Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  But just weeks earlier, the hound's master had died.

  In early 1947, with his only son, Edsel, now dead and his company in the hands of a grandson, Henry Ford seemed rootless and lost. For all his many faults, he had always been, maybe above all else, a productive, industrious self-starter. Without a company to run, or a son to nag, Ford grew bored. As grandson Henry II later put it, “He gave up.”

  “The unhappiest man on earth is the one who has nothing to do,” Ford once said. And it appeared that he had done all he could do in life. In his eighties, he began spending winters far from his Detroit factories, meandering around the thousands of acres of his Georgia estate, called Richmond Hill.

  Henry Ford's life had spanned the Civil War and two world wars. He had lived through—and, in fact, personally symbolized—the evolution from rural farm life to mechanized city life, an era now driven by electricity and gas-powered automobiles. But in his dotage, Ford seemed to regret those dramatic changes. At his southern estate, Ford would drive around the countryside, stopping to talk with farmers, scooping up handfuls of red dirt, sitting on tree stumps and whittling sticks of wood with his pocket knife—”like a character in a Willa Cather novel,” Douglas Brinkley wrote in Wheels for the World. It was as if he were suddenly saddened by, maybe frightened by, all he had created. “The plants have grown so big,” he once said to a friend visiting him in Georgia, referring to the Ford factories back home in Detroit. As Brinkley put it, “He was the master of the modern world—but he longed for the nineteenth century way of life.”

  Ford still showed signs of his spunky, puritanical distaste for liquor. He may have lost his fight to keep Prohibition intact, but untaxed whiskey was still illegal. So, whenever he found a moonshine still on his property—which was often, this being Georgia, after all—he would have someone on his staff destroy it. Such outbursts of energy were rare, though, and his zeal for life was on the wane.

  In January of 1947, Ford and his wife, Clara, left their suburban Detroit home and drove south to Georgia, fleeing a brutal Michigan winter that had left Ford feeling ill. Two months later, in early April, they returned home to Dearborn, whose streets had been flooded by heavy rains and swollen rivers. On April 7, a day after Easter Sunday, Ford and a chauffeur took a ride around the city—in a Ford V-8—to survey the flooding, which had knocked out the power to Ford's homestead and was threatening to overtake his factories. On the way back home, Ford asked his driver, Robert Rankin, to stop at the cemetery on Joy Road, where his family had been interred.

  “Rankin,” said Ford, who was wearing bedroom slippers and stayed in the car, “this is where I'm going to be buried when I die.… Will you take care of that?”

  That night, Ford drank a glass of milk and went to bed. He awoke a short time later, gasping for air. Clara sent Rankin to fetch a doctor and sat stroking her husband's head as he breathed his last, labored breaths. Ford died just before midnight, April 7, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was eighty-three.

  Two days later, one hundred thousand people lined up to pay their respects, parading past Ford's open coffin. The day after that, all of Detroit's carmakers stopped their assembly lines at 2:30 p.m. for a few eerie, silent moments of homage to the man who had started it all. At that very moment, said ????γ magazine, “They lowered the coffin into the wet, clayey mud.… The cars rushed past, filling the night with the smell of gasoline.”

  Ford had openly proclaimed his belief in reincarnation and once said he always felt his soul had previously belonged to a Union soldier killed at Gettysburg, the terrible Civil War battle that had raged four weeks before Ford was born in 1863. It's doubtful that Ford, with all his disdain for moonshiners and their stock car races, would have liked to see his own soul reincarnated into anything or anyone involved in such unwholesome pursuits. But it is at least an interesting coincidence of automotive history that the year of Henry Ford's death was also the year of NASCAR's birth.

  Bill France may not have been an exemplary racer, nor an ingenious mechanic, though he was surely above average in both regards, having won a number of races and the 1940 championship. Mostly, he was a shrewd, savvy salesman who had also become a natural showman, comfortable with microphones, crowds, and newsmen. Across his nearly ten years as a racing promoter, France had learned to borrow the best ideas from other promoters, including his AAA rivals. He had decided from the start that stock car races should be more than just speed contests, they should be shows.

  Having given up on his racing career, France focused more than ever on being the P. T. Barnum of stock car racing, intent on creating events that were part circus, part race. For that, he needed the best drivers. “Better drivers mean better races and larger crowds,” France told a magazine writer in mid-1947. To lure those drivers and those crowds, France studied other promoters of the day, particularly AAA's top man, Sam Nunis.

  Nunis was born on an onion farm in Texas and ran away from home at age fifteen to pursue a racing career. After almost losing his leg in a wreck at a North Carolina race, he switched to promoting races. With his double-breasted suits and slicked-back hair, and with AAAs substantial bank account behind him, Nunis's promotional savvy outclassed France's bootstrap efforts. Nunis hired a stable of PR men (all former newsmen) to help spread word of his races to sportswriters and hired off-duty detectives from the Pinkerton Agency to assist local police with crowd control. Although most of Nunis's races were Indy-style “big car” events, he felt that the postwar appetite for auto racing was on the rise and that there was plenty of room for a few AAA-sanctioned stock car races.

  In 1947, Nunis told AAA that its retreat from stock cars a year earlier had been premature. Despite AAAs long-standing uneasy relationship with stock cars, Nunis convinced the organization's Contest Board to give them another chance and to schedule a handful of AAA-backed races that summer. In early 1947, Nunis began advertising those races in auto magazines, declaring in bold black and white his intention to bring AAA into the Bill France realm of southern stock car racing. His ads touted “world's finest talent” and “nation's largest racing schedule.”

  From Nunis, France learned the importance of strong advertising and good press. That lesson prompted France to befriend sports editors at most of the towns he visited, and early on he became close friends with Bernard Kahn, the well-regarded writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, who wrote so eloquently about Red Byron.

  France and Kahn had met before the war, when France bailed Kahn out of a potential night in jail by paying a parking ticket Kahn couldn't afford. During the war, Kahn served in the navy and would receive long letters from France, rambling about how he believed he could “make some sense out of [the] wildcat” sport of stock cars. They renewed their friendship after the war, and for the next few years, Kahn's exciting stories about stock car races, his heartfelt descriptions of Red Byron, and his promotional references to Bill France played a big role in the coming success of Bill France's sport. Kahn was a good journalist, but hardly an objective one.

  France hoarded such allies and alienated those he didn't trust. He would need such partners even more with AAA threatening his control of stock cars. Other racing groups also posed a risk to France's plans. In addition to France's NCSCC, there was the Atlanta-based NSCRA, sanctioning many stock car races in 1946; the Stock Car Auto Racing Society (nicknamed, appropriately, SCARS); the South Carolina Auto Racing Association (SCARA); the United Stock Car Racing Association (USCRA); the American Stock Car Racing Association (ASCRA); and the National Auto Racing League (NARL). In addition to self-proclaimed “national” groups, scores of highly competitive regional organizations mushroomed up and down the East Coast.

  Each organization had its own system for assigning points to victories and top-ten finishes and for keeping a tally of how racers performed in their events. Organizations gave a driver anywhere from 100 to 500 points for a victory, 90 to 400 for second place, 80 to 300 for third, and so on. At the end of the year, the driver with the most p
oints would be that specific group's “champion,” which would earn him a trophy, maybe a small bonus, and bragging rights. Due to the disparate accounting systems, most groups only counted points earned in their races and did not allow victories in other leagues to count toward points in their own league. The term champion, therefore, was a measure of how well a racer had performed in one particular group's races and hardly a declaration of overall dominance in the sport. At one point during 1947, Red Byron, Bob Flock, and Buddy Shuman would each rank as points leaders of three different groups.

  It had been the same debacle for years, and racers found it maddening to discern which groups were legit. Mainly, drivers followed the money, racing in events offering the largest winner's purses. Sometimes drivers would reach the end of a race only to find the purse had simply disappeared, along with the promoter. Still, most racers cared more about a few five hundred-dollar victories than an end-of-the-year championship trophy.

  That would soon begin to change, thanks to Bill France.

  Red Byron traveled wherever the dollar signs lured him. He raced to win, but also to earn, and cared little which acronym was printed on his paycheck. France was smart enough to realize that racers such as Byron needed stronger reasons to race in his stock car races. They needed financial incentives, winnings large enough to cover the cost of fuel, tires, and put a little extra cash in their pockets. If France could buy the loyalty of the best southern racers—and Byron was now soundly one of the best—the crowds that such stars lured to his circus/races would put cash in France's own pockets.

  France's task was a mountainous one. Stock car racing, by its very nature, had so far defied efforts to control it because so many racers were law-defying, whiskey-tripping Scots-Irish, whose psyches made them aggressively averse to governance. They just wanted to race, drive fast, win a few bucks, and couldn't give a goddamn which suit-wearing businessman sponsored or sanctioned the event. Racers had little loyalty except to themselves, their cars, and their mechanics. That summer, Bill France made his first major stab at buying drivers' loyalty by announcing that his NCSCC organization would go beyond paying drivers for each individual victory. It would also pay one thousand dollars to the driver who, by year's end, had amassed the most points in NCSCC-sanctioned stock car races. Second place would be worth five hundred dollars. France's offer of cash was a first for stock car racing.

  “By establishing the national point ranking system we will be able to guarantee fans, as well as track officials, and a crack field of drivers,” France said after announcing his new championship scheme. France's incentive plan would encourage drivers to join as many NCSCC events as they could and seemed aimed directly at Byron, whom he called “the hottest rider in the stock car circuit.”

  However, France didn't exactly emphasize that his new game plan carried some fine print. Namely: Only races in his organization, the NCSCC, would count toward his “national” points-ranking system. Victories in other organizations' events, such as AAA's, would be worth zero.

  At the time of France's announcement, Ed Samples and Bob Flock led NCSCC's point standings. Byron had a better winning percentage but had competed in fewer NCSCC races and was therefore further back in the standings. Whether to prove France's boast that he was the “hottest” driver or to make amends for his embarrassing nonstart at Indy, Byron came back to stock cars with a vengeance.

  After returning briefly home to Atlanta, Byron immediately got behind the wheel of the Ford convertible that he had purchased after his release from the hospital in late 1945. Nell—as she often did—rode beside him, and they towed Raymond Parks's number 22 Ford V-8 behind them, the start of an epic, summer-long race-to-race-to-race journey.

  Nell rarely witnessed her husband's victories, though, preferring to wait in the car. She loved him, but watching him race made her too nervous. So she was sitting in the parking lot when he set a new track record in Jacksonville, finishing a lap ahead of the field. She was in the parking lot outside Lakewood Speedway when Byron uncharacteristically smashed a competitor off the track. The other driver, Jack Etheridge, had passed Byron and was in a power slide in turn two. Byron accelerated and punched Etheridge's left front, which sent him through a wood-slat fence. Byron later claimed he was only trying to help. “I saw you sideways and thought I could straighten you out,” he said, but Etheridge didn't entirely believe him and wished Byron had just let him be.

  Nell was also in the parking lot when Byron took his second victory in a row at Lakewood, before twenty-one thousand fans. That second Lakewood win happened to be a AAA event, part of Sam Nunis's recent effort to test France's growing domination of stock cars. France's incentive plan clearly wasn't enough to prevent men such as Byron from racing in non-NCSCC races. The lure of a AAA race was, of course, the money. Before the war, Nunis and France had actually been friends, and Nunis served as France's announcer at a few Daytona Beach races. The racing world was small and tight-knit. Racers were a constantly moving bunch, like gypsies whose travels often intersected with one another. They helped each other, loaning tools, tires, gas, or cash. But the postwar racing community had become more competitive, and the Nunis-France friendship was a casualty. When Nunis convinced AAA's Contest Board to allow him to try promoting a few stock car races in southern states, he chose Atlanta's Lakewood for his first events, igniting a rivalry with France that would last the rest of the decade.

  Nunis called his June event at Lakewood the “National Stock Car Championship Race.” When word of the event reached France, he was furious. In retaliation, France announced that Byron would not receive any NCSCC points for that victory, since the Lakewood race hadn't been sanctioned by his “official” stock car racing organization. Men such as Byron would learn, time and again, that France's rule book was a never-ending work in progress and that he could bend, break, or replace his own rules on a whim.

  France, meanwhile, was slowly realizing that to wrestle stock car racing into conformity, he might have to do more than buy racers' loyalty. At some point, he'd have to strong-arm them.

  France wasn't the only one playing loose with the rules of stock car racing in 1947. At every level, the entire sport had become, metaphorically, a rules-be-damned stock car race, with the front-runners looking nervously over their shoulders at the stalkers. Up-and-coming stock car mechanics were threatening Red Vogt's preeminence. A new gang of investors was throwing money into stock cars, challenging Raymond Parks's role as the sport's first and most successful team owner. A ragged young army of speed-hungry drivers was beginning to haunt Red Byron at every race. And new dirt racetracks began vying for the attentions of racers and fans in places such as Macon, Georgia; Huntsville, Alabama; Danville, Virginia; Martinsville, Virginia; Elkins, North Carolina; High Point, North Carolina; and North Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

  In late June, at the first-ever race at North Wilkesboro's track, nine thousand fans came from as far off as Philadelphia and Miami, quadrupling the town's population. They were not disappointed as they watched Bernard Mitchell's car tumble violently in the first turn of the first lap. The door was shorn off, and the crowd gasped as Mitchell's seat belt snapped and he was thrown into the air. Mitchell seemed to float above his rampageous car before landing face-first on the red-dirt track. Byron and a few other drivers had to think fast and swerve sharply to avoid killing the man. Miraculously, Mitchell was helped off the track with only a broken arm and a body full of bruises. Had his seat belt not snapped, he would have been crushed inside his demolished car. Fonty and Bob Flock took first and second, well ahead of Byron—in a sign of things to come.

  Byron was a perfectionist. Bad engines and mechanical problems drove him nuts. Byron was leading a race in Allentown until two flat tires in a row dropped him to sixth place. He was leading a race at Jacksonville until his V-8 began to smoke and sputter, and he pulled off the track to watch Bob Flock race to victory. At Macon, Georgia's new track, Byron's car stayed intact, but Bob Flock pulled ahead of him on the second of f
ifty laps and stayed there; Byron settled for third, two feet ahead of Fonty Flock. At Trenton, New Jersey, the Flock boys swapped places— Fonty won the race, Byron finished second, with Bob half a car length behind. At Greenville, South Carolina, Byron settled for third—a full lap behind the first two finishers, Bob and Fonty. And at yet another race, Byron was a lap from victory until a broken oil line allowed Fonty to win by a nose.

  Flock, Flock, Flock, Flock, Flock. Every race swarmed with them.

  Even though Bob was a teammate, Byron hated to lose and began to feel the desperate need for an edge, a bit of extra speed. He could deal with the crippled leg, but he couldn't deal with crippled cars. Some drivers were experimenting with alcohol instead of gasoline, but the fumes could be lethal. Byron, desperate to give anything a try, one day nearly passed out in a car powered by alcohol. Other drivers added an occasional drop of nitromethane, a mixture of nitric acid and methane. But “nitro” was also tricky—too much could burn up an engine. Byron finally urged Raymond Parks to purchase a third race car as a backup for the two Fords he and Bob Flock drove. The idea was to have an extra V-8 on hand in case one of the others died, as Byron's had more than once.

  The first journey for Parks's three-car team occurred in early August 1947, when the entire Georgia Gang—Parks, Byron, Flock, and Vogt— drove north to a race at the famous track in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. After driving all night, the straggly, Fords-puUing-Fords caravan arrived at dawn at the Howard Johnson's parking lot in nearby Bordentown, New Jersey, which for years had served as Langhorne's unofficial (and reluctant) race headquarters. On race weekends, the lot became cluttered with cars and trailers, its pavement littered with parts and tools.