Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  He returned to Lakewood for another AAA-sponsored open-wheel race on Labor Day, competing against other big-car racers, but none of the South's beloved stock car drivers. Byron's luck was no better there, and he again failed to finish the race.

  Two months later, on Armistice Day, Byron returned to Lakewood in a beat-up 1926 Model A Ford roadster that one sportswriter said “was a little rough in appearance and sounded as if the engine would come apart any time.”

  The 1938 Armistice Day race was Atlanta's and Byron's first stock car race. Though he longed to race at Indianapolis, Byron enjoyed all kinds of racing, and the wild stories he'd heard about this new style of racing in his adopted South had aroused Byron's curiosity. For the first time, Byron found himself at the same track with Lloyd Seay, Roy Hall, Bill France, Raymond Parks, and Red Vogt. Byron had heard about them all, especially Vogt, whom Byron knew had worked on the winning car at the Indianapolis 500 earlier that year. Byron considered himself a pretty good mechanic, but he could tell from just the sound of Vogt's engines—a steady, machine-gun thrumping—that they were potent.

  Byron's engine, meanwhile, sounded “blappity” and sick. His car looked like a regular, if raggedy, Model A “stock” Ford, but under the hood grumbled the engine from his open-wheel car. Still, not even his blatantly nonstock car was enough to beat some of the whiskey drivers at their game. Byron placed third in an eight-mile heat race. He then qualified for the 150-mile main event, and when he crossed the finish line, he thought he had just won his first stock car race. But race officials gave the victory to Lloyd Seay, claiming that Byron was a lap behind Seay. Byron complained, but the ruling stood.

  For the next three years, Byron focused mainly on AAA-sponsored open-wheel races while occasionally trying his luck at stock car races. In 1939, at a July Fourth AAA race at Lakewood, Byron “gave the crowded grandstands one of Lakewood's greatest thrills,” according to the Atlanta journal. Lakewood's notorious dust blinded Byron in the first turn on the first lap, and he gouged a hundred-yard hole in the fencing as he flipped his car end over end and was thrown clear. A photograph in the next day's paper shows Byron standing beside his mangled scrap heap of a car, with a look on his face as if he was wondering how he'd emerged alive.

  “MIRACULOUS DEATH ESCAPE,” the headline blared.

  Byron returned to Lakewood for a stock car race on Labor Day of that year, 1939, but again lost to the best southern stock car racers of the day—Roy Hall and Fonty and Bob Flock finished 1-2-3. Byron's path had begun to intersect more and more with Raymond Parks's. But every time he competed against Parks's team—Seay, Hall, or the Flock brothers—he finished well behind at least one of the moonshining racers.

  Byron felt he was as good a driver as Seay and Hall, and a strong mechanic, but he couldn't beat the stock car boys at their game. And he never seemed able to beat the top dogs of AAA racing, either. He knew of Red Vogt's genius, and that made a huge difference—that and thousands of dollars from Parks. As Vogt said, “money equals speed,” and Parks's patronage paid the substantial bill for Vogt's speed-boosting parts and labor. Whenever he was in Atlanta for a race, Byron would enviously visit Vogt's garage.

  He thought, If I could just hook up with a team like that…

  Byron's introduction to Parks, Seay, Vogt, and the others marked the start of his dual loyalties to open-wheel cars and stock cars. Open-wheelers were expensive, usually premade by expert race car builders, and, culturally, very northern. Stock cars could be made on the cheap from an orphaned Ford from a junkyard and transformed into a race car in the backyard. They were very southern. Byron, at the start of his career, placed himself between those two racing genres and their divergent cultures. But before he could declare loyalty to one or the other, the course of history led him in another direction.

  In the summer of 1941, Byron returned to Colorado for a rare visit with his father and stepmother. His younger sister laughed at the southern accent he'd picked up; he sounded more southern than even the Alabama-born friends he brought with him. Byron was soft-spoken but seemed confident, well-dressed, and charming. He told funny stories about the southern boys and their wild ways. He spoke of his “miraculous death escape” in Atlanta. Jack Byron noticed that his rebellious son had become a handsome and dignified young man, his dapper appearance giving no sign that he was a race car driver.

  Father and son felt more relaxed around each other than they'd been in years, and one night during a game of bridge, Byron told his father that he was happy doing the thing he'd always dreamed of: driving faster than most men could ever imagine. He wasn't having the success he'd hoped for, though, he explained.

  So he had decided to join the army.

  Byron's first steps toward one of the lesser-known battlegrounds of World War II began when he walked into an army recruiting office in Montgomery, Alabama, in mid-1941. Sensing that war was imminent, Byron hoped to join early and become a pilot with the Army Air Corps, predecessor of the U.S. Air Force. He was devastated to learn he had imperfect eyesight and could not qualify to fly planes. Instead, the army wanted him to become a navigator and tail gunner. He agreed and was assigned to a Louisiana air base. Soon after reporting for duty, Byron was given two days of liberty and drove to Atlanta for one last race before getting swallowed up by his military obligations.

  The July 13, 1941, event featured an open-wheel race and stock car races of five, ten, and twenty-five miles. Early in the twenty-five-mile stock car race, Lloyd Seay, driving his convertible, flipped and was tossed out of his car. He tumbled through the air and seemed headed right for the lake, which was not a good place for Seay. He couldn't swim. Seay splash-landed right at the water's edge, uninjured, but unable to rejoin the race. With just three laps to go, Byron found himself vying for the lead with three other racers, until a group of slower cars up ahead became entangled in the first turn. The yellow caution flag came out, warning drivers to slow down, but many of them were blinded by a swirl of dust that shrouded the tangled cars. Byron and the other co-leaders, unaware of the yellow flag or the wrecked cars ahead of them, barreled straight ahead toward the “mass of spilled vehicles and drivers.” At the last second, all four drivers finally saw the wreckage in front of them and veered hard to the right, crashing into the wall, side by side. Byron's face slammed into his steering wheel, breaking his nose and splitting a deep gash into his lip and mouth. The race was stopped, and race officials decided to give one of the co-leaders who had been racing beside Byron the victory.

  Byron was angry. Determined to achieve victory that day, he declined medical attention so he could race his banged-up car in the ten-mile race. With blood dribbling down his chin and neck, and a blood-soaked cigar in the uninjured half of his mouth, he finished second. Finally, he lined up for the last event of the day, the five-mile stock car race. His face was a painful, blood-caked pulp. Dust was glued to his face, and blood from his injury had dribbled down his neck and turned his white coveralls crimson. Each rut of the beat-up track sent a jolt of pain to his cracked nose. Byron kept his foot mashed on the accelerator and never dropped below sixty miles an hour. He finished the five-miler in four minutes and two seconds, just a car length ahead of three Atlanta drivers.

  Byron celebrated his first-ever stock car victory, and the Atlanta boys were clearly impressed. But it would be Byron's last race for five years.

  Afterward, he had a doctor look at his face. They straightened his cracked nose, but it took fourteen stitches to close the tear in his mouth, which he then had to explain to the U.S. Army back in Louisiana on Monday morning.

  Following the nightmare of Lloyd Seay's death, Raymond Parks realized he was far from ready to relinquish his own dreams of greatness in the still untested world of stock cars. By late 1941, he had spent seven thousand dollars on his cars and on Vogt's bills and travel expenses. With his two-thirds share of Seay's and Hall's victories, he barely broke even. Still, he had that fever. And he wanted to stoke it. He wanted to win.

  W
hen Parks first met Byron, he seemed too quiet and aloof, especially compared to loudmouthed, pistol-toting racers such as Roy Hall. Parks thought Byron had “a face you can't read.” Indeed, his face was usually hidden behind round sunglasses, shaded by a helmet visor, his mouth clamped tight around an unlit cigar, which seemed to hold back any conversation. His jumpy sidekick, Shorty, did most of the talking.

  Parks would never have guessed at the time that mysterious Red Byron would, a decade later, take his racing team—and the entire sport— to new heights.

  After Lloyd Seay's death, on a recommendation from Red Vogt, Parks had briefly considered asking Byron to join his fractured team, but he would not get the chance.

  World War II interrupted the entire sport of stock car racing. Parks would soon be crouched in a foxhole during one of the coldest, bloodiest battles in the history of modern warfare, while Byron would find himself with a shard of hot metal burning into his thigh as his shredded airplane plummeted toward apparent doom. Surviving the horrific physical and psychological damages of war would make their eventual return to stock cars all the more remarkable.

  * Now an avid sponsor of NASCAR race cars and trucks.

  War suits them. They are splendid riders,

  first rate shots and utterly reckless.

  — UNION GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN

  9

  Body bajs and B-24 bombers

  W l orld War II would accidentally play a significant role in the evolution of stock car racing. Many of the creators of the sport would see far corners of the earth during wartime, places they'd never imagined. Afterward, they would return to the South dramatically altered by war. The experience gave southern men an even deeper sense of adventure, a respect for fear, a taste for freedom.

  As the nation prepared for that war in late 1941, dark days followed the death of Lloyd Seay, whose killer was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. A jury declared that Woodrow Anderson “shot the Seays while their hands were raised and they were begging him not to shoot.” The same day as his sentencing, a U.S. Navy destroyer was torpedoed off the coast of Greenland, and nearly a hundred men sank to their deaths. President Roosevelt was getting fed up and had recently promised Hitler that American men were ready to “stand up as free men and fight.” Three days later, the nation's best-known stunt driver, Lucky Teeter, who had started his career at Lakewood in 1933, was killed at Indianapolis in a failed attempt to jump his car over a bus. That same afternoon, November 2, 1941, the Lloyd Seay Memorial Race gunned to a start at Lakewood.

  Seay's parents had become quite reliant on their son's moonshining income and were struggling desperately without his help. So the managers of Lakewood Speedway allowed Raymond Parks, Red Vogt, Bill France, and a handful of other racers to host a race in Seay's memory. Their intent was to donate the winner's purse to Seay's family.

  Among the racers listed at the start was Parks's bootlegger friend Ralph “Bad Eye” Shirley. In truth, it was Roy Hall sitting behind the wheel in disguise, hiding once more from the law. Bill France joined the race, as did Fonty and Bob Flock, both driving Red Vogt cars. Except for Red Byron, who was back at his army training camp, all of stock car racing's stars were there. Racers named Tip, Crash, Red, Buster, and Speed.

  The Lloyd Seay Memorial turned out to be the last southern stock car race before World War II, which would suspend racing for five years. An envelope with the race proceeds—$831.32—was afterward handed to Seay's father, Robert, who had never once seen his own son race. The winner was a veteran Georgia racer, nicknamed “Jap”—and Roy Hall was awarded the 1941 championship, which would have been Seay's, had he lived.

  Five Sundays later, Japanese warplanes bombarded an unsuspecting U.S. Navy fleet on an otherwise quiet Hawaiian morning. The attack on Pearl Harbor finally pulled the country into war, and the National Office of Defense Transportation immediately banned all sporting events. America's men, women, and machines prepared to focus the nation's brainpower and firepower on the Pacific and in Europe, where U.S. troops would soon engage once more in visceral Tom-versus-Jerry battle against German foes.

  In the South, young men lined up outside recruiting offices, enlisting in far greater numbers than their northern peers. Those who didn't enlist were soon drafted.

  At thirty-seven, Red Vogt was too old to be drafted and would remain stateside. His father had served overseas in World War I, but Vogt would now serve in a different capacity. His reputation as a mechanical wizard earned him a “critical to the war effort” classification and a job as an army mechanic. Because he stayed open twenty-four hours, the army sent a steady supply of trucks in need of repair from various military bases.*

  Bill France, now thirty-two, also remained stateside, working as foreman of an engine-installation crew at the Daytona Beach Boat Works, which built submarine chasers and other light ships for the navy and army.

  Red Byron, twenty-six, was headed to one of the coldest U.S. military bases to prepare for the only battle of World War II to be waged near American soil. A few of the Aleutian Islands off the Alaskan coast had been taken over by the Japanese, and the Army Air Corps, recently renamed the Army Air Force, was determined to reclaim them. Byron had finished his training and was now an engineer and tail gunner in the largest American airplane ever built, one of the most difficult planes to fly, but also a remarkably resilient aircraft capable of taking a beating and remaining airborne. Its co-creator happened to be Henry Ford.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Raymond Parks, meanwhile, was drafted in 1942 and trained with a U.S. Army division headed for the famously brutal and wintry Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes region of Belgium. There, Parks would face unfamiliar snows and the men and machines of Hitler's feared Panzer divisions—terrifying examples of the German work ethic and engineering Red Vogt so admired.

  Parks had tried hard to avoid the war. With a wife and a son at home, two ex-wives counting on his financial support, his liquor stores and numbers racket, his growing real estate holdings, and a dirt-poor family and drunken father depending on him, Parks felt he had more to lose than most. At first, he tried to act a little crazy so the draft board people would declare him 4-F and unfit to serve. When that failed, he managed to get a noncombat job at nearby Dobbins Air Base, which gave him a deferment from overseas military service. But he and a coworker were one day caught driving a fire truck down the runway.

  Parks was fired and then reassigned—to the U.S. Army's Ninety-ninth Infantry Division. After a brief stay at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was shipped to Camp Van Dorn in Mississippi for thirteen weeks of training designed to turn regular citizens into soldiers.

  Parks's first lesson was that, even in the army, moonshine was currency. He managed to have jars delivered to his sergeant, a guy from Ohio named Parkhill. During the endless and grueling marching sessions, Parkhill allowed Parks to slip off to the motor pool and hang out with the mechanics while the other trainees marched for miles. Sergeant Parkhill also gave Parks a German pistol, a Luger, in exchange for a jar of corn liquor. Parks and the rest of his unit—the 394th Infantry—next spent months at Camp Maxey, near Paris, Texas, training for and awaiting their call-up to war.

  Parks's third marriage was already on the rocks. He met another woman in nearby Paris and rented an apartment there. At night, he'd sneak out of the barracks and stay in town, then slip back to base before dawn. The other soldiers noticed how Parks's bed always seemed to be made, and how he'd be up and mopping floors when they awoke.

  One day, he received a telegram from his sister, who had taken over his lottery operations. Due to a strange accident of luck (or possibly cheating), hundreds of people had picked the correct numbers, and Parks lost twenty thousand dollars. He asked his sergeant for a few days of liberty so he could go home and clean up the mess. Before he even got on the bus, he got another telegram: another loss, this time ten thousand dollars. Parks decided it was finally time to get out of the lottery business. In Atlanta, he sold some property to a collea
gue and put the cash in a suitcase and the suitcase in his trunk. He then drove around Atlanta, paying off his lottery customers and telling them he was done with the bug.

  Parks's embarkation orders came a few weeks later, in the summer of 1944. Allied troops had already stormed the beaches of Normandy and begun fighting east toward Germany. Parks's regiment and the entire Ninety-ninth Infantry Division were scheduled to catch up with that fight in Belgium.

  In late September of 1944, Parks left Boston aboard the “Liberty ship” Excelsior, which for him and many of his southern colleagues was their first time at sea. While crossing the rough and stormy Atlantic, the men were allowed on the top deck only two hours a day. Parks spent most of his time in the crowded troop holds below, where the air quickly became stale with the smells of body odor, cigarette smoke, and seasickness.

  After stopping in Scotland, the Ninety-ninth traveled to the French coast, where troops unloaded and began their long trek eastward. By November, they reached the hills of eastern Belgium. As they continued toward the German border, rain turned to snow, and Parks was soon glad he had brought extra socks and sturdier civilian boots.

  Days began early with hot coffee and warm bread and, after many miles of marching or riding in the back of a transport truck, ended with a shivering night inside a two-man pup tent. One night, a foot of snow fell on their tents, and a major wrote in his diary, “I hate the cold. Men are miserable, too. Am afraid this is only the beginning.”