Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  In the mid-1930s, a colorful new style of racing began to gain credibility, and fans. Rather than pro drivers in the open-wheel vehicles of Indy and AAA, these new races featured amateur racers in off-the-lot “stock” cars. Most of them were Fords, and many of them were modified for whiskey tripping. At first, AAA could afford to ignore such races, since they mostly occurred in the South. But not for long.

  It's impossible to pinpoint the exact origins of stock car racing. At first, it was a gimmick. As early as 1914, short stock car events were tacked on as entertaining sideshow acts to legitimate open-wheel races. In the 1930s, stock cars began attracting a loyal following of their own. Before NASCAR came along, however, regional organizations overseeing such races were either spurious or nonexistent. The sport was entirely homemade and didn't so much emerge with fanfare as evolve in grungy little baby steps.

  But there were two crux points—twin birthplaces, if you will— where stock cars were raced more often than elsewhere: Daytona Beach and Atlanta. In those two geographic regions, two distinct groups of men hammered the upstart sport into refinement. Those men ground down the rough, outlaw edges a bit, and in time, some semblance of structure and legitimacy was slowly, sometimes painfully imposed.

  Racing had first come to Daytona and adjacent Ormond Beach with speed-record attempts in 1902. During low tide, the recession of the Atlantic created a two hundred-yard-wide swath of sand that was baked hard and flat by the sun. The straightaway stretched twenty miles and— at a time when paved and straight roads were but a distant dream—was considered the nation's premier speed-racing surface. Henry Ford came to Daytona and Ormond Beach a few times to try one of his experimental vehicles on the beach. Ford's driver was often that “rogue, rule breaker, braggart” Barney Oldfield.

  In 1935, Sir Malcolm Campbell set a new world speed record of 276.8 miles per hour at Daytona. Soon after, the annual International World Speed Trials left Daytona and moved to the more reliable surface of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where G.E.T. Eyston would shatter Campbell's record by reaching 357 miles an hour in 1938.

  Fearing the loss of tourism dollars to Utah, Daytona's town fathers decided to replace the speed trials with a new type of race in 1936. They used the hard-packed beach as one of two straightaways in what became known as the Beach-and-Road course, an elongated, 3.2-mile oval that would come to rival the mythic status of Indianapolis Speedway. Part of the appeal among fans was the proximity to sea life—one straightaway ran along the sand, just feet from the Atlantic surf. The other straightaway was Daytona's main street, Highway A1A, which ran parallel to the beach. City fathers plowed two paths through the dunes to connect the two straightaways. Those new paths became the north and south turns, tight arcs where most of the spectators lined up to watch the inaugural 250-mile contest, sponsored by Daytona City and AAA, on March 8,1936.

  Instead of inviting open-wheel race cars, promoters decided to gamble on stock cars and only allowed American-made, “strictly stock” automobiles to enter. AAA had experimented with a similar stock car event ten years earlier; its 1926 advertisement had lured fans with the promise of seeing the very same cars driven by them and their neighbors: “Will the Car Like You Drive Win Over the Kind Driven by Your Friend?” Fans hadn't seemed too wild for stock car racing in the late 1920s, but AAA agreed to give it another chance in 1936 at Daytona and officially “sanction” the race.

  Although the terms strictly stock and stock car race had been around for years, no one could yet claim to be a professional stock car racer. After AAAs event in 1926, there had been too few “stock” races anywhere in the United States to create racers who called themselves “stock car” drivers. Most of the competitors in the March 8 race were transplants from dirt-track, midget, board-track, and Indy racing, including 1934's Indy 500 champ, Wild Bill Cummings. For many drivers, it was their first attempt at stock car racing. For many fans, it was also their first taste of stocks, and everything about the first stock car race at Daytona Beach carried a whiff of experimentation—and danger. Wary newspapers warned spectators to “KEEP OFF THE COURSE, for your own safety.”

  Of the twenty-seven starters, twenty were Fords, which proved to be the only cars capable of handling the Beach-and-Road course. The final laps devolved into a jumbled mess. The north and south turns became rutted “hog wallows,” and nearly every racer had to be pulled from the thick sand by tow trucks. So many disabled cars clogged the course that organizers cut the race short by ten miles. Only ten cars—all but one of them Fords—finished the race. But spectators loved it, having been treated to such sights as one racer getting flung out of his tumbling convertible and others rolling into the Atlantic surf.

  Milt Marion, in a Ford, was declared the winner, and Red Vogt's childhood friend from D.C., Bill France, came in fifth, though he'd later claim that he had actually lapped Milt Marion twice. With imperfect rules and lap-counting systems, such disputes would become a common affliction across the early years of stock car racing.

  Ford V-8s took the top five spots, and the top finishers split the five thousand-dollar winners' purse. The sponsors—the city of Daytona and AAA—were the only losers, coming out of the weekend twenty thousand dollars short. The organizers had poured money into the event but accidentally allowed thousands of fans to enter without paying. It was AAAs first and last race at Daytona Beach. Factory-built stock cars, AAA decided, were simply not meant to race, and the organization returned to more reliable open-wheel race venues.

  A local Elks club hosted a similar stock car race on the Beach-and-Road course, on Labor Day in 1937, but also lost money. It wasn't until the summer of 1938 that stock car racing in Daytona began to truly catch fire. That's when twenty-nine-year-old Bill France took over as chief sponsor and promoter, as well as part-time racer, pursuits to which he would dedicate the rest of his life.

  Tired of the cold and snow up north, France had left his mechanic's job in Washington, D.C., and headed for Florida with his wife and son. When he arrived at Daytona Beach in 1934, he thought it was “the prettiest place I'd ever seen.”

  The Frances moved into a fifteen-dollar-a-month one-bedroom house. France found a fifteen-dollar-a-week job as a mechanic but spent most weekends working on racing cars or driving to and from races. The three hundred dollars he won for fifth place in the 1936 Beach-and-Road race convinced him that racing was not just fun but potentially profitable.

  In 1938, at the request of the Chamber of Commerce, France and another local businessman—Charlie Reese, the owner of Charlie's Grill and Cocktail Bar—agreed to sponsor two races that summer. The first, held on July 10, netted France, as the contest's cosponsor and its runner-up, a tidy little one hundred-dollar profit. The next race, scheduled for Labor Day, foreshadowed many of the complications that would confound stock car racing a decade later, when France took charge of the entire sport.

  On September 5, 1938, five thousand spectators paid fifty cents apiece to attend France's Labor Day race, featuring fourteen cars, all but one of them a 1937 or 1938 Ford V-8. To funnel fans through the ticket turnstiles and prevent unpaid crashers, France posted signs through the surrounding dunes, “Careful—Rattlesnakes.”

  A leather-faced, pistol-carrying moonshiner/gambler from Georgia named Smokey Purser took the checkered flag at the end of the 160-mile race, just as he had a year earlier, when he won the 1937 Elks Club's Labor Day race. The 1938 winner was to receive not only a $240 purse but also a case of beer, a bottle of rum, a box of cigars, and a case of motor oil; Purser was especially looking forward to the beer and rum. But instead of pulling into the pits to claim his trophy and winnings, Purser drove straight up the beach and out of sight.

  France had instituted prerace and postrace engine inspections, to make sure racers didn't tweak their “stock” cars with illegal modifications. At the time, inspections weren't too strict—mechanics were typically free to tweak and soup their cars at will—and some race organizers didn't even bother to inspect cars. France'
s inspection was a rarity in an otherwise free-for-all culture.

  Purser returned for a 4:00 p.m. postrace inspection, but France— assuming that Purser had fled to remove evidence of illegal modifications from his ′38 Ford V-8—disqualified him.

  Born to a family of North Georgia moonshiners, Purser had left home as a teen and landed in Florida, where he became street-smart and slick. During Prohibition, he delivered liquor to southern waterfront cities by boat, sometimes traveling up the Mississippi River to St. Louis. He also delivered whiskey in a van labeled “Florida Fresh Fish,” and his favorite disguise was as a Roman Catholic priest. A notorious gambler, Purser was once tied to a tree and left for dead by an angry gang to which he owned money. By 1938, Purser had become wealthy and philanthropic, often donating Thanksgiving turkeys to a local orphanage. Now in his forties, and mostly retired from moonshining, except for the corn liquor he sometimes served to trusted patrons of his tavern, the New Yorker Bar& Grill, he took to stock car racing with ease—and relish. Taking a cue from Barney Oldfield, Purser was a vigorous self-promoter and aggressively averse to rules and restrictions. He had won just $43 for his victory in the Elks Club's 1937 Labor Day race. But this time, with $240 plus the Ballantine beer, rum, and cigars on the line, he was not about to yield quietly to France's authority.

  “I am entitled to my winnings,” Purser complained after being informed of his disqualification. He argued that his car had been inspected before the race, that he was told to come back for a postrace inspection by 4:00 p.m., and had arrived ten minutes early.

  “The time to disqualify a car is before and not after a race,” Purser told the race officials. “My car is strictly stock. I don't feel I've been given a fair deal.”

  It was no use. France declared that he would give the victory to the second-place finisher: himself. France's partner, Charlie Reese, realized that awarding the winner's purse to the race promoter on a technicality would look bad. So, while France was given credit for the victory, they bumped the third-place driver, Lloyd Moody, into second place and gave him the $240 winner's purse. Purser was given fourteenth place.

  Purser's frustrations foreshadowed the many disputes that would arise between Big Bill France and the crafty, rule-breaking moonshiner/ racers with their mechanical ingenuity. Paul Hemphill speaks of a stock car truism in his book Wheels: “The surest way to get a ‘hillbilly’ to do something was to tell him it was against the law.”

  France would never quite learn that lesson and would continue to battle against wily racers such as Purser the rest of his life. He would mature into a tireless, intuitive salesman and promoter, the P. T. Barnum of the racing world. But he would also develop a reputation as a cutthroat, imperious, domineering, pistol-toting bully.

  Still, he was smart enough to know there was something to this new kind of racing, and he decided right then, in 1938, to dedicate himself to stock cars. No one, not even a friend, could stop him now.

  Meanwhile, in stock car racing's other birthplace, Atlanta's moonshiners improvised. They may not have had Daytona's packed sands. But they had cow pastures.

  It turns out the thick, iron-rich red soil of North Georgia was a poor host to most living things—except corn (and its by-product, moonshine). But the red clay found just beneath the thin layer of topsoil made the perfect racing surface. That's why most of the first southern stock car racing promoters were farmers. They found that a tractor and some chicken fencing could turn a cow pasture into a racetrack in no time. Some farmers confounded racers by spraying water on the track, turning it slick, thick and syrupy, like a spilled can of ocher-colored paint. In part, it was an effort to prevent dust on dry summer days, but it also treated the crowds to a more entertaining, slip-sliding spectacle. Racers came home with orange clothes and scalps, ears and mouths full of red grit.

  In truth, there were many such pasture tracks around Atlanta and North Georgia, so trying to narrow down a single starting point is futile. Still, some moonshiners-cum-racers insist it all started outside the town of Stockbridge, just south of Atlanta, where bootleggers sought bragging rights as having the fastest car in their chosen profession. Thirty or forty of them would gather there, speeding around a cow field, spinning their wheels to etch a half-mile racing oval into the same “savagely red land” described in the book all Atlantans were reading at that time, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

  The transition from participatory sport to spectator sport progressed fairly quickly. At first, a few dozen neighbors might show up, wondering what was happening beneath the cloud of dust. The next week, a hundred people might show. Word spread, and soon it was three hundred, then four. In the beginning, such races were virtual free-for-alls, and attendance was also free. Money only entered the picture when racers started passing around one of the leather football helmets they wore, collecting nickels and dimes from the fans and putting the cash into a pot that the winner would take home.

  Once small-time entrepreneurs realized there was money to be made, they hosted stock car races at horse tracks and county fairgrounds, which began to attract paying crowds in the thousands. Fairground races had an innocent, homemade feel, almost naive despite all the noise and brawn of the V-8s. Money for the racers was hard to come by at first, and fraud and theft were rampant. Without a AAA-type umbrella organization, races were usually sponsored by local slicksters, who'd collect sponsorship dollars from the local gas station, grocery store, or tavern. Winners might bring home seventy-five dollars for their life-threatening victory— just enough money to pay for their tires and gas. Unless a sleazy promoter took off with the purse.

  In contrast to AAA events and their traveling bands of professionals, stock car races were often filled with amateur local drivers in local cars, which erased the elitist taint from auto racing and, in the South, multiplied the thrills. A peanut farmer with dreams of speed and victory might come in from his fields, hand-paint a number on his family sedan, and race his heart out, bumping fenders with other farmers, mill workers, mechanics, and moonshiners, until his face was caked and his throat clogged with dust. Moonshiners had their own weekend routine. They'd come down from the hills with a carload of moonshine on Friday or Saturday night, then party all night in Atlanta's nightclubs and honky-tonks. They'd race on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, then pick up sacks of sugar for the stills and deliver them back home on Sunday night.

  To cut costs, some racers in those early days would try to get Sears, Roebuck to share the tab. They'd buy Sears tires from the Atlanta showroom on Ponce de Leon Avenue and then, after racing on them on a Sunday, try to return the chewed-up tires on Monday, innocently claiming, “I don't know how they got wore out so fast.”

  Partnered with the lawbreaking moonshiner in such early stock car races were, of course, the law-bending whiskey mechanics. As they bored out the cylinders of whiskey cars, and added dual manifolds and carburetors, men such as Red Vogt were in effect learning how to build race cars. Vogt's reputation even earned him an invitation to the 1938 Indy 500, where he worked on the car of Floyd Roberts, the victor. Vogt's wizardry and hard-to-detect machining tactics would attract controversy throughout his entire career and lead to infamous run-ins with lifelong friend Bill France.

  The year 1938 was both the year that Bill France began promoting stock car races at Daytona and the year of Atlanta's first big stock car event, which ignited a competition between the two cities as the hub of stock car racing.

  Two months after France's first big Labor Day race at Daytona, Atlanta scheduled its own stock car race for Armistice Day, November 11, 1938. Despite the recent march of German troops into Czechoslovakia, and of Japanese troops into China, war seemed a faraway notion. The twentieth anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I seemed as good an excuse as any for a car race at Lakewood Speedway, which the Atlanta papers had dubbed “Dixie's greatest track.”

  Lakewood Speedway was about to offer southerners, on an enormous scale, a new kind of racing altogether. The track
had begun life as a horse track encircling a lake and was part of south-side Atlanta's amusement park and fairgrounds complex. It had been converted to a one-mile car track in 1915, to compete with the popular Atlanta Speedway, a short-lived, two-mile track created in 1909 by Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler.

  Barney Oldfield himself had been a favorite at Lakewood, where he once narrowly escaped death when an acrobatic pilot hired to entertain crowds during a race crashed his plane onto the racetrack. Through the 1920s and ′30s, Lakewood became a regular stop for open-wheel racers, the so-called big cars, and other AAA-sponsored contests. By the mid-1930s, Lakewood was considered the “Indy of the South,” and AAA sponsored hugely popular Indy-style races on July 4 and Labor Day in 1938.

  But never before had Lakewood sponsored a stock car race, and the instant success of the November 11 race shocked all who were there, racers and fans alike.

  Having graduated from the makeshift cow pasture racetracks, the biggest names in southern racing gathered that Friday in late 1938, along with twenty thousand enthusiastic fans. The two previous races at Daytona Beach had each drawn fewer than five thousand spectators, making Lakewood's race—with four times as many fans—the South's first true big-time “stock car” race, and one of the largest stock car races anywhere in the United States.

  It was Vogt's first big stock car race, as well as Lloyd Seay's, Roy Hall's, and Raymond Parks's. It would also be the first time that Parks crossed paths with Bill France, who entered the race at the last minute, at the urging of Red Vogt. In fact, many of the men who would create “NASCAR” ten years later were there, including Red Byron, a recent transplant to the South from Colorado.