Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Having moved to Atlanta after the war, Byron became a regular visitor to Red Vogt's garage on Spring Street. He and Vogt found they had a similar passion for Ford V-8s and spoke a similar language, both of them interested in various open-wheel cars as well as stocks. Byron spent much of his free time there and eventually told Vogt that he wanted to race one of Parks's stock cars for the 1946 season. Secretly Byron wondered how his damaged and withered left leg would hold up, but he kept that to himself.

  Vogt saw something in Byron that he hadn't seen in Hall or Parks's other occasional racers, such as Legs Law or the “kid,” Billy Watson. For them, racing was all about gut instinct, which in Law's case was askew—he was a great moonshine runner but a terrible racer. Recklessness frustrated Vogt. After all, he'd have to repair cars wrecked due to a bad decision on the track. In Byron, Vogt sensed a deeper understanding of the tactics and strategy of racing. So, in late 1945, Vogt decided to formally introduce Byron to Raymond Parks, which led to a few meetings at Vogt's garage. Byron's timing turned out to be perfect, and by January of 1946, a historic new partnership had formed.

  Parks had been getting increasingly nervous about Roy Hall's unresolved problems with the law and his pending jail sentence. Parks knew time was running out on his cousin's freedom. If he wanted to keep his racing team alive, he'd need a new driver. Parks remembered Byron from a few races before the war—the quiet redhead with the nervous and chatty sidekick, Shorty. But Parks also recalled Byron's steady, solid driving. There were qualities in Byron's driving and personality that reminded Parks of Lloyd Seay. He was more human, had a modest confidence, seemed a bit smarter than most of the other drivers, and was certainly more reliable than Roy Hall.

  Parks may have wavered a bit when he first witnessed Byron's pronounced limp and learned the extent of his one-legged condition. But Parks told Byron he'd bring him onto his team. If Vogt was willing to vouch for him, that was enough for Parks. And after Byron's acceptable finish at Charlotte back in October, Parks was willing to take a chance on the crippled vet. In fact, Parks respected Byron's gritty fight back from his World War II ordeal, which was even more horrific than Parks's. That respect allowed Byron to become one of the few members of Parks's inner circle who wasn't a criminal or kin.

  Parks then asked Vogt to come up with a better contraption to replace Byron's risky hand clutch. Through January of 1946, Vogt worked many late nights, like a mad scientist in his lab, chewing his chocolate bars and drinking syrupy black coffee from a tin cup. The potbellied stove that he'd converted into a heater gave off foul-smelling fumes. He occasionally stopped to pet Buddy, his dog. One day, Vogt emerged from his lab with a new device that he felt would help Byron compete with the sport's best racers. Vogt's solution was a new clutch pedal with what he called “fatigue pins” welded onto it.

  Because Byron had regained some feeling and strength in the left leg, Vogt figured he could at least depress the clutch pedal, as long as he didn't have to lift his foot up onto the pedal each time he shifted gears. With the stirruplike fatigue pins—two steel posts welded a few inches apart at the bottom of the pedal—Byron could rest the heel of his orthopedic shoe between those pins, keeping his foot cradled atop the clutch pedal. Then, because his shoe was attached to a leg brace that ran all the way up to his hip, Byron could lift and depress the clutch by shifting his lower body—literally twisting his left side so that his left hip pulled and pushed the half-dead leg and the clutch pedal beneath it.

  It was a ridiculously primitive and risky setup. With Byron's foot resting right on the clutch pedal, he had to keep his body at a slight angle so his leg didn't accidentally push the clutch. After some prerace practice runs at Lakewood, he seemed to get the hang of it, though he still worried about operating the clutch rig for a hundred high-speed laps, and he worried about bumps and ruts knocking his leg off the pedal.

  The first race of 1946, cosponsored by France, was scheduled for mid-February, again at the new Seminole Speedway outside Orlando, Florida.

  Roy Hall and Bill France were again the favorites, and fans looked forward to another chapter in the ongoing rivalry between the two. Up in Atlanta, where fans were steeped in the moonshining culture that created men such as Hall, Hall was clearly the favorite. But France had plenty of fans in his home state of Florida and was itching for a chance to beat Hall in his backyard. “I hate to win a race I'm sponsoring,” France told a newsman before the race. “But I'm afraid I'll have to do it.”

  Qualifying runs began on Saturday, February 23. Veteran racer and unrepentant North Carolina moonshiner Buddy Shuman won the pole position, followed by Hall, France, Bob Flock, and then Red Byron. Fans paid $1.04 to attend Sunday's main event, but instead of watching Hall or France take the checkered flag, a little-known, handicapped war vet eked out his first major stock car victory.

  Biting as usual on an unlit cigar, like biting a bullet against the pain in his leg, Byron drove a steady race despite the ruts jackhammering his body and the Japanese metal twisting and poking deep inside his hip. Byron outlasted France, who spun out in a turn, and Hall, who finished second. In victory lane, Byron had to be helped from his car, where he took off his helmet and smiled a tight smile. “This racing game is still fun,” Byron said, though the pained look on his face spoke otherwise.

  One sportswriter called the victory “heartwarming” but added that when Byron removed his helmet and goggles, “it appeared as though the man was twice his 30 years.” Writers and fans considered it quaint that a cripple could win a race against men such as Hall and France. When Byron sat down with one reporter, he explained that he didn't intend for the day's victory to be a one-off, that he was a serious racer, not a sideshow freak. He wanted Bill France and Roy Hall and all the other racers to know he was now in the game for good, bad leg and all.

  “I never gave up hope of racing again, even when I was laying in the hospital and the doctors didn't know whether I'd ever walk again,” Byron said.

  Byron immediately began looking ahead to the next big race, in April, on the famed Beach-and-Road course of Daytona Beach, which France still controlled.

  The spring of 1946 saw stock car racing regain all its momentum. Bill France replaced the rotted wood of the grandstands in preparation for a 160-mile race on the Beach-and-Road course, the first at Daytona since Lloyd Seay's remarkable 1941 victory.

  France promised the race would include “all of the top-name gasoline jockeys in the South.” France publicly invited “anyone in the country who owns a stock car and who likes to step on the gas pedal,” but the favorites were beach-driving veterans such as himself, as well as Roy Hall, semiretired Smokey Purser, Joe Littlejohn, and Dawsonville's own Gober Sosebee and Ed Samples.

  Byron had raced at Daytona only once, in 1939, and was considered an underdog. His recent victory at Seminole Speedway was viewed by many as a fluke. After all, the skinny redhead was disabled, for God's sake.

  Before the April 14 race at Daytona Beach, South Carolina driver Joe Littlejohn boasted that his 1941 Buick would handily beat the prewar Fords that comprised all but three of the starters' cars. Roy Hall countered that he and his Ford would be “hard to beat in this one.” Byron steered clear of any boasts and said simply that the race would be won not by speed alone but by the guy who drove a strategic, calculated race. Instead of battling Hall for the lead, Byron started the race carefully, avoiding all the early wrecks. Once he felt he had a feel for the sandy north and south turns, he began to cut into Hall's lead and, after a few laps, was right on Hall's tail, hanging a hundred yards behind, waiting…

  For the first third of the fifty-lap race, Byron chased Hall but refused to get drawn into a dangerous tussle for the lead. Not yet. Hall was driving balls-out, but every time he looked back, Byron's number 11 car was right there. The ocean's tide began to rise at around lap sixteen, and Hall, knowing that the firmer sand was right at the water's edge, drove with his right tires slightly in the water. The saltwater spray caked Byron's windsh
ield, forcing him to stick his head out the side window to see where he was going.

  On lap nineteen, as Hall approached the north turn, his right tire got caught in a rut of softer sand. His car was pulled off course and veered straight toward a row of fans standing too close to the track. To avoid plowing into the crowd, Hall reacted quickly, spinning the wheel sharply to the right as spectators dove for cover. Hall narrowly missed a few of the airborne fans and drove his Ford a few yards into the surf. Within moments, he was able to reverse out of the Atlantic and rejoin the race.

  Byron had passed him, but his lead was brief. Hall pulled ahead six laps later. Byron continued with the same patient tactic, driving a few dozen yards behind Hall, hoping for another mistake, until he got his wish. In an overly aggressive attack on the south turn, Hall got caught in another rut and his right wheel was shorn off. Once again, Hall had to spin away from the fans standing right beside the track. He catapulted over an embankment and plowed into the palmettos, bouncing and crunching and gouging a deep trough through the sand, but amazingly emerged with only minor injuries.

  Byron held the lead unchallenged and finished nearly three miles, a full lap, ahead of Joe Littlejohn.* In keeping with his unintended streak of top-five finishes, France—who had flipped early in the race—finished fourth.

  Now there was no denying it. Byron was no fluke. “It was a tough race to win,” he said afterward. “But they're all tough when you have to bear down all the way for 160 miles.” The eight thousand fans went wild, and the next day's newspapers called Byron's performance a “one-man extravaganza” and “a championship display of skill and endurance.” Only eleven of twenty-eight cars finished the race, and one writer praised Byron for his “consistency and persistence.” Byron had raced exactly as planned, and the fatigue pins helped greatly. But he was physically spent. In fact, despite his earlier declaration that the racing game was “still fun,” Byron wondered about his ability to compete over the long haul in such grueling stock car races.

  But he perked up that night. While leaning against the bar and sipping a beer at a Daytona Beach nightclub, he spotted a beautiful, dark-haired woman in a tight, bright pantsuit walking toward him, a sultry smile on her face.

  For a one-legged racer, it was easier to drive the Indy-style race cars of the AAA circuit, which required less shifting than a stock car. Byron told Parks he wanted to take a break and try competing in a few shorter races in the AAA circuit, which was also getting back on its feet after the war. Even though he'd decided to race mostly in stock cars, Byron knew the survival of stock car racing was far from a sure thing.

  Stock car racing—disorganized and motley and full of outlaws— was scoffed at by the cleaner, more organized AAA with its gorgeous open-wheel cars and nationally recognized stars such as Ted Horn, Mauri Rose, and Bill Holland. No one yet knew whether stock car racing was a trend or a fad. So, as a racing gourmand, interested in all styles of motorsports, Byron courted stock cars while still courting Indy cars— like dating two cousins at the same time. It just seemed safer—not to mention easier for a wounded racer, and potentially more lucrative, too—to straddle both worlds until he was sure of stock cars' future. He was wisely hedging his bets and, for the next two years, would bounce back and forth between stocks and AAA.

  In AAA races, Byron drove a car partially built by a famed Indy car-builder named Pop Dreyer and seriously modified by Red Vogt. By mid-1946, after just a handful of AAA-sanctioned open-wheel races, Byron was suddenly ranked twentieth on AAA's list of the year's top points leaders, ranked incredibly among the best Indy-style racers of the day. He was also ranked second in the informal stock car standings, although, in a sure sign that stock car racing wasn't yet a legitimate sport, some newspapers couldn't get his name right, referring to him as Red Bryan, Bed Byron, or Rey Byron. Byron's top AAA ranking would not last long, but it emboldened his longtime dream of reaching auto racing's mecca, Indianapolis, which seemed finally within reach.

  Roy Hall, meanwhile, pursued the same dream, with disappointing results.

  Through the first half of 1946, Reckless Roy was poised to become stock car racing's winningest postwar champ, its brightest star, and potential successor to cousin Lloyd as the fan favorite. Despite continued financial support from Parks and emotional support from the fans, Hall seemed determined to sabotage his promising career.

  Parks expected loyalty in return for his generous financial sustenance. But Hall continued to cross the unspoken line, going beyond the harmless sins of moonshine into darker territory. Hall and Billy Watson—the neighborhood kid whom he'd taught to drive and who now worked for Parks—would drive around Atlanta looking for cops to taunt. Hall loved luring them into a chase, which he always won. Parks wouldn't learn until late 1946 just how far Hall had veered into even darker territory.

  On the rare occasions when Parks tried to talk to him about his recklessness, Hall just laughed and told him not to worry. “You're too wild,” Parks told Hall one day. It was like talking to a junkyard dog—undisciplined, wild, and angry. Lately, Parks had quit talking. And Hall knew from the cold stares and steely silence that he'd let his cousin down. In an apparent effort to reconcile with Parks, in early May of 1946, Hall walked into the offices of the Atlanta Constitution and asked to speak with a reporter.

  Columnist Jack Troy sat with Hall, who explained that he wanted to “tell my story,” including the announcement that he'd soon be racing at the upcoming Indianapolis 500, in a car financed by Parks and with a crew headed by Red Vogt. Hall said he was trying to prove to Atlantans “that I am worthy” of racing with AAA's best.

  “I have two fine backers in Red Vogt and Raymond Parks and I intend to give them the best I have. I intend to stick strictly to auto racing in the future,” Hall said in a conciliatory statement aimed at Parks as well as Atlanta's mayor and police chief.

  “I realize I did some things that went against me, but that's all over now. I'm just asking for a fair chance,” he said. “I've seen the error of my ways. I want to make good in big-time racing.”

  Hall practically pleaded for “a helping hand” but seemed incapable of helping himself. It only worsened his fragile emotional state when his attempt at Indianapolis in late May ended in smoky failure. In an open-wheel Maserati racer honed by Vogt, Hall whipped around the famous Brickyard track during his qualifying laps at speeds he'd never before reached—one-twenty, then one-thirty. But Hall's engine began to smoke and cough, and he had to pull out. The car was scratched at the last minute, and Hall missed his shot at Indy, which would turn out to be the only chance of his career.

  Bill France was there that day, serving on the pit crew for racer George Robson. France must have felt some satisfaction at seeing his rival experience failure, a feeling that was stoked further as France celebrated Robson's eventual victory.

  After his washout at Indianapolis, Hall returned to more familiar territory—a June 30 stock car race at Daytona, and a jail cell. In his typical, hotdogging fashion, he roared into town at 4:00 a.m. and announced his arrival by speeding down Main Street and spinning a few screeching, tire-smoking donuts in the otherwise quiet intersections.

  Police immediately arrested Hall, who joked with them that Daytona's hotel rates were too high and all he really wanted was a place to sleep. They led him to his cell and shut the barred door. “What, no sheets?” Hall complained. “I've just driven non-stop from Virginia and I need a good day's rest. I would sure appreciate some sheets.”

  Hall was released from the Daytona jailhouse in time for his race, which he handily won with a record-breaking performance in which he averaged ninety-two miles an hour. He finished six miles ahead of the second-place finisher. It seemed as if the more emotionally unhinged Hall became, the better he raced. Afterward, even Bill France praised Hall's driving as well as his mechanical prowess. “Give that boy a set of tools and he could make a covered wagon do sixty,” France said.

  Through 1946, Bill France continued wearing two hat
s, as racer and promoter. Parks still considered France a good driver, and when France raced, Parks often allowed him to drive one of his cars. But France hadn't won a race in years, and he was beginning to think it was time to quit. France's promoting duties were taking up more and more of his time. He had begun to make plans for another annual Labor Day race at Daytona later that summer and had signed on to promote a July Fourth event at the Greenville-Pickens Speedway, just west of downtown Greenville, in South Carolina.

  With his wife, Anne, France arrived a few days before that race. They stayed at Greenville's Ponsett Hotel, and France drove over to the racetrack on Friday to see how preparations were coming. Two days of horse racing had been scheduled before Sunday's stock car race, but when France arrived on Friday, he saw a pathetic smattering of people in the stands to watch the horses. He grew very nervous. Even if a crowd twice that size showed up on Sunday, he'd lose money. And France hated to lose money.

  The next morning, he told Anne that he was abandoning the race and they were going home. The turnout would be bad, he said, and he wouldn't take in enough at the ticket booth to pay drivers their winnings. Better to bail out now than face a bunch of angry racers with their palms out on Sunday. Anne tried to talk him into staying, but he refused. “I ain't going back there,” he said, and they began driving back home to Florida.

  About an hour south of Greenville, Anne finally convinced him to turn back. The next day, as they drove from their hotel toward the track, they saw an enormous swirl of dust in the distance. France quickly learned that it was no tornado; the dust was caused by early arrivals, part of a crowd that would swell to twenty thousand by race time, which sportswriters declared was the largest crowd ever to attend a South Carolina sporting event. Choking traffic jams forced police to turn away another five thousand or so fans.

  Dawsonville's Ed Samples won the race, but the big winner was France. Instead of losing money, he took in thirty-six hundred dollars— one of his best days to date as a promoter and proof that stock car racing could be a moneymaker in places other than Daytona.