In 1942, doctors removed half of Edsel's stomach, and in May of the following year, he was diagnosed with “undulant fever,” the result of drinking unpasteurized milk from his father's farm. He died a few days later at the age of forty-nine. That same year, Ford's grandson—Edsel's eldest son, Henry II—took over as company president and began to repair much of the damage the company had lately sustained under its stubborn founder. Henry II set about turning Ford back into a modern corporation with a singular goal. “Beat Chevrolet,” Henry II told anyone who asked. When Ford and the other carmakers resumed production in 1946, cars sold faster in the South than anywhere else. Henry II responded to the South's renewed hunger by replacing the old Ponce de Leon Avenue factory in downtown Atlanta with a new assembly plant on the city's outskirts.
With his soldier's pay or a job in the war-boosted economy, even a poor country boy could now buy his first car, something to baby and call his own, something that offered speed, power, escape. “People will pay any price for motion,” William Faulkner wrote of the era when a man washed his car so often that friends warned he'd “soak all the paint off of it.” With a car, a man could scorch the dusty back roads, roll proudly through town, spin a donut in the Tastee-Freez parking lot, and take his girl to a romantic hilltop. The car was, as John Updike once said, a “sheath for the knife of himself.” Freed from wartime rationing and restrictions, southerners were hungrier than ever for fun and entertainment. Awaiting them was a sport with their very own cars on the track.
Rather than being stanched by war, the adventures abroad and the sweetness of victory had stirred anew the passions of stock car racing's pioneers and fans, becoming nothing short of a new religion. Men back from war, and women reunited with their men, became its zealots. The delicious metal-on-metal crackups, like mechanized cockfights, attracted hordes of new devotees who displayed what one sportswriter called “worship of a newfound power—and freedom.” Stock car racers and their fans were “rude, violent, uncouth, and proud of it… attending races reaffirmed their status as outsiders, outlaws.”
But the sport's outlaw creators and fans would quickly be challenged by puritans trying to whitewash their sport. A battle between the sport's two factions—dirty and clean, drunk and sober, naughty and nice— would rage for years to come.
In August of 1945, just days after Japan's surrender, the Office of Defense Transportation officially lifted its wartime ban on sporting events. The South wasted no time, and the first postwar stock car race was immediately scheduled for Labor Day, at the same site that had hosted the last notable prewar race, and Lloyd Seay's final victory.
At Atlanta's Lakewood Speedway, a record crowd of more than thirty thousand piled inside, swarming over the five thousand-seat grandstands and jostling for a spot around the track. As race time approached, eager fans anticipating Atlanta's largest sporting event of any kind since the war—described by one reporter as “a sweating, howling crowd”—whipped themselves into a near riotous frenzy.
Then they heard an unexpected announcement over the public address system.
In the days leading up to the race, Atlanta's Methodist and Baptist ministers had teamed up to publicly denounce a race that had “acknowledged criminals cast in roles of heroes” and convinced Atlanta's mayor Hartsfield that he was allowing the city to host a “rat race.” The Atlanta journal then picked up the flag. Its editorial writers viscerally denounced city and Lakewood officials for allowing “some of the more notorious racketeers of liquor running” to compete, calling it “a shocking display of bad taste.”
“To permit them brazenly to race in public is too much for us to stomach.”
Such admonitions reached the offices of the city police and Mayor Hartsfield, who then leaked to the newspapers the names of five “underworld rats.” Hartsfield's chief of police then decided to ban those men from the Labor Day race. His last-minute announcement at Lakewood—Five drivers have been barred from this race, by order of Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield, because of liquor-hauling violations—elicited the seething rancor of fans who came specifically to see those rats race.
Three of them were Raymond Parks's drivers: Roy Hall, Bob Flock, and noted Dawsonville moonshiner Glenn “Legs” Law, who had married one of Parks's sisters. Another “rat” was Jack Cantrell of Dawsonville, Lloyd Seay's cousin and Hall's half brother.* Cantrell was wanted in connection with the death of a young girl. Police had chased Cantrell's speeding car full of liquor down Ponce de Leon Avenue, but Cantrell lost control and flipped his car onto the sidewalk, killing the girl, then fled on foot. Bob Flock—known to police by various aliases, such as Frankie Johns and Robert Clark—was barred because of a lengthy record of speeding and liquor violations dating to 1936. He'd spent a year in jail on earlier charges of hit-and-run and carrying a concealed weapon.
Flock and Cantrell wisely decided not to show for the race, for fear of arrest. But Hall arrived in his 1939 Ford, unbowed and ready to pick up where he'd left off in 1941. Hall's obsession with racing had never ebbed. In fact, one reason he was on the police list of rats was his role in an illegal drag race among moonshiners back in March.
Police called it a “bootlegger sweepstakes,” and it had drawn a handful of Atlanta's best-known whiskey trippers. Red Vogt even showed up, to see firsthand how his workmanship on Hall's Ford performed. During the one-hundred-mile-an-hour contest down the un-paved Buford highway east of Atlanta, one driver lost control, crashed, and was killed. Everyone disappeared before police got there, but investigators learned that Hall had been among the ringleaders that night— that he had, in fact, won the deadly race.
Over the past eight years, starting at age seventeen, Roy Hall had been arrested at least sixteen times by police in and around Atlanta— on liquor charges, lottery charges, driving charges—and had cumulatively spent more than a year behind bars. His driver's license had been revoked for years. Police were fed up with him, tired of hearing his name, and saw no reason why a criminal should be allowed to continue racing.
For all his good looks and street savvy, his movie star cool, his nice clothes, hats, and shiny shoes, Hall had become nothing more than a thug. With cousin Parks off at war, with cousin Seay dead, with no father figure to try to keep him straight, Hall became addicted to trouble and during the war hooked up with the wrong crowd. When Parks had left for war, he agreed to keep a friend's fancy, custom-built Ford roadster locked up in his garage. Hall would break into the garage and take the roadster out for a cruise, usually ending up at the Varsity Drive-in, where a gaggle of pretty Georgia peaches would flock to the cherry red car and its handsome driver. For Parks, Hall was a constant disappointment. He tried again and again to help Hall stay straight, as he did with many family members and friends. Parks wasn't one to give second chances to those who abused his trust. But for some reason, he kept giving Hall chances, which Hall kept blowing.*
Atlanta's police wanted to prevent Hall from reestablishing the outlaws' stranglehold on a sport that had been created by and for southern lawbreakers. Parks was, at that moment, on a westbound ship crossing the Atlantic, on his way back from the war, and unable to intervene this time on Hall's behalf. The newspaper campaign against Hall continued with another editorial questioning why Hall and the others “made no contribution to the war. Why were they not in the Army?”* Trouble was, regardless of Hall's unexplained avoidance of military service, most of the Lakewood fans arrived on Labor Day 1945 dying to see Reckless Roy drive to victory once again.
The fuming crowd began chanting, “We want Hall! We want Hall!” Race officials quickly gathered for a tense meeting with Police Chief Marion Hornsby, who finally, to avert a riot, agreed to let the race continue, bootleggers and all. Hornsby claimed that he hadn't received the mayor's orders until that morning, so he did not have enough time to enforce the ban. “It's too late now to bring this crowd under control,” Hornsby said over the loudspeakers, to the wild cheers of the increasingly impatient fans.
The decisi
on likely saved a few lives.
Lakewood's 1945 Labor Day race finally began—two hours later than expected and exactly four years after Lloyd Seay's murder. Police efforts to bar Roy Hall meant he didn't have a chance to properly qualify before the race, but officials allowed him to compete anyway, giving him the second-to-last position among fourteen starters.
Hall would race from the dreaded number thirteen spot. Bill France, meanwhile, had qualified earlier with the fastest time and started up front on the pole.
Starting in thirteenth place brought Hall no bad luck at all. For fifty miles, he averaged a mile a minute—”a speed far tamer than police say he has set up in liquor chases,” the newspaper sniffed the next day. Hall passed the dozen drivers who'd started ahead of him, including France, who lurked on Hall's tail the rest of the race.
Despite France's disgust over the stink of moonshine at his first postwar race, he simply couldn't catch Hall and settled for second place—a position that would become frustratingly familiar to the onetime champ. France had been a popular figure at southern racetracks before the war. He traveled far and wide and often finished in the top five. But he was usually kept out of victory lane by moonshiners such as Seay and Hall. Now, even with Seay gone, France was settling for second behind a moonshiner from Dawsonville.
The newspaper expressed its own disgust again the next day, excoriating “shameful” city officials for caving in and allowing Hall not only to race but to win. The race was evidence that bootleggers “have more authority than the police force.” The writer suggested sarcastically that the police might as well stop chasing the bootleggers and allow them to deliver their liquor “free of molestation”—as long as they painted their cars red “so that innocent pedestrians give them a wide berth.” Then, like a poke in the writer's eye, Roy Hall refused to turn himself in to court officials for his scheduled hearing later that month. In his absence, Hall was sentenced to a year in prison.
Clearly, postwar Atlanta was going to have a complicated relationship with stock car racing and its lawless star drivers. Chief Hornsby vowed to uphold Mayor Hartsfield's ban at all future Lakewood races, which sent drivers looking for newer venues.
About that time, Sergeant Robert “Red” Byron was slowly working his way east across the country, driving his red Ford ragtop with the makeshift hand clutch. Byron's entire body had withstood harsh aftereffects of the injury—the loss of blood, the loss of half his body weight. Doctors had warned that, by not allowing them to amputate his useless leg, Byron would always walk with a pronounced limp, would often be in pain, and should expect to treat the leg and his health gingerly.
They advised him: Take it easy, son. Take a desk job. Ease into life. That wasn't Red's style. A desk job was inconceivable and would surely have been a death sentence.
When he finally reached Alabama, he briefly reconnected with his friends and his one-legged mechanic, A. J. Weldon, who must have sympathized with Byron's leg injury. Weldon, surely more than the rest, understood Byron's determination to avoid amputation, which would have ended his racing career. Still, they were all surprised to hear of Byron's plan to start racing again. Byron shocked his friends further when he told them he would not be staying long in Alabama. He would be racing elsewhere.
Before the war, Byron's group of racing pals had mostly belonged to the world of open-wheel cars. That's what Weldon built, and that's what Byron had mostly raced—three-quarter-sized Indy-style sprint cars and smaller midget cars. Stock cars hadn't proliferated in his part of Alabama the way they had across Georgia and the Carolinas. Yet, while Byron knew he didn't exactly fit the mold of a Roy Hall-style outlaw stock car racer, he had decided to restart his racing career not on the open-wheel circuit but on the stock car circuit to which he'd been introduced before the war. For that reason, he was headed to a city that appreciated racing as much as he did, a city where stock cars reigned—Atlanta.
Byron never fully explained his decision to switch to stock cars, although his obvious disability played a factor. In open-wheel cars, a driver's torso stuck up out of the open cockpit, and drivers rarely wore seat belts. If the car rolled, a driver ducked, jumped, or sometimes died. With his bad leg, Byron couldn't jump free of a tumbling “big car.” Stock cars, with a hard roof overhead, seemed a safer bet for Byron and his handicap.
It wasn't just safety he had in mind. The idea to relocate to Atlanta to pursue stock car racing sprouted during his many months in the hospital and, during the long drive east, had taken firm root. It was absurd to think he'd be able to race again—in stocks or open-wheelers—but he knew he had to at least try. And to give himself an edge, he decided to position himself in the same hometown as the impressive team of Parks and Vogt.
Byron found a hotel room to stash his meager belongings in, then stopped at Vogt's garage, where he learned that the nearest available race was a seventy-five-miler scheduled for late October in Charlotte. Unlike Atlanta, Charlotte hadn't banned criminals from its stock car races, and Roy Hall, Bob Flock, and other moonshiners were headed there, along with an eager lineup of war veterans, mechanics, farmers, and mill workers.
Take it easy, the doctor had said. Take a desk job. Instead, on October 27, 1945, a cool Saturday afternoon, Byron returned to the workplace he'd dreamed of so often during those agonizing months of recovery. With his leg still clamped into a metal brace, and with his strange-looking hand clutch, Byron reunited with men he hadn't seen for four years. At the Southern States Fairgrounds track, a dustbowl of a raceway, forty-five hundred spectators arrived early for a contest sponsored by a local veterans' group—and Bill France.
As soon as the war had officially ended, and France was relieved of his duties at the Daytona Beach Boat Works, he began making plans for a race. The Beach-and-Road course was in terrible shape, the grandstands rotted and crumbling after four years of neglect. So France called around to others in his rejuvenated fraternity, searching for a racetrack. He found willing partners at the Southern States Fairgrounds and immediately called the Charlotte Observer's sports editor, begging for some publicity. France even told the editor, Wilton Garrison, to call it a “National Championship Race.”
“Who's going to be in this race of yours?” Garrison asked.
France rattled off a few names, including Roy Hall, Skimp Hersey, and Buddy Shuman, all of them southern boys and more than a few of them known moonshiners.
“How can you call it a national championship with local boys like that running?” Garrison asked. “Maybe you could call it a southern championship, but there's no way it's a national championship race.”
Garrison proceeded to give France some harsh words of advice that would guide him through the next few bumpy years. If France wanted to make something of stock cars, Garrison said, he'd have to create structure and uniformity. He needed rules and a consistent system of tallying points to determine the “champion.” He could do that by allying himself with AAA—which was mainly sanctioning open-wheel events—or by creating his own AAA-type organization specifically for stock cars.
France had in fact approached AAA, seeking a partnership, but was rejected. “We're only interested in big races,” they told him, and France knew he was on his own.
That first postwar race at Charlotte reminded him that stock car racing was still popular and potentially profitable, still worthy of his life's work. It also reminded him that, while he might not need AAA, he still needed the moonshiners.
Roy Hall whipped around the tight turns of the red-clay oval that afternoon, averaging eighty miles an hour and seemingly destined for yet another victory—his second in a row since war's end. But on the final lap, a swirl of dust on the backstretch blinded him, he lost his bearings, then lost control and flipped. Bob Flock swept past and took the checkered flag. Fonty Flock rushed over and scooped brother Bob out of his Ford, hoisted him onto his shoulders, and paraded him before the screaming crowd. Red Byron finished back in the pack, in desperate need of a pile of aspirin for his ravaged le
ft leg and a canteen of water to rinse the dust from his mouth.
Fans streamed off into the cool autumn evening, content with what they'd gotten for their fifty-cent admission fee. A sportswriter said that, due to the swirling red dust, “the spectators had a reddish color at the end.” And Bill France had the greenish hue of crisp cash in his pocket.
With bootlegging racers chased from Lakewood by Atlanta's new ban on drivers with criminal records, racetracks in other southern states seized the opportunity. A group of inventors just outside Orlando, Florida, built a one-mile dirt oval called Seminole Speedway, which hosted its first race in December of 1945. Once again, Roy Hall—still on the lam, despite recently being sentenced to a year in prison—beat out Bill France for his second victory of the abbreviated 1945 season.
Hall was awarded the title of national champ—his third. As in previous years, the title was a questionable achievement. With no AAA-like body governing stock car racing, Hall's title wasn't so much an official designation as an informal agreement among various stock car racing clubs that he was the year's best racer. Mainly, Hall's 1945 title was a victory of bragging rights. Such was the second-tier status of stock cars, and another reminder to France of the need for validity.
A full slate of stock car races was scheduled for 1946.
France planned to take his first stab at bringing a more viable structure to the sport by unveiling his own AAA-like sanctioning body for stock cars, to be called the National Championship Stock Car Circuit (NCSCC). Red Byron planned to race as often as possible in 1946, for France and anyone else offering a decent winner's purse. First, Byron realized he needed some help. Turns out, someone needed his help, too.
Driving with the Devil Page 19
