speed.

  Speed became a valuable commodity in Atlanta during the 1930s. Mainly, it took the form of Ford coupes and sedans powered by V-8 engines. Those cars were built right in downtown Atlanta and comprised the bulk of Red Vogt's business through that decade.

  Ford's V-8s earned him the loyalty of many bootleggers, and those loyalists gathered daily outside Red Vogt's shop, swapping tales of federal agents as they passed around a flask of whiskey and talked of engines and tires, speed and tactics. Southern whiskey boys loitered outside the legend's workplace the way northern or midwestern boys hung around basketball courts or sandlot baseball fields. Inside, Vogt tore apart engines, tweaked the stock parts, added hot-rod parts he ordered from California or Philadelphia, or homemade parts he machined himself, and pieced it all together again.

  Among Vogt's truest acolytes were Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall. Other moonshining clients (and future NASCAR racers) found their way to Vogt's shop, too. Vogt would ask them, “What roads are you driving?” and “How many gallons are you hauling?” He then tailored his modifications to a specific route and weight load. Just as the trippers' delivery skills would translate into dirt-track racing skills, Vogt's ability to make Ford engines perform above and beyond their mechanical limitations helped establish him as one of the nation's first and best racing mechanics, and one of the sport's driving forces.

  Word of Vogt's mechanical prowess had already reached Atlanta's moonshine kingpin, Raymond Parks, who entrusted Vogt with his whiskey cars. Parks paid Vogt once every week or two to keep his whiskey cars in peak condition. Vogt's wife, Ruth, angrily nagged Parks if he was even a day late with a payment. Some suspected that Vogt's wife was among the reasons he spent so many hours at the garage, and the couple would indeed soon divorce. Vogt's garage stayed “Open 24 hours,” as the neon sign above the front bay declared. He sometimes worked days at a time, catching catnaps here and there on a cot or simply passing out, flat on his back beneath a car on one of his wheeled crawlers. If an employee kicked one of Vogt's outstretched legs and asked, “You asleep, Red?” he'd snap awake and bark at him.

  “Hell no I ain't asleep—get back to work.”

  When exhaustion threatened to drop him, Vogt would go home and sleep fifteen hours straight, then come back to the garage and work another three days in a row. He combated fatigue with a steady diet of coffee, chocolate, cigarettes, and Coke. Chain-smoking had stained the two fingers of his right hand a permanent yellow. In winter, he warmed the unheated garage with buckets of burning coal and an old kettle stove he rigged with a stopcock that dribbled used motor oil into the fire. The sides of the stove sometimes glowed red, and on top sat a pot of strong, thickening coffee. Vogt's snarling, snaggly toothed boxer dog, named Buddy, often slept near the burning stove.

  In time, Vogt built a secret room at the far back of the garage, behind a false wall, where he experimented on bootleggers' engines. Vogt knew the feds watched his garage, and he didn't want a revenuer walking in one day to find him tinkering on a Roy Hall or Lloyd Seay whiskey car.

  While his personality and social graces were something of a mess, Vogt's personal appearance and his garage were incredibly pristine. He wore the same uniform, day after day: white pants, white T-shirt, and white socks. Wi
th his neatly combed red hair and sparkling white clothes, he always looked impossibly clean. The only physical signs that he was a mechanic were dark smudges around the pants pockets and the permanent black beneath his fingernails. The white uniform was a gimmicky display of Vogt's arrogance and obsessiveness. So was the meticulous organization of his tools, which lay neatly in drawers and on shelves, as if part of a museum display. He made workers polish his tools and sweep the floors; except for the occasional cigarette butt, the garage floor was always spotless. He even made his employees change uniforms if they got a bit too dirty.

  Vogt's paranoia and obsession with cleanliness were more than a fixation. They were his secret weapon and would be copied by future generations of racing mechanics. It turned out that a fastidiously clean engine lasted longer and ran faster. Vogt wouldn't even allow workers to use rags in certain areas of his shop, for fear that errant pieces of microscopic lint would enter one of his engines and shave a sliver off a V-8's top speed. As usual, Vogt was way ahead of his time. And in the chronology of America's racing history, his timing was absolutely perfect.

  Car racing in America in the 1930s was still largely a sport of the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West—and a sport of the rich. It had been that way from the start. Future NASCAR legend Richard Petty said that car racing began when the second automobile rolled from the factory, which is practically the truth. As early as the 1890s, men on steam-powered “quadricycles” raced one another in comical, five-mile-an-hour duels a pedestrian could have won. The first official gasoline-powered race was held in Chicago in 1895, a fifty-two-mile contest that was won by a one-cylinder car in ten hours.

  The inaugural organized races of America were playgrounds for wealthy playboys and their specially made race cars. Henry Ford had proved with his racing victory in 1901 that gas-powered vehicles were the speedsters of the future and that winning was a proven sales tactic. Ford had therefore built special racing cars for that sole purpose of winning races and attracting attention to his brand. His regular, factory-built cars, meanwhile—the Model Ts and Model As—were built for everyday use. Through the early 1900s, then, there were two types of cars: built-from-scratch racing cars and mass-manufactured “stock” cars, such as the Model T and its descendants.

  Racing cars first found a home in the Northeast, where the first American automobiles had been manufactured in the early 1890s by the Duryea brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts. Race cars then migrated west to cities such as Detroit and Indianapolis, and south to Daytona Beach, which was prized for its hard-packed sand.

  In Daytona, the first races were straight-ahead sprints down the smooth surface of the flat beach. Alexander Winton, whom Henry Ford had beaten in his only race in 1901, was among the nation's first speed demons, beating Ransom Olds (namesake of the Oldsmobile) in a 60-mile-an-hour duel at Daytona Beach in 1903. Both cars were one-of-a-kind prototypes. Three years later, a sleek canvas-and-wood experimental vehicle sped to an amazing 127 miles an hour there. Four years after that, Barney Oldfield reached 131 miles an hour on Daytona's sands in a powerful, German-built experimental model and declared that he had achieved “the absolute limit of speed as humanity will ever travel.” Such speeds, he said, felt like “riding a rocket through space.”

  Elsewhere in the United States, specialized race cars used public roads as racetracks, following the European “Grand Prix” model. Millionaire racer W. K. Vanderbilt began hosting wildly popular, absurdly dangerous Vanderbilt Cup races along Long Island's roadways in 1904. Many of those early road races suffered from the problem of spectatorship. On Long Island, a quarter million spectators might line up along the route. So eager were they to see drivers that the crowds would close in tight beside the road, creating a human wall of potential carnage; one driver said he “brushed at least a dozen coats while making the turn.”

  The issue of heedless spectators on public-roadway racetracks was partially solved by the creation of circular tracks, around which spectators gathered in grandstands. One such oval speedway was built in Indianapolis in 1909. Barney Oldfield took the first spin and averaged eighty-four miles an hour on a dangerous surface of crushed stone and tar. But the problem of casualties lingered: during the first three-day Indianapolis meet, two spectators, a driver, and two mechanics were killed. The track was resurfaced with 3.2 million bricks, and in 1911, the brick-paved speedway began hosting annual 500-mile races. The Indianapolis 500 was soon declared “the greatest race in the world” and “the greatest spectacle in sport.” One early observer called it “a transcendent event that dwells in the very bloodstream of America—a virus of velocity.”

  During the first two decades of American auto racing, a variety of diverse racing styles, cars, and governing organizations competed for fans' attentions. Nagging questions associated with the young sport included: How do we harness the public's interest? and Who should oversee it all? In baseball, football, and basketball, a single league eventually emerged to oversee the rules and regulations, with the nation's top teams gathering obediently beneath that umbrella organization. But in racing, unity was elusive. A fierce battle would be waged for many decades to come. The difficulty was partly due to the evolution of so many species of car racing, such as drag races, dirt-track racing, board-track racing, road rallies, hill climbs, time trials, endurance races, demolition derbies, and many more. Also, bigger-than-life racing personalities such as Oldfield resisted efforts to bring too much structure and rule making to racing.

  After a successful bicycle-racing career and a not-so-successful boxing career, Bernd Eli “Barney” Oldfield drove Henry Ford's first race car to victory in 1902 and quickly went on to become the first legend of auto racing and a household name.

  Born poor on an Ohio farm, he made a perfect transition from bikes to cars, learning to slide his race cars through the turns of dirt tracks, just as he did when racing bicycles. Oldfield made history by driving a mile a minute in a gas-powered car in 1903 and a year later beat Henry Ford and others in a one-mile race at Daytona Beach.

  He liked racing on dirt more than pavement or bricks, a preference that would recur among many subsequent racers. In 1915, he became the first person to race up the dirt road leading to the 14,110-foot summit of Pike's Peak. But Oldfield was at his best on the small-town dirt ovals. Oldfield's trademarks were a scarf around his neck and a chewed-up cigar that he kept clamped in his jaw during races, to keep his teeth from chattering on the rutted dirt tracks. His cross-country barnstorming trips to hundreds of fairground racetracks became hugely popular, even if many of his victories were fixed.

  Oldfield's notoriety contributed to auto racing's rise to prominence, and his pudgy, cigar-stuck face personified the popularity of the “open-wheel” race car that dominated the contests of the first quarter century of automobile racing in America.

  Open-wheel cars were shaped like stubby baguettes, or two bullet slugs attached end to end, with the wheels sticking out from the fuselage—hence, the term open-wheel. These cars would go by many names and come in many different sizes—big cars, dirt cars, champ cars, sprints, midgets—but the premier version was the high-powered Indy car, capable by the mid-1930s of reaching 140 miles an hour at its namesake track. It wasn't just wheels jutting from the body that distinguished the cars from regular, everyday Fords. Racers' torsos also stuck partway out of the shell, exposing them to all sorts of horrific injuries.

  Many of the top open-wheel auto races of the first third of the twentieth century were governed by AAA—the American Automobile Association. Though it later became solely a road-service and travel organization, AAA started life as a support group for motorists and local motor clubs, which mostly consisted of wealthy men and their expensive playthings. When it became clear that the increasingly popular sport of auto racing needed some rules and organization, AAA took on the responsibility with great relish, beginning around 1909 with the creation of its Contest Board, which quickly earned a reputation as a stuffy, arrogant, and capricious gove
rning group.

  AAA endorsed or “sanctioned” races and established itself as an ironfisted patron. If a race wasn't officially sanctioned by AAA's Contest Board, it was considered an “outlaw” race, and that term would be used in future years to disparage racing events considered to be less than legitimate. Even the most famous racer of his day, Barney Oldfield, was occasionally fined by or barred by AAA for racing in outlaw events.

  Oldfield would win just two national-level races in his career and would fail three times in a row at the Indianapolis Speedway—in 1914 (finishing fifth), 1915 (failing to qualify), and 1916 (again finishing fifth). Oldfield's infamy on the racetrack was rivaled by his renown as a notorious drinker, a “barroom brawler, dirt-track daredevil, a man without fear”—all of them apt descriptors for many of the pioneers of stock car racing to follow in his wake. He bristled against AAA's efforts to regulate racing and control drivers, and his retirement in 1918 was largely a result of his many conflicts with AAA's tetchy Contest Board.

  Various other racing organizations tried to compete with AAA, but as the sponsor of the greatest race of all—the Indy 500—AAA easily kept upstart groups in line. Most racers of the day aspired to compete at Indy and were reluctant to incur the Contest Board's wrath by racing in events run by AAA's competitors.

  Through the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, most of America's official races remained exclusive, elitist events, often in the North (AAA was headquartered in New York) or the Midwest, with well-paid professional drivers in their costly, specially made cars circling specially made tracks. A Kentucky Derby-like air of aristocracy hung over most races. Fans were typically men, wearing suits and bowlers, smoking pipes. Bands sometimes performed, and catered lunches were served. Even famed evangelist and prohibitionist Billy Sunday was known to attend such highbrow events, although some of the more adventurous fans considered them “rather dull and colorless affairs.”