Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  He later told friends, “That was the start of NASCAR.”

  France followed his profitable success in South Carolina with a series of business maneuvers and short-lived partnerships that turned the rest of the 1946 season into a confusing mess that vexed drivers and set the stage for some future showdowns.

  For starters, the civic leaders and citizens of Daytona Beach—especially those with beachfront homes—began complaining about the crowds and noise of France's increasingly popular races, whose many wrecks and injuries inspired some to call them “undertaker's races.” They wanted France, or the city, to build a new racetrack that didn't include a straightaway that ran through downtown. Because France only leased the land for his racetrack (from the city and a few private landowners), and because that lease could easily be revoked, pressure from the townsfolk forced him to cancel his upcoming Labor Day race, which sent stock car racers looking for venues in more welcoming states.

  Atlanta was not one of those welcoming locations. The mayor and police chief refused to rescind their ban on liquor-running race drivers, so stock car racing bypassed its two most famous venues late that summer, Daytona and Lakewood. France teamed up with promoters at other racetracks and cohosted a few races in North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. AAA remained the dominant sanctioning body of the day for auto racing, and France had bills to pay. He had a family and finally decided he had no choice but to befriend—albeit briefly—the notoriously imperious AAA.

  AAA's home base was in Paterson, New Jersey, otherwise known as Gasoline Alley. AAA controlled many of the racetracks up and down the east and west coasts, and in parts of the Midwest. Since 1909, AAAs primary focus had been open-wheel racing, though after World War II, it expanded into similar types of racing, such as sprint and midget cars, which weren't quite Indy machines but still hand-built racers and as different from “stock” cars as corn liquor was from fine brandy.

  But AAA had decided in 1946 to again dip a tentative toe into southern racing and to experiment with a few stock car events, just as it had occasionally done before the war. And because France needed to earn a living, he swallowed his considerable pride and promoted a few stock car races as AAAs partner. The partnership wouldn't last long.

  France had been scheming to cut into AAA's increasing dominance of auto racing by creating his own organization to oversee stock car racing. In late summer of 1946, he abruptly split with AAA and unveiled his new group, the NCSCC. In no time, a bitter rivalry would develop, with AAA declaring France's stock car races to be “outlaw” races and forbidding its drivers to compete in such contests. France would respond by similarly banning his stock car drivers from AAA races. In time, he'd also call anyone who dared race in events other than his outlaws.

  That situation would cause problems for dual-minded racers such as Byron. The luxury of calling himself both an open-wheel racer and a stock car racer, with a ranking among the top-twenty AAA drivers and the top-ten stock car drivers, would not last long.

  One day soon, he'd have to choose.

  Red Byron's hero, Barney Oldfield, died that October at age sixty-eight. If Byron had been a religious man, he might have viewed the death as a sign from above.

  Oldfield had come to the realization, after his failed attempts at Indy, that he was simply a better driver on dirt tracks. Byron, though not quite ready to abandon his dream of racing at Indy, was beginning to accept the same reality. By late 1946, Byron had slid back in the AAA points standings. But he suddenly found himself the top points earner in Bill France's new stock car organization, the NCSCC.

  France quickly pulled together five NCSCC races for the fall of 1946. Bob Flock, driving Raymond Parks's car in place of Roy Hall, incredibly won them all, shoving Byron off his perch as the new league's best driver. But when the season came to an end, Dawsonville's Ed Samples—who had won France's July 4 race at Greenville, South Carolina, among others—was named the so-called national stock car champion.

  Once again, the term champion was an imprecise one. Because France's new group emerged late in the year, he couldn't legitimately award an NCSCC championship. He conferred with the heads of a few other stock car groups—including the National Stock Car Racing Association, or NSCRA, which had been created in Atlanta earlier that year, and the U.S. Stock Car Drivers Association—and together they added up drivers' victories in various races that year and determined that Samples had the best record.

  Still, Byron finished tenth in the points standing for the year's stock car championship race and nineteenth in AAA, making him the only driver in history to finish in the top twenty of both AAA/Indy racing and stock car racing.

  Bill France finished a distant fourteenth in the stock car standings and announced his retirement from racing. France joked that he decided to give up driving and take up flying, “because it's not so dangerous.” In truth, he admitted, he'd been dividing his time between driving and promoting and “haven't got time to do both.”

  Roy Hall finished second in the stock car standings, followed by Bob Flock, who had been driving Hall's number 14 car. But by the end of 1946, Hall was no longer racing. In the aftermath of his desperate plea to the Atlanta newspaper back in May, his failure to qualify at Indy in June, and his arrest in Daytona Beach in July, the twenty-five-year-old moonshiner was showing signs of a losing grip on reality, on life. He had to know his days of freedom were dwindling down, that his luck was finally about to run dry, especially after an incident in Greensboro, North Carolina, in August of 1946.

  Following a race outside Greensboro, Hall was staying at a local hotel with another racer from Atlanta named J. R. Walden, along with Walden's friend Walter Leonard, whom the newspapers later described as an “Atlanta produce dealer.”

  The night after the race, police arrived at the King Cotton Hotel with plans to pick up Hall and deliver him to Atlanta. It seems the cops were investigating a recent forty thousand-dollar bank robbery outside Atlanta—and Hall was a suspect. They knocked on Hall's hotel room door around 1:00 a.m. He and his friends were still awake, having a fun night after the afternoon race. Police began questioning him and his two friends. When Hall claimed not to know the other two men, his lack of cooperation led the cops to arrest all three on the spot. As the three were led toward the patrol cars, one of them, Walden, took off running.

  An officer opened fire, and Walden appeared to have been hit, but after stutter-stepping down a side street, he turned the corner and got away. The police later discovered that Walden had recently escaped from a Georgia prison, and they issued a description of the escaped prisoner, who was “bearing the appearance of a ‘hillbilly’”

  The authorities charged Hall with abetting the “desperate criminal.” Hall was then returned to Atlanta to face charges in connection with the forty thousand-dollar robbery.

  Weeks later, Hall was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in the bank robbery and other pent-up charges. He said good-bye to Margaret, his wife of three years, and their son, Ronnie, born earlier that year. Hall wrote letters to Ronnie, always telling his son, “Take care of your momma.”

  Roy Hall had been a wanted criminal for most of his adult life. Despite his promises to clean up, he never displayed serious intentions of making amends. Instead of turning himself in and confronting the many charges against him, Hall always gambled and stayed mobile, hoping he could outrun the law long enough for the past to just disappear. Hall became practiced in the art of evasion, staying with friends and relatives, rarely settling down in one place for too long, even after the birth of his son.

  Hall often received help from other whiskey trippers, such as “Bad Eye” Shirley. Through the late 1930s and into the postwar years of stock car racing, Shirley's name appeared often on racing programs. On the racetrack, he would drive behind the wheel of a ′39 Ford owned by Parks and tuned up by Red Vogt. His driving style, not to mention his physical appearance, was remarkably similar to Roy Hall's. He even had the same number—�
�14”—painted on the car's door. It would take fifty years for Bad Eye to finally confess: “I never raced a day in my life. But I helped out Roy Hall quite a bit.”*

  The start of his long-coming prison sentence in late 1946 only added to Hall's mythic, southern stock car racer story. He'd hauled liquor and carried a pistol. He was incredibly handsome, smooth-talking, sharply dressed, sexy as hell, and a flat-out badass. He'd survived in dual professions—moonshining and racing—that had killed his cousin and many peers. In addition to the song penned years earlier by Blind Willie McTell, another songwriter would one day put Hall's big, fast, audacious life to music. Jim Croce's musical homage to Hall would one day go like this:

  Oh Rapid Roy that stock car boy

  He too much to believe

  You know he always got an extra pack of cigarettes

  Rolled up in his t-shirt sleeve

  He got a tattoo on his arm that say Baby

  He got another one that just say Hey

  Oh Rapid Roy that stock car boy

  He's the best driver in the land

  He say that he learned to race a stock car

  By runnin' shine outta Alabam'

  And Sunday afternoon he is a dirt track demon in a ′57 Chevrolet

  Yeah Roy so cool that racin' fool he don't know what fear's about

  He do a hundred thirty mile an hour, smilin' at the camera,

  With a toothpick in his mouth

  He got a girl back home, name of Dixie Dawn

  But he got honeys all along the way

  And you oughta hear ‘em screamin'

  For that dirt track demon in a ′57 Chevrolet*

  And so, stock car racing lost another great driver, and Parks lost his top star. Again. There was an odd sense of relief, at least, that Hall reached the end of his career alive, unlike Seay. But losing drivers was becoming a theme of Parks's stock car career.

  * Cantrell would later be shot and killed in a moonshining argument at Red Vogt's garage, one of two liquor-fueled gunfights at Vogt's garage that year. The other shoot-out was witnessed by Bill France and a racer named Frank Mundy, who both dived under a car when the shooting started.

  * Parks's brother-in-law, Legs Law, also drove him crazy. He'd set Law up with a business — a fruit stand or service station — only to learn Law had lost it in a card game. Like Hall, Law revolved in and out of prison on liquor and driving charges. When Law died, at age seventy, he'd spent a total of thirty years behind bars.

  † Billy Watson, a longtime friend of Parks, said Hall's police record kept him out of the armed services.

  * Littlejohn had also finished second behind Lloyd Seay in 1941 and would go on to take more second-place finishes than any racer of the 1940s.

  * Shirley, who died in 2005, “raced” for others, too, starting in 1941 at Daytona, when an Atlanta driver named Carson Dyer was on probation and not allowed to leave the state of Georgia. Shirley let Carson, and later Hall, borrow his name.

  * Of course, Hall only drove Fords, not Chevys — although, late in life and years after his release from prison, Hall ironically would work as a Chevy salesman.

  I never really thought much of racing.

  — HENRY FORD

  11

  Henry Ford is dead

  B efore each race, she'd coach him. “Be careful, Red,” she'd say. “Be careful, but win the race.” That's what she said when he left home in late January of 1947 for the year's first race in Daytona Beach—the town where they'd met—where Bill France's “Battle of the Champions” would kick off the first full year of his new NCSCC governing body.

  Her name was Eva Nellis Davis, but everyone called her Nell. She was raised on a farm east of Atlanta, a farm she'd been scheming to escape since childhood. Nell was half Cherokee, with dark skin, a stunning figure, bold dark eyes, and high cheekbones. She reminded Byron of the exotic squaws he'd read about in his favorite childhood series Rolf in the Woods: “silent, reserved, and shy… but very human.” Her innocence, restraint, and self-determination also reminded Byron of the native Inuit women he'd met selling their primitive crafts on the Aleutian Islands. During the war, Nell took a job at a railroad office in Atlanta. She rode the bus into the city on Monday, stayed at a boardinghouse all week, and returned home to her family on weekends.

  One weekend in 1946, her coworkers planned a trip to Daytona Beach to see a stock car race. Nell said she said she couldn't afford to join them, but her boss loaned her forty dollars, and the women piled into a car and drove to Florida. It was Nell's first race, and she quickly discovered she wasn't all that interested in stock cars. Nearby fans, however, were very interested in her. She was buxom and shapely; she wore a tight pantsuit, and men worked hard to strike up a conversation. But she barely spoke to anyone—”I was so shy.” Then, after the race, she and her girlfriends went to a nearby nightclub, where she saw the same racer she'd spotted in victory lane—Red Byron. She was instantly smitten by the smoldering war vet with the brave limp. She told her sister it was “love at first sight.” He thought she was spectacular and back in Atlanta began visiting her at the railroad office where she worked.

  “Where do you want to live?” Red finally asked her. “I'll build you a house.”

  “That'll work,” she told him.

  They'd soon marry and begin a new life in an apartment in downtown Atlanta. But she told him right from the start: I want to see the ocean, to live at the beach. Take me to Florida. In January of 1947, he drove south to Florida without her. He couldn't show her the ocean, but he promised to return a few short days later with a trophy—and some cash.

  One of the frustrations of being a stock car racer in the 1940s was trying to understand the sloppy, complicated, ever-changing rules and rulers of the sport. The postwar racing culture was so convoluted—the complex relationships among racetrack owners, race promoters, and race-sanctioning bodies, with their alphabet soup of acronyms—it could have comprised an entire college course. With the lack of uniform guiding principles, and the risk of losing large amounts of cash, it's amazing that anyone willingly chose to dabble in the business side of stock car races in the 1940s.

  The three-tiered hierarchy went something like this: someone owned the track; someone else hosted and promoted the race; someone else authorized or “sanctioned” the races of a particular region or racetrack.

  The tracks were typically owned by local entrepreneurs or, in the case of public fairgrounds such as Lakewood, by the city; Daytona's Beach-and-Road course consisted of a mix of public and private parcels that Bill France leased.

  The races were often, but not always, organized by someone other than the track owner. In fact, a race could be “promoted” by just about any risk taker with a knack for numbers who was willing to rent a track from its owner, advertise the race, lure the drivers, hire folks to sell concessions and programs, charge admission, then choreograph the qualifying heats and the race itself. Promoters were sometimes local businessmen, or racers such as Bill France, or affiliates of larger organizations such as AAA. The promoter was also responsible for paying the drivers their winnings. The winner's purse was typically a portion of that day's ticket sales—40 percent was becoming the standard—but a local franchise might also donate a case of beer or motor oil to the winner.

  Finally, there was the race sanctioner, an overseeing entity that gave its stamp of approval to events and controlled the tallying of points and the naming of champions. Sanctioning organizations emerged to provide stability and constancy in a world that resisted both. The sanctioner's role was twofold. First, its presence told a racer there was a legitimate organization lording over the race. Second, sanctioners doled out championships. Without a sanctioning group's stamp of approval, a race wouldn't necessarily count toward a “championship” of any sort. While most drivers of the day competed primarily to win each individual race and its winner's purse, many were also interested in earning themselves a “championship” title.

  Making heads or tails of
the often cutthroat and byzantine machinations of sanctioning could induce some serious head-spinning, which is why Bill France struggled so messily to enforce some semblance of governance.

  In the Indy racing world of expensive open-wheel cars, AAA's racing arm, the Contest Board, “sanctioned” races such as the Indy 500. That meant AAA tracked each driver's performance through the year, tallied the drivers' points, then awarded a year-end championship to the driver with the most points. Back in 1941, AAA also tallied numbers for the handful of semilegitimate stock car races. Roy Hall's championship that year was more or less a AAA-sanctioned championship.

  By the end of 1946, however, AAA had stopped sanctioning stock car races and, in fact, wanted little to do with them. After its few stock car experiments that year, AAA's Contest Board announced at the end of the ′46 season that it would no longer affiliate itself with Bill France or his stock cars: “The Contest Board is bitterly opposed to what it calls ‘junk car’ events and believes the fad … is dying out.” Scores of small sanctioning groups arose throughout the South to fill that void, each competing to become the premier stock car-sanctioning entity. The problem for drivers was that the rules and point-tallying systems varied from group to group, often in conflict with one another.

  Three dominant groups emerged by 1947: the National Championship Stock Racing Association (NCSRA); the Atlanta-based National Stock Car Racing Association (known as the NSCRA and sometimes the NSRA); and France's NCSCC, the National Championship Stock Car Circuit.

  Because the NCSCC didn't begin sanctioning races until halfway through 1946, the NSCRA—with France's concurrence—christened Ed Samples as champion, based on his performance in races sanctioned by various organizations. The consensus choice of Ed Samples as champion had been a rare display of cooperation among sanctioning bodies. Such cooperation would not exist in 1947. Nor ever again. In many ways, 1947 would be the turning point for a sport soon to be governed by one group, one man.